“So, the boy’s father and you were separated,” said Jackie. “I’m sorry.”
“They go,” said Lillian. “You know that. Everything’s fine, then they go. Just as you please.”
“I do know,” said Jackie, glowering at me, the closest representative of the offending group.
“So, Arthur stayed with you and Jonathan went with his father. That must have been hard.”
Lillian let out another one of her nervous, humorless laughs.
“What’re you going to do? If that’s what the boy wants to do? He can be anybody, anywhere he wants, I can’t help that. I think I could drink some of that coffee,” she said, pointing at my cup. I got her some.
“Arthur was your husband’s name, too, wasn’t it?” asked Jackie.
“I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him in a while. Arthur should tell him to come see me.”
She showed the first signs of agitation, so Jackie slid back and let out a contented little breath, looking out at the gathering on the patio.
“You must like to sit here. It’s very pleasant,” she told Lillian.
“Lillian likes it here. I don’t care. I can sit in the room just as easily.”
“How does Lillian feel about Arthur? Your husband,” I asked her.
“Another country heard from.”
“She want to see him?” Jackie asked.
“Doesn’t much care for him, truth be told. He should still come and see me.”
“Could bring along Jonathan,” I suggested. I could sense Jackie tensing up, thinking I was about to blow her play.
“That’s up to Arthur.”
“Your husband.”
“No, of course not. I’m talking about Arthur.”
“Your son.”
Lillian looked at Jackie.
“You should introduce him to the rest of the family,” she whispered. “I think he’s a little confused.”
“Happens easily.”
Maryanne came back out on to the patio. She carried a clipboard and a blood pressure gauge stuffed under her arm.
“Hello, Sweetheart. Are you having a nice visit?” she asked Lillian.
“I think so. I have some coffee.”
Maryanne looked impressed.
“Well, that’s a new thing. I didn’t know you liked coffee.” She took me by the sleeve and pulled me out of earshot. “Five years I’ve been here, never saw her drink coffee.”
“Maybe we should stay for cocktail hour. Could start a whole new trend.”
“Why not. Just have to check for adverse reactions.”
“What sort of meds is she on?”
“You want to talk cocktails. Quite the mix. Mostly tranqs, a serotonin reuptake inhibitor—between the two they flatten things out a little. Not that she’s bipolar, technically, but you get a lot of the same symptoms. Anhedonia, dysphoria, depression, agitation. They’ve been prescribing antipsychotics, but I don’t know what for. She isn’t delusional.”
“I notice she’s got another Lillian hanging around with her.”
Maryanne smiled.
“Not another.
The
Lillian.”
“So who’re we talking to?”
“She doesn’t know.” She leaned into me, as best she could given her girth, and whispered, “That’s why she’s here.”
Maryanne gave me a clinical briefing on Lillian’s condition, which promptly took me out of my depth.
“She said I’m the one that’s confused. She’s right.”
“Welcome to my wonderful world.”
Jackie was still talking to her when we rejoined the two of them, sitting sideways Buddha-style on the bench. It didn’t seem to matter much to Lillian that we were back. She hadn’t moved and was back to picking at her clothing, though she seemed reasonably calm. I guess I would be too if I was drugged to the gills.
Jackie stood up when she saw me and Maryanne approach. She pulled me back over to where I’d just come from.
“How’s the chat?” I asked her.
“Getting a little circular. And I’m getting short on things to talk about. Kind of like my blind dates. I do all the yapping while the guy answers in monosyllables and stares out into space. Not sure what else we can learn.”
“Where did her husband live after he left? Arthur the first.”
“Riverhead. I think. Makes sense if he raised Jonathan.” She looked around the patio. “Sam, I’m getting a little paranoid.”
“Must be the ambience.”
“We’re sort of here on false pretenses. The longer we stay, the bigger the risk.”
“Is that what your research told you?”
“Not exactly research. I just tried to remember some case law before I fell asleep last night.”
While we talked we walked back over to the bench to say goodbye. Maryanne caressed the top of Lillian’s head and then escorted us back to the entrance. We were all quiet until we got to the security desk, where Jackie and I signed out and relinquished our passes. Maryanne took both our hands,
joined them together, and then held them enclosed within her own two hands.
