Pascal's Wager (3 page)

The room erupted into applause, and my mother rose from her seat. In the instant it took her to get from there to the podium, I placed a wager I had absolutely no doubt about. I would have staked my last four years on it: Dr. Elizabeth McGavock was drunk.

I
sat there staring like an idiot.

The administrator who had just introduced her held out his hand to shake hers. She stared at it for a good three seconds before she took it and let him pump her arm while she gazed into his face—as if she were having trouble putting a finger on just who he was.

He took her by the elbow and ushered her to the microphone amid the waning applause. As she gripped the sides of the podium, a vague smile crossed her face.

“Hi,” she said.

Hi? I
wanted to shout at her.
Hi? You
are
drunk!
Except that my mother never consumed a drop of alcohol. Ever.

I put my lips close to Max's ear. “Since when did she start drinking?” I said through clenched teeth.

He looked at me as if I'd just fallen in through the ceiling. “What are you talking about?”

I jerked my head toward the podium. Mother had relaxed her death grip on the lectern, and her eyes were now focused on the audience.

“It's hard for me to believe I'm being honored for twenty-five years of service,” she was saying. “The difficulty is not in accepting that it's been twenty-five years. Has it only been that long?”

There was a ripple of laughter through the dining room. Max looked at me smugly.

“No, it's the
honoring
part that surprises me,” she said. “After
what I've put these people through during that time, I'm amazed they aren't asking for early retilement—
retirement.”
She paused, fixed a smile on, and turned to the head table. “Or are you?”

They laughed appreciatively. Max started a round of applause. I stayed locked in on my mother.
Retilement?
No, there was definitely booze in her immediate past. I craned to get a glimpse of her now-vacated place at the table, in search of a wine glass.

“It has been a journey for all of us,” she went on. “I can't speak of anybody else's. I'm only here to shlare—to
share
—my own experience at Stanford Hospital.”

I bored my eyes into the side of Max's face, but he didn't look at me. He was hearing it too, though, I knew. His proud expression looked as if it had suddenly met with a stun gun.

Across the table, Ellen Van Dyke cleared her throat, and I realized there was a long pause going on up at the podium—an interminable pause in the public speaking world. My mother was gazing at the audience with an empty grin on her face. If it had been anyone else, I'd have assumed she was waiting for the next car in the train of thought. Max reached over and grabbed my hand.

“So,” Mother said finally, “my journey. Yes, it escaped me for the moment!”

And then she threw her head back and laughed, a juicy snorting sound that came straight out of her nose. One hand left the podium with a jerk and made contact with the glass of water in front of her. She watched as it dropped to its side, the same look of dismay on her face that Max and the Wangs were now wearing on theirs. In the drop-dead silence that followed, I could hear the water dripping over the edge of the lectern and onto the floor.

My mother gaped at it for a moment, and then her persona suddenly snapped back into place—as if it had just been off in the ladies' room powdering its nose while Liz's body kept the audience entertained.

“This is why I became a well-educated woman,” she said. “I could never make it waiting tables!”

While the audience roared—more out of relief than glee, I was convinced—I gave Max a sharp jab.

“I'm telling you, she's half schnockered,” I hissed through clenched teeth.

“She's stressed,” Max said. “That's all it is. She's fine now. It's just the stress.”

I folded my arms and tried to focus on the “journey” my mother had been promising to recount for the last five bungled minutes. Max was patently wrong. The only theory more ridiculous than her being
drunk
was her being
stressed
. It didn't happen. The woman oversaw dozens of medical technologists while they juggled ten different machines that ran thirty blood tests at a time—and she seldom even smudged her makeup in the process. The word
stress
never crossed her lips.

She got through the speech without any further overturning of the stemware or obvious lapses of memory. But the slurring of her words was so noticeable to me that I kept sneaking glances around to see if anybody else was picking up on it. If restless repositioning of chairs and faces squinted in concentration were any indication, it wasn't escaping anybody.

