Pharmakon (21 page)

“I didn’t.” Her mother was giggling. “But you said a name would make you feel better, so I gave you a name. You’re being ridiculous.” Nora looked past the outline of the smile she had drawn and saw Lucy staring at them.

“Ye gads, Lucy’s outside listening to this.” That and “hell’s bells,” were the closest Lucy had ever heard her mother come to swearing.

“How much did she hear?”

“Enough to know her father’s . . . never mind.” Nora opened the car door. “Lucy! I was just coming to see if you’d like to help me bake cookies.” Nora did a convincing job of pretending she was happy. She wondered which was worse, lying to a child or burdening them with the disappointments of adulthood.

“Why were you fighting?” Nora took Lucy by the hands and swung her around, trying to distract her.

“We weren’t fighting, we were playing a game. Your father says silly things, and I tease him.”

Lucy looked up at her father. “Who is Mommy sleeping with?”

Friedrich’s answer was to glare at his wife and pull Lucy’s right hand free from her mother’s grasp.

“Happy?” Nora asked. Lucy was. Her father holding one hand, her mother the other, Lucy liked being in the middle of things.

Lucy had her parents on the front porch now. Fiona was scurrying around the kitchen, frantically dismantling the operating room. Jack came out the kitchen door, shirtless, smeared with ketchup. “I have cancer!”

“Fiona cut out his tumor. I told her you’d be mad.” Willy was a natural-born squealer. “And I told her I didn’t want to tell on her but you’d be mad at me if I didn’t.”

“You did not. Willy’s lying; it was his idea to play doctor.”

Before any grains of truth could be separated from the day’s chaff of doubt, a brand-new glistening green Chrysler woody convertible slithered up to the curb in front of the house. Doris Day was singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.”

The man at the wheel was young and tan and perfectly dressed—blue blazer with a silk handkerchief peeking out of a crested breast pocket over a creamy white turtleneck Irish fisherman’s sweater (the sort that wouldn’t be sold in America for fifteen years). More rugged and outdoorsy than he appeared, he was as unnaturally masculine as a mannequin. Lucy would still rather marry an African prince who had been turned into a parrot, even if their babies would be Negro. But if the curse on Gray couldn’t be broken, the young man now getting out of the Town & Country convertible would do.

It wasn’t until Gray squawked “hello” that Lucy realized that the young man who was now walking up the walk toward them was holding hands with an older girl. This unknown female quantity that approached had Snow White’s face, Cinderella’s hair, and a gold charm bracelet just like the one Dr. Winton jingled when she pretended to like children. The sight of this perfect couple conjured up a disorienting mix of desire and resentment that made her wrap her arm around her father’s waist and bury her face in his darned vest.

“Hello Lucy, hello Fiona.” Neither of the girls had any idea who they were talking to.

Lucy peeked out from behind her father, who was oddly silent. “How do you know my name?” For a brief instant she considered if he was one of the frogs Willy had captured and she had set free in the creek behind her house.

“We met last spring. I took photographs of your father and the parrots.”

“You look different.” That was Fiona.

“That’s because I feel different.” Casper looked over at the girl whose hand he was holding, as if she had turned his frog self handsome with a kiss.

“Casper, what a wonderful surprise.” Nora was too startled by the transformation to notice that her husband did not share her surprise.

“Doctor Friedrich, Mrs. Friedrich, I’d like you to meet Alice Wilkerson.” Alice shook their hands.

“Would you two like some coffee, or, tea, or . . . ?”

“No, thank you, we don’t want to impose. I just came by to give you a present.”

“That’s not necessary, Casper.” Lucy noticed her father eyeing Casper the same way he would study her before asking, “Do you have a temperature?”

“It’s for all of you, the children, too.”

As Nora Friedrich continued to protest, Casper ran back to the Chrysler. Something big and wrapped in brown paper was lying lengthwise across the backseat. It had a big red bow on it, and it was round and taller than Casper. “This is too much, we can’t accept,” Nora called out.

“It’s our present too, Mommy,” Lucy protested.

Casper wrapped his arm around the gift and dragged it across the lawn like there was a body inside.

“Will, help him.” Friedrich took one end of it. It was more awkward than heavy; even he was curious to see what was in it.

“Can we open it? Can we open it? Can we, please, please?” Lucy, Willy, and Jack shouted and jumped up and down as Friedrich and Casper carried it up onto the front porch. Fiona, feeling too old to do the same, felt left out and pretended she wasn’t excited.

“It looks more impressive than it is,” Casper told them apologetically.

Alice volunteered, “We saw it yesterday in the window of an antique shop on the way up to my grandfather’s.” (It would be thirty minutes before Dr. and Mrs. Friedrich would be able to put together that Alice’s grandfather was a former governor of Connecticut.) Lucy, Will, and Jack ripped away the brown paper, revealing a towering Victorian birdcage big enough to imprison a man.

“It’s beautiful, Casper.” Nora liked it so much, she kissed him on the cheek.

“I saw it and thought of you, Dr. Friedrich.” The remark puzzled Friedrich, but the cage was indeed beautiful. Its bars were woven out of brass and zinc wire hammered and trompe-l’oeiled to look like bamboo entwined with vines.

