Deliver Us From Evil

by Philip Luber

Chapter Two: SUFFER EVIL THE NATURAL WAY

Janet Rose Kline
August 3, 1954 - February 4, 1987
Beloved Daughter, Wife, and Mother
"Even though we are apart
You will stay here in my heart"

When your wife lies buried just a mile from your home, you can spend a lot of time walking among tombstones. That's how it was with me for more than a year after Janet died. Once or twice each week I walked past North Bridge and the site of the first pitched battle of the Revolution, into Concord center and over to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Janet's grave was on the side of a low hill, less than a hundred yards from Authors Ridge -- the steep rise that holds the graves of Concord's nineteenth century Transcendentalist masters. There I sat, sometimes for an hour or more, trying to fathom the unfathomable.

I learned to recognize the others by sight, even though we never spoke: the survivors, all of them much older than me, who came regularly for whatever combination of pain and solace such visits can bring. I took particular comfort from the presence of one old woman, gray and bent, who arrived at precisely two in the afternoon every Thursday. She placed a single flower on a fluted tombstone, made the sign of the cross, then slowly walked away. Her constancy soothed me. I began timing my visits to match hers. Then one Thursday she failed to show, and then the next, and the next after that. A short while later I found a freshly dug grave next to the fluted marker. And soon after that I began to visit Janet's grave less and less often. Somehow the death of that old woman I never knew helped me ride out my grief.

I was down to three visits a year now: I brought my daughter with me on Mother's Day and Janet's birthday, and I came alone on our wedding anniversary. And so it came to pass that I was sitting on a bench near her grave on a mid-April Tuesday afternoon, six springs after her death, on what would have been our sixteenth anniversary.

Lost in memories, I didn't notice the young woman approach. She said, "Sir, may I share your bench for a minute? I didn't realize how hilly it is here and I'm very tired."

I hate it when people call me "sir." It's something people say to my father. I'm not that old, I thought as I moved over to make room for her.

"Thank you." She leaned back and sighed. A gust of wind blew a long red curl across her forehead. She brushed it off and closed her eyes for a moment. "I never knew a cemetery could be this lovely." She pointed to Authors Ridge. "I can't believe Thoreau's grave is so simple. Just a small stone marker with the name Henry."

"I don't think he wanted it to become a tourist attraction," I replied. "He really wasn't very sociable."

"Yes, I know. My mother had a favorite passage from Walden. `If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me...'"

"`...some of its virus mingled with my blood,'" I continued. "`No, in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.'"

She smiled. "You know your Thoreau."

I shrugged. "I've lived in Concord a long time. It comes with the territory."

She gestured once again toward the ridge. "It seems like half the things in town were named for one of them. Emerson Hospital. Hawthorne Inn. The Alcott School."

"Don't forget the Thoreau Club," I said. "They cut down six acres of trees to make room for swimming pools and tennis courts, then they named it after the godfather of environmental awareness."

"I wonder if they appreciated the irony."

"Probably not," I said, "but Thoreau would have."

She sat quietly for a while, then looked directly at me for several seconds. "I think I know you," she said. "Aren't you Harry Kline?"

Surprised to hear her call me by name, I studied her more closely and tried to place her face. She was no more than thirty, a dozen or more years younger than me. She was uncommonly attractive. Her long red curls were streaked with shades of brown and gold; they were offset by light green eyes and a fading tan. She carried her sweater over her arm, the afternoon having turned unusually warm. Her light cotton blouse revealed enough to be enticing, yet was demure enough to make you think the enticement was all in your own head.

Somehow she knew me. She was waiting to see if I knew her. I didn't, and I found it hard to believe we'd ever met, for I couldn't see myself forgetting her if we had.

"It's me -- Marjorie." Again she brushed a dangling curl off of her forehead. I still didn't remember her. "Elizabeth Morris's daughter."

Professor Elizabeth Morris was my favorite teacher when I was an undergraduate at Tufts. I formed a mental image of a freckled tomboy with skinned knees who liked to tag along with me whenever Professor Morris brought her along to the campus. Then I glanced again at the beautiful young woman beside me.

"Marjorie Morris," I said. "If you're this grown up, then I must have gotten old and decrepit without realizing it."

"Not at all, Harry." She smiled. "I think you look wonderful."

I kept in touch with Professor Morris for a few years after I graduated, but I hadn't spoken with her in more than a decade. Now Marjorie told me her mother had passed away a few years earlier. "My parents divorced years ago. My mother went to teach at Florida Atlantic University. She used to call Boca Raton the home of the newly wed and nearly dead."

"That sounds like something she would say. During my junior year I was thinking about switching from prelaw to premed. I really wanted to be a doctor, but something was holding me back. Your mother cut right to the heart of the matter. She said, `Just because your parents want you to become a doctor, that doesn't mean you have to become something else.'"