The final “thank you” was no more out of her mouth than the audience came to its feet
en masse
, clapping. I suspected as I joined them that they were determined not to give her a chance to say anything else. I hoped that from a standing position I could get a better view of my mother's wine glass, but Sam Bakalis was blocking my view. I noticed only in passing that he was a lot taller than he looked sitting down.

When the formalities were finally exhausted and my mother was in possession of an engraved plaque, I skipped the good-byes to the Wangs and the rest and told Max to meet me in the hall.

It took him a good ten minutes to get out there, during which I raked my hand through my hair enough times to
drive
my mother to drink. I knew I was obsessing, but I got that way when I was thrown completely off balance. Most disturbing of all: My
mother had been the one to do the throwing. She might have been critical, judgmental, domineering, and cold, but at least I always knew what to expect. That woman who had practically slobbered her way through a speech to her colleagues was nobody I had ever seen before.

In mid-rake number forty-two, I spied Max's bearlike form emerging from the dining room and waved him over. It took him another two minutes to get to me with people stopping him for hugs and handshakes and brief dialogues on Paderewski. I was ready to chew glass by the time I was able to get my fingernails into his velvet jacket and drag him into a smaller hallway off the main one.

“Okay, Max,
what
is going on?” I nearly shouted.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I'm talking about,” I said. “Mother looked like Robert Downey Jr. up there.”

“I don't know—”

“She slurred every other word. She forgot what she was going to say. She
snorted
, for Pete's sake! You can't tell me you didn't notice. You were practically cutting off the circulation in my hand.”

“All right, calm down.” Max took my arm and tucked it through his, trying to stroke my fingers.

I wrenched myself away. “You saw it.”

He shrugged. “So she was a little off.”

I drilled my eyes into him and put my hands on my hips. He drooped like a scolded spaniel.

“Something was wrong. She was distracted,” he said. “I told you it was the stress.”

“Since when does she let something as benign as a job where people's lives are in her hands get her down?” I said. “She thrives on that.”

“Maybe not so much anymore.”

I could tell Max wanted to grab my hands again. I kept them firmly planted on my hips.

“When was the last time you saw her?” he asked. “I mean really saw her—sat down and talked to her?”

I could feel my jaw stiffening. “It's probably been six months. But that's been her choice, not mine. She doesn't return my calls. She barely answers my e-mails. When I do happen to get her on the phone, she always has some reason to dash off somewhere.”

“You see?” Max said, bringing out the soothing voice. “She's too busy. Anybody is going to crack sooner or later under the kind of schedule she keeps.”

“Are you saying she's about to have a breakdown?”

“I'm saying you're jumping to conclusions. Your mama is under a lot of pressure, and that's all. But I will tell you this, though God forbid I should try to give you advice—”

“Let's have it,” I said tonelessly.

He reached for my hands again, prying them right off my hips to squeeze them in his. “Try again to spend some time with her. Make her meet you for lunch. You two share some nice antipasto.”

“Now I think
you're
the one who's on the verge of a breakdown,” I said. “Who do you know that can
make
my mother do anything?”

“Just promise me you'll try.”

It was clear he wasn't going to let go of me until I agreed, so I nodded. Then, as soon as he went off in search of my mother, I hightailed it out of there.

I called Mother the next morning from my office in the math department, and I did get her on the phone—by disguising my voice and telling Alma, her secretary, that I was from the bank. Liz kept a tight watch on her finances. I knew that would get her scurrying to the phone.

“It's Jill,” I said when she picked up.

There was a brief pause. After last night's performance, it
crossed my mind that she might be trying to recall who the heck Jill was.

“Alma told me you were someone from the bank,” she said.

“I think Alma's getting a little ditzy,” I said. “Isn't it about time for her to retire?”

“I'm sure you didn't call to check on Alma's work status. Was there something else?”

