Authors: Larry McMurtry
Meanwhile, though he denied it, his granny’s behavior did sort of bother him—her affair with the young psychiatrist had brought her atavism to the fore, or something. She had always been greedy, but she was usually greedy with flair, making a comedy of her own selfishness; people rolled their eyes and talked about her behind her back, but no one really disliked her for it. Sometimes she shocked people, but most of the time she entertained them and they ended up giving her the benefit of the doubt. Even someone like Patsy, who didn’t really approve of his grandmother, usually let her get away with whatever it was she was getting away with.
But then, too, his granny seemed to have pretty good judgment about personal relations. If she wanted something or someone, she would always take things right up to the line, but usually, when she got to the line, she stopped.
This time he had a feeling she might have got carried away and crossed the line. Dr. Bruckner seemed nice enough—he just hadn’t impressed Teddy as being too smart. He seemed kind of passive, like most shrinks, but if he was really smart, then he was doing a good job of hiding it. If there was a rub, that could be it. Teddy knew his granny was really smart.
She was the one who had always encouraged him to seek equals as lovers—she had recognized Jane’s intelligence immediately and urged him to stick with her, despite knowing that Jane had been in mental hospitals more than once, and had even had to be straitjacketed a time or two because of her suicidal tendencies.
“It’s a sad fate, living with someone less smart than oneself,” Aurora had told him at the time. “I know, because it has been my fate.”
“Was my grandfather dumb?” Teddy asked, rather surprised. His grandfather had died before he or his siblings were born.
“He was not entirely unintelligent,” Aurora said. “But he was not as smart as I am, nor was he anywhere near as curious. I like Jane because she’s curious about so many things. I hope you’ll do your best to keep her.”
Teddy had done his best and in fact had kept her. Now he couldn’t really imagine what he’d do if for some reason, someday, he failed to keep her. The car inched onward a few feet, giving him enough space to make his cut for the shoulder—the temperature needle was just about to go above the H, which was not good. He himself didn’t really mind heat—at least he preferred it to cold—but his granny, who had put on weight lately, looked as if she might melt. The last thing they needed was to have the radiator explode.
Aurora was wondering if she should tell Teddy that Jerry Bruckner was not an accredited, college-educated psychiatrist. She thought probably she shouldn’t. Though he had dropped out of college himself, Teddy remained a bit of a snob about schools. In the past he had liked matching wits with psychiatrists who trained at Harvard or Stanford or other such places. Finding out that his new doctor was the son of a Las Vegas showgirl and had simply read his way into the profession might activate this snobbery. Jerry said that Teddy, so passive in life, was a very aggressive patient, very quick in debate, and also very well informed about psychiatric concepts and theories of personality structure.
In fact, though she took care not to ask Jerry anything that
would even momentarily tempt him to reveal personal things that Ted might have said—about things that related to his mother, or to herself—she almost regretted getting Ted into therapy with Jerry because she sensed that Jerry was rather intimidated by Ted. At least he was rather intimidated by him intellectually, and the sense that this was the case made her even more dubious about her own situation. Jerry’s patients were hardly intellectuals. They were ordinary people, many of them elderly, whose psyches had been mangled by life. They were not well informed about psychiatric concepts, or the structure of their own personalities. They just needed a little sympathy, a little company, and a little common-sense advice. Part of Jerry’s appeal was that he was generous with such people; he didn’t charge them much, he took them seriously, he did his best to be helpful, and undoubtedly was helpful much of the time.
Still, it was not really comforting to consider that she was sleeping with a man who was intellectually and in some ways socially intimidated by her grandson. She had insisted on the relationship, and was still insisting on it—not that Jerry had really made much of an effort to resist. He was a slow-swimming fish, and it was perfectly obvious that anyone who cared to cast a line could catch him: waitresses, stewardesses, girls who worked in health spas, even an aging woman such as herself. Jerry took almost no initiative, but he also put up almost no fight; when she showed up, he allowed her her way, but it was beginning to bother her that he himself
never
did the showing up. He was never likely to bang on her door in the middle of the night, drunk with love or thick with passion, as Pascal had now done three times since she had taken him to lunch and politely informed him that she was occupied elsewhere.