"And did you become a doctor?"

"I'm a psychiatrist."

"Uh-oh. Maybe I should watch what I say."

It's an occupational hazard for psychiatrists: Some people think we have a magical ability to detect their innermost secrets from just a few words. And so they withdraw as soon as they know what you do for a living, afraid of being found out.

She laughed. "I'm just kidding. God knows I've talked to more than my share of shrinks."

We sat silently for a minute or two. A caretaker's truck rumbled slowly past on the service road. Marjorie asked me why I was visiting the cemetery. I told her about Janet's death.

"Oh my," she said. "What a terrible thing to die so young. How old was she?"

"Thirty-two."

"I'm so sorry, Harry." Marjorie waved toward the newest section of the cemetery. "I came to visit my father's grave. We buried him early last month." She paused for a moment. "Did you know him? His name was Charles Morris."

"I don't think so. The name sounds familiar, though."

"You probably read about his death. He died in a hit-and-run accident while he was jogging near our house."

Something like that was big news in our quiet suburban town. Five or six weeks earlier it was the lead article in the weekly Concord Journal and a two-day story in the Boston Globe. No one had been charged yet with her father's homicide. I knew that he was a successful Boston attorney. That's all I remembered reading about him in the paper.

Marjorie said, "My father moved to Concord after my mother left him. He had a second wife for a couple of years, very young. Then she left him, too. And then he lived in the house by himself, until I moved back from California last summer."

We talked a little while longer, veering between past and present, catching up haphazardly on the turns our lives had taken in the twenty years since we last saw one another. I'd remained in Massachusetts the entire time, becoming a doctor, husband, father, and widower. Marjorie stayed in California after college. For a few years she tried to make a living as an actress. She did have a small role in one low budget film, but her acting career ultimately proved to be a bust. She had a failed marriage and various other troubles that she didn't give any details about. And now she lived alone in a luxurious home overlooking the Sudbury River.

"Moving into my father's house was my final admission of defeat. When I was growing up, I told myself that I wanted my life to be different, that I didn't want to be just like everyone else. Unfortunately for me, I got exactly what I wished for." Her voice began to quiver. "I should never have come home. I bring trouble with me wherever I go. I'm not even thirty, and now I'm an orphan."

She sighed deeply, then continued. "My father and I used to run every morning. We always followed the same route. Sometimes we went together, sometimes we went separately. The morning he was struck, I had just come back from running the same roads." Tears welled in her eyes. "My therapist says I have survivor's guilt."

I offered her my hand and she grasped it tightly.

"Do you have children, Harry?"

"A daughter."

"How old is she?"

"Ten. Or as she would say, ten and two-thirds."

Marjorie quickly did the simple subtraction. "She was only four when your wife died. Goodness, how sad."

"Yes, it was."

"Did you get married again?"

"No."

"Do you think you ever will?"

"I don't know. I've been seeing somebody for about a year."

"Does she live with you?"

"Not officially."

She smiled. "`Not officially.' I'll have to check the rule books to see what that means. Is your friend a doctor, too?"

"Veronica? No, she's a lawyer. She works for the FBI in Boston."

"She's an FBI agent?"

"Special agent, actually. Then again, they're all called special agents. I guess sometimes there's nothing so special about being special."

She laughed politely at my weak joke, then stared into the distance at nothing in particular.

Marjorie Morris was a child when I last knew her. In her sadness now, she seemed like a child to me still. I wanted to stay longer, but I had to return home for an appointment in my office with a new patient. I said, "I'm tempted to say I know what you're going through, but how could I really know that? I know what I went through, though, after my wife died. And how important it is to have friends to talk to."

She sighed. "My friends are all in California, and I've burned most of those bridges."

I stood. "I need to get back to my office. Promise you'll call me if you need someone to talk to."

"I will, Harry." She stood and held my hand, then touched my fingertips to her face and kissed them. "Thank you. You know, I had a terrible crush on you when I was a little girl." She smiled. "I hope I'm not embarrassing you."

She walked off toward a grove of balsam firs. I returned to my wife's shaded gravesite. I kneeled and said a silent prayer, then headed toward Monument Street and the short walk home.

* * *

Michael Cafferty was a student at one of Concord's private prep schools, sent by wealthy parents to live and study with the sons and daughters of other wealthy parents. He did a quick visual survey of my office when he entered for the first time. "No couch?"

"No, no couch."

"I thought psychiatrists are supposed to have couches."

"Psychoanalysts have couches," I replied as I sat behind my desk.

The teenager sprawled his gawky frame across a chair, trying to look calm and nonchalant. He took a swig from a Coke can he'd carried into my office. He wore new blue jeans that were artfully tattered. His hair was tousled but otherwise well groomed. He asked, "What's the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst?"

