It Might Have Been What He Said Page 2

  “Yes,” answered the unsuspecting union leader.

  “He's been paid to permanently cripple you if any member of your union suggests the slightest discomfort to any member of my family. Am I understood?” was Rufus's second and only other question before excusing himself. “I think I'll leave you to a quiet moment. Just let my driver know where you'd like to be taken once you've collected yourself.”

  If Isabel's parents were cast as fictional characters, they'd appear in different novels: Mr. Simpson in one written by Theodore Dreiser; Mrs. Simpson in one by Zola. Shimmering in the distance like a beautiful mirage, Isabel's mother — Tisza — was as ethereal as Rufus Simpson was earthbound. Of undisclosed European background, Tisza Simpson had a maiden name and accent diffi-cult to place. In fact, everything about her was strangely elusive.

  Mrs. Simpson took an extended holiday both times she gave birth, leaving alone and directly from the maternity ward. At home, she was her least comfortable in the company of her children; and in the unlikely event they ever saw her, very little was said. Ian and Isabel knew from television and their friends that a maternal relationship typically included contact with one's children, and that Mrs. Simpson presented a fairly unusual rendition of motherhood.

  4

  Dr. Lewis was a distinguished psychiatrist with a taxing lecture schedule and a private practice in New York. He spent Sunday afternoons at his office preparing for the coming week's appointments.

  Only after he hung up the phone did it occur to him that the woman, Isabel Simpson, must have somehow known his routine.

  “How can I help you?” the doctor asked Isabel after she introduced herself in person and was seated across from him.

  Isabel responded with a question of her own.

  “Is it true that in the middle of the brain there's something called the caudate?” she asked.

  Adding to Dr. Lewis's intrigue was now bewilderment.

  “The caudate nucleus.” He pronounced the words with deliberate authority. “It occupies a relatively small section.”

  “Regardless of its size, it has a profound impact on behavior,” said Isabel.

  “You seem to be well versed on the subject.”

  “I've read that its cells produce a chemical that is released into the bloodstream when a person feels desire.”

  “Dopamine is the chemical, but whatever studies there've been have generally associated it with passion —”

  “Passion and desire are inextricably linked,” Isabel fired back.

  Dr. Lewis wasn't used to being interrupted by a patient… especially when it concerned his area of clinical expertise.

  “For the sake of your point, I'll agree. Exactly what is your point?” he asked.

  “Don't you see? It's a kind of biochemical self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Isabel. “The more desire one feels — and the more the object of desire is withheld — the more extreme one's behavior becomes.”

  “That's an unorthodox way of putting it; but, yes, I suppose the gist of what you've said is correct,” said Dr. Lewis. “I'm still not getting your point.”

  Isabel's eyes locked on to Dr. Lewis. Her point gathered its full force. “Under certain circumstances, love looks like mental illness,” she said.

  Dr. Lewis thought the woman who phoned on a Sunday without a referral, much less an appointment — who faced him down with a defiant stare and ramrod posture — was capable of acting on any number of impulses… second-degree murder included.

  Isabel's blunt candor had pile-driven down to bedrock: she admitted trying to kill her husband, but insisted she couldn't remember how or why. Before their second session, Dr. Lewis decided that, rather than focus on Isabel's murderous act, he would ask her to describe her relationship with her mother.

  Isabel bristled when the question was asked.

  “I had none,” she said.

  “How can that be?” asked Dr. Lewis.

  “It can,” said Isabel. “It was.”

  “Surely there were times when your mother sought you out?” suggested Dr. Lewis.

  “Once, when I was a girl,” said Isabel.

  “What were the circumstances?” asked the doctor.

  “I was practicing how to get in a car,” answered Isabel.

  “I didn't catch that,” said Dr. Lewis.

  “I was practicing — ,” repeated Isabel.

  “To get in a car?” asked the doctor.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you need to practice?”

  “To do it correctly,” said Isabel.

