Natalie nodded thoughtfully and gazed out at the peaceful sylvan view. "That's the struggle, isn't it? Not to have kids and to mourn their absence, or to have them and be forever concerned about their fate."
Joe stared at her. A startling aspect of this job was how often people defied expectations. Before coming here, he'd worried about this person being mentally capable. Now he knew he was dealing with someone whose brains and verbal competence were several notches above the norm. He was grateful he'd broken the ice as he had.
"Was Hannah a challenge along those lines?" he asked.
"She was willful, independent, stubborn, and proud," her mother told him. "All the makings of a corporate tyrant. Unfortunately, she was also lazy, hedonistic, impatient, and arrogant."
Gunther felt a small chill. He didn't doubt the portrait's accuracy, but he would have expected it from someone other than the subject's own mother. It was almost clinically detached. The image of grief-stricken parent was undergoing serious revision.
"Sounds like she might've been a handful now and then," he commented blandly.
Natalie shifted her gaze outdoors once more. "I suppose so. It's a shame you never had children, in a way. They're quite fascinating to watch. You can learn a great deal. The concept that they mimic their elders is quite hopeless, obviously, beyond certain speech patterns and behavioral twitches. Fundamentally, they set their own course pretty early on, which I think is why so many parents become baffled and anxious when the child acts so wholly differently from their memories of themselves."
She stopped. Joe waited, unsure if that constituted her answer in full, or if she was warming up to an entire treatise on children as lab rats.
But she was done.
"You've given it a lot of thought. I'm guessing you've had training in some of this," he suggested, by now ready for anything.
"I was a psychologist at Tufts for thirty years," she answered. "Research work only, of course," she added.
Of course, he thought. Probably a good thing, too-might have cranked up the suicide rate otherwise.
"Did her father play much of a role in her upbringing?" he asked.
She eyed him appreciatively. "You are good. Were we divorced? Yes, early on. His name was Howard, and after we broke up, he moved to Vermont-Norwich. Hannah spent most of her summers with him. After I got her back each fall, it would take me weeks to undo the bad habits he let fester."
Joe opened his mouth to ask the next obvious question, but she anticipated him with, "He died almost fifteen years ago."
He nodded and pretended to consult the notebook he'd pulled from his pocket. At least he was no longer concerned about her falling apart. "She had a lot of different jobs over the years. Why was that, do you think?"
Natalie sighed-not impatiently, Joe chose to think, but perhaps with a touch of melancholy. "Hannah was one of the perpetually discontent. She aspired to wealth, respect, and being admired, but she never worked hard enough to earn them. In purely structural terms, you might say she was too eager to operate at the uppermost tiers to bother constructing the scaffolding that could have gotten her there. She never seemed to either understand that dichotomy or to stop hoping that some shortcut might render it moot."
"Did she ever marry or have any boyfriends?"
She looked straight at him. "Same disability with the same results. No one ever measured up. She tried enough times, but again, with absurd expectations."
"Anyone recently that you know of?"
"I knew little of her life during these last ten years. She grew distant. Perhaps my increasing lack of vitality proved discouraging-too much of a reminder of what she would be facing soon herself."
Joe could have thought of a variety of other, more plausible reasons for Hannah to distance herself from Mom. Lack of warmth, for one. For that matter, Joe was beginning to think that adding vitality to the woman before him might be a horrible idea.
"When I was looking into Hannah's background," he continued, "I noticed she worked as a court reporter for a period. Do you recall that?"
Natalie Shriver nodded slowly. "About thirty years ago. She went to Champlain College in Burlington for training. Took her a couple of years or more. I was quite impressed at the time. I didn't understand the interest, but she seemed very taken with it. Perhaps she thought it would lead to an easy entrance to the legal world and all that might entail. I never asked much about it, because I was afraid she'd take such questioning as interference and quit."
"But she did quit, didn't she, not long after starting?"
The woman's brow furrowed. "Yes. I never understood that. It was an odd period in her life, generally-I suppose as it was for so many her age. Society in a turmoil, the country running without a rudder. Her behavior was quite erratic."
"Can you go into a little more detail?" Gunther asked, at this point milking the professional viewpoint for all it was worth.
"Not really. One of her patterns then was to be quite secretive. At one moment she was working as a court reporter, complaining as usual about how difficult it was to get ahead, and the next she was footloose and fancy-free, not working at all and living like a bohemian. That lasted about a year before she settled down to yet another job."
Joe's interest sharpened at this. "How did she support herself during that year?"
"I don't know. I assumed she'd either saved up or done something lucrative enough to once again short-circuit her potential."
"But in either case, she acted as if she'd come into some money?"
"I don't know that I'd put it that way, but she had no job that I knew of." She sighed once more. When next she spoke, her voice was higher, more distressed. "Poor child never seemed able to get a grip. Do you know what I mean?"
She'd closed one narrow, angular hand into a fist and was looking at him again in that pleading way he'd mistaken for heartbreak at the start.
But now, to his own surprise, he was no longer so sure he was wrong. In her detached, academic way, Natalie Shriver appeared to be genuinely grappling with the abruptness of her daughter's death-not just the news of it, but with the unexpected effect it was having on her. It was as if the scientist was trying to understand why emotion was interjecting itself in the midst of an analysis.
"Natalie," he asked softly, "when Hannah was working as a court reporter, did she do any jobs that affected her personally-something she mentioned to you?"
Natalie spoke to her hands. "It was so long ago. You tell yourself that everything your child does will be locked in your memory forever. It comes as such a shock, that first time you discover it isn't so. Shouldn't there be a special capacity there? An exception that places a son or daughter apart from everyone else you meet?"
She glanced up, and he could see that at last her eyes were moist. "The first time Hannah left me for any period of time," she continued, "was to live up here in Vermont with her father for a few months as a teenager. Not for the summer, as before, but to finish out the school year. We'd had a falling-out, and we all three thought a short separation might help. And it did, to a degree. At least the arguments abated. But when she returned, I remember looking at her face once, as she was reading and unaware, and thinking to myself that for the first time in her life, things had happened to her on a daily basis that I would never know about. Influences, encounters, thoughts, even a fragment of evolution I'd never share with her. It struck me with such force, it almost made me cry on the spot."
She was trembling. Embarrassed that he'd so misread her, Joe slipped off his chair to kneel by her side and hold her hand in his own.
"I didn't recognize that moment as just the beginning," she said, "Nor did I realize that it would lead to a time when her entire life-everything she'd ever experienced as a living human being-would be as void as what existed before she was born. A mere figment in my mind."