“I know it doesn’t seem like much, but it was wonderful that you spent a little time with Lillian. I honestly think it’s been over a year since I saw anybody from the family. I’m not supposed to be judgmental about the relatives, but I think it’s disgraceful. The therapeutic value of your visit might be debatable, but I like to think it makes a difference. So, if only for my own sake, thank you very much.”
“So, last year. Who came to visit?” I asked.
“The two of them, I think. The son Arthur and the lawyer. Funny name.”
“Gabriel Szwit.”
“Something like that. Funny little man. Not very pleasant.”
“They were here together?”
“Usually are. Mr. Szwit handles all the paperwork for the family. He makes a pest out of himself with the administrative people while the son sits with his mother. They don’t talk much, but I still think it’s important to spend the time.”
Even though the parking lot had the same weather as the patio within the complex of brick buildings, it seemed sunnier and the atmosphere was filled with oxygen. I took in a few hearty gulps before lighting a cigarette. Jackie was quiet, and stayed that way for about a half-hour after we got underway. That was okay with me. I didn’t want to talk much myself. The whole experience might have been easier if it hadn’t been the same place I’d stored my mother the last few years of her life. Where I’d neglected to see her as often as I should have, even though in the end she really didn’t know who I was. Like Maryanne was trying to say, it almost doesn’t matter if they know you or not, or if they seem to get anything out of seeing you sitting there in their rooms. It’s just
what you’re supposed to do. It’s how you honor all those years in the past when the same scooped-out mummies fed your face and wiped your ass and put up with your wailing selfishness.
Though this was about more than just growing old. This was a brief visit with madness, a condition that had no age preference, no discrimination between the innocent and the damned. In those rare, quiet moments of pure lucidity that come fleeting past your consciousness, you can sometimes capture insights into your true nature, and in so doing, glimpse the darker potentials of your mind. For me I’d always known, and feared, what I sensed was close proximity to genuine insanity. That my father’s abiding fury was more than simple rage, that it was an indicator, a symptom of incipient pathology, that died stillborn with him on the floor of a filthy restroom at the back of a ratty bar in the Bronx, and that the same embryonic madness festers within me, darkly watchful, waiting to be born.
I
FELT LIKE
Appolonia Eldridge when Jackie and I first rolled into Nassau County. It was only the second time in five years I’d been out of the East End and I was unprepared for the crush of traffic, chaotic zoning and neon sprawl. It was getting hot, so I also had to endure Jackie’s comments on the air-conditioning inside the Grand Prix, centering on the fact that there was none. It did have some pretty big windows, which let in a lot of hot, wet and noisy Nassau County air, forcing her to pull her thickets of insubordinate hair into a ponytail again. The only compensation was our destination—the Long Island headquarters of the FBI, Web Ig’s home base.
There was little chance he’d give us any more information. I only wanted to give Jackie another glimpse of him before she went back into surgery. As we closed in she gave him a ring.
“He’s going to meet us for lunch,” she said, snapping her
cell phone closed. “He said his boss doesn’t like civilians in the office unless they’re in the interrogation rooms.”
“I’ll pay. Haven’t filed a 1040 in a few years. Least I can do for my country.”
“Tax shelters?”
“Yeah, the ultimate. No income. Not enough to pay taxes, anyway.”
Now that we were back to civil discourse, she reopened our favorite subject.
“Are you going to give me an opinion?”
“On tax policy?”
“On Lillian Eldridge.”
“She’s nuts.”
“That’s the kind of sensitivity I was hoping for.”
“Depersonalization disorder. Marked by loss, distortion or fragmentation of the identity. Pretty rare, hard to diagnose, harder to treat, wreaks hell on people and their families. Probably, maybe, triggered in the susceptible by some traumatic event. Usually in childhood or adolescence, but not exclusively.”
“You knew that?”
“I just thought about Psych 101 before going to sleep last night.”
“Come on.”
“Maryanne told me. At least something that sounded like that.”
“How traumatic an event?”
“Usually natural disasters, war, sexual abuse—though trauma is in the mind of the traumatized. Kids kill themselves over being cut from the cheerleading squad.”
“The divorce. Lost her husband and one of her kids in one fell swoop.”
