The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (9 page)

“So you’re wanting to buy a house,” I said to her by way of conversation.

She glanced toward her husband and he answered.

“We want to stay in our neighborhood,” Guerra said firmly. “We are not interested in developments on the north side.”

Obviously this had not been this family’s initial introduction to
affordable housing
seminars. Often, as tax breaks or eli
gibility for special programs, builders would throw in a few low-income housing units, usually at gate fronts or backing against the thoroughfares of their developments—the least desirable spots that were the most difficult to sell. It is a perfectly good idea. However Mr. Guerra, like a lot of other people, preferred to buy a home in an area he knew and cared about, rather than one developed completely from scratch.

I looked at the zip code on his address and didn’t think there would be much of a problem. There would be some single-family homes in that area that would qualify for low-income financing.

“How many in your household, Mr. Guerra?”

He glanced toward his wife. She counted it out on her fingers.

“Eight,” he answered. “Our three children, two of my nephews and my mother, of course.”

I kept smiling, but I wasn’t pleased. Eight people required a pretty big house.

I looked through their income information.

“You and your wife are both employed?”

He nodded. “Mama keeps the children,” he answered.

According to his tax forms, he was something called a
table braider
at Weigan Industrial. I knew Les Weigan. He was a member of the club and a friend of David’s father.

Mrs. Guerra worked at a local pizza place. I was surprised. I suppose I thought those minimum-wage jobs were part-time work done exclusively by students.

I frowned at the total that Mr. Guerra had written down on his application form. It was more than what was indicated on his 1040.

“Your annual household income is higher than your taxable earnings would suggest,” I said.

“I added in Mama’s social security,” Mr. Guerra told me. “The other woman said that we could.” He indicated Ann Rhoder Hines who was filling out forms at another table.

“Yes, of course,” I agreed, glancing at the older woman. “If Mrs. Guerra lives with you, her income can be included.”

The older woman raised her chin and announced proudly, “Three hundred twenty-three dollars a month.”

I felt a thrill of hope rush through me. These were fine people, hardworking people. And I was going to help them buy a home. That was really something good.

I perused their expense reports and was less heartened. Food, clothing, utilities, none of these things came cheap.

“This six-thousand-dollar debt?” I asked. “Is this automobile or credit cards?”

There was a silent stillness so abrupt, I looked up.

The Guerra family was extremely ill at ease, not so much as casting a glance at each other.

“It’s Papa’s funeral expenses,” Mr. Guerra finally told me quietly. “We’re paying it off directly to the funeral home.”

“What kind of interest are you paying?”

The man shrugged and shook his head. “I didn’t ask,” he told me. I stared at him in disbelief.

“The paper is in there,” he said.

I shuffled through until I found it. I almost moaned out loud. The interest on it was twenty-four percent, the highest allowed by law. They’d already made payments for two years and had yet to touch the principal.

“You could have gotten a better rate at the bank,” I pointed out.

Mr. Guerra looked at me, puzzled. “A bank? A bank wants…what was it?” he asked his wife.

“Collateral,” she answered.

He nodded. “The bank wants collateral for their loans,” he said.

That’s right, of course. The bank wouldn’t loan money for a funeral. What could they do if the money wasn’t paid back? Dig up the corpse? You had to own something in order to borrow. The Guerras didn’t have anything but a strong work ethic and a handful of kids.

I continued to look through their forms and records, worry superseding hope.

Finally I smiled brightly at them.

“Would you excuse me for just a minute,” I said. “I need to ask a couple of questions.” I smiled even harder. “Just one minute.”

I grabbed up my notepad as if I was going to use it and hurried over to where Ann Rhoder Hines was orchestrating the movement of families to different tables. I signaled that I needed a word with her and then waited patiently as she made no attempt to hurry.

Finally she was free and she turned to me.

“I’ve got a problem here,” I said.

She raised a condescending eyebrow. “I thought you were supposed to be such a hotshot real estate person,” she said. “You find something you can’t handle?”

I refused to let the poisonous drip of her tongue deter me. We were both trying to do good here, I was just worried about how we were going to do it.

“I’m having trouble with the Guerras’ finances,” I told her. “Their credit score barely meets requirements and they’ve got a commercial service debt that could really impact their ability to pay.”

“So do they qualify or not?” she asked me.

“Well, yes, they do,” I admitted. “But they’ll have to borrow the down payment and closing costs from the affordable housing consortium. Then there will be the real estate loan and
this outstanding obligation—I don’t think they’ll be able to make it.”

She folded her arms across her chest and glared at me, annoyed.

“It’s not for you to make that judgment,” she said. “It’s your job to get them through the paperwork to buy a home.”