I didn't answer right away. Her words were as pointed as ever, each one carefully selected to go into me as cleanly as a needle. But the thickness I'd heard in her voice during her speech was still there. Good grief, had she already downed a couple of Bloody Marys to take the edge off of her hangover? Max was even more clueless than I'd realized. How could he have missed this?

“Jill, I don't have time for this. Why don'tcha crawl me back when you have something to shay?”

It took a moment to interpret. “No, no, I just wanted to set up a lunch date with you.”

“I have lunch plans today.”

“So how about tomorrow?”

“I'm leaving for a conference. I'll be gone until Monday.”

“So Monday then,” I said. “Noon?”

“It takes me a day to get out from under the work that pliles—piles—up while I'm away—”

“Okay, Tuesday. Next Tuesday.”

There was another pause. I thought she was considering hanging up on me.

“What is this about, Jill?” she said finally. “You're not usually this ang-shush to spend time with me. “

Ordinarily by that point in such a conversation with my mother, I would have said, “And I'm not now either. Call me when you've got a minute, okay?” But “crawl” instead of “call”? “Ang-shush” instead of “anxious”? I had to get her to lunch—and I'd probably need a delegation from Alcoholics Anonymous with me.

“I just need to talk to you,” I said.

“Are you out of money?” she said.

“No,” I said. The hair on the back of my neck was starting to bristle. She wasn't too drunk to get my hackles up.

“You're not going to finish your dishertation in time, and you want me to intercede for you for more funding.”

“No,” I said. “It isn't about me, Mother. It's about you.”

“What about me?”

“I'll tell you when I see you. Next Tuesday, noon. I'll meet you at Marie Callendar's.”

Then I was the one who hung up on her. “You owe me, Max,” I said.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” a husky voice muttered from the doorway.

I looked up to see a tall, skinny girl peering in with apologetic gray eyes. It was Tabitha Lane, a freshman in my Math 19 class, the one who always reminded me of an adolescent giraffe. I'd totally forgotten she was coming by this morning.

“Sorry about what?” I said. “Come in.”

“I thought I heard you talking to somebody,” she said. “I can come back later if this isn't a good time.”

“It's fine,” I said. I turned around and cleared off a seat on the straight-backed wooden chair next to my desk. Then I had to find the matchbook I always put under one leg so it wouldn't rock and drive me nuts. Most of the furniture in graduate student offices, at least in the Alfred P. Sloan Mathematics Center, looked like it had been salvaged from the Stanford attic. I kept talking as I hunted under the desk for the matchbook. “You've got an appointment. I was just on the phone.”

“I thought maybe you were talking to that guy you share your office with.”

“Alan Jacoboni?” I said. “He never comes in until at least noon, the slacker. You know, you'd think with the amount of tuition people pay to go to this school, they could afford a chair that doesn't require—”

I stopped in mid-sentence at the sound of wheels rolling
across the office floor. Tabitha was entering on roller blades.

“What the heck?” I said, looking up at her.

“Oh, I'm sorry!” Her face went pale under the spattering of freckles that covered her nose and cheeks like carelessly thrown confetti. “Do you want me to take them off? Are they too noisy? I can take them off—”

“No,” I said, still staring. “You can wear them in here. The question is, why?”

“It's so much easier to get around campus with these,” Tabitha said. “I was ending up late to, like, every one of my classes, and they frown on that around here and so then I saw this girl in my dorm putting them on and I go, what are you doing, and she goes, they're totally the best, so I asked my mother to send me mine and of course it took, oh, maybe three weeks for me to get them because the mail is so slow—”

“Well, good. Whatever works for you,” I said. It was no wonder she talked like she was hoarse, I thought. Overuse of the vocal chords. “I have to ask, though, how do you deal with steps?”

Tabitha cocked her head, her short, blunt-cut, reddish hair spilling against her cheek. It would have fallen straight into her eyes if she didn't have it pulled back with the clips that made her look even more like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. There was a small outbreak of tiny pimples on her forehead, but she was obviously making no effort to conceal them.