Yet, the fact was that Jerry Bruckner remained intensely attractive to her physically—so intensely that she tolerated his passivity and lack of initiative, flaws that had caused her to reject or dispose of many, many men when she was younger. She didn’t really doubt that Jerry cared for her in his way; for that matter, she knew that he was fascinated by
her. She had gone out of her way to
make
him fascinated—it would probably be the last time she was up to that effort with a man, and she had spared no pains. It had worked, and yet it hadn’t, because his fascination was too studious, too patient, too relaxed; in some way, it was even too sincere: all in themselves very decent qualities, but not exactly the qualities she would have preferred in a man for whom she harbored such a racking attraction, and with whom she was having what might well be her final fling. She would have preferred him to be a little racked too, or at least a little more unsettlable, or confused, or needy, or something. Yet he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be. Her grandson, so young and so shaky, was quite mistaken in thinking that she was too concerned with age, when in fact she had chosen to ignore it, and at great risk.
“Fortunately you don’t know anything about age yet, Teddy,” she said. “It isn’t that I’m hung up on it, it’s that it’s hung itself on
me.
I don’t want it. I despise it! I try to give it the back of my hand. But there it is: the skin I wear and the breath I breathe. I just
am
getting old.”
Teddy was slipping along the frontage road, passing the miles of stationary cars that were still stuck on the freeway. He had forgotten his remark about age; he had even forgotten, as they sped along and the two of them and the engine cooled, that his grandmother was sleeping with his new shrink. His mind had moved ahead to Tommy, whom he would be facing in another half hour. He didn’t mind facing Tommy—he felt that he understood Tommy, and he also felt close to him. His sense of being Tommy’s brother was his strongest connection in life, even stronger than his connection to Jane. Tommy just had his own way of being, and Teddy didn’t feel there was anything he could or should do about it. He didn’t dread going into the prison, as his granny and his sister did. It was just Tommy’s place—he had chosen it and adjusted to it, and that was that.
At the prison he managed to find a parking place at the edge of the lot, where there were some trees just outside the fence to provide his granny a little shade. He looked at her
to see if she might want to change her mind and come in, but she gave her head a little shake, so he rolled all the windows down and left her in the car.
Watching Teddy cross the parking lot, Aurora felt an old sadness. Teddy seemed so slight—so mere. He was not going to be the writer she had once hoped he would be, nor was he likely even to be the classical scholar he himself had once hoped to become. He was only going to be a nice, lost man, with perhaps enough strength and clarity of purpose to guide and raise his son. It had started, probably, with Emma’s death. Teddy had once told her, as a heartbroken little boy, that if he had known how to love his mother better maybe she wouldn’t have died.
“Teddy, that’s wrong,” she said. “Of all of us, you loved her best.”
“But she died—I didn’t know what to do,” Teddy said. The conversation had taken place on one of her visits to Nebraska when the children were still living with their father.
Somehow the orderly, careful way Teddy moved between the rows of parked cars stirred her in her depths. Now and then he paused so that the sad mother or aunt or girlfriend of some other incarcerated boy could squeeze through ahead of him—the prison authorities had not been generous with parking space. It seemed to Aurora that his very kindness and consideration were a measure of his lostness—she was glad when he was out of sight. Selfish as it might seem, keeping her mind on her own dilemma was better, in a way, than thinking about Teddy and his problems.
She had brought the morning paper with her, meaning to study her horoscope and see if anything good could be expected to happen anytime soon. After that, she could devote whatever time was left to doing the crossword puzzle. Fortunately the horoscopes and the crossword puzzle were on the same page.
As she was about to fold the paper, she noticed an item—not a long one—at the top of the page opposite the weather map and the horoscope. The headline said: “Writer’s Daughter Killed By Convict Husband.”