  “How wrong can one possibly be when it comes to getting in a car?”

  “I've provided enough of my backstory for a better question than that,” said Isabel sarcastically.

  “Really?”

  “It's the flip side… not how wrong, but how correct. How precisely correct can you be getting in a car? Manners are measured in degrees of subtle correctness,” said Isabel. “Just as table manners were to be mastered, so too the manner I was to get in a car.”

  “I can't imagine…. Tell me,” said Dr. Lewis.

  It involved sitting down on the very edge of the car seat — facing out — feet planted on the pavement. Pushing off the pavement, Isabel was expected to propel herself to the middle of the seat and simultaneously pivot so as to end up facing forward. That Saturday afternoon, the car had been parked in the driveway in order for her to practice. No matter how many times the exercise was repeated, Isabel was unable to organize her disparate and gangly limbs to act in a single, seamless motion.

  “You do realize how aggressively odd it was,” said Dr. Lewis.

  “What?” asked Isabel.

  “The zeal by which propriety was enforced. The table manners… the car thing.”

  “Yes, I knew it was odd… but there was no choice.”

  “Fair enough,” said Dr. Lewis. “What about that day.”

  “She was coming out of the house while I was getting in and out of the car,” recounted Isabel. “It must have been a whim… she decided to take me along to the beauty parlor.”

  “And…?” asked Dr. Lewis.

  “I was thrilled.”

  “What did you talk about during the drive?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “That's right… nothing. But something happened when we arrived in front of the beauty parlor.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Well, are you going to tell me?”

  “Mother double-parked to wait for a car that was just pulling out… another driver came out of nowhere and usurped the parking space.”

  “And…?”

  “And that's when it happened.”

  Dr. Lewis leaned forward in his chair, then — realizing he was anticipating Isabel's response — sat back.

  “She turned off the motor and adjusted her strand of pearls so its clasp was in the back,” continued Isabel. “She said she'd just be a moment.”

  “‘I'll just be a moment,’ was all she said,” Isabel repeated to herself.

  Dr. Lewis leaned forward again, this time making no effort to mitigate the suspense.

  Initially the exchange between her mother and the man appeared civil, explained Isabel. But he became progressively agitated the longer Mrs. Simpson calmly held her ground. The man stepped out of the car, and Isabel heard the word “bitch.” She saw her mother slap the man across his face.

  “Without any urgency whatsoever, mother walked to our car and slipped behind its wheel in one perfectly coordinated movement. She shut the door and sealed in such calm that, at first, I thought what I'd just witnessed hadn't really happened. But I looked out the window, and as we passed the man — standing in the exact location he'd been confronted — I saw what vouched for it. A bleeding skid mark across his face… Mother was wearing a loose ring that had turned itself around… the stone was facing in, and it tore his cheek.”

  “Did you and your mother discuss what happened?”

  “No.”

  “Not during the drive to the house?”

  “No,” said Isabel to the psychiatrist. That's all you get today, she thought to herself.

  Dr. Lewis realized there would be no more to Isabel's answer. As he wrote in his notepad, Isabel remembered that, despite her age at the time, she hadn't been squeamish about the man's gouged face. During the drive back to the house, she had busied her brain by compiling a mental inventory of books with the word red in their titles: The Red Balloon, The Red Badge of Courage; and what of The Scarlet Letter… not red exactly, but in the range. When she couldn't think of any more color-coded book titles, Isabel contemplated the slap. It was an act taken by a woman, occurring without regret, causing a man physical injury and public humiliation. Isabel had always considered her mother an impenetrable mystery… but the slap was proof of something her mother possessed that other mothers didn't seem to: the unqualified confidence in her station as a woman.

  “I've had enough today,” said Isabel.

  “That's fine… our time was almost up,” said Dr. Lewis whose scrawled notation concluded, “repressed childhood… violent tendencies (same) from mother.”

