Rabbit Remembered

'Angstrom. Nelson if you'd rather.'

'Don't listen to her, Nelson. He was fine. He played sports, got the good marks, ran for student council. Said no to drugs, booze. An altar boy, too, until he was fifteen, and we didn't push that. In America religion becomes your own business. Likewise I told him, 'Michael, listen, you want to forget the dry-cleaning business, be some kind of professional-a doctor, lawyer, whatever, sit behind a desk using your smarts-that's O.K. with me, and Mamma too. Whatever makes you happy. This is America.' But no, he wanted to learn dry-cleaning, summers, after school, it was what he loved. From me there was absolutely no pressure.'

'There was pressure,' Mrs. DiLorenzo tells Nelson. 'Joe needed him to carry on and he knew it. That he didn't come out and say it made it worse. The girls, they married and got out of here. They'd had enough of it, the chemicals, the presses, the hours until seven, eight. Only one of them even stayed in the state, and she's way out near Pittsburgh, a nice suburb up along the Allegheny. Their husbands, what do they care about dry-cleaning? It was all on Michael, and he knew it. He snapped. Men don't want their whole lives mapped out for them. They want adventure. Isn't that right, Mr. Nelson?'

'She's crazy,' Mr. DiLorenzo confides. 'He didn't want adventure. He wasn't like these young hoodlums these days, their heads full of, what do they call it, hip-hop, grabbing guns and going off to shoot their classmates to make the evening news. Shooting their parents, no respect for anything under the sun. He wanted to carry on the family business. There was no pressure. At Penn he was taking chemistry to be on top of the best, the newest solvents, the most environmentally sensitive as we say now. Disposal of used cleaners is the number-one headache in this business; a single cancer lawsuit can wipe you out-defending against it, even if you win. I love America, but not its justice system.'

'Joe, there was pressure.' To Nelson Mrs. DiLorenzo explains, 'My husband, he slaved to build up Perfect. He began by doing dirty work for this old Jew in South Brewer, just a basement in a row of houses, a little dark slot, his equipment crowded into the back, a shed built illegally, fifty cents an hour if he got that, Joe was always being chiselled. When the Jew died Joe borrowed to buy the business from the widow and named it Perfect Cleaners himself.'

'It's prettier in Italian, perfetto' Mr. DiLorenzo said, drawing out the word, 'but this is America. Things want to be perfect here. Don't mind Maria-Jake was good to me, he taught me the trade. Had me out on the vats first, breathing in carbon tetrachloride before the switch to petroleum solvents, then had me as a finisher, on the steam presses, and then a spotter, that takes skill-you can ruin a silk blouse, a fine wool suit. After a while it was going so good I opened a branch in West Brewer, and then one up in Hamburg, and two years ago this industrial acreage came up for sale in Hemmigtown. For a long time I'd been wanting to build a bigger plant, with summer fur storage and equipment to take anything, to take even old lace tablecloths, they get yellow with age, very fragile, and big velvet curtains where you could choke on their dust, some of these mansions in Perm Park and up along Youngquist, the owners never-'

Nelson has heard enough about dry-cleaning. 'And you were counting on Michael to take all this over someday.'

'Someday, not now. Maybe ten years, maybe less. We have a little place in Florida, the winters here aren't so good for Maria-'

'Don't blame me if you want to go to Florida and stick the poor boy with all these plants, all these employees and their benefits-'

DiLorenzo takes this up enthusiastically, telling Nelson, 'It's socialism without being called that. It's putting everybody smaller than Perfect out of business-the benefits, the insurance. There used to be a cleaner every other block. I shouldn't complain, it's good for the bigger outfits that can absorb it, but still you hate to see it. Setting out the way I did back then, with no assets to speak of, I couldn't do it now.'

'He slaves' his wife says, 'and he wants to lay it all on Michael. He wants to go to Florida and look at the girls on the beach and make himself dark as a black.'

'The boy was eager, I mean it, with no pressure from me.'