It sounded like the first line of a joke, but my new patient wasn't smiling. I said, "Psychoanalysis is a specialized form of psychiatry. It's a more intensive treatment, not practiced very much anymore."

"Intensive and expensive, I bet."

"I suppose you could say that."

He yawned. "So not all psychiatrists are psychoanalysts."

"No."

"Just the really good ones, I suppose. The ones who know what they're doing."

It was a hostile remark, but I let it pass. I tilted my head slightly without speaking: one of the pieces of body language and gesturing I'd developed unconsciously over the years. They were cataloged for me once by a hypervigilant patient -- a young woman who studied every nuance of every movement I made, sensitive to the slightest sign of rejection, real or imagined. "First we have your basic head tilt," she said, "then your shoulder shrug, the one-eyebrow lift, the two-eyebrow lift, the palms-up-and-out subtle supplication, the permutations and combinations of all of the above...."

Michael Cafferty asked, "Did you study that in school?"

"Study what?"

"That thing you just did with your eyebrows. They teach you how to do that in school, or what?"

I smiled. "It's not a formal part of the curriculum."

My new patient was a month shy of his seventeenth birthday. He was the slowest and clumsiest of three youths who tried unsuccessfully to break into a Concord residence a couple of months earlier, and the only one who was caught. Luckily for him, in Massachusetts you had to be seventeen to stand trial as an adult. His case was disposed of quickly in the juvenile court system. "Continued without a finding," the Concord Academy dean of students reported when she referred Michael to me, "on the condition that he get some therapy."

"You know how much I hate those situations," I told the dean, "trying to do therapy with a captive audience."

"Come on, Harry," she said, coaxing me. "He's a good kid who's fallen in with a not-so-good crowd. I allow myself one rescue fantasy per semester. Michael is my spring candidate."

"What happened to his partners in crime?"

"Michael wouldn't reveal their names. I think I know who they are, and they're both seventeen, so the adult court wouldn't be quite as easy on them. Michael thinks he's passing some rite of manhood by taking the fall himself and not turning them in."

Michael Cafferty was nervously twiddling something in his hand. I couldn't see what it was. He said, "What am I supposed to call you? Dr. Kline? Harold? Or what?"

I was going to turn the question back on him, ask him what he wanted to do. Then I noticed his left leg shaking, and the beads of sweat on his neck. "Most fellows your age feel comfortable with `Dr. Kline,'" I told him.

"And what am I supposed to talk about? Confess my sins, or what?"

"We can talk about anything you want to talk about."

"Terrific," he said with obvious sarcasm. "And for that I'm supposed to pay you a hundred and twenty bucks a pop."

"Actually, your father will be paying me a hundred and twenty bucks a pop." I regretted the words before I'd completed the sentence. I'd taken unfair advantage of the power differential between us, putting him in his place by reminding him how little control he felt he had over his own life.

"I don't need this shit," he said, more to himself than to me. Then he looked at me. "This was all my lawyer's idea so I would look good in court. He said I should come here. Him and the stupid dean of students."

"Dean Maxwell sounded concerned about you when she spoke with me."

"Yeah, well, that's what they pay her to do -- be concerned."

It was the second time that he'd commented sneeringly about people who earned money by providing services to others: first me, now Dean Roslyn Maxwell. I was tempted to point out the pattern, then thought better of it. He'd likely hear it as a challenge or a putdown.

He took a sip of Coke and gazed at the bookcase to his right. He scanned the shelves for several seconds until his eyes came to rest on two particular volumes. He said, "You wrote those?"

"Yes."

"What are they?"

"I used to work with war veterans. The first book is a series of case studies. The other one is a novel about a Vietnam veteran."

"Are you famous, or something?"

"No, I'm not."

He snickered. "Are they any good?"

"You're welcome to borrow them."

He hesitated. "Maybe some other time." Borrowing a book would imply a pledge to return, and he wasn't making any commitments just yet. "My father managed to avoid the service during the Vietnam War. He says the people who went were suckers."

"Some of the people who went feel the same way."

He pondered that for a moment, then asked, "What does my father get for his money? Do you call him with progress reports, or what?"

"No, nothing like that. He pays the bill, but you get to call the shots."

"Yeah, right." He snickered. "My father always calls the shots. He can buy and sell you a thousand times over. If you have something he wants, he'll find a way to get it."

"You make him sound formidable. What does he do for a living?"

"Kills rivers and streams. He's in the industrial polluters' hall of fame. But once a year he gives a big party for handicapped orphans, they put his picture in the paper, and everyone calls him a great humanitarian."

He could have been expressing genuine disdain for his father's values, or just reacting bitterly to the fear that he might not measure up to his father's accomplishments. I waited to hear more.

"So you don't talk to him about me?"

"Not without your permission."

