Mount Pleasant Read Free

in who her son was spending time with. To which Ben had predictably yelled, “I’m spending time with Sarah. She’s who she is. Why can’t you just let things be?”
    “So what is it these days, nature or nurture?” Harry asked Sarah, a question that drew a sharp-eyed glance from Gladys.
    “What?”
    “I mean that whole debate.”
    Sarah reached for the wine and filled her glass almost to the top. “Is this a quiz?”
    “Just curious.”
    Sarah stopped just short of rolling her eyes. “It’s an unanswerable question.”
    “But a lot of energy goes into trying to answer it, doesn’t it? Like the shape of the universe for physicists.”
    Gladys glared subtly as Sarah stared at her wine for five seconds. Then she recited in a near monotone, “The relationship between lymphocyte precursors and other blood cell lineages is basically groundbreaking. The RAG1/GFP knock-in mice experiments are… I mean, you can chart the entire sequence of lymphocyte differentiation events in bone marrow. Bottom line: steady-state lymphocyte formation doesn’t recapitulate ontogeny.”
    Harry wondered how much of this was distorted and/or bullshit. “But in your own case, what would you say?”
    “Is this the lame hypothesis where people go into psychology to deal with their own problems?”
    “Do they?”
    “Everyone has problems, Dad,” Ben said, rallying to his girlfriend’s defense. “It’s a bit simplistic.”
    “Psychology is a perfect complement to law,” Gladys said.
    “Not everything is about getting a job, Mom,” Ben said, who’d always been adept at translating Gladys’s words into their actual meaning.
    Sarah was twisting her perilously full wineglass, rotating it on Gladys’s expensive Provençal tablecloth, a fact that Gladys registered with quiet alarm as she reached to take Sarah’s almost untouched plate. The tablecloth was bunching slightly in small swirls that would unbalance the glass. Gladys stared at the glass for a second, then went into the kitchen. The background music she had meticulously chosen filled the void.
    Harry stared at Ben, remembering the unconditional joy he’d felt when Ben was an infant. Those months when Harry took him for long walks in the stroller, talking to the sleeping lump curled under the fleecy with its cute, hopeful slogans. Back then, Harry had overflowed with love. He’d imagined Ben growing up and imagined new victories in his own life. Gladys had the difficult job—the nightly feedings, getting up when Ben was afflicted by some unfathomable fear, lulling him. Harry just had to push the stroller in the pleasant autumn light and change a few diapers. He occasionally imagined that he was raising Ben alone, like a valiant TV dad, just the two of them. Harry used to sit on the bench outside the organic grocery store and return the smiles of women who walked by, and then he’d stare at Ben’s sweet face and think, You are the love of my life.
    What was he now, Harry wondered. This young man, resentful and distant, holding his girlfriend’s hand as if in solidarity against Harry. His own father had been a miserable role model, and Harry realized he hadn’t done much better, despite the vowshe’d made to himself as he pushed the stroller. What would he pass on to Ben? Debt, perhaps. Distrust of the world, certainly.
    Ben and Sarah were talking about something, but Harry couldn’t tune them in. The hum of his debt suddenly intruded, and it had taken on a new, musical quality. As Harry watched his son’s mouth move, he heard what sounded like the forceful strains of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.
    Gladys finally came back carrying a fruit flan she had made. Dessert arrived as a mercy, and there was a lull as she cut and distributed it.
    “This looks wonderful, Gladys,” Harry said.

TWO
    T HE NEXT DAY , H ARRY ARRIVED at his father’s private hospital room to find Dale in the small bathroom behind the partially closed accordion door.
    “Did you manage to unhook