Pharmakon (6 page)

“How so?” Nora tried to straighten the twisted wheel.

“I see the same look in my eye every morning when I look in the mirror and shave.”

Nora knew her husband defined depression as paralyzed rage. She laughed only because, as Fiona sobbed, Jack began to cry, and she didn’t want to make it a trio. Her lip trembled, her eyes watered up, just the way they had when she misspelled “ennui” in the state spelling bee. As soon as the last letter was out of her mouth, she knew she’d made a mistake. It was too late to take it back. She didn’t like to think about her marriage the same way: “Is that how you feel about your life?”

And then a smaller but genuine miracle happened: “Not when I look at you.” That it was what she needed to hear didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

Dr. Friedrich’s dreams of greatness began when he was nine and would sneak down to the root cellar where his mother made Homer sleep as punishment when he’d wet his bed in the summer. In the winter she was less cruel. In the cool, earthy dark, smelling of parsnips and potatoes, Will would put Homer to sleep with talk of all the wondrous things they’d accomplish together when he was grown up. Holding open a frayed atlas someone had purchased at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1903, running his fingers across maps where the hearts of continents were still marked “unexplored,” Will would confide, “After we find the new tallest mountain in the world, President Calvin Coolidge himself will give us a medal and the money to build a rocket, like Buck Rogers, only better, because it will be real. And I, I mean, we’ll . . .”

In 1952, the six inches between one’s ears were the least explored territory on the planet. And the chemistry of feelings was thought by most to have as little to do with hard science as Kryptonite.

A thirty-three-year-old man who can’t afford to replace a bicycle and thinks a flock of parrots in his tree is a sign he’s on the right track is worse than lost; he’s fallen. Feeling like he was sliding from the peak of a glacial mountain of narcissism, Friedrich reached out and grabbed hold of his wife like she was the last rung of a rope ladder dangling from the edge of the world.

“Why are you doing that?” Fiona had never seen her parents kiss on the mouth. Not like that, and never on the front lawn.

“Because we’re happy.” Nora giggled as her husband buried his face in the softness of her neck.

“Mama’s Sleeping Beauty, and Daddy’s waking her up.” It was the other way around, but it was also Lucy’s favorite fairy tale.

“That’s stupid.” Fiona watched jealously as Lucy threw her arms around her parents’ hips, pressing them even closer.

Feeling left out, Willy pawed at his father. “Uppee me.”

“Kiss.” Jack wanted in too. Their embrace had more limbs than an octopus.

Friedrich was about to whisper in his wife’s ear, “Let’s get a babysitter and go to bed,” when he felt a small hand on his penis. Lucy? Jack? Oh, God, please not Willy. He hoped it was his wife. “Was that you?”

“Was me what?” It had been more than a month since they had had sex. An erection flagpoled the front of his pants. Nora laughed.

Fiona was staring at his fly. Or was she just refusing to look her father in the eye? Will knew he was certifiable when he found himself imagining his daughter replaying the seminal moment of her sexual dysfunction to an analyst twenty years and a bout of nonorgasmic nymphomania later.

Will, hand in his pocket, was nonchalantly trying to girdle his erection behind his belt buckle when a foreign accent inquired, “Dr. Friedrich, in your professional opinion, do you think a tree full of parrots will have the same effect on my wife?”

It was Jens. The animal behaviorist lived across the street. Bristly, yellow hair, solid, and warm as a Dutch oven, so obviously a foreigner (shorts, sandals with socks), Jens had been the first person on the street to take notice of the parrots, which were still jabberwocking and squawking in the mulberry tree. His wife, Anka, and their twin girls were running across the street, blond and red-faced like figures from Brueghel dropped into suburbia. And a half block away, Fred Mettler, a physicist with a glass eye who had worked at Los Alamos, and his wife, the den mother of Fiona’s Brownie troop, were being pulled toward the parrots by their three children, the youngest of whom, due to a fondness for running in front of cars, was kept on a leash.

After that, news of the parrots rolled through Hamden like ball lightning. It was spread via word-of-mouth, telephone, and children on roller skates. Buzz-cut boys with slingshots dangling from back pockets, girls in smock dresses tied in the back with bows, like presents waiting to be opened, shortcut through backyards, jumped fences, and rampaged through freshly planted gardens to glimpse the birds. Crabby old ladies and professional grouches, who waited on porches and sat behind draped windows, eager to report youthful trespass or misdemeanor, barked, “Johnny, Susie, Bill, Fred, Sam, Wendy, Gus: I’m calling your mother right now and . . .”

Mothers put dinner on hold to see for themselves. And husbands used to being greeted with a highball at the door found cryptic notes re: parrots in a mulberry tree on Hamelin Road.

And from their little starter house subdivision, the rumor of feathered fun moved up the hill, to the big old homes on the ridge, with maids’ rooms, and views, and broad lawns landscaped with shade trees and boxwoods older than the century. Streets where PWMs lived next to bank presidents and businessmen who ran companies founded by their grandfathers. A world Friedrich drove through once or twice a week, sunk low in the White Whale so as not be recognized, just to see what life would be like once his name was in the textbooks.

An hour after he first saw the birds, Friedrich’s threadbare patch of lawn was crowded not just with fellow academics connected to Yale, but with neighbors they never talked to and never knew they had—car salesmen, insurance brokers, bakers of bread mingled with headshrinkers and meteorologists, individuals who were richer and poorer for their ability to recite poetry in five languages or their intimate knowledge of the defenestration of Prague. As the parrots cackled and called out, “Hello! Shut up! Close the door!” and one tangerine-winged cockatoo wailed plaintively,
“¿Donde está Marjeta?”
over and over again, town and gown cracked witty, wise, and dumb about what had brought the birds to town.

