The Crazy School (28 page)

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“A night in jail, the possibility you might be accused of the murders . . .”

I crossed my legs.

“It must have been tremendously upsetting,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Scary?”

“Please tell me that’s a rhetorical question.”

“Sure,” she said. “What do lawyers say? ‘Asked and answered’?

Let’s call it that.”

“Let’s.”

She gave me “the nod.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“What?”

“The nodding. Really. Save your breath. Or, you know, your neck or whatever, okay?”

“Okay.”

We sat there.

For a good while.

Sookie crossed her legs.

I uncrossed mine.

“Is there anything I can tell
you
?” she asked.

“Such as?”

“Such as how angry
I
am?”

“About what?”

“About your having been put through all this . . . this . . .

shit.”

“Sookie, are you serious?”

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She pointed to the typewriter. “I’ve written my letter of resignation.”

I looked at the piece of paper.

“I was tempted to give it to Dhumavati the minute she walked you in here. And then I realized I should see if there was anything I could help you with fi rst, while I still offi cially work for these people,” said Sookie.

“I’m, um . . . wow.”

“Anything, Madeline—answer your questions, talk to your lawyer, testify on your behalf—you name it.”

“I admit to being shocked. Pleasantly.”

“This is not what I signed on for when I worked my tail off to become a shrink. It’s a travesty. And I don’t mean just what they’re doing to you, I mean all of it.”

“So, Sookie,” I said, smiling. “How does that make you
feel
?”

She giggled. “Ready to blow the damn roof off this place.

Where should we start?”

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40

“Let’s start with what you meant by ‘what they’re doing’ to me,” I said. “They who, and doing what?”

“I just can’t believe it’s a coincidence that all this started after you told me about what you’d gone through last year.”

“Because you did the show-and-tell at Santangelo’s house last Friday night?”

“You know about that?”

“I do now,” I said. “A little late to matter.”

“For both of us.”

“And it never bothered you before, the fact that there wasn’t any confi dentiality? I mean, wasn’t that a bit of a contrast with the other places you’ve worked?”

“I didn’t have any other places to compare it
to,
Madeline.

This was my fi rst job out of graduate school.”

“It still didn’t raise any fl ags? Pardon my saying, but isn’t confi dentiality pretty much the cornerstone of therapy? I can’t believe your professors failed to mention that.”

“I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew. The kids, the parents—”

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“The teachers.”

“It never occurred to me that we were being pumped for information without our clients’ consent. I can’t believe that’s legal.”

“It probably isn’t,” I said.

“Then I guess maybe I should be making my own appointment with your attorney.”

“He’s expensive.”

“I have a feeling I’m going to need expensive, if I ever hope to work in this fi eld again,” she said.

I couldn’t dispute that, much as I would have liked to.

“I know,” she said. “I’m an idiot.”

“I think that probably goes for both of us. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

“Take them down,” she said.

“If they don’t take me down fi rst.”

“I won’t let that happen. I don’t care if it means I don’t ever get a second job doing this.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, so let’s scuttle a little confi dentiality of our own.

What else do they know about me? What else do you know about them?”

She thought about that.

“Start with who goes to the meetings,” I said. “I presume Dhumavati and David . . . all the shrinks . . . any faculty?”

“Only two,” she said. “Gerald, of course. And then lately, that new guy’s been showing up too.”

“Tim?” I asked, knowing full well that Sookie would have just said Tim, had he been the new guy in question.

“No,” she said, “I’m talking about your ‘friend’ Pete.”

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“I’m not liking the way you just said ‘friend,’ Sookie. Makes me nervous.”

“It should,” she said. “He thinks you did it. He thinks you killed them.”

It took a minute for that to sink in.

And a very bad minute it was.

“He told you guys that this Friday? What was it, last night?

I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”

“We had an extra session this week,” she said. “I suppose for damage control.”

“When?”

“The night before you were taken to jail.”

“Is that why?”

“Yes. I think it was,” she said. “Detective Cartwright came to the meeting. With another offi cer, a woman.”

“Baker?” I asked.

Sookie nodded.

“Have they been back since?”

“Twice,” she said. “As far as I know.”

“To sit in on more meetings?”

“To talk with Pete. And Dhumavati and David. So I don’t know what was said at those meetings.”

“Can you fi nd out?”

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “They’re coming back tomorrow morning. Apparently, Cartwright wants to talk with Gerald.”

“And tonight Gerald wants to talk with me,” I said.

Sookie looked thoughtful. “Are you going to take Mr. Jones up on that invitation?”

“Not alone. Not in his apartment.”

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“Are you saying you think
he
might have . . .” She shook her head, stunned.

“He was serving the punch the night Fay and Mooney died.

Other than that, I have no idea.”

“What does he want to talk about?”

“About what originally brought him here to Santangelo.”

“I may be able to tell you that,” she said. “In fact, I have a feeling Gerald would want me to. He recently opened up to me about it.”

“You’re his therapist?”

“We’ve been doing a lot of private sessions, which he specifi ed had to be confi dential.”

“How did he fi nagle that?”

“He pays for them. And we meet off campus.”

“If you’re willing to tell me, I’m presuming his reason for coming here wasn’t something horrible.”

“You’d be wrong,” she said.

“Anything to do with the accusation that he grabbed that boy last year?”

“You know about that?”

“Wiesner told me.”

“Wiesner . . . You watch yourself with that boy.”

“Wiesner aside, do you think Gerald might have done any grabbing?” I said.

“I know for a fact he didn’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I still don’t want to go to his apartment alone.”

“Why don’t I come with you?” she said looking at her watch.

“We could walk over right now. He should be there. He speaks with his mother every day around this time. She’s in a hospice in Great Barrington. Stage-four bone cancer.”

