Jonathan Kellerman - Bad Love

Are. So the old man was still alive.

"I see," I said.

"Yes, indeed." The color had risen in his cheeks, and his usual glibness had given way to something tentative, shaky.

He removed the cigar from his pocket and held it between his index fingers.

From the corner of my eye I saw Katarina. Watching me.

Neither of them spoke; I felt as if the next line was mine and I'd flubbed it.

"High esteem," said Bork finally, sounding more tense.

I wondered what was bugging him, then remembered a rumor of a few years ago. Doctors' dining room gossip, the kind I tried to avoid.

A Bork problem child, the youngest of four daughters. A teenaged chronic truant with learning disorders and a tendency toward sexual experimentation, sent away, two or three summers ago, hush-hush, for some kind of live-in remediation. The family tight-lipped with humiliation.

One of Bork's many detractors had told the story with relish.

The de Bosch Institute and Corrective School…

Bork was watching me. The look on his face told me I shouldn't push it any further.

"Of course," I said.

It sounded hollow. Katarina de Bosch frowned.

But it made Bork smile again. "Yes," he said. "So obviously, we're eager for this conference to take place. Expeditiously. I hope you and Dr. de Bosch will enjoy working together."

"Will I be working with both Drs. de Bosch?"

"My father isn't well," said Katarina, as if I should have known it. "He had a stroke last winter."

"Sorry to hear that."

She stood, smoothed her skirt with brief flogging movements, and picked up her attaché. In the chair she'd seemed tall- willowy- but upright she was only five two or three, maybe ninety-five bony pounds. Her legs were short and her feet pointed out. The skirt hung an inch below her knees.

"In fact, I need to get back to take care of him," she said. "Walk me back to my car, Dr. Delaware, and I'll give you details on the conference."

Bork winced at her imperiousness, then looked at me with some of that same desperation.

Thinking of what he was going through with his daughter, I stood and said, "Sure."

He put the cigar in his mouth. "Splendid," he said. "Thank you, Alex."

She said, "Henry," without looking at him and stomped toward the door.

He rushed from behind his desk and managed to get to it soon enough to hold it open for her.

He was a politician and a hack- a skilled physician who'd lost interest in healing and had lost sight of the human factor. In the coming years he never acknowledged my empathy of that afternoon, never displayed any gratitude or particular graciousness to me. If anything, he became increasingly hostile and obstructive and I came to dislike him intensely. But I never regretted what I'd done.

• • •

The moment we were out the door, she said, "You're a behaviorist, aren't you?"

"Eclectic," I said. "Whatever works. Including behavior therapy."

She smirked and began walking very fast, swinging the attaché in a wide, dangerous arc through the crowded hospital corridor. Neither of us talked on the way to the glass doors that fronted the building. She moved her short legs furiously, intent upon maintaining a half-step advantage. When we reached the entrance, she stopped, gripped the attaché with both hands, and waited until I held one of the doors open, just as she'd done with Bork. I pictured her growing up with servants.

Her car was parked right in front, in the NO STOPPING ambulance zone- a brand-new Buick, big and heavy, black with a silver vinyl top, buffed shiny as a general's boot. A hospital security guard was standing watch over it. When he saw her approaching he touched his hat.

Another door held open. I half expected to hear a bugle burst as she slid into the driver's seat.

She started the car with a sharp twist, and I stood there, looking at her through a closed window.

She ignored me, gunned the engine, finally looked at me and raised an eyebrow, as if surprised I was still there.

The window lowered electrically. "Yes?"

"We were supposed to discuss details," I said.

"The details, " she said, "are, I'll do everything. Don't worry about it, don't complicate things, and it will all fall into place. All right?"

My throat got very tight.

She put the car into drive.

"Yes, ma'am, " I said, but before the second word was out she'd roared off.

I went back into the hospital, got coffee from a machine near the admittance desk, and took it up to my office, trying to forget about what had happened and determined to focus myself on the day's challenges. Later, seated at my desk, charting the morning's rounds, my hand slipped and some of the coffee spilled on the blue brochure.

• • •

I didn't hear from her again until a week before the conference, when she sent a starchily phrased letter inquiring if I cared to deliver a paper. I called and declined and she sounded relieved.

"But it would be nice if you at least welcomed the attendees," she said.

"Would it?"

"Yes." She hung up.

I did show up on the first day to offer brief words of welcome and, unable to escape graciously, remained on stage for the entire morning, with the other co-chair- Harvey Rosenblatt, the psychiatrist from New York. Trying to feign interest as Katarina strode to the podium, wondering if I'd see another side of her, softened for public consumption.

Not that there was much of a public. Attendance was thin- maybe seventy or eighty therapists and graduate students in an auditorium that seated four hundred.

She introduced herself by name and title, then read a prepared speech in a strident monotone. She favored complex, meandering sentences that lost meaning by the second or third twist, and soon the audience was looking glazed. But she didn't seem to care- didn't seem to be talking to anyone but herself.

Reminiscing about her father's glory days.

Such as they were.

Anticipating the symposium, I'd taken the time to review Andres de Bosch's collected writings, and I hadn't raised my opinion of him.

His prose style was clear, but his theories about child rearing- the good love/bad love spectrum of maternal involvement that his daughter had used to title the conference- seemed nothing more than extensions and recombinations of other people's work. A little Anna Freud here, a little Melanie Klein there, tossed with croutons of Winnicott, Jung, Harry Stack Sullivan, Bruno Bettelheim.

He leavened the obvious with clinical anecdotes about the children he'd treated at his school, managed to work both his Vienna pilgrimage and his war experiences into his summaries, name dropping and adopting the overly casual manner of one truly self-impressed.

Emperor's new clothes, and the audience at the conference didn't show any great excitement. But from the rapt look on Faithful Daughter's face, she thought it was cashmere.

By the second day, attendance was down by half and even the speakers on the dais- three L.A.-based analysts- looked unhappy to be there. I might have felt sorry for Katarina, but she seemed unaware of it all, continuing to flash slides of her father- dark-haired and goateed in healthier days- working at a big, carved desk surrounded by talismans and books, drawing in crayon with a young patient, writing in the brandied light of a Tiffany lamp.

Then another batch: posing with his arm around her- even as a teenager, she'd looked old, and they could have been lovers- followed by shots of a blanket-swaddled old man sunk low in an electric wheelchair, positioned atop a high, brown bluff. Behind him the ocean was beautiful and blue, mocking his senescence.

A sad variation upon the home-movie trap. The few remaining attendees looked away in embarrassment.