E. Doctorow - Sweet Land Stories

Please.

Not just once has she been in for detox at Betty Ford. That’s the talk, anyway. You know my theory?

Tell me.

Lives to pay Daddy back for the life he’s provided her. I mean, that may be her true passion — they are really a very intense couple, Glenn and his daughter Chrissie. But you know what’s most remarkable?

No.

You sit across from her at the dinner table and she is spectacular. A vestal virgin, not a sign of wear and tear. Brian, she has the most beautiful skin you can imagine, coloring I would die for. Goes to show.

THE PHONE NUMBER Molloy had found in the Guzman kitchen was for the office of a Dr. Leighton, a pulmonologist, one of three associates in a clinic a few blocks from the Texas General medical complex. The waiting room was packed, aluminum walkers and strollers abounding: women with children on their laps, the elderly, both black and white, clutching their inhalators. Three TV sets hung from the walls. Eyes were cast upward — a chorus of labored breathing and bawling children blocked out the sound. It was a world of eyes sunk in hollow sockets.

A nurse, turning pale at the sight of Molloy’s credentials, had him wait in an examining room. Molloy sat in a side chair next to a white metal cabinet on which sat racks of vials, boxes of plastic gloves. On the facing wall, a four-color laminated diagram of the human lungs and bronchia. In a corner, on the other side of the examining table, a boxy looking machine hung with a flexible tube and mask. Nothing out of place, everything immaculate.

Dr. Leighton came in, equally immaculate in his white coat over a blue shirt and tie. He was a bit stiff, but quite composed and professorial-looking behind wire-framed glasses. He leaned back against a windowsill and with his arms folded looked as fresh as if he had not been tending all morning to an office full of people who had trouble catching their breath. Molloy remarked on the crowd.

Yes, well, the smog has been worse than usual. You put enough nitrogen oxide into a summer day and the phones light up.

I wanted to ask you about the Guzman boy who died last week, Molloy said. I understand he was your patient.

Am I obligated to talk with you?

No, sir. Do you know a Christina or Chrissie Stevens?

The doctor thought a moment. A sigh. What would you like me to say — what is it you want to hear? The boy suffered terribly. On days like this, he was not allowed to go to school. He tried so hard to be brave, to control his terror, as if it was unmanly. He was a great kid. The more scared he was, the more he tried to smile. In this last attack, they rushed him up here — Chrissie and the priest and the boy’s father — and I put him on intubation. I couldn’t reverse it. He died on me. Roberto didn’t need a respirator, he needed another planet.

CHRISSIE STEVENS had been checked in to the Helmut Eisley Institute, a sanitarium for the very wealthy.

Molloy found her in the large, sunny lounge to the right of the entrance hall. She was seated on a sofa, her legs tucked under her, her sandals on the carpet. He had not expected someone this petite. She was the size of a preteen, a boyishly slim young woman with straight blond hair parted in the middle. Her elbow propped on the sofa arm, her chin resting on her hand, she was posed as if thinking about Molloy as she stared at him.

But don’t you people travel in twos? she said with a languid smile.

Not all the time, Molloy said.

Behind her, standing in attendance, was a very young Marine in olive drab too warm for the climate. He had the flat-top haircut, the ramrod posture, the rows of ribbons, of a recruitment poster.

This is my friend Corporal Tom Furman.

When the corporal put his hand on her shoulder, she reached back and covered his hand.

Tom is visiting. He just flew in today.

Where are you stationed, son?

When he didn’t answer, Chrissie Stevens said, You can tell him. Go ahead — nothing’s going to happen. It’s been decided.

Sir, I’m posted at the White House.

Well, Molloy said, that’s a plum assignment. Does it come with the luck of the draw or is it saved for the very exceptional?

Sir, yes. We’re chosen I suppose, sir.

Ah me, ah me, Chrissie Stevens said. Can we all sit down, please? Pull up a chair for Agent Molloy and you sit beside me here, she said to the Marine as she patted the sofa cushion.

And so the two men sat as directed. Molloy hadn’t anticipated Chrissie Stevens as a Southern belle. But she was very much that. His own daughters, straightforward field-hockey types, would have taken an instant dislike to her.

She was strikingly attractive, very pale, with high cheekbones and gray eyes. But what was mesmeric was her voice. That was where the vestal-virgin effect came from. She had a child’s soft Southern lilt, and when she lowered her eyes, her long blond lashes falling like a veil over them, it was as if she had to examine in her mind the things she was saying to make sure they were correct, and the effect of an ethereal modesty was complete.

I’m not here of my own volition, Agent Molloy. Apparently I’ve done something for which the only possible explanation is that I’ve gone off the deep end. But if that is true, what other questions are left to ask?

I have just a few.

Though it’s not at all bad here, she said, turning to the corporal. They fatten you up and give you a pill that makes you not care about anything much. They stand there until they see you swallow it. I’m out to pasture right now. Are my words slurred? I mean, why not, why not, you can dream your life away, she said with her sad smile. That’s not so bad, is it?

Molloy said: Did you know that the boy’s parents are faced with deportation?

Clearly, she didn’t.

But I think that can be stopped, he said. I think there’s a way to see that it doesn’t happen.

She was silent. Then she mumbled something that he couldn’t hear.

I beg your pardon?

Deport me, Agent Molloy. Send me anywhere. Send me to Devil’s Island. I’m ready. I want nothing more to do with this place. I mean, why here rather than anywhere else? It’s all the same, it’s all horribly awful.

Molloy waited.

Oh Lord, she said, they always win, don’t they. They are very skillful. It didn’t come out quite as we planned — we are such amateurs — but even if it had, I suppose they would have known how to handle it. I just thought maybe this could restore them, put them back among us. It would be a kind of shock treatment if they felt the connection, for even just a moment, that this had something to do with them, the gentlemen who run things? That’s all I wanted. What redemption for little Chrissie if she could put a tincture of shame into their hearts. Of course I know they didn’t give our gardener’s son the asthma he was born with. And after all they didn’t force his family to live where the air smells like burning tires. And I know Daddy and his exalted friends are not in their personal nature violent and would never lift a hand against a child. But, you see, they are configured gentlemen. Am I wrong to want to include you, Agent Molloy? Are you not one of the configured gentlemen?

Configured in what way?

Configured to win. And fuck all else.

Her Marine reached over and held her hand.

What do you think? Chrissie Stevens said. Am I making sense? Or am I the family disgrace my father says I am?

The both of them were looking at Molloy now. They made a handsome couple.

Would you like some refreshment, Agent Molloy? There’s a bell over there — they bring tea.

BACK AT HIS desk in Washington, Molloy caught up on the cases that he’d left when the call came in about the dead child in the Rose Garden. One of the cases, a possible racketeering indictment, was really hot, but as he sat there he found his mind wandering. His office was a glass-partitioned cubicle. It looked out on the central office of lined-up desks where the secretaries and less senior agents worked away. There was a nice hum of energy coming through to him as phones rang and people went briskly about their business, but Molloy couldn’t avoid feeling that he was looking at a roomful of children. Certainly everyone out there was at least twenty years younger. Younger, leaner, less tired.