“Well, you know, I’ve been sick! That takes up lots of time. Oh Jesus — got hit with prostate, then skin, then breast. Breast cancer! That’s not a typical thing, not for men. But you learn to look on the bright side: never got it in the brain, balls or palate. Saw those characters when I went for chemo. ‘Pretty work,’ as my Southern auntie used to say — ghoulish. But you don’t want to hear about all that. Tell me about yourself, Dodd! Marcie says you’re pretty high up there on the Forbes heap. I think that’s all kind of silly myself. Do you really have that much money?”
“I have a lot, but I never see it.”
Dr. Janklow was tickled. “I like that,” he tittered. “You never see it! Who wants to see old dirty dollar bills anyhow?”
They reminisced awhile before Dodd got around to asking if he was aware of the sad state their alma mater was in, what with the seemingly permanent bungalows and school board entropy. The doctor nodded gravely and said that Marcie Millard sent him a petition bemoaning a bureaucracy that dared allow the halls of learning to remain in such prolonged post-earthquake disrepair. It was obscene. Dodd spoke of his vision for “the new BV,” an academic phoenix risen from the ashes.
“Well,” said the doctor, after getting an earful, “it does sound a bit grand, but why not? Why should the good folks of Beverly Hills be denied? I think it’s a hell of an idea, David.”
Dodd smilingly overlooked the misnomer.
“But what can I do? Now, what would you want with an old retired windbag with three cancers?”
“For me, tradition is very important. Dr. Janklow, if we can make this thing happen, I’d like you to have an office there — as an emeritus. You could come in whenever you like. Of course, you’d be salaried. If all this does come to pass — and my lawyers and friends on the school board are giving me every indication it will — I’d like very much if you stood alongside me during the ground-breaking.” The dinner guest was flustered to speechlessness, but Dodd was just gathering steam. “I want to be able to look around and see old friends and mentors, so there’s a continuum. See, I’m one of those people who remember things: I remember you taking the time to come to my family’s house on Roxbury Drive for supper. That meant a lot to me. You didn’t have to do that — no one paid you extra or wrote about it in the Courier. I think you just thought it might make a difference. I remember some of the other kids finding out … and for a few days, I felt just a little more important, a little more comfortable in my own skin.”
The doctor looked sternly contemplative, as if working through a knotty math problem. “I have a confession to make.” He pushed around an endive with a fork. “For weeks I’ve been racking my brain. Who is he?” He paused dramatically. “Who is that boy?”
Dodd’s face froze in a half smile. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Now, the only thing I can come up with is the trauma—I went through an awful, terrible time right about then. My wife and I were separating, a protracted thing. That’s the only explanation I can give! Because even after three cancers, my mind has remained agile as ever. The Millards’ll tell you. One thing I’m not and never have been is a forgetter.”
“Forget—”
“What I am trying to say, what I feel genuinely terrible about, is that I cannot remember. Cannot remember—you—at all! I have racked my brain. I saw so many children, so many girls and boys. Had so many dinners — feathers in the parents’ caps, but they took a toll. Oh yes they took a toll. And that was fine, I was happy to do it! Would do it again. If it’s true that I was of some small comfort — and you said yourself it was a good, a worthwhile thing — then my, my … they were all good, wonderful children. Through the years. And you wouldn’t have been the only one! Heavens. But where did you say you lived? Roxbury? South or north? Well, of course it would be north …”
“It was actually south.”
“Well — but you — you say it was twice a week you came? How is that possible? Twice a week! I have racked my brain. Even looked through the yearbooks — I’ve got every single one — you weren’t in any of the yearbooks—”
Though crestfallen, Dodd gamely rallied. “I always arranged to get sick when those picture-days came around.”
The doctor laughed hollowly. “I can only say it has to have been because of my marital difficulties — which of course I had to shield not only from the students but from faculty as well. Took an enormous toll.”
“I’m sure it will come back.”
“I feel so foolish. Your generosity—I thought by seeing you it would jog my memory. Awful to say! It’s the damnedest — what was it that we talked about? In my office … Did you have a specific problem?”
“I imagine it was nothing that unusual,” he said cordially, “in terms of the type of thing you heard from most of the kids who came to see you. And the advice or support that you gave.”
“So many of the children’s troubles were alike; that’s true today too, no? — hard to distinguish. Have you changed much?” Dr. Janklow squinted at him. “I mean, physically? From when you were — from those days? Because you look like the type who might have—”
“Nothing dramatic.”
“It’s just extraordinary that I can’t recall! Your father wasn’t in television, was he?”
The next afternoon was an active one. After visiting his mother in the Louis and Bluey Trotter Family wing at Cedars, he returned home to find his old friend Samson Dowling in the living room.
Joyce sat off to one side while the detective faced the children, grouped in a semicircle on the emerald-green Roche-Bobois sectional. Edward had insisted on motoring up from the Boar’s Head for the interview; he would not have Olde CityWalk invaded by “the Spanish Inquisition.” (Though with a secret lodger in the attic, the setting certainly would have been more dramatic.)
Toulouse had of course already met the dapper Mr. Dowling, but the pleasure was a first for first cousins. Needless to say, Lucille Rose was smitten. Basking in the mannish cloud of their interlocutor’s aftershave, eager for some of his authenticity to rub off on her authorial side, she could barely contain herself; it didn’t hurt that the detective, as later described in a Smythson BIRD NOTES paean, resembled nothing less than a “Grecian god.” For his part, Edward, swathed in fine brocade, was haughtily up for an old-fashioned game of cat-and-mouse. Only Toulouse lagged behind, quietly, nervously, dubiously hoping that as the son of the detective’s ladylove he might at least be given special dispensation — the slack would help camouflage his fear of inadvertently giving Amaryllis away.