“Would all be in her medical records. Good luck with
that. Make the FBI look like a bunch of blabbermouths. And I don’t think Maryanne would be into a game of hot and cold.”
I made a turn off a four-lane boulevard that ran through what I thought was an overdeveloped retail district, only to plunge into a six-lane version of the same thing that stretched before me in a straight line all the way to the horizon. Maybe beyond. Maybe it was endless, and they’d managed to warp space-time into an infinite series of branded restaurants, home centers, bathroom fixture emporiums, dry cleaners, banks, hardware stores, self-storage units, gas stations and single-story asbestos-shingled houses with low-pitch roofs and bright red pickup trucks, decorated with scrub oak and cedars planted along chainlink fences by the random hand of the wind.
I reminded myself that inside the grids drawn by these monstrous Gomorrahs were large tracks of blessed Long Island landscape filled with serene homes settled within verdant gardens, in which kind and intelligent people raised joyful children and lived lives of thoughtfulness and reflection. Who barely noticed the vulgarity through which they traveled on the way to meaningful vocations, as doctors, engineers, professors of abnormal psychology.
“Don’t underestimate me,” said Jackie.
“Only an opinion. What’s yours?”
“She’s nuts. But not crazy. Or stupid. I think she’s happy being where she is. Getting cared for, fussed over even, finding safe haven from a world that didn’t work out the way she wanted. Three squares a day and all the drugs her liver can withstand. What the hell. Doesn’t sound that bad.”
“Maryanne thought she was lonely.”
“Lillian might be lonely. The woman we talked to is all set.”
“And what else?” I asked her, rhetorically. “The big news.”
“It looks like Butch is the only one who paid either of them any attention. I thought he was the family brat and Jonathan Mr. Responsible.”
“So did Sam,” I said. “Dashiell is not surprised.”
“Well, have him tell Sam to find a place where I can pee and fix up my face. I want to do it before we get there.”
Agent Ig’s invisible gray Ford was parked in a corner of a nearly empty parking lot surrounding a franchise restaurant called something like The Olde Mill Tavern, the name written out in eighteenth-century script in ten-foot-high neon letters, just like they did in the time of Alexander Hamilton. The facade was mostly made of fieldstone, marred only by the random placement of actual barrelheads, protruding from the walls as if they’d been shot there by a cannon.
Web met us in the foyer. He kissed Jackie and shook my hand with both of his, which I took to be an outpouring of nearly untamable emotion.
“Hey Web. What’s up?”
“I’ve secured us a table in the back so we can have a little privacy,” he said. It occurred to me that the Olde Mill Tavern chain must be a big front for the FBI. Put them all over the country. Pick a decor all the troops could agree on. Place to have meetings, have a little lunch and stay camouflaged. Probably turned a profit. Helped defray Bureau expenses for things like plain gray Fords and in-ear communication devices.
“Awfully nice to see you both.”
Jackie let him hold her arm so she could glide across the floor from the foyer to the far end of the main room. There might have been a hundred tables there, at which only a handful of people were eating. It was after one. All the early birds had flown the coop. Webster Ig’s white shirt looked like it just came out of the laundry box, the sleeves billowing
and buttoned tight at the wrists. I always wondered how certain guys could pull that off. If I didn’t roll up my sleeves the second I took off my jacket I’d start to sweat and lose concentration.
“How’s the Pequot?” he asked us when we settled in our seats. “Mr. Hodges is quite the chef.”
“Hasn’t killed anybody yet. Far as we know,” I told him.
“I’ve tried to describe his special whitefish.”
“Indescribable is fair enough.”
He nodded enthusiastically. It occurred to me that for a stitched-up guy like Web, confined most days within a parched office cubicle, relieved only by forays into the shop-worn municipal grime of courtrooms and record repositories, spending long hours on the phone or with US Attorneys, or more likely their legal assistants, a simple lunch with a lavish oddball like Jackie Swaitkowski must seem like an epic adventure. Jackie, meanwhile, had managed to transform herself into a softer, sweeter and more accommodating version of the woman I’d been driving around all day. Made me ponder whatever Darwinian imperative underlies the aphorism that opposites attract. But only until I was attracted by the specials of the day.