Sudden Mischief

I said, "You haven't seen Brad Sterling around, have you?"

"Who?"

"Just grasping at straws," I said.

"Sure," Gavin said. "So where do we stand?"

"We stand as follows," I said. "A, I'm going to find out what's going on with Civil Streets. And B, don't put your arm on my shoulder again."

Gavin stood and looked at me for a moment. I could see that he wasn't used to rejection. Then he simply turned and left. He walked straight back to his car, got in, started up, and drove away without looking at me again.

Sorehead.

chapter eighteen

SUSAN AND I were ru

"Don't get giddy here," I said, "but have you heard from Brad Sterling?"

"No."

"I went to see him and he wasn't there and his office was closed. Do you know his home address?"

"No."

"You have any thoughts on his absence?"

"Perhaps he's gone away for a few days."

"Perhaps," I said.

The ice was out of the river and the boat crews were on the cold water pulling hard while their coaches followed in small motor boats, yelling instructions through bull horns. Susan and I ran with the river on our left, the sparse Saturday-morning traffic moving on Fresh Pond Parkway to our right. Across the parkway some kids were out early throwing a baseball on the prep school field. It was still cold enough so that a ball off the handle would make your hands ring up to your shoulder.

Susan ran beside me, on my left, so that my sword arm would be free. She wore a lavender headband and gray-lensed Oakley sunglasses and a gray sweat jacket that said Ventana Canyon on the left breast, and came low enough to cover most of her fa

"You work out before you met me?" I said.

"No, I don't think I did," Susan said.

"You play any sports as a kid?"

Susan laughed.

"Cute little Jewish girls, when I was a kid, did not play sports."

"What did you do," I said.

"We looked beautiful and our daddies took us to libraries and theater matinees and movies and museums and shopping and lunch."

"No mommies?"

"Mommy thought spending money was a bad thing. She always disapproved of the things my father bought me.

"Did you have money?"

"We had enough. The drug store did well, I think. I always thought we were… upper class, I guess."

"I bet you were," I said.

We chugged up over the Eliot Bridge and onto the Boston side of the river. Actually, I chugged. Susan glided.

"It's fu

"Thing is," she said, "I didn't know them either."

"Not even your father?"

"Especially my father. He was simply a playmate. He was never really a father. He never reprimanded or instructed, or even explained. If I was doing something he didn't like, he'd speak to my mother about it. She'd do the parenting."

"Which she probably liked," I said.

"Yes, I suppose she did. It gave her status, so to speak, in the family. And it gave her a chance to berate me in a socially acceptable way."

"Probably a lot of parental discipline is disguised anger," I said, just to be saying something. I had no idea what I would accomplish by getting her to tell me about her childhood, but I liked hearing it. And it couldn't hurt.

"Yes, she was quite careful about that. She would denigrate me, whenever she could. If I said something at di

"And your father never intervened."

"No. Parenting me was my mother's job. Besides, we had to protect her."

"You and your father."

"Yes."

"From what?"

"From breaking down. She was very nervous. That was the phrase, nervous. I suppose now we would say she was phobic."

"Oh, Ma," I said. "You know how you are."

Susan smiled.

"Perhaps if you decide to give up professional thuggery," she said, "you could hang out your shingle."

"Then could I say things like, she was projecting her own inadequacies onto you?"

"Yes, only I think you need to deepen your voice a little more and say it more slowly."

There was sweat on Susan's face and sweat had soaked through the back of her gray jacket. But her voice was still even and conversational.

"You and your father ever talk about that?"

"Protecting my mother? No. It was an unspoken agreement. We'd pretend she wasn't phobic. We'd agree that she was `nervous' and that we didn't want to `upset her.' But the agreement was silent. We never spoke of it. We never, in my memory, spoke of anything."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing of substance. He'd ask me how I liked school, or tell me what a pretty dress I had on. That sort of thing. But an actual conversation-I can't remember one."

"So the only parent you had was your mother and she was jealous of you. Did she love you too?"

"I think so. I know that I was ashamed of her. She was older than other kids' mothers, and she was really square. And I know I hated her for being so"-Susan smiled sadly-"nervous. But however bitchy she was, I knew she loved me. And she was always there. I trusted her, as much as I despised her. She was the one who took care of me."

"And she had her problems," I said.

"Yes," Susan said, "she had many and they were probably deep seated and my father was probably one of them."

"He fool around?" I said.

"I have no idea," Susan said. "I spent a lot of time with him, but I can't express to you how much I didn't know my father."

From the Harvard Boat House to the Larz Anderson Bridge is uphill. You never notice it driving along Soldier's Field Road. It's not very dramatic, but if it marks the last stretch of a four-mile run, it becomes more apparent.

"Well, dysfunctional or not," I said, "they produced a hell of a daughter."

"A bit dysfunctional herself."

"You think?"

"Not easy to live with," Susan said.

"Impossible to live with," I said. "But what we do works out pretty good."

"Just pretty good?"

"Masculine understatement," I said.

"Oh that," she said.

We went up the little hill and turned left across the Anderson Bridge, where I had almost died last year.

"I am being a bitch," Susan said, "about Brad Sterling."

"Yes."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

"I don't know if I can promise not to be again."

"I know."

"Nothing breaks you, does it," Susan said. "Nothing makes you swerve."