“I’m back,” she said. “I’ve got a dry-cleaning bill I’ve been saving for you.”
“Huh?” he said.
“What are you drinking?” she asked me.
“Scotch on the rocks.”
“Make it two,” she said to Robert.
“Nice to see you again,” Robert said, and went off to get the drinks.
“What’s your name?” she asked me.
“Peter.”
“Mary Margaret.”
“I gathered.”
“Nice to meet you.”
In the next half hour of conversation, I tried to analyze why I was afraid of Mary Margaret. (This is a very good thing to do when you are away from your shrink. To begin with, it helps you to understand yourself, and at the same time it makes you feel you don’t need a doctor at all. It is very beneficial. It is also difficult. It becomes even more difficult when you’re trying to do it while another person is filling you in on her life and times.) Mary Margaret was a marathon talker. She was also a pretty good drinker. I stopped counting after her fifth scotch. I think I also stopped listening, so occupied was I in trying to learn why she frightened me, while simultaneously trying to keep up with her phenomenal capacity for putting away the sauce. We both got pretty drunk in that next half hour. That’s the only way I can possibly explain my fear.
The first thing I considered in the analysis of my fear was her resemblance to Rhoda. But why should that have frightened me? Besides, whereas my first impression had been of a girl remarkably similar in appearance to Rhoda, closer scrutiny along the bar convinced me I had made not only a visual error, but a personality goof as well. Mary Margaret was as unlike Rhoda as two turnips in a cornfield. I rejected the Twin Sister Theory and continued to examine the nudging unconscious urge to get away from her before she somehow hurt me. In the meantime, we kept drinking scotch as though the barley supply were in imminent ecological danger.
“I’m twenty-four years old,” she said, “and I’ve got a B.A. in education from Hunter College, which thank God I’ll never have to use. I earn on the average of fifteen hundred dollars a week, most of which I sock away in the bank as insurance against the day my hands begin to wither. It’s a nice feeling, believe me.”
“Fifteen hundred a week,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
Occupied as I was with self-analysis and drinking, I could not at the moment pay any real attention to Mary Margaret’s peculiar problem, which at first glance appeared to be schizophrenia of the paranoid type, with accompanying delusions of grandeur. I listened nonetheless while she recited a touching Rags-to-Riches tale (Italian Immigrant variety) about herself and two brothers living in Queens with Mama and Papa in the shadow of the Triboro Bridge, Papa eking out a mean living as a cab driver, Mama employed as a file clerk with a Wall Street firm of lawyers, all of it changing the moment Mary Margaret hit it big. She was somewhat vague as to exactly how she’d hit it big, seeming a bit embarrassed about revealing the source of that fifteen hundred bucks a week. This led me to reconsider my earlier appraisal of Mary Margaret as blackmailer, and to analyze this concept in terms of my irritational fear.
The fact was that she had witnessed a crime, and that I could reasonably be considered an accomplice to that crime, having acted in concert with Sandy when she was ripping off the parka. In which case, should Mary Margaret decide to go to the police, there existed the possibility that David, Sandy, and I would be charged with larceny and spend the rest of our lives in prison, where David would become star soloist with the prison orchestra, and where I would learn firsthand how to treat the criminally insane, thereby realizing all my psychoanalytic ambitions. Sandy, meanwhile, would languish in the women’s section and become a notorious lesbian. My mother would bring me chocolates and cigarettes every other Tuesday, remarking on my prison pallor and asking if the food was good. Eventually, I would be returned to society after having paid my debt, severely chastened, old and stooped, marveling at the fact that a joint Russian-American-Chinese team had landed eighteen men on Jupiter just the day before. In my boozy state, the notion seemed more amusing than frightening. If Mary Margaret ever did turn informer, there simply was no way to prove that Sandy had actually stolen the parka. Who was to say she hadn’t bought it back in the city? Was a person supposed to save all her sales slips in the unlikely event some lunatic might one day accuse her of shoplifting? Preposterous. Then why was I frightened?
“My father used to drive only at night because there was more money in it — you know, the traffic’s lighter and the tips are bigger. He got held up six times in Harlem. The last time he was sixty-four years old. He got out of the cab with a monkey wrench, and chased that spade crook for eight blocks, finally catching him, and telling him if he didn’t return all the money and pay the cab fare as well, he was going to be wearing the wrench around his head for the rest of his life. P.S., the spade coughed up. I used to love his working nights. He’d get home for breakfast at eight in the morning, go to sleep, wake up at two, and then spend the rest of the day with me. I told all the kids he was a detective. He looked like a detective, you know? Well, his friends still call him Big Buono. Even now — hell, he’s almost seventy — he can lift a refrigerator six inches off the floor. Strong as an ox. I love that guy. I just wish he’d get over this hang-up he has about his sister.”
“What hang-up is that?” I asked.
“He thinks he killed her,” Mary Margaret said.
“Oh.”
“Actually, she died of scarlet fever, everybody knows that, it’s on the death certificate. But what happened was he’d gone for a walk with her the day before she took sick, and they got caught in a rainstorm, and then she came down with this fever of a hundred and four, and he figured it was because they got caught in the rain. Go tell him otherwise. He’s yay big and yay wide, his friends call him Big Buono...”
“Yes, you told me that.”
“But he still cries like a baby whenever he thinks back to that walk he and his kid sister took in the rain, and he tells anyone who’ll listen that if it hadn’t been for him, she’d still be alive today.”
As Mary Margaret prattled on about the possible real reasons for her father’s feelings of guilt (Had he, for example, seen his sister naked in the tub or copped a feel on the fire escape?) I considered the possibility that my own suppressed feelings of guilt were causing in me an unconscious clamoring for retribution, and that Rhoda (in the guise of Mary Margaret) satisfied this unfulfilled wish for punishment while simultaneously posing a threat that punishment might actually be meted, thereby causing extreme anxiety manifesting itself in the form of unreasoning fear — how do you like that one, Dr. Crackers? I rejected the possibility on the grounds that the resemblance to Rhoda had already been disproved, and besides, the whole guilt theory was Krakauer’s, not mine. So why was I afraid of Mary Margaret? I asked silently, as I tilted yet another scotch on the rocks.
“I thought all that would change when he retired,” Mary Margaret said. “I mean, a person can go crazy sitting in a cab all night with his own thoughts, don’t you think? Especially when he keeps blaming himself for killing a nine-year-old kid. So when I started making such big money, I told him he could quit the cab, that I would take care of him, he could go to ball games, he could smoke his guinea stinkers, he could do whatever he liked from now on, without having to worry about a thing. The idea was to get him to stop thinking about his little sister all the time. So do you want to know what he does now? Instead of sitting in the cab and thinking about his sister, he sits in the parlor and thinks about her.”