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“Oh, Sookie,” I said.

“They’ve always been close,” she said. “Gerald’s the eldest of seven children, and his mother was widowed when he was still very young. He helped raise the other kids.”

“I had no idea.”

“Gerald is a remarkable man. It’s been a privilege getting to know him. Not just professionally.” She checked her watch again. “I’d call, but they’re probably still on the phone together.”

“You’re sure it would be okay for us to barge in?”

“She’s in a great deal of pain. Their calls don’t last very long these days.”

When Gerald greeted us at the door of his apartment, it was obvious that he’d been crying.

He and Sookie hugged, and what with the way he looked at her after welcoming us inside, I began to sense why she had such absolute trust that his passions had nothing to do with young boys. Gerald was smitten with her, and she with him.

They fairly glowed with it.

“How was she today?” she asked him.

“Mother’s ready to go,” he said. “I’m the one who can’t accept it, and I can’t stand the knowledge that she’s suffering so greatly to make the transition easier on me. She’ll wait until I’m ready. I want to be ready, able to let her go, but I’m not strong enough. Not yet.”

I looked around his apartment. A lot of very good Japanese wood-block prints. Hiroshige. Hokusai. Bookshelves jammed with nonfi ction hardcovers. Family photos on all the tables—

group shots, mostly, in clean-lined sterling frames.

Over on his desk, there was one color eight-by-ten of a 2 7 6

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smiling dark-haired woman, taken in the early sixties, if her cat’s-eye glasses were any indication. She had Gerald’s jaw. His eyes. She was proudly holding up a fi shing rod in one hand and a rather large walleye in the other.

Next to that shot was another of the same woman, only this time she had a laughing little girl on her lap. Beautiful-looking.

Huge gray eyes, ash-blonde hair. Six years old, maybe, and holding up a minnow.

Gerald turned to me. “Sookie’s told you about Mother, Madeline?”

“She has,” I said. “I hope that’s all right.”

“Absolutely. I only wish you could both have met her before she became so ill. She is a woman of tremendous depth and courage. Always has been.”

“She sounds it,” I said.

“May I get anything for the two of you?” he asked. “A glass of wine? Some coffee?”

“I’m fi ne, thank you,” I said.

Sookie told him she’d love a glass of white. Gerald put some music on. Young Glenn Gould doing his 1955 take on the Goldberg Variations.

Perfect sound track for someone who loved fractals, when I thought about it—how each little piece built on the last, the way they all unfolded and sort of sparkled.
Melodies for
Mandelbrot.

Gerald had a tremendously hardcore set of speakers on that stereo. You could hear Gould humming along with himself, which I’d never been able to detect on my own cassettes
refrito
of the same recordings.

“Sure you wouldn’t like anything, Madeline?” he called out from the kitchen.

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“Maybe a little punch?” Sookie whispered under her breath.

“That’s the kind of thing that passes for humor among shrinks?” I said, getting up to look more closely at the pictures on his desk.

“Mary,” said Sookie. “Gerald’s mother. And Mary-Claire.”

Mary-Claire was wearing a T-shirt celebrating the Bicenten-nial. Not the sixties, then. Maybe his mother just took good care of her glasses. Fastidious, like her oldest son.

Gerald came back out with Sookie’s wine.

“Mary-Claire was a student here,” he said when he saw me looking at her photograph. “That’s why I came.”

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41

“She was the brightest of any of us,” said Gerald. “Always the head of her class. Tremendously gifted in math and science but far above average in the humanities as well.

Unlike me—I was always rather one-sided academically.

Mary-Claire used to tease me about that something fi erce.

Tried to get me to read poetry. When she was fi fteen, she won a concert competition—full scholarship to study at a conservatory in Boston.”

“What instrument?” I asked.

“Piano,” he said. “She played stunningly. Would have given Glenn Gould a run for his money, no doubt.”

Would have.

“She never got to Boston,” he said. “We realized that summer that she had bi-polar disorder. Had her fi rst psychotic break in late August, during a harrowing manic episode.”

He picked up the frame and ran the tip of his fi nger along the edge of it. “She spent sixteen months in a hospital, then we enrolled her here.”

“That was three years ago,” said Sookie.

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“I could afford the best care for her by then,” he said. “The doctor at her hospital recommended Santangelo. From the heft of the tuition, I believed him.”

“What was the name of the hospital?” I asked.

“Lake Haven,” they said in unison.

“And when did Mary-Claire leave Santangelo?”

“She didn’t,” said Gerald.

“She died here. Two years ago,” said Sookie.

“I resigned from my job in Tokyo,” said Gerald. “That’s when I came here. Pretty much the fi rst time I was ever glad to have such a common last name. You and Sookie are the only people on campus who know that Mary-Claire and I were brother and sister. Tomorrow I’ll be telling Detective Cartwright.”

“Gerald, I’m so sorry. What happened to her?”

“We were told she committed suicide. I don’t believe it.”

“Please excuse me for asking this, but how can you be sure?

I mean, considering her illness . . .” I said.

“She was doing far, far better. Her meds were working, and she was hoping to go to the conservatory after all. She’d written to me in Japan to tell me about it. I was planning to visit the week she died.”

Still, maybe she’d had another manic episode? A crash into depression afterward?

“I fl ew home for her funeral instead. “Mother was so dis-traught, I couldn’t leave.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t suicide?” I asked.

“We believed that it was at fi rst. They did an autopsy, so we knew she was pregnant. We presumed that was why she’d done it. But then Mary-Claire’s last letter to me arrived—forwarded from the offi ce in Tokyo. She’d been raped here. That was how she got pregnant.”