“But what if something, anything happens?” I said. “One little unexpected expense and they won’t be able to make their payments. They’ll lose the house.”

Ann shrugged. “You know, 35.6 percent of affordables get foreclosed,” she said. “What we’re giving these people is a chance. What they make of it is up to them. Don’t tell me you’ve never sold a house where you thought the buyers were in over their heads.”

She was right about that, of course. I sold houses every week to high rollers whose financial house of cards could come tumbling down any second. But I’d never made those deals as an altruistic act.

“If they try now and fail, they’ll never get another chance.”

That was the grim, awful truth that stared me in the face, as sure and stoic as Mr. Guerra’s mother.

“So what did you do?” Chester asked me on my next visit to the assisted living center.

“I went ahead with the deal,” I told him. “The Guerras were happy. Ann Rhoder Hines was happy. I’m sure the sponsors of the seminar were happy. But I don’t feel happy about it at all. I’m nervous. I gave Mr. Guerra my card, and I am personally handling everything. I don’t want any slipups or unexpected glitches. These people will be walking a financial tightrope for at least the next five years.”

Chester nodded sympathetically. “They probably already have been,” he pointed out. “They might very well be used to it.”

I agreed with him, but it didn’t make me feel one bit better.

“I thought about just paying off that loan,” I said. “David would probably have me committed. I’ve been giving away money faster than I’m taking it in. But I’d do it anyway if I thought the Guerras would accept it. I’m sure they won’t.”

“And they shouldn’t,” Chester said. “It was their loved one who died. Having a stranger pick up the tab as charity does nothing to honor his memory.”

“But I want to do something to help,” I complained.

“You are and you will,” he assured me. “You can’t just rush in like a fairy godmother and wave a wand, making everything perfect. You’ve got to wait for your opportunities. They’ll come.”

“You’re sure?” I asked him.

He nodded.

Chester was looking very thin in the morning sunshine that striped the room through the window blinds. His bony frame was covered by a shirt and pants that looked two sizes too big, giving him a thin, shrunken appearance. His feet, which were swathed heavily in bandages and covered by huge paper slippers, seemed to dwarf the rest of him.

His thinness reminded me of what I’d brought. I dug down into my purse and retrieved a giant, king-size Snickers. I handed it to him.

“My do-good deed of the day,” I said, teasing.

To my surprise, he didn’t laugh at my little joke. He looked down at the candy bar as if it represented a lot more than chocolate, sugar and empty calories.

“Thank you,” he said softly. “I’m just going to save this for later.”

He secreted it in the chest next to his bed. When he returned to his chair, he patted my hand gratefully.

“You are doing good,” he assured me. “Sometimes when you don’t even know.”

I laughed with a lot of self-derision.

“In all honesty,” I admitted, “this whole promise thing just terrifies me.”

“Why is that?”

“In that car, when I said I’d do good, I really meant it.”

“And now you don’t?”

“I do,” I assured him. “But I’m scared of what it might require. I’m scared that maybe I promised to take in motherless crack babies or nurse AIDS patients in Africa or counsel rape victims on a hotline.”

“And you don’t want to do those things.”

“I don’t know how to do those things,” I said. “They take a really special kind of person. I’m not a special person. I’m a very ordinary person.”

Chester shook his head. “I think you are an extraordinary person,” he told me. “You just haven’t figured out the difference between the volunteers and the draftees.”

“What?”

“During the war,” he said, “a lot of men, including myself, knew exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted to drop bombs on the Germans or do jungle combat with the Japanese. We had it in our minds to storm a beach or shoot down a plane. So we hurried down to the recruitment office and signed up.”

He gave a slight smile as if the memory of his short-lived military career was still bittersweet.

“But, Jane, there were lots of other men, fine men, who didn’t know what to do,” he continued. “All they really wanted was for the war to be over so they could stay home with their sweethearts and families. When their country called them,
they took whatever job they were given, big or small. And those fellows did as well with it as the volunteers.”

I nodded. That was absolutely true.

“It’s a fine thing to have folks in the world who set out to make it a better place,” Chester said. “Those are the volunteers, we admire them and we should. But us draftees are needed, too. We’re just waiting to be called, and we will be—to do those good things, big or small, that need to be done.”

“Well, that’s a comfort,” I said. “I’ll try to be a ready draftee, although so far my efforts aren’t working all that well.”

“Sometimes that’s the way it is,” he said.