  5

  When the gods grant gifts to a mortal, punishment isn't too far behind.

  Isabel's memory came with the emotional cost measured by its cruel accuracy. One unrelenting torment had to do with a sound.

  Not long after the incident in front of the beauty parlor, Isabel heard an unworldly sound. It had beckoned from the house's first-floor guest room. The Chintz Room faced south. Its flowered upholstery and hand-blocked English wallpaper of peacocks were almost always bathed in sun. On this particular day, the room's curtains were inexplicably drawn. Isabel cracked the door open to investigate, sending a chevron of lig
ht into the mystery — but not enough for her to see anything that would explain the sound.

  “Is anyone here?” Isabel inquired to the darkness as she tentatively stepped inside the room. There was no answer… only more of the pitiless sound.

  Isabel's curiosity turned into fear. What would continue wailing when it was aware of someone in the same room? It wasn't the sad — but recognizable — sound of weeping. More like a high-pitched cry made by a desperate animal trying to escape a trap by chewing off its own leg. She reached behind to push the door wide open. When the hall light flooded in, Isabel was able to see that the unholy sound and her mother were one and the same.

  The day Isabel discovered the unspeakable reason for the sound was the day she watched her mother being borne away. Isabel was almost the age her son would be when he saw his father, under different circumstances, also disappear. And like her son, some thirty-five years later, Isabel witnessed her world change from a window view two floors above.

  Hospital attendants, choreographed by a nurse whose crisp white uniform was not dissimilar to that of Vera's, engineered her mother into the back seat of a car that looked like a fortress on wheels. Isabel opened a window on the house's second-floor hall overlooking the scene, so that she might hear what was being said. But the adults — who seemed to have been programmed in advance — were moving mutely in concert from one reverent task to the other. The only noise was of driveway gravel. First, the crunching of it underfoot. Then, the dissipating pelting of it against the wheels of the car, which faded from sight.

  Isabel trained her eyes on the car until it was no longer within the frame of the window. After the last sight of her mother — the car as a speck at the end of the driveway was all that was left to view — Isabel stepped away. She went into the bathroom and tucked herself in the narrow space between the toilet and the bathtub. Sitting on the floor, surrounded by cool white porcelain, Isabel drew up her long legs and wrapped her arms around them. She put her head down on her knees, closed her eyes, and balanced her mind on only two words. If Isabel recited the words to herself, she was able to break loose from the devastating horror that had hidden itself in the Chintz Room. By repeating two words, Isabel reduced herself to all that mattered, and all that mattered could be launched into limitless space. One word said after the other, then repeated: Let go…

  Soon after Mrs. Simpson was institutionalized, the children were separated from one another and sent to boarding schools in different foreign countries. They were told their mother had an inner ear infection and needed rest. Ian — having no understanding of the situation and afraid of pressing his father for details — accepted the absurdly false explanation. Isabel sheltered her brother by keeping the secret. But it was only one of many. Like the smallest in a grouping of intricately painted Russian dolls, that single secret had been crafted to nestle neatly within one, then another, and then another ornately concealed secret.

  6

  Background is a poor substitute for character but shouldn't be completely ignored because, inevitably, it explains a thing or two.

  Rufus Simpson came from a seriously questionable background. His English forebears, two brothers who barely escaped execution in the early 1700s, were what would now be referred to as career criminals. The prisons were full; luck saved them with a choice between hanging and boarding a trading ship bound for America.

  Both men settled in the Appalachian Mountains and became trappers. Simpson offspring gradually migrated to the East Tennessee Valley. Rufus's brash uncle, Sherman Simpson, made a fortune as a bootlegger. After a stint at Leavenworth for liquor smuggling, he opened a New York City speakeasy. When Prohibition was repealed, it became a famous nightclub and the favorite gathering spot for café society.

