“Ah what a shame,” I said. “Your work has made you cynical.”
“Of course it has. Hasn’t yours?”
“Certainly,” I said. “You got any background on him family, education, favorite food?”
“His mother’s name was Celia Johnson. She bore him in August of 1971 when she was fifteen years and two months old. She was also addicted to PCP.”
“Which meant he was, at birth,” I said.
“Un huh. She dumped him with her mother, his grandmother, who was herself, at the time, thirty-two years old. Celia had three more babies before she was nineteen, all of them PCP addicted, all of them handed over to Grandma. One of them died by drowning. There was evidence of child abuse, including sodomy. Grandma was sent away for six months on a child-endangerment conviction.”
“Six months?” I said.
“And three years’ probation,” Arlene Rodriguez said.
“Teach her,” I said.
“His mother hanged herself about two months later, doesn’t say why, though I seem to remember it had something to do with a boyfriend.”
“So Major is on his own,” I said. Arlene Rodriguez looked down at her folder again.
“At eleven years and three months of age,” she said.
“Anything else?”
“While we had him at Lakeville,” she said, “we did some testing. He doesn’t read very well, or he didn’t then, but one of the testers devised ways to get around that, and around the cultural bias of the standard tests, and when she did, Major proved to be very smart. If IQ scores meant anything, which they don’t, Major would have a very high IQ.”
We were quiet. Around us there were other cubicles like this one, and other people like Arlene Rodriguez, whose business it was to deal with lives like Major Johnson’s. The cubicle partitions were painted a garish assortment of bright reds and yellows and greens, in some bizarre bureaucratic conceit of cheeriness. The windows were thick with grime, and the spring sunshine barely filtered through it to make pallid splashes on the gray metal desk tops.
“Any thoughts on how to deal with this kid?” I said.
Arlene Rodriguez shook her head. “Any way to turn him around?” I said.
“No.”
“Any way to save him?”
“No.”
I sat for a moment, then I got up and shook her hand.
“Have a nice day,” I said.
CHAPTER 7
Susan and I were walking Pearl along the Charles River on one of those retractable leashes which gave her the same illusion of freedom we all have, until she surged after a duck and came abruptly to the end of her tether. The evening had begun to gather, the commuter traffic on both sides of the river had reached the peak of its fever, and the low slant of setting sun made the river rosy.
I had the dog on my right arm, and Susan held my left hand.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“One should do that now and then,” I said.
“I think it’s time we moved in together.” I nodded at Pearl.
“For the sake of the child?” I said.
“Well, I know you’re joking, but she’s part of what has made me think about it. She’s with me, she spends time with you. She’s really our dog but she doesn’t live with us.”
“Sure she does,” I said. “She lives with us serially.”
“And we live with each other serially. Sometimes at my house, sometimes at yours, sometimes apart.”
“The `apart‘ is important too,” I said.
“Because it makes the `together‘ more intense?”
“Maybe,” I said. This had the makings of a minefield. I was being very careful.
“Sort of a `death is the mother of beauty‘ concept?”
“Might be,” I said. We turned onto the Larz Anderson Bridge.
“That’s an intellectual conceit and you know it,” Susan said. “No one ever espoused that when death was at hand.”
“Probably not,” I said.
We were near the middle of the bridge. Pearl paused and stood on her hind legs and rested her forepaws on the low wall of the bridge and contemplated the river. I stopped to wait while she did this.