There was one place where I was not a draftee. In the life of my daughter, Brynn, I was meant to be a force for good. I had volunteered for motherhood, albeit reluctantly, and doing good is what mothering is all about. From the memory of those frightening moments in the car, it was perfectly clear that the most important thing in my life was my daughter. I’d forgotten that, somehow, in the last few years. I wanted to make up for that lapse. I wanted to be the kind of mother she needed. I wanted to do some good just for her.

Brynn was not impressed with the idea.

“Dr. Reiser thinks you’re probably having a breakdown,” she told me when I tried to express my feelings to her. “He says that you’re a histrionic empty nest seeking a cloak of worthiness.”

“I don’t think Dr. Reiser can possibly diagnose me from twelve hundred miles away,” I countered. “And the man hardly knows me.”

“Oh, we’ve talked about you, plenty,” Brynn answered. “How you try to live your life through me, virtually negating everything about me that is unique and personal. How you’ve tried to make
me
the person that you could never be yourself. Everything.”

“Brynn, I’m sorry if I’ve done that,” I told her. “I really love you and I really want you to be happy.”

“I am happy, Mother,” she said. “I’m happy in
my own life.”

She made the statement calmly, rationally, as if her words were a reasonable exchange of ideas. But they hurt me anyway.

“I do have some good news for you, Mother,” she said. “I’m coming home for Christmas after all.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” I said, feeling exactly that way. That news completely washed away the sting of what she’d said before.

“Daddy sent me a ticket,” she said.

“David sent you a ticket?”

I was surprised. Brynn’s comings and goings were virtually always done by my arrangements. He never got involved in such mundane details.

“He says he has something he wants us to discuss as a family,” Brynn replied. “Undoubtedly it’s your craziness. You should get into therapy and save all the emotional wear and tear on Daddy.”

David hadn’t mentioned anything to me about a family discussion. And even his suggestions that I seek professional help had dwindled to no discussion at all. I had assumed that he was no longer concerned. However, contacting Brynn on his own was unusual.

“Maybe I should see someone,” I admitted.

I had been quick to get a doctor for Brynn when things weren’t going well. Perhaps it would please her to see that I was willing to do the same for myself. At the very least, it would give us something in common.

I
PICKED
M
ILTON
F
EINSTEIN
, III, M.D., FAADEP, at random from the preferred provider list of my insurance company. I didn’t want to go to any of the therapists that had seen Brynn, and I wasn’t ready to get a list of suggestions from my friends and associates. It was curious, really. I’d been in family counseling several times, most often to try to work out problems with Brynn, but also earlier in my marriage, the first time I’d discovered David was unfaithful. I’d not actually been very embarrassed about those things. Everybody I knew had trouble with their kids, and almost everybody had an affair, either their own or their spouse’s, that threatened their marriage. Those seemed to be perfectly acceptable and legitimate reasons for seeking help. But to ask a doctor how to help me to be a better person, well, I admit I felt uncomfortable about that.

Dr. Feinstein’s office was located in a big medical office building way out in the suburban sprawl. It was conveniently located near the new hospital, though inconveniently located for any sick person who might be in need of a doctor. The parking lot was expansive and could have easily served an NFL-
franchise stadium. Each and every car was charged a dollar for the first hour and fifty cents more for every additional thirty minutes. I buttoned my suede jacket as I walked across it, the wintry day was cold and the wind had become unpleasantly chilly.

I took the elevator from the lobby level. I got off on the correct floor, only to discover myself surrounded by an overflowing crowd of metal-mouthed preadolescents. The dental practice that took up the south half of the building had apparently removed the walls to the waiting room and had expanded into the hallway. Their obvious success may have been based, at least partially, upon their name, Budget Braces.

I skirted my way through strewn backpacks, math books and boom boxes toward the direction indicated by the arrows for Suite 902.

An electronic buzzer went off as I walked inside. There was no one at the reception window. I glanced at my watch a little uncertainly. I was actually two minutes early.

Within the office a door opened and a young guy, about Brynn’s age, I thought, stepped up to the other side of the counter and gave me a big smile.

“Hi! You must be…” He glanced down at the appointment book on the desk. “Jane Lofton?”

“Yes, I have an appointment with Dr. Feinstein.”

“Buddy.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Everybody just calls me Buddy,” he explained, clumsily offering his hand to me through the opening.

He was dressed in Dockers and a brown sweater. I took his hand and managed, with some difficulty, not to say one word about how unexpectedly young he looked.

“My receptionist isn’t here today,” he said. “She’s home
with a sick baby. She’s my wife, actually. She works here for me, part-time. I do most of my own paperwork.”

This was far more than I wanted to know.

Fumbling around, he found a clipboard with a pen attached and gave me a form to fill out.