Aurora glanced at the brief item—just two paragraphs—and discovered to her shock that the murdered girl had been the daughter of Danny Deck, the famous television producer, who had been for a time her own dead daughter’s best friend—her lover, even, for one night: the very night, in fact, in which the girl named T.R., who was now dead, had been born.
Painful memories flooded Aurora—she had to put her face in her hands for a moment, to hide her shock. She remembered the very quarrel she and Emma had had—always snoopy about her daughter’s life, she had happened to drive by and see Danny Deck’s rattly old car parked at the curb in front of Emma’s apartment in the early morning. Flap, Emma’s husband, the very man who had just ignored Melanie in her distress, had been off on a fishing trip with his father at the time. He had often been off on fishing trips with his father. These absences hadn’t suited Emma, but they suited Aurora fine—she even entertained the hope that Danny Deck, who showed at least some promise and might someday be an interesting and successful man, would step on the gas and take Emma away from Flap before it was too late.
But it had already been too late: Emma was pregnant with Tommy, though Aurora had yet to find that out. Emma was stuck with Flap for life, and her failure to escape was one reason Aurora herself was now sitting in a prison parking lot in Huntsville. Danny Deck, after a slow start, had made a great name for himself in television, creating one of her own favorite shows,
Al and Sal
. The show had been off the air for quite some time, but she and Rosie still occasionally watched it on reruns—it was a family comedy, and both she and Rosie identified strongly with Sal, the sex-starved wife, a lovely woman but married to Al, a slug of a man who would rather mow his lawn than make love to Sal.
Now tragedy had struck the comedy master. The girl had been shot down at a filling station, with two other people, by her convict husband, who, through a clerical error, had been released from the very prison whose parking lot she now sat in—and less than a week ago.
It was too much—life was too wretched. Danny Deck had been a rather soft boy. In the quarrel she had had with Emma about Danny and their night of illicit love, Emma had been so defensive that she had missed the point. Aurora had only been trying to encourage her to escape to a better man, but Emma, furious that her mother had spied on her, would talk of nothing but Danny’s sorrow and heartbreak. His wife, it seemed, had kicked him out on the very day that their child was born—he had gone to the hospital to try to see the baby, only to be beaten off by his wife’s dreadful parents.
So now, for the second time, Danny Deck had lost his daughter—and this time he had lost her forever. Carefully she tore the little story out of the paper and tucked it in her purse. Rosie and the General would be interested. Also, the piece mentioned the name of the town where the killings had taken place. She thought she might just write Danny—in the old days she had called him Daniel, to irritate Emma. She might write him and try to say something comforting. Perhaps he would want to visit sometime. They could all sit around and tell stories about Emma. It might be nice, though of course it would probably have to wait until the first rawness of his grief had passed—if it did pass. T.R. had only been a few months older than Tommy, who might even have known the man who killed her, since until a few days earlier they had both been inmates of the same prison.
Lonely all of a sudden, wondering how she would go about recovering if one of her grandchildren were brutally slain, she looked around the parking lot to see if there were any humans available—a dope-addict guard like Willie, a distraught mother or sister, anyone she might talk to in order to distract herself from the dreadful scene in her head in which one of her grandchildren, rather than Danny Deck’s daughter, was lying dead on the greasy concrete at a filling station.
But there was no one—she could only sit and suffer the scene until Teddy came back to the hot car.
“We talked about baseball,” he said cheerfully, starting the Cadillac. He saw at once that his grandmother looked even less happy than she had looked when he went in to see
Tommy. It didn’t seem to him that Dr. Bruckner could be worth quite so much agony, if he was what her agony was about. But he didn’t say it. In fact, he and Tommy had had a pleasant visit. They both kept up with baseball, and it made a good meeting ground. Coming to the prison was really no problem during baseball season. He and Tommy both had total recall of all the recent games; they could forget about the prison and the family and everything else and just analyze ball games. It was very pleasant; he and his brother still talked baseball just as avidly as they had all through their childhood and adolescence. They still had that, and that was sort of enough—at least, when he left the prison, he felt that he still had a brother, and he hoped that when he was back in his cell, Tommy felt the same.