Pharmakon (37 page)

“No, I don’t. But I think we can learn from him.” Not knowing anything about GKD, we were spared the irony of the life my father had sentenced him to. “My hope is that we can use the tragedy of his life to discover something that might possibly help others lead productive lives.” My father chose his words carefully. My mother never looked up from the broken bowl.

“So even if you cured him, you wouldn’t let him free?” Lucy burned a bloated tick. Its skin popped and dog blood fizzled.

“They’ll never find a cure for what’s wrong with Casper.”

“But what if they did?” I protested. “What if the medicine you gave him worked and he got well and he wasn’t crazy and he promised not to hurt anyone?” Fiona fretted a minor chord and glanced at me, and then my father.

“Would you want me to take that risk, Zach?”

I fell asleep that night wondering what my father would do if one of us got crazy like Casper. Would he lock us up in a room with books and TV for company? Have us watched over by cameras and strangers? Try out medicine on us, knowing that even if we said it worked and weren’t crazy anymore, he would never believe us?

When I woke up in the morning, the questions bothered me even more than they had the night before. Overnight, my unanswered and unasked queries raised more and more questions; so many it seemed as if I could feel them pressing against the inside of my skull. But when I ran downstairs in search of my father and the answers I hoped he’d give me, I found his seat at the breakfast table empty. “I need to talk to Dad.”

“He’s upstairs. And tell him his eggs are getting cold.”

When I went back up to his bedroom, I found him sitting on the edge of the bed. “What would you do if one of us got crazy?” I waited for him to say something that would make me feel better. But he said nothing. He had one shoe on and a sock in his hand.

“Dad?” He looked right through me. Again, I waited for an answer that would reduce the unknowns that were crowding my brain. Unable to stand it a second more, I finally shook him. “Dad, answer me.”

He blinked twice and looked at the sock he was holding as if it belonged to someone else. “What’s going on, Zach?”

“What would you do if one of us went crazy?”

“We don’t have to worry about that.”

I did, though.

My father’s first Sock Moment was a harbinger of other changes that Casper’s capture wrought on our family life. Not all of them were as spooky as Dad’s shoeless catatonia. In fact, some of them gave me hope that the low-grade fever of unacknowledged melancholia that afflicted my family might have finally broken.

Later that day, my mother asked me to help her move her things out of the little room under the stairs where she had slept since my birth back into my father’s bedroom. I never knew how lonely I felt, knowing they slept alone, until I experienced the joy of having a bad dream and being able to snuggle into the soft darkness that lay between them even in sleep. My mother said she came back to Dad’s bed because he’d stopped snoring. I knew it wasn’t true, because when I snuck into their newly conjugal bed, I was surprised to discover they both snored. But I liked the idea that they were in love.

That was the biggest change of all. I didn’t fully understand what had been done with Casper. But whatever it was, it had an immediate, startling, and profound effect on how my parents interacted. If they weren’t holding hands, my mother was sitting on his lap. And I heard her tell him he was handsome, and my father answer, “That’s because I have a beautiful wife,” and he’d kiss her on the mouth right in front of us; they’d wrap their arms around each other when my father left for work in the morning like people did in movies when they were saying goodbye forever.

Their public displays of affection made Willy stick his finger down his throat and make barfing noises.

Fiona’s explanation for the sudden onslaught of intimacy was more clinical. “Mother obviously wants to have another baby.”

Like all youngest children, though I did not like being referred to as the baby of the family, I enjoyed being a baby. The thought of being replaced would have caused me more anxiety if Lucy hadn’t set the record straight: “Don’t worry, Mom’s taking the Pill.”

Thinking of the giant antidepressant that kept the papers on my father’s desk from blowing away, I thought of the mood change I had witnessed in Zuza. “Mom’s taking medicine to make her like Dad again?”

“No, silly. She’s taking
the
Pill. It lets you have sex without having to worry about getting pregnant.” In 1962, in twenty-two states it was still against the law to take G. D. Searle & Co.’s synthetic progesterone for contraceptive purposes, but not to imbibe it for “menstrual disorders.”

“Why does Mom want to have sex if she doesn’t want to have a baby?”

“Because sex is the most beautiful thing in the world.” Lucy’s voice was solemn.

“You’ve had sex?”

“Sort of.”

Before I could ask her what that meant, Lucy announced dreamily, “Mom’s having her second spring with Dad. I’m happy for them.”

“Me, too.” I was, at first.

Unlike the rest of us, my mother did not wonder if Casper, with his demonic genius, might still, like Spiderman’s nemesis, Green Goblin, have enough superpowers in hidden reserve to short-circuit the TV cameras, trick his psychiatrists, kill his guards, and break the grip of the cure that could not be trusted, even if it worked. She believed my father when he told her Casper could never touch us again.

My mother was, in fact, so sure in this belief that in this second spring she flowered overnight in exotic and unexpected ways, intent on making up for lost seasons. She went to a beauty parlor, a first, according to Fiona, and had her hair cut almost as short as Zuza’s. She gave away all her old clothes and bought new ones. My mother looked like someone else when she called the Salvation Army and had them come by and pick up Jack’s old crib.

My mother’s days of going back to bed after my father left for work and we were off to school were over. The same new reenergized ardor she displayed for my father was manifest in the most mundane minutiae of daily life. Dust bunnies were no longer allowed to breed beneath sofas and beds. Bookcases were rearranged according to subject matter and alphabetized by author. The jumble of closets was sorted out and the mess of life was labeled and organized into plastic bins.

