Dr. Alan Duberstein probed the air with his ice cream spoon. It was his belief that Susan’s breakdown was connected somehow to her extracurricular activities. He thought she might be in SDS, but he knew for sure she had been active in the Boston Resistance. Last winter, when he and Susan had agreed to terminate her therapy, he had warned her about becoming too involved in political activities. He was having a vanilla soda with peach ice cream. We were all five of us plus the baby stuffed in a Howard Johnson’s window booth. Phyllis sat next to him and I imagined her as his wife. She fed the baby ice cream from a dish. I didn’t like their baby, a fat kid with red cheeks, light hair like his mother’s, and an odor of vomit.
Incredibly, we were all sitting in the Howard Johnson’s restaurant near Exit II on the Westbound side of the Massachusetts Turnpike. Yet it was logical enough. We had come to pick up Susan’s car, left by the police in the parking lot. It was mid-afternoon; everyone was hungry and thirsty. Perhaps also we were trying to see what there was about a Howard Johnson’s that would make Susan want to die here. Perhaps we felt if we could only understand we could help her. Nevertheless, I was ill. I am very sensitive to inappropriateness. For instance, to weddings in catering halls. There are no decent settings for joy or suffering. All our environments are wrong. They embarrass our emotions. They make our emotions into the plastic tiger lilies in the window boxes of Howard Johnson’s restaurants.
“Ordinary political expression was difficult enough for her,” Duberstein said. “Dissent was traumatic. It’s understandable after all. She bit off more than she could chew.”
“She’s a willful person,” my father said quietly.
“I have great faith in her,” Duberstein said, looking under his napkin for a straw.
Every table was taken. A holiday crowd stood behind the hostess stationed by the velvet rope at the entrance to the dining room. With her menus held to her breast, she swept her gaze across the tables. The hostess was in her forties with a beehive hairdo of platinum blonde. She wore an aqua crepe dress with a cowled collar and she was looking serious.
“If you’re not finishing your sandwich,” I said to Phyllis, “pass it over here.” I was angry with her for imagining Susan’s misery in the earnest compassionate way of high school girls with day-glow flowers. I strongly suspected her of having found it thrilling to marry into a notorious family. That was something I still had to look into.
“Well, listen,” Duberstein said, “I’d be insulting your intelligence if I didn’t admit this is a pretty serious business. There’s a lot to work out. But she has tremendous resources. She’s been down before.”
“What did you do, put ketchup on this?”
“What?” Phyllis says.
“You put ketchup on a club sandwich.”
Phyllis looks at me unhappily. She is still hoping someday to be accepted by her in-laws if not by her husband. My mother, Lise, perceives this. “Why not ketchup,” she says.
“We’ll get her all settled,” Duberstein says to my father, “and then we can go to work.”
“Yuk!”
“What’s the matter, Dan,” my father says. He is sitting next to me,
“Ketchup on a club sandwich. Yuk.”
“Would you like something else? How about ordering something.”
“No thanks, Dad. I’d still have to sit here and listen to this schmuck talk about my sister.”
It is just a few volts, but enough to do the job. The thing about the Isaacson family, the thing about everyone in our family, is that we’re not nice people. The issue, however, is real. I love my foster parents, but in this emergency they have chosen Duberstein. Duberstein is their man. God knows where he came from originally, I forget the circumstances, but to me he is just one of the thousands of intruders in my life, in my sister’s life — one of the thousands of guides, commentators, counselors, sympathizers and holders of opinion.
“Daniel, I hope you are prepared to apologize,” says my mother.
“What is it about Susan and me that makes anyone feel privileged to say anything at all to us. Why do I have to sit here and listen to this creep. Who needs him?”
“I called Dr. Duberstein because I think we need him very badly. I think Susan needs him. And I don’t think you’re handling yourself very well.”
“Dad—”
“I would expect better of you.”