Casper and Alice stayed for tea. Nora and Lucy baked cookies after all. Alice helped in the kitchen, insisted on washing the dishes, and relaxed enough to confide, “I’ve never met anyone like Casper.”

“Yes, he’s unusual.”

“We’ve been talking about marriage.”

Nora said, “That’s wonderful.” But at that moment, that wasn’t how she felt.

Over tea Fiona showed off her vocabulary, telling Willy he was “simian,” and Lucy sang “Petit Poisson,” only to burst into tears when she couldn’t remember the final verse.

Friedrich said she was overtired; Casper said the same thing had happened to him once, only he made it worse by wetting his pants. Everyone laughed.

As Casper drove off with Alice into the sunset, Friedrich put his arm around his wife. “He seems to be doing okay.”

“He seems like a whole different person. I saw him last month. He seemed more relaxed and confident, but nothing like this.”

“You didn’t tell me you saw him.”

“Yes, I did. I told you I ran into him downtown. We had a very funny conversation.”

“What about?”

“
The Waste Land.
”

“I would have remembered that.” His eyes narrowed as he imagined his wife bobbing for apples with Casper. In his head he’d already seen her do it with Thayer. He was just beginning to make himself miserable.

“He loaned me a nickel to call you.” Nora pushed her hair behind her ear. “It’s funny, I kind of miss the old Casper.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that your drug works.”

“How do you know he’s on the drug?”

“He is, though, isn’t he?”

“It’s a double-blind placebo test. I don’t even know.”

“But you’d tell me if you did know, right?”

“That would be unethical.”

At 6:15
A.M.
the next morning Friedrich was awakened from a dead sleep by a child’s scream, sharp as a knife cutting glass. It was Lucy. Before he was awake he was running toward the sound, his brain caffeinated with parent paranoia. It was coming from downstairs. Was there a fire? Had she fallen, cut herself? Was an intruder dragging her out of the house?

He found her on the front porch. She was pointing at the parrot cage, Casper’s gift. Friedrich did not know if they had come over one by one or migrated into captivity all at once. But every single parrot had left the mulberry tree and crammed themselves into the cage except for the gray.

“Daddy, you’ve got to set them free.”

Friedrich was sure he had closed the door to the cage the night before. “How the hell . . . ?” Grey sat on the railing and ruffled his wings. His eyes twinkled manically as he threw his head back and mimicked a laugh.

Will opened the cage door with his good hand and tried to shoo out the birds. The cockatoo bit him on the thumb and wailed,
“Donde está Marjeta?”
Friedrich left the cage door open all that day and through the night. But the parrots didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t budge. The idea that the birds preferred Casper’s cage to the freedom of the mulberry tree in his front yard depressed and annoyed Friedrich more than he’d admit. The next day he tried to lure them out with special treats, pumpkin seeds and corncobs. All the parrots stayed behind bars except for Gray, who feasted.

Friedrich gave them five days to fly free. He didn’t want to believe they had come to him in the hopes of finding a cage. In the end he had to call the ASPCA. The man who took them away promised they’d be well cared for.

They kept Gray. Lucy continued to believe he was an African prince. But Friedrich’s feelings toward Gray changed. Looking into the glare of Gray’s eye, past his own reflection into the heart of the family beast who would not be tricked by the cage, Friedrich could not help but think that Gray had been the culprit who had lured his brothers and sisters into the cage and then locked the door with his beak. Of course, none of it would have happened if Casper hadn’t come to take the damn picture.

Friedrich had what turned out to be his last session with Casper on a Monday in late September. Casper had called and asked to meet Friedrich on the bench at Sterling. “Let’s finish where we started, for old time’s sake.” When Friedrich had first heard his voice, he thought it was Thayer. More than Casper’s appearance had changed. His high-pitched, nasal, South Jersey accent had been refined over the course of his summer behind the zinctopped mahogany bar at the Wainscot Yacht Club into a substantial and intoxicating tenor, fruity with a touch of sweetness, like a well-mixed Manhattan.

Friedrich arrived at their old meeting place early. There’d be follow-ups with Casper and the other test subjects over the next few months. Since Dr. Winton had reported seeing no withdrawal or addiction problems either in her lieutenant or among the Bagadong, they saw no need to taper off the drug.

The sky was a pale shade of blue that made Friedrich think of a blank check. The campus was crowded with freshmen. Friedrich watched as loafered lost boys in tweed jackets unknowingly made decisions that would add up to the man they would be stuck with when they graduated. He had a strange urge to warn them. But of what?

Friedrich’s hand was finally out of the cast. The study was done, the summer of sugar cubes over. After this last meeting Friedrich would go back to his office and evaluate Casper using the same rating scale he and Winton had employed to evaluate Casper and his thirty-nine fellow test subjects every week since the start of the study, the Friedrich Psychiatric Rating Scale.

Friedrich’s Rating Scale was nine pages long, seventy-two different areas of behavior, qualities of personality and behavior to be observed and judged. It contained questions to be rated 0 (no pathology) through 3 (extreme pathology):