“I suggested you were a rat,” I said, confessing to the lesser sin. What I had suggested, as I feared he knew, was that he was an inquisitive dependent animal, exchanging advice for friendship; that for all his intuition and clinical wisdom he did not know firsthand the rage that flared between individuals, the urge to eat each other up. Strong emotions were not part of his repertoire. But they had become part of mine during Anjali’s visit as I watched her unfold under his radiant friendship — envy, hatred, fury … Once I saved you from ridicule, you ridiculous man.
“A rat,” he echoed. “Nevertheless, you are my favorite … niece.”
“I’m supposed to take that lie seriously? Up your goulash, Milo.”
“Susan—”
“Go home.” I took several steps away from him and his friend the agouti. Then I whirled and began to run. I ran past the pichi and the monkeys and into the farm area, scattering hens and chickens and little kids. “Hey!” yelled Mr. Bosky. I vaulted the railing of the ponies’ riding ring and ran around it and vaulted back. “She’s crazy,” remarked one of the local boys, in surprised admiration. Perhaps I could sneak out one night and meet him in a haystack. I ran straight into the corn, between stag lines of stalks.
Past the corn was another field where lettuce grew close to the ground. I skirted it — I had no wish to do damage to Bosky’s. I ran, faster still, enjoying one of those spurts our track coach taught us to take advantage of — a coach who, without concern for feelings or individuality, made us into athletes. I slowed down when I reached the woods, and padded through it like a fox free of her partner; I slithered, like a snake who has to catch her own mouse. On the other side of the woods was the highway. I crossed it carefully — I had no wish to grieve my parents, either. Another narrow road led to the rocky beach, a couple of miles from our house. I walked the rest of the way. My brother and his friend were sitting on the porch, amiably talking with Milo — Aunt Milo, Queen Milo, Dr. Milo, who so evenly distributed his favors. He and I waved to each other, and I went around to the outside shower and turned it on and stood under it, with all my clothes on.
AS I HAD NOTICED, my mother was calling Milo less frequently. By that last year in high school, it seemed, she didn’t call him at all except to remind him of the New Year’s party.
And later, talking with children of the other therapists when we were home from college, or, still later, when we ran into each other in New York or San Francisco, I learned that all of our mothers eventually stopped consulting Milo. Partly, I think, they had less need for his advice. We kids were at last growing up. And our parents had incorporated and so no longer needed to hear Milo’s primary rule about offspring—“They owe you and society a minimal courtesy. Everything else is their business”—just as they had incorporated his earlier observation about physical punishment: “It’s addictive. Rather than strike your child, light up a cigar.”
And perhaps, too, they had to flee their older sibling, the one who had seen their wounds.
A few of them may have even believed the rumor about Milo: that he was paying so much attention to Anjali N., a high school girl, that her parents had to warn him off. That fable had been astonishingly easy to launch. I merely related it to Dr. Margaret’s daughter — two years younger than I, grateful for my attention. Then I swore her to secrecy.
At any rate, we grown offspring discovered from each other that Milo himself began to initiate the telephone calls, eager to know the progress of the patients, the anecdotes from the latest trips, the news of the children — especially the news of the children.
“Nosy,” said Dr. Lenore’s daughter.
“Avaricious,” said Benjy Plunket, who had practically lived at Milo’s house during his parents’ divorce. “When I was in college he wanted to study everything I was studying — he even bought himself a copy of my molecular biology textbook, stuff new since his time.”
“He managed to tag along on the Apfels’ Las Vegas trip,” said Dr. Lenore’s daughter.
“People outlive their usefulness,” Dr. Judah’s daughter summed up.
“It’s sad,” we all agreed, with offhand malice.
My mother still answered when Milo called (machines allowed other old friends to screen him out) and she tolerated his increasingly discursive monologues. And she kept inviting him to our Cape Cod house, and when he joined our family on a cruise to Scandinavia it was because she and my father enthusiastically insisted. Others were less generous. The Apfels, who had lost heavily in Las Vegas, broke with him entirely.
WE ARE ADULTS NOW. We prefer e-mail to the telephone. Many of us still live in Godolphin. None of us has entered the mental-health professions. Even Anjali failed to follow her parents into medicine. She teaches art history in Chicago, and has three daughters. Nature proved too strong for her, too.
Some of our children have problems. But though the aged Milo is still working — is esteemed adviser to an inner-city child-guidance center, has done pioneering work with juvenile offenders — we don’t consult him. He reminds us too much of our collective childhood in that all-knowing burrow; and of our anxious mothers; and of the unnerving power of empathy. We’re a different generation: the tough love crowd. And there’s always Ritalin.
I do keep in touch with Milo. It’s not a burden: my husband and I are both linguists, and Milo is interested in language. “There is a striving for design in the utterances even of the schizophrenic,” he has written.
I inherited the Cape Cod house, and Milo comes to visit every summer. He and I and my two sons always pay a visit to Bosky’s. The wild-animal preserve has dwindled to one desperate moose, one raccoon, and those poor foxes, or some other pair. The snake has retired and the agouti is gone, too. But the farm in back continues to flourish, and the ponies get new straw hats every season. My kids have outgrown the place but they understand that old Milo is to be indulged.
A white mustache coats Milo’s upper lip. His hair, also white, is still long. His hairline has receded considerably, and he’s subject to squamous carcinomas on the exposed brow. Advised by his dermatologist, he covers his head. In the winter he sports a beret, in the summer a cloth hat with a soft brim.
Today, wearing the summer hat and a pair of oversize cargo pants that look like a split skirt, he is riding one of the ponies. That saddle must be punishing his elderly bones. Maybe he’s trying to amuse my sons. Certainly they are entertained. When he reaches the far side of the ring they release unseemly snickers. “Granny Wild West,” snorts one. “Madame Cowpoke,” returns the other. Meanwhile Milo is bending toward the kid who’s leading his pony — eliciting a wretched story, no doubt; offering a suggestion that may change the boy’s life or at least make his afternoon a little better.
I’d like to smack both my sons and also smoke a cigar. Instead I inform them that Milo represents an evolved form of human life that they might someday emulate or even adopt. That sobers them. So I don’t mention that he was once valued and then exploited and then betrayed and finally discarded; that, like his displaced parents, he adjusted gracefully to new circumstances.
We stand there, elbows on the railing, as Milo on his pony plods toward us. We smile at him. Within the rim of his bonnet, his face creases; below the soapy mustache his lips part to reveal brown teeth. He is grinning back at us as if he shared our mild mockery of his performance: as if it were his joke, too.