  Sherman refused to cooperate with the mob's protection racket and was murdered. But it wasn't organized crime that killed Sherman. It was his reckless manhood. While he was chatting with Walter Winchell one night at the club's corner banquette, a recently cuckolded husband walked over to greet them… his welcoming handshake held tight to Sherman's, while the other, holding a gun, shot point-blank into his face.

  Isabel's father was an only child — orphaned early — who lived with Uncle Sherman's spinster sister. Rufus escaped the oppression of his aunt and the South by way of a train ticket and Harvard, both paid for by Uncle Sherman. Like his uncle, Rufus was a maverick. He wasn't interested in membership in any one particular university house. Instead, he struck a distribution agreement with the Coca-Cola Company to install vending machines in all of Harvard's houses. By the time he graduated, Rufus had made the first of his many fortunes.

  Despite their parents’ absence, Isabel and her brother were tightly controlled. They were required to excel in two social sports — tennis and sailing — and were assigned a third, gender-specific activity. For Isabel, it was ballet. For Ian, it was boxing taught at the Chicago Athletic Club. Even in the locker room, the coach addressed Ian as “Mr. Simpson.” The boy's courteous replies were prefaced with “Sir.”

  The children's lives were dictated by an immutable code of behavior that appeared admirable. But decorum took the place of something that should have been slightly more human.

  “The world will call on you, Isabel,” Mr. Simpson told his daughter just before she walked down the ramp and into a plane. Isabel was twelve years old at the time.

  The plane would take her from Ian and to an isolated life at boarding school in Zurich.

  Her father said it at the gate, instead of “Good-bye.” He reached up to his brown Borsalino hat, removed it, and said, “The world will call on you, Isabel. I expect you to meet its challenges head-on.

  “You must always remain a lady,” he added with the same weight of importance.

  Rufus Simpson put his hat back on, turned around, and walked away.

  7

  Long before Mrs. Simpson was sent to a mental hospital, long before Isabel and Ian left for boarding schools, they were told their mother was Lutheran and their father was southern.

  “Something's wrong,” Isabel suggested to Ian.

  “Why?” asked Ian.

  “Well, Mother's religion is described by a word that must mean whatever it is,” Isabel laid out her argument, “but Father's religion is described by a general direction. Don't you think that's strange?”

  “Maybe by being southern, you practice the only religion there,” speculated Ian.

  “Maybe you don't have a choice.”

  “That can't be it,” insisted Isabel. “Something's missing. They're not telling us something… some piece of information that's important.”

  Identifying her religion was fairly academic because, with the exception of Christmas and Easter, Isabel hadn't been inside a church. That was fine by her. She was not God-fearing by nature. Then, for reasons unexplained, Mrs. Simpson decided the children should attend the Episcopal Sunday school in town.

  There was an incident during the children's first — and what would be their only — day of attendance. Rather than crayon in the outlined drawing of Jesus distributed by the teacher, Isabel insisted on a blank piece of paper so that she might render a personalized image of Christ. Ian became anxious. He knew his sister was capable of her own understated brand of disruption.

  Confronting what appeared to be a polite child, the pastor was caught off guard by Isabel's refusal to follow the simple assignment.

  “Why won't you color in the shapes?” he asked.

  “Has anyone actually seen Jesus?” Isabel answered with a question.

  “Yes, all those he has touched,” he said.

  “If we don't know what Jesus looks like, then he looks like whatever we imagine him to be. So why should I color in someone else's shape of him?”

  Isabel was issuing a challenge more than posing a spiritual question. It was as though her entire nature, restless from being kept in check, chose to rebel against authority in a black outline of Christ.

  “Whatever Jesus looks like doesn't matter. The only thing that matters, really, is if you believe in him or not,” Isabel suggested to the other children, who had pegged her early in the lesson as an outside agitator. Isabel was sent home with a note memorializing her disrespect. Ian had been offered the opportunity to stay the course, but felt his sister deserved his loyalty. The Episcopal Sunday school didn't invite either of them back.