My mother, who once took pride in her lack of domestic aptitude, began to clip recipes and arrange flowers and invite my father’s graduate students over for casseroles flavored with wine. She even invited our neighbors, who didn’t like us to begin with, and who still hadn’t forgiven us for Casper and trusted us even less when she served them boeuf bourguignonne.

My father liked her new haircut, the colorful clothes, and the newfound tidiness of our household, and enjoyed being sucked up to by the graduates who suddenly invaded our home in search of an A. He was even able to take a certain perverse pleasure in using his skills both as a bartender and a psychologist to get our neighbors tipsy enough to admit things he knew they’d regret telling him when they woke up with a hangover the next morning. Who would have thought Dr. Goodman and his wife once went to a nudist camp? Or that Mrs. Lutz, head of the PTA, had met her husband at the party his parents had thrown to announce her engagement to his twin brother. Or that Mr. Murphy’s father and grandfather had both shot themselves with the same shotgun that, weirder still, they hadn’t thrown away.

When neighbors were embarrassed or ashamed of what they’d revealed under the truth serum of alcohol and unexpected conviviality, my father would tell them “we’re all complicated creatures,” and then throw them for a double loop with the kind of facts he loved to shock people with. “George Washington suffered from Klinefelter’s syndrome.”

“What’s that mean,” they would ask.

“He had breasts and atrophied genitalia.” No question, my father knew things the rest of the world didn’t. When I was little, I was impressed. But as I got older, he could never resist the opportunity to demythologize anyone more famous than himself.

Gandhi drank his own urine, JFK had a ghostwriter, Winston Churchill was a drunk. Eleanor Roosevelt chewed with her mouth open and was a lesbian. (He’d actually had lunch with her once. He and Mom had met the former first lady at the medical conference I still wasn’t quite convinced they’d actually ever gone to in Philadelphia.) Unable to believe in his own greatness, he couldn’t allow himself to believe in the greatness of anyone else.

My father not only welcomed but made the most of all the innovations my mother instigated in the weeks and months after Casper’s capture. Except for one.

Just after Halloween, my mother woke us all up early Sunday morning announcing, “You’re going to church today.”

“What for?” Except for a second cousin’s wedding, Willy and I had never set foot in a house of God. She handed us neckties and freshly ironed shirts.

“Because faith is an important part of life.”

“Don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical making us go to church while you and Dad stay home?” Fiona had graduated from “Kumbaya” to “We Shall Overcome.” She slept in black tights and a turtleneck, hoping to wake up in the morning a real beatnik.

“We’re all going to church.” My sisters groaned when Mom told them to put on dresses and hats.

“Why?” I still didn’t get it.

“Because I said so, and because sometime in your life, you’ll need to believe God loves you.”

“Nora, I’m not going to be part of this.” My father was still in his pajamas. He was willing to make peace with the next-door neighbors, but not with God.

“I’m staying home with Dad.” Fiona was still in turtleneck and tights.

“It won’t hurt you to go once.” My mother was tying my necktie.

“Will it hurt you?” my father called out from the other room.

“Mother, can I borrow your pearls?” Lucy was all for any excuse for getting dressed up, even for church.

“No.”

“Can we go to a Catholic church?”

“We’re not Catholic.” My mother slid a Windsor knot tight to my neck.

“We’re not anything,” Fiona protested.

My father was curious. “Why Catholic, Lucy?”

“I’ve always thought that when I’m old and been married and my third husband’s dead, it’d be nice to become a nun and marry God.”

My mother had her pilgrimage already worked out. “We’re going to go to Christ Church.” It was an elegant eighteenth-century Episcopalian Church in what had now become the Negro section of New Brunswick.

“Why there?” my father asked.

My mother smiled. “They have the prettiest graveyard.”

My father stayed home and cleaned out his closet.

The choir sang, the minister gave a sermon, Fiona sulked, Lucy made eyes at the altar boy, and Willy read a classic comic of
Moby-Dick
until my mother took it away from him. I was pleased to see several kids I knew from school sitting with their brothers and sisters and parents. I held my mother’s hand and craned my neck stiff looking at the light shafting through stained-glass windows of water turning into wine and Jesus walking on water and getting nailed to the cross and coming back from the dead, and compared them to the miracles I’d experienced. A psycho killer teaches me to swim instead of killing me, my parents sleep in the same room, and now, most unbelievable of all, I was sitting in church.

We went back the following Sunday. And the Sunday after that I went to Sunday school with Willy, and Fiona and Lucy sat in on a youth fellowship meeting where Fiona got to play the guitar and sing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” while Lucy, I learned several decades later, was paddling to second base with the altar boy in the coat closet. After our third visit, there was even talk of getting us baptized. We were all just getting used to getting up early on Sundays when we heard a sermon titled “What God Expects of Us,” in which the minister referenced the story of Abraham’s hearing God’s voice telling him to kill his child as a metaphor for the hard choices in life.

My mother came out of church with a distracted look on her face. She was in such a hurry to get away from the service that she walked across a grave. And when she got home, the first thing she said to my father was, “Do you think Abraham could have been depressed?”

“Abraham who?”

“The man who said God told him to kill his son.” My father looked worried. His mother had left him for theosophy. Did he think my mother was going to leave him for Jesus?