So that her talent for creative abuse, for industrial-strength practical jokes, must have dated from those days. Indeed, she had once said as much at a dinner party.
“When I was being fattened up back there on the farm, when they were getting me ready for the world, I wasn’t permitted drugs. I wasn’t even permitted sleeping pills. Hell, I wasn’t even permitted shock therapy. I can remember looking at the faces of some of the other patients on my wing when they came back from electric shock. They looked as if they had just been jabbed in the eyes with Novocaine. I envied them their dulled wits and hamstrung wills. A crazy is so helpless anyway. No one believes her. That’s the ultimate outrage anyway — that everyone’s always considering the source. I tell you if I had smelled smoke and yelled ‘Fire!’ not a nurse or orderly would have looked up. You had to do grand opera to get a response from those people. I wouldn’t do that. I became a sort of mad politician instead. I schemed constantly. We became pen pals.”
“Pen pals?”
“I wrote them letters. I reminded them of everything I knew about them, all I could think of that had just been jarred loose by the electric company, everything their doctors and the public utilities wanted burned out of them. It was one public service against another. They turned on the juice, I turned on the heat.”
“Did they ever answer?”
“You bet they did! Among all those get well cards and cheery letters from home, I venture to say mine was the only mail with any real news. They answered all right. They told me stuff about themselves their docs didn’t know.”
“Oh, Judy,” Sam said.
“Oh, Sam. What’s so terrible? We believed in trauma then, in dreams and childhood. In the raised voice at the vulnerable moment. It was a sort of astrology. The houses of Jupiter, the cusps of Mars. We believed in everything but character. — And I didn’t do anything with their letters. I didn’t use them for blackmail or flash them for gossip. I was interested in only one thing.”
“Judy, please.”
“Sam, please. — I was interested in only one thing. I was a kind of alchemist. All I cared about was the transubstantiation of dross into mischief.”
The cunt, Messenger thought, and knew something he hadn’t known he’d known. She’d made Sam dean. He didn’t know how, but he couldn’t recall either which were girl cousins, which boy, or where the money came from or if it even was money at the bottom of the family fortune. It could have been anything. It could have been God’s good will. Sam was Judy’s man. Judy was Sam’s friend downtown. He was her dean, her mischief.
And it was still an exquisite situation. Judy was dying, he couldn’t lay a glove on her. Judy was dying, she held all the cards. She was a hell of a foe. She was a hell of a foe with her scorched-earth policies and land mines and booby traps and all the rest of her devastating paraphernalia and time bomb vengeance.
That she had planned this he had no doubt. That she had known who her victims would be was another question. (Excepting the immediate family of course — Sam, the girls, possibly her father.) Was he meant to be a victim? Messenger thought so. “If there’s anything I can do,” he had said. It was what everyone said. Surely he had been saved for the Meals-on-Wheels route. But how could she have known his schedule that semester, that he was conveniently free just those two to two and a half hours she would need him? How could she have known Mrs. Carey would be so cooperative, blurt out the names and disgraces of his friends, accuse Cornell of his habit, and hint at inside information about his children? How, finally, could she have known she would get cancer?
But that was the point, wasn’t it? She couldn’t. Judith made mischief the way some people made money. Not to buy anything with it, just to have it ready to hand. If she was a vague irritant to them while she was alive, how much more of a pain in the ass would she be when she died and there was no stopping her? Who else in the city knew of the griefs in the west county? Messenger saw these now as Mrs. Carey must have seen them — distanced by soap opera, attenuated in a medium of insulate otherness, flattened by the fact that they were not shared in any real way. Judith’s achievement had been to trivialize what was most important to them, what kept them going and made them friends.
He would not eat the next leftover lunch. He would bring it to Judy.
2
No one has called him Captain in years. He’s Mr. Mead now. He would be Mr. Mead to anyone. To a president, to an enemy or friend, to the public health nurses who have the most intimate knowledge of what remains to Mr. Mead of Mr. Mead’s body. To God Himself perhaps. It seems strange to him, and a little impertinent — for great age alters relation as well as vocabulary — that Louise should call him Dad. He can be no one’s dad.
Because you outlive everything if you live long enough.
What changes he has seen!
And has outlived change too, the years, even the epochs of his own life, no longer discrete to him, or that things done one way were now done — if they were done — another, of the least importance. He is too old to be an old-timer, too old for that county courthouse ease where soul takes tea with soul or cronies swap cronies not viewpoint, opinion — they can’t hold their bowels, how can they hold opinions? — but simple, loquacious mood, up there, static, displayed as artifact, veteran’d whether or no they have ever been to war, even the benches on which they sit become a sort of reviewing stand. He is too old to be a grandfather, too old to fish, whittle, lie, too old even to be marked by a distinct disease. That those nurses know him so well, and know so well what can be expected of him, has nothing to do with his being Mr. Mead. (There is a chart at the foot of his bed even though he is home and not in a hospital. Nothing is written on it except his name — Mr. Mead — not his pulse or blood pressure reading or temperature, no note about diet or medications — possibly his age.) They know him so well because he’s a category, not a person. As an infant is a category. Finally, he is too old even to be Mr. Mead.