“Ten bucks says somebody who owns a pet shop isn’t very happy right now,“ opined the car salesman, who invited Friedrich to come down and test-drive a Nash.

“I called Creedmore’s Pets and the University Zoo. Nobody’s missing,” said Sergeant Neutch, a Hamden cop who looked like a turtle who’d misplaced his shell.

A teaching assistant who’d written her doctoral thesis on
Don Quixote
volunteered, “The macaw speaks Spanish with a Madrilenian accent.”

“They were unloading a freighter from Bolivia down at the harbor this morning. Maybe they got locked in the cargo hold.” That was the policeman.

“Bolivia is landlocked,” Jens interjected.

“Okay, Einstein, what’s your explanation?”

“Commies.” Jens winked at Friedrich.

“Are you telling me communists are using parrots to spy on us?” The cop was interested.

Jens put his finger to his lips. “Don’t let them know we’re onto them.” Everyone who knew Jens and his wife were both card-carrying communists laughed.

“Maybe the hydrogen-bomb testing has affected migration patterns,” suggested a botanist who had a toadstool named after him.

It was the physicist’s wife’s turn. “Fred says in twenty years we’ll have atomic-powered vacuum cleaners.”

“What’s a vacuum cleaner?” Nora deadpanned.

Nora prided herself on her lack of homemaking skills.

“What if they have a disease?” A mother pulled her child away from the tree.

“You mean, like, parrot fever?”

“What if they’re radioactive?”

“What about parrot-toe-nitus?”

“Is that like an ingrown toenail?”

Friedrich excused himself from what passed for wit to bring a chair out from the living room for a pregnant woman who looked like she was going to faint, directed several children to his downstairs bathroom, and heard the driver of a kosher butcher’s truck, on listening to the cockatoo call for Marjeta, tell no one in particular, in a thick, consonant-heavy Mitteleuropean accent, “Marjeta was my sister’s name.”

Friedrich wondered but didn’t want to ask what had happened to her. He cheered himself by giving Jack a hug and, at his wife’s suggestion, headed toward the backyard to get the picnic benches.

Will was just lugging the benches around to the front of the house when he heard, “Portentous, don’t you think, Doctor?” He didn’t have to look up; he recognized Bunny Winton’s voice. Her la-di-da accent no longer offended him; he found it amusing. It made it seem more like he was acting in a stage play about a research project rather than living it.

“What?” He hadn’t expected her to come see the parrots, and he had no idea what she was talking about.

“The parrots; they’re a good omen for the start of our project.” She was surprisingly superstitious. She kept her keys on a rabbit’s foot and a four-leaf clover in a crystal heart dangled from her charm bracelet.

“Let’s hope.”

“Sorry I wasn’t at the lab this morning. Carol broke her arm at school and Thayer couldn’t pick her up, so I had to play Mom.” Carol was her twelve-year-old stepdaughter, and Mom was a game she had almost convinced herself she had no interest in playing.

“Dr. Petersen dropped in. I think he was disappointed you weren’t there. He’s keen on our work.” Friedrich thought, but didn’t say,
He’s keen on you.

No question, Bunny Winton knew both how things worked and how to make them work. Dr. Petersen was seventy-two years old. She had picked not only the most senior psychiatrist at the institute but the randiest to sponsor their research project. When she had laid out what they wanted to do, she sat cross-legged at the old goat’s feet. Watching him watch her, she did everything but lick her paws and purr to close the deal.

Friedrich thought he had yet another reason to dislike his collaborator, until they walked out of Petersen’s office and Winton whispered, “I’m sorry you had to witness that nauseating display of coquetry, but it was the quickest way to get him to say yes.” Friedrich didn’t like women who used their sexuality to fuel their ambitions. He was less certain how he felt about feminine wiles being used to further his own.

Thayer Winton was unloading two cases of beer from the trunk of his Cadillac. He was older than Bunny, tall, and had the kind of tan you got when you spent spring vacation winning the Bermuda race on your yacht. Friedrich had read about him in the Yale alumni bulletin left on the floor of the bathroom of a stall where he had once taken a shit. Dr. Winton had told Friedrich Thayer had married her because his first wife had died in childbirth and he wanted a mother for his daughter. “He got something else. Which I think he realized is what he wanted all along,” was how she’d put it, as they’d chopped up the kwina leaves for their first fermentation.

“And what was that?” Friedrich had asked.

“A friend.”

Widower, child to raise—Friedrich would have felt sorry for him if he weren’t the heir to an insurance company up in Hartford.

“Thayer likes your wife.” Bunny liked to say things that got men thinking. Friedrich looked over. Nora had her purse open and was insisting the millionaire take her money for the beer.

“I’m fond of her myself.” Thayer wouldn’t take the money. Nora had the last word by slipping it into his pocket.

It was about then that Jens came back from his house with a big pitcher of Manhattans and a stack of paper cups. And suddenly Dr. and Mrs. Friedrich, whose social skills were normally stretched by their annual baked ham and potatoes lyonnaise dinner for eight to suck up to the dean in hopes of tenure, were hosting the best cocktail party anyone in Hamden could remember.

No one noticed the tall, skinny, stoop-shouldered seventeen-year-old slowly pedaling up the hill toward the Friedrichs. A four-by-five Speed Graphic press camera hung from his neck, swinging back and forth like the pendulum of a ticking clock.

The camera was borrowed. The old fat-tired girl’s bicycle, with the rusty chain and the seat too low, was his own. Each time he pushed down on one pedal, his opposite knee hit the end of the handlebar and the bike veered. Still, he had made the three-and-a-half-mile ride out from campus in less than an hour. His kneecaps were rubbed raw, and he had blisters on both his palms. Sweat dripping from the end of his nose, straining as he pushed down on the pedals, lips pursed tight as a sphincter, he was misery on wheels.