The worst instance of both Orin’s mendacious idiocy and Mrs. Incandenza’s unwillingness to countenance an idiotic lie came one grisly day soon after Orin had finally gotten his vehicle operator’s license. O. and I found ourselves with an idle weekday afternoon off in August after losing early at a synthetic-grass tournament down at Long-wood, and Hal was still alive in what was then Boys’ 10’s and thus a good bit of the E.T.A. summer community was still down at Longwood, including Mario and Mrs. Incandenza, who’d been driven down I remember by a sort of swarthily foreign-looking moniíial-internist medical resident Mrs. Inc had introduced as a so-called “dear and cherished friend” but hadn’t explained how they’d met, and Dr. Incandenza was indisposed and not in a position to bother anyone that day, I remember, and Orin and I had most of E.T.A. to ourselves, even the gate’s portcullis unmanned and up, and this being at the acme of our interest in such things we wasted little time in ingesting some sort of recreational substance, I cannot recall what kind but I remember them as particularly impairing, and we decided however that we weren’t yet impaired enough, and decided to drive down the hill to one of the disreputable liquor stores along Commonwealth Avenue that accepted your word of honor as proof of age, and we hopped into the Volvo and blasted down the hill and down Commonwealth Avenue, severely impaired, and wondered in a speculative way why people on the sidewalks all along Commonwealth seemed to be waving at us and holding their heads and pointing and jumping wildly up and down, and Orin waving cheerfully back and holding his own head in a sort of friendly imitation, but it was not until we got all the way down to the Commonwealth-Brighton Ave. split that the horrible realization hit us: Mrs. Incandenza often during summer days kept the Incandenzas’ beloved dog S. Johnson leashed to the back of her Volvo within reach of his water and Science Diet bowls, and Orin and I had peeled out in the car without even thinking to check for whether S. Johnson was attached to it. I will not try to describe what we found when we pulled into a parking lot and slunk to the rear of the car. Let’s call it a nubbin. Let’s say what we found was a leash and collar, and a nubbin. According to the couple of witnesses who were able to speak, S. Johnson had made a valiant go of trying to keep up back there for at least a couple blocks down Commonwealth, but at some point he either lost his footing or got his canine affairs in order and figured it was his day to shuffle off, and gave up, and hit the pavement, after which the scene the witnesses described was unspeakable. There was fur and let’s call it material down the middle of the inside east-bound lane for five or six blocks. What we had left to take slowly back up the Academy’s hill was a leash, a collar with tags describing medication-allergies and food-sensitivities, and a nubbin of let’s call it attached material.
The point is that I defy you to imagine how it felt later that day to stand there with Orin in the HmH living room before the prone and piteously weeping Mrs. Incandenza and listen to Orin try to construct a version of events in which he and I had sensed somehow that S. Johnson was dying for a good brisk August walk and were walking him down Commonwealth,15 saying there we were walking good old S. Johnson demurely down the sidewalk when a hit-and-run driver not only swerved up onto the sidewalk to run the dog down but then backed up and ran him over again and backed up and ran him over again, and on and on, so more like a pulverize-and-run driver, while Orin and I had stood there too paralyzed with horror and grief even to think of noticing the make and color of the car, much less the fiend’s license plate. Mrs. Incan-denza on her knees (there’s something surreal about a very tall woman on her knees), weeping and pressing her hand to her collarbone but nodding in confirmation at every syllable of Orin spinning this pathetic lie, O. holding up the leash and collar (and nubbin) like Exhibit A, with me next to him wiping my forehead and wishing the immaculately polished and sterilized hardwood floor would swallow up the whole scene in toto.
… (7) Ms. Steeples, to my way of thinking, the word “abuse” is vacuous. Who can define “abuse”? The difficulty with really interesting cases of abuse is that the ambiguity of the abuse becomes part of the abuse. Thanks over the decades to the energetic exercise of your own profession, Ms. Steeley, we have all heard ACOAs and AlaTeens and ACONAs and ACOGs and WHINERS relate clear cases of different kinds of abuse: beatings, diddlings, rapes, deprivations, domineerment, humiliation, captivity, torture, excessive criticism or even just utter disinterest. But at least the victims of this sort of abuse can, when they have dredged it back up after childhood, confidently call it “abuse.” There are, however, more ambiguous cases. Harder to profile, one might say. What would you call a parent who is so neurasthenic and depressive that any opposition to his parental will plunges him into the sort of psychotic depression where he does not leave his bed for days and just sits there in bed cleaning his revolver, so that the child would be terrified of opposing his will and plunging him into a depression and maybe causing him to suicide? Would that child qualify as “abused”? Or a father who is so engrossed by mathematics that he gets engrossed helping his child with his algebra homework and ends up forgetting the child and doing it all himself so that the child gets an A in Fractions but never in fact learns fractions? Or even say a father who is extremely handy around the house and can fix anything, and has the son help him, but gets so engrossed in his projects (the father) that he never thinks to explain to the son how the projects actually get done, so that the son’s “help” never advances past simply handing the father a specified wrench or getting him lemonade or Phillips-head screws until the day the father is crushed into aspic in a freak accident on the Jamaica Way and all opportunities for transgenerational instruction are forever lost, and the son never learns how to be a handy homeowner himself, and when things malfunction around his own one-room home he has to hire contemptuous filthy-nailed men to come fix them, and feels terribly inadequate (the son), not only because he is not handy but because this handiness seemed to him to have represented to his father everything that was independent and manly and non-Disabled in an American male. Would you cry “Abuse!” if you were the unhandy son, looking back? Worse, could you call it abuse without feeling that you were a pathetic self-indulgent piss-puddle, what with all the genuine cases of hair-raising physical and emotional abuse diligently reported and analyzed daily by conscientious journalists (and profiled?)?
I am not sure whether you could call this abuse, but when I was (long ago) abroad in the world of dry men, I saw parents, usually upscale and educated and talented and functional and white, patient and loving and supportive and concerned and involved in their children’s lives, profligate with compliments and diplomatic with constructive criticism, loquacious in their pronouncements of unconditional love for and approval of their children, conforming to every last jot/tittle in any conceivable definition of a good parent, I saw parent after unimpeachable parent who raised kids who were (a) emotionally retarded or (b) lethally self-indulgent or (c) chronically depressed or (d) bor- derline psychotic or (e) consumed with narcissistic self-loathing or (f) neurotically driven/addicted or (g) variously psychosomatically Disabled or (h) some conjunctive permutation of (a) … (g) Now, Orin had never once walked S. Johnson. Orin was not even all that keen on S. Johnson, because the dog was always trying to mate with his left leg. And anyway, S. Johnson was very much Mrs. Incandenza’s dog, and was normally exercised only by Mrs. Incandenza, and at rigidly specific times of day.