“I should be wearing a sleeveless undershirt,” I said.
“The notorious wife-beater undershirt,” Susan said.
“Like Brando,” I said. “In Streetcar.”
“Wasn’t he a wonderful actor?” Susan said.
“No,” I said. “I always thought he seemed mannered and self-aware.”
“Really?”
“Can’t help it,” I said.
“But he was so beautiful.”
“Didn’t do much for me,” I said.
A woman with shoulder-length gray hair walked by in hiking boots and short shorts. Her companion was tall and bald with a combover.
“How you feeling?” I said to Susan.
“Like I failed.”
“The kid who killed himself?”
“Yes. I’m supposed to prevent those things.”
“Didn’t someone say something about the tyrannical ”supposed to’s“?”
“Karen Horney,” Susan said. “The tyrannical shoulds.”
A guy walked past wearing a seersucker suit and one of those long-billed boating caps. He had a tan mongrel on a leash. The mongrel was wearing a red kerchief.
“Stylish,” I said.
Susan nodded. Pearl lay between us on the top step with her head on her paws. The mongrel spotted Pearl and barked at her. Pearl’s hearing wasn’t much anymore. She glanced at the source of what must have been a dim sound, and growled a little without raising her head. Susan patted her absently.
“My office was the only place he was safe,” Susan said. “His parents were appalled that he was gay. His schoolmates were cruel. He had no friends.”
I didn’t say anything.
“He could only be who he was in my office.”
I nodded.
“I couldn’t help him to change who he was. I couldn’t help him to accept who he was. All I could accomplish, finally, for a few hours a week, was to provide a temporary refuge.”
“Not enough,” I said.
“No.”
My beer was gone. I got up and went to the kitchen and got a jar of olives and another beer. I was trying Heineken again. A blast from the past. Susan was having another micro sip of her martini when I came back and sat down beside her. It was still warm, in the evening. The air had begun to turn faintly blue as the darkness came toward us. There was no wind. I plunked a fresh olive into Susan’s martini. She smiled at me.
“If they have something somewhere,” Susan said. “If they are loved at home. If they have a circle of friends. But if it’s no good at home and it’s no good at school… Goddamn it.”
“No place to hide,” I said.
“No place.”
“Any theories why people are such jerks about it?” I said.
Susan shrugged.
“Nature of the beast,” she said.
“There is a high jerk count among the general populace,” I said. “Present company, of course, excluded.”
Four girls from Radcliffe went past us in various stages of undress. They all talked in that fast, slightly nasal way that well-bred young women talked around here.
“Living in a college town is not a bad thing,” I said.
Susan watched silently as the girls passed. She sipped her martini. I could hear her breathing.
“We are both in a business,” I said, “where we lose people.”
“I know.”
“A wise therapist once told me that you can’t really protect anyone, that sooner or later they have to protect themselves.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes.”
“After you lost Candy Sloan?”
“Yes.”
“I am wise.”
“Good-looking, too,” I said.
“But god-damn it…” she said.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t feel bad when you lose one.”
Susan nodded.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Feel bad.”
Susan nodded again.
“I’ve been fighting it,” she said.
“And losing,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Give in to it. Feel as bad as you have to feel. Then get over it.”
Susan stared at me for a while. Then she put her head against my shoulder. We sat for a time watching the street traffic. I listened to her breathing.
“That what you do?”
“Yes.”
“Even after Candy Sloan?”
“Yes.”
She fished another olive from the jar and put it in her martini. She had already drunk nearly a fifth of it.
“And,” I said, “there’s always you and me.”
“I know.”
A squirrel ran along Susan’s front fence and up a fat oak tree and disappeared into the thick foliage. Pearl followed it with her eyes but didn’t raise her head.
“You’re a good therapist,” Susan said after a while.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “Maybe we should open a joint practice.”
With her head still against my shoulder Susan patted my thigh.
“Maybe not,” Susan said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It took me three days to boil the class lists down to people I could locate, and another two days to find people on that list who remembered Mary Toricelli. One of them was a woman named Jamie Deluca, who tended bar at a place on Friend Street, near the Fleet Center.
I went in to see her at 3:15 in the afternoon when the lunch crowd had left and the early cocktail group had not yet arrived. Jamie drew me a draft beer and placed it on a napkin in front of me.
“I didn’t really know her very good,” Jamie said. “Mary was really kind of a phantom.”
Jamie had short blond hair and a lot of eye makeup. She was wearing black pants and a white shirt with the cuffs turned back.
“What kind of a phantom?” I said.
“Well, you know. You didn’t see much of her. She wasn’t popular or anything. She just come to class and go home.”
“Sisters or brothers?”
“I don’t think so.”
While she talked Jamie sliced the skin off whole lemons. I wondered if the object was to harvest the skin, or the skinless lemon. I decided that asking would be a needless distraction, and I had the sense that Jamie would find too much distraction daunting.
“Parents?”
“Sure, of course.” Jamie looked as if it was the dumbest question she’d ever heard. “She lived with her mother.”
“Father?”
“I don’t know. When I knew her there wasn’t no father around.”
“Her mother still live in Franklin?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“Her mother’s name is Toricelli.”
“Sure. I guess so.”
“Who’d Mary hang out with?” I said.
“Most of the time she didn’t hang with anybody,” Jamie said. “She didn’t have a bunch of friends. Just some of the burnouts.”
“Burnouts?”
“Yeah. You know, druggies, dropouts, the dregs.”
“Remember anybody?”
“Yeah. Roy Levesque. He was like her boyfriend. And, ah, Tammy, and Pike, and Joey Bucci… I don’t know some of those kids. I think she just hung with them because she didn’t have no other friends.”
“Got any last names for Tammy and Pike?”
“Pike is a last name. It’s a guy. I don’t even remember his first name. Everybody called him Pike.”
“How about Tammy?”
“Wagner, I think. Tammy Wagner. Kids used to call her Wags.”
“You know where they are?”
“No. I moved in with my boyfriend soon as I graduated. Pretty much lost touch with the kids I knew.”
“Boyfriend from Franklin?”
“No. Brockton. I met him at a club. He didn’t last.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s all right, he was a loser anyway.”
“Lot of them around,” I said, just to be saying something.
“Least he didn’t knock me up,” she said.
I nodded as I was glad about that, too.
“What was Mary like,” I said. “Was she smart in school?”