I thanked him and seated myself just on the edge of one of the narrow uncomfortable chairs provided. I quickly filled in my pertinent information: name, address, birth date, insurance provider. It took me a good deal longer to answer the long list of questions on the back of the form about night sweats, panic attacks, hormone replacement and family mental health history.

I was trying to fit all of Brynn’s issues into two lines when Dr. Feinstein—Buddy—opened the door to the room.

“You about ready?” he asked.

“I haven’t quite got it all filled out.”

He shrugged dismissingly. “That stuff really doesn’t matter that much,” he said.

Somewhat deflated, I looked down at the questions I’d already taken the time to answer.

I handed him the clipboard and he led me directly into his office. It was unspectacularly furnished with somebody’s castoff, family-room rejects. I was certain the green plaid Early American sofa that I sat down on was older than he was.

He took a seat on a beat-up slat-wood rocker with faded, buff-colored cushions. I watched him speed-reading my written responses on the clipboard.

“How did you hear about me?” he asked.

I’d left the
referred by
question blank.

“I didn’t,” I admitted. “I just picked your name at random.”

His forehead creased as he read further on the sheet.

“Who did your daughter see for counseling?” he asked.

“Jacob Trendall,” I answered.

His eyes widened. Trendall was the most successful and certainly the wealthiest psychiatrist in the city.

“Brynn was only with him about a year,” I explained. “Then we tried Esther Ashley, Daniel Welch, Howard Boyle.” I hesitated, thinking I’d left someone out. I couldn’t remember who, so I just continued. “After Boyle, I decided they were all too dependent upon either Freud or pharmacology, so I switched her to Gestalt and we saw Clifford Sheldon for about three months, then Paul Zaharoff. Now she’s seeing an Adlerian near where she goes to college.”

Buddy Feinstein was staring at me, eyebrows furrowed.

“You’re familiar with all the most prominent therapists in town,” he said. “What do you think you’ll get from me that you couldn’t get from them?”

I tried to be really honest. It was my impression that honesty was the basic tenet of the doctor/patient relationship.

“I don’t know if I really want to get anything,” I admitted. “My daughter and my husband see that I’m acting differently and think that’s a problem.”

Briefly I related the events of the accident. He listened intently. Nothing in his expression betrayed in any way what he might have been thinking. When I finished, he hesitated a long moment before posing a question.

“Do you believe that God actually intervened to save your life?” he asked.

I shrugged and shook my head.

“I don’t know what to believe,” I admitted. “But I feel obligated to fulfill my commitment. I said I would change my life. I said I would be a better person. I said I would do good. So now…so now, I’m trying to do what I said.”

He nodded slowly, thoughtfully.

“My family thinks I’m depressed or suffering from post-traumatic stress or having a breakdown,” I said.

“And what do you think?” he asked.

“Does it matter what I think?”

“What you think is all that matters,” he answered.

I feigned shock. “What branch of psychoanalysis is that from?” I asked him.

He raised his eyebrows and made a silly face like an unruly schoolboy before replying, “The Buddy Feinstein School of Minds?”

“Ah…”

We both laughed. It felt good.

“You keep this sort of thing up, Buddy,” I teased, “and you’ll never make membership in Davenport Heights Country Club.”

“
As if
I would even know what to say to one of those people,” he retorted, laughing.

I just gave him a long look and smiled.

He recognized his own gaffe.

“You’re in Davenport Heights Country Club.”

It was a statement more than a question, but I nodded affirmatively.

He moaned aloud.

“It’s okay,” I assured him, genuinely amused. “Truthfully, I didn’t always know what I was going to say to them myself.”

“You weren’t born to the purple?”

“Mmm, no,” I answered. “It was more like rusty orange.”

He nodded. “So, with a good education and hard work you managed to climb the social ladder.”

I shook my head. “Not me, I just married well. I did make good grades and go to college. But I married my way into money and social position.”

He leaned back into the rocker, observing me, elbow on the armrest, his face cradled in his hand.

“Oh?”

It was an implied question loaded with significance. But I wasn’t there to talk about my loving relationship with David’s wealth and family name.

“I’m not sorry about any of the decisions I made,” I stated flatly. “I’m not sure if terms like gold digger even exist anymore. But if I were called something like that, I don’t think I would be insulted.”

He reached over and picked up the clipboard that had the form I’d filled out.

“You sell real estate,” he said, looking more closely at what I’d written there.

“Yes.”

“Just occasionally, to give yourself a job description?”

“No,” I answered. “I suppose it might have started out that way. But I’ve actually been very successful.”

“Perhaps that’s why you don’t feel like a gold digger.”

I shrugged.

“Maybe,” I admitted. “Although I think the career had more to do with Brynn than David.”