'Joe, the boy felt pressure. Even his senior year, he was drifting away, into his own world. He was bringing home B's.'

Nelson intervenes, to stop their love feast. They love each other, and the child of their hearts is Perfect. 'Michael is very angry with himself,' he tells them, 'for what he calls letting his family down. But, I keep trying to tell him, it's not his fault. It's not your fault either. It's no one's fault.'

'What is it then?' Mr. DiLorenzo asks simply, of this invisible invader, his son's destroyer.

Good question. 'It's a,' Nelson says, 'it's a disorder of the nervous system, having to do with dopamine flow, with the chemical control of the synapses' tiring.'

'I often wondered about that,' Michael's mother breaks in. 'When he was so young, thirteen, fourteen, working with his father summers, inhaling all those poisons.'

'Get sensible, Maria,' her husband says, hoarse from his talking. 'Look at me, inhaling all my life.'

'It's not that kind of chemistry,' Nelson says. 'I'm no doctor, I don't really understand it, brain chemistry is very complex, very subtle. That's why we don't like to assign a diagnosis of schizophrenia without six months of following the client and observing his symptoms continuously. What we do know about the disease-the disorder-is that it quite commonly comes on in young men in their late teens and early twenties, who have been apparently healthy and functional up to then. Michael does fit this profile. A breakdown early in college is pretty typical.' He looks down at the yellow pencil still in his hand. On the upper edge of his vision, the faces of the parents before him, it seems to Nelson in a little hallucination of his own, rise like balloons whose strings have been released, but without getting any higher.

'What can we do?' Mrs. asks, her voice fainter than he has heard it before.

'Is there no hope?' Mr. asks, heavier, the chair under him creaking with the accession of weight, hopelessness's weight.

'Of course there is,' Nelson says firmly, as if reading from a card held in front of him. 'These neuroleptic medications do work, and they're coming out with new ones all the time. Michael's hallucinations have diminished, and his behavior has regularized.

Now-where YOU can help-he must learn to take advantage of our resources here, and to assume responsibility for his own medications, the prescribed daily dosages.'

'He says they make him feel not like himself,' his mother says. 'He doesn't like who he is with the medicines.'

'That's a frequent complaint,' Nelson admits. 'But, without nagging, without seeming to apply pressure, remind him of what he was like without them. Does he want to go back to that?'

'Mr. Angstrom, I know you don't like to make predictions,' the father says, manly, ready to strike a deal, 'but will these medications ever get his head so right he can go back to work- keep a schedule, pass his courses?'

Another good question. Too good. 'Cases vary widely,' Nelson says. 'With strong family and environmental support, clients with quite severe psychotic episodes can return to nearly normal functioning.'

'How near is nearly?' the father asks.

'Near enough,' Nelson says carefully, 'to resume independent living arrangements and perform work under supervision.' To have a room in a group home and bag groceries at a supermarket that has an aggressive hire-the- handicapped policy. Maybe. 'Keep in mind, though, that many tasks and daily operations that are obvious and easy for you and me are very difficult for Michael at this point. He not only hears things, he sees and smells and even touches things that get between him and reality. Yet it's not oblivious psychosis-he knows his thoughts aren't right, and knowing this torments him.'

The two wearily try to take this in. Their appointment is winding down. They hear the rain lash at the loose- fitting elementary-school windows in a tantrum, in a world unhinged.

'It's a heartbreaker,' says Mr. DiLorenzo. 'All those years since the boy was born, I thought I was building it up for him. Building up Perfect.'

'Don't look at it so selfishly,' his wife says, not uncompanionably. 'Think of Michael. Suddenly, where did his life go? Down the drain into craziness.'

'No, no,' Nelson urges, almost losing his therapeutic poise. 'He's still the child you raised, the child you love. He's still Michael. He's just fallen ill, and needs you more than most young men need their parents.'

'Need,' Mrs. DiLorenzo says, the one word left hanging in air. She pushes herself up, holding on so her black- beaded purse doesn't slip from her lap.