He threw his hands up. "Ah, who am I kidding? He wouldn't be interested, anyway. And my mother won't be asking you any questions, either, because she'd be afraid of what she might find out." He paused. "So what I tell you is -- what do you call it -- confidential, right?"

"Yes."

"Suppose I told you I wanted to kill myself?"

"We'd talk about it, and if I thought you were in danger of hurting yourself, I'd hospitalize you."

"Even if I didn't want you to?"

"Yes."

Some patients back off after hearing that, fearful that I might overreact to a rash statement and sign an emergency commitment order. Others feel relieved to know that someone will take them seriously enough to help them stay safe, and this lets them open up about the anguish in their lives. I didn't know Michael Cafferty well enough to know which camp he was in, but I hoped it was the latter. He said, "And suppose I wanted to talk to you about a murder?"

"That depends."

He arched his eyebrows. "Depends on what?"

"On whether it's a murder you're thinking about committing, or one you've already committed."

He looked confused. It wasn't the response he expected. He didn't say anything.

"If it's something you're thinking about doing, I'll try to protect your victim -- and you -- from what it is you're contemplating."

He yawned. Apparently his failure to shock me with his question had caused a profound lack of interest in anything I might say in response.

I continued anyway. "If it's a murder you already committed," I said, knowing full well we were really talking about confidentiality and trust, not homicide, "then I'm duty bound to keep your confidence."

"You'd want to do that?"

"It's not a question of `want.' I'd be duty bound to keep your confidence, whether I wanted to or not."

"Just like a goddamn priest," he said. "Hey, maybe that's what I should call you -- Father Harold. What do you think of that?"

"Perhaps there was more you wanted to say about your father," I said.

Michael Cafferty snickered.

* * *

Veronica laughed. "Look at your father's face," she said. "He looks like he's taking his life in his hands."

My daughter, Melissa, pointed at the bowl of beef stew in front of me. "It won't kill you, Dad. Veronica did a good job."

My housekeeper had the evening off. Veronica had volunteered to make dinner. It was my first exposure to Veronica's uncertain culinary skills. We'd known each other for almost a year, but she'd never prepared anything more complicated than frozen waffles for me.

The broth was a bit too salty for my taste, but most of the ingredients were identifiable. "Not bad," I said. "Not bad at all."

"I'll take that as a compliment, I guess," Veronica replied.

"Well, I think it's great," Melissa said.

Melissa thought that everything Veronica did was great. When I began dating Veronica, my daughter was jealous of the time I spent with her. And I think Melissa was afraid that if she liked Veronica she would be betraying her own mother. But that was behind us now. Melissa knew that love isn't a zero-sum game: You can add some in one part of your life without subtracting from another part.

"I tried calling you at work today," Melissa said to Veronica. "My teacher wants to know if you'll come talk to my class about the FBI." Melissa had probably been bragging about her at school, thus prompting her teacher's request.

"I know you called, honey," replied Veronica. "I was out of the office all afternoon. I didn't get the message until I was just getting ready to leave for, uh, here."

She'd almost said "home" instead of "here." But it wasn't her home, even though she'd spent almost every night of the previous six months sleeping there. She still kept her condominium in Watertown; it was a sore point between us.

"Speaking of phone calls," Veronica said, "I tried to reach you, Harry, around two o'clock."

"I was out," I said.

"I thought you were seeing patients this afternoon."

"I had some time free, so I ran an errand."

It wasn't really a lie, but it felt like one. I'd spent that time mourning one woman and renewing an old acquaintance with another. I didn't know which one was more responsible for my evasiveness with Veronica.

I checked my watch. "Speaking of your teacher," I said to Melissa, "I'd better get moving or I'll be late."

There was a parent-faculty conference at Melissa's school that evening about a proposed sex education curriculum. My daughter was only in the fourth grade; I really wasn't ready yet to contemplate the sexual aspect of her being. But if the school system was ready to so contemplate, then I damn well wanted to know what they had in mind.

Veronica said, "If you can wait a few minutes for me, I'd like to come, too."

I hesitated for just an instant, but it was long enough to betray my reluctance and create a chill in the room.

"That's okay," I said. "I don't mind going by myself."

She glanced at Melissa, who looked down at her dinner. Veronica turned to me. "It wasn't an offer of help. It was an appeal for inclusion. I didn't say `would you like me to come?' I said I wanted to go with you."

She's my daughter, I thought, Janet's and mine. Had it not been our wedding anniversary, I might not have had that particular thought, or waffled so obviously in the face of Veronica's request. "Sure," I said, in a tone that wasn't at all convincing. "That would be fine."

"Never mind," Veronica said as she rose to take dishes to the sink.

"No, really," I said, "I can wait for you."

"Never mind!" She turned her back toward me and began scrubbing the dishes ferociously.

My daughter pushed her chair back from the table. I thought I saw tears as she brushed past me. "Nice going, Dad," she muttered, then bolted from the room.

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