“How so?”

“I think I needed to accomplish something,” I told him. “I devoted so much time and effort to Brynn, and the more I tried to do, the less competent I felt. I needed some way to be successful. So I went to work. Having a career kind of took me off the hook.”

“What do you mean?”

“Girls with workaholic career mothers are supposed to be screwed up,” I told him, not completely joking.

He didn’t laugh at all.

“What do you mean by screwed up?” he asked. “Is she self-destructive? Suicidal? Drugs and alcohol? Lost weekends?”

“Oh no, nothing like that. She has a really poor self-image and never fit in well with the other children at the club. She could be a really pretty, popular girl if she would just make the effort.”

He made no comment on that.

“I put her in therapy when she was eleven,” I said. “And she hates me for it.”

“I doubt if she hates you,” he said.

“Well, she’s got a pretty good imitation going,” I answered.

“She actually sounds like a normal, ordinary teenager,” Buddy told me. “Rejecting your mother and all she stands for is a typical way of establishing your own identity.”

Surprised, I couldn’t resist teasing him.

“Let me give you a clue, Buddy,” I said. “You’re not going to make a lot of money in this business if you tell people their disagreeable teenagers are just being normal.”

He chuckled in a very boyish, unprofessional fashion.

“Making a lot of money,” he said, “was never my primary objective going into this
business
.”

I nodded. I could appreciate that.

“So,” I asked him, “what was your primary motivation for becoming a therapist?”

Buddy hesitated a long moment, considering his answer or perhaps considering a reply that would be a polite version of
mind your own business
.

“I guess I became interested in psychiatry because of my brother,” he said finally. “He’s schizophrenic.”

My smile faded.

“Oh,” I said, feeling extremely uncomfortable.

Buddy warmed up to the subject immediately, apparently
having missed the class explaining that the therapist shouldn’t discuss the mental health of those in his own family.

“Jake’s illness was the single most defining factor of my childhood,” he said. “It changed my parents. And it changed me.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

He nodded, accepting my sympathy graciously.

“It changes one’s perspective on problem children,” he pointed out.

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Jake’s on medication,” he said. “He has been for years. And he does pretty well. He’s very charming and smart, a real math whiz.”

He spoke with genuine affection.

“It sounds like a real success story,” I said.

“Yes, he is,” Buddy answered. “He does just fine for months, sometimes even years. Then he’ll just disappear and my parents will be calling missing persons, hiring private detectives, sending out pictures to shelters. A month or so will go by and then they’ll get a call from Boston or Sarasota or Seattle and Jake will be in a hospital and back on his medication.”

I swallowed hard imagining myself in his mother’s place, imagining my Brynn lost and alone in the world.

“It’s like, all the time when Jake’s doing well and things are going fine, they are always waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“So you went into psychiatry to help your brother,” I said.

“Yes, of course,” Buddy answered. “And to help my parents and myself and other people who are suffering.”

I nodded, thinking about myself, thinking about Brynn, thinking about Buddy and his mom and dad.

“Your brother was kind of like my car accident,” I said to him. “He led you to a decision to do good.”

Buddy looked at me, hesitating a moment, and then he grinned. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“So you’ve chosen a career that simply lets you do good every day,” I said. “That’s terrific. In real estate it’s not quite so cut-and-dried. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if what I’m doing actually helps or hurts the people I’m working for.”

He laughed out loud at that.

“Honestly, Jane,” he said. “Psychiatry is exactly the same way. Half the time when people leave my office, I worry that I’ve done as much harm as good.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Well, let’s hope it’s not, anyway,” he said.

“So?” I asked, bringing the discussion back to the reason for my visit. “Do you think I need therapy? Do you think I’m crazy to try to keep the promise I made in the car?”

“Do you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then if you think you can do some good in the world,” he said, “if you think that’s what you’re supposed to do. Then I say, go for it!”

His enthusiasm felt wonderful.

“I’ve been trying,” I told him. “But it hasn’t been easy.”

“I doubt if it’s supposed to be.”

He looked thoughtful for a moment.

“Have you ever heard of Maimonides?” he asked.

The name sounded familiar, as if I’d seen it mentioned in a book somewhere, but I couldn’t place it. I shook my head.

“He was a Spanish philosopher and physician,” Buddy told me. “He was the leader of a twelfth-century Jewish community in Cairo, big on indexes and lists. One you might be interested in is called the Eight Levels of Tzedakah.”

“Tzedakah?”

“It translates as charity, but I think it means a lot more than that,” he said. “The list is sort of the eight tiers of do-gooding.”

I was sitting up straighter in my chair.