Animal Appetite

met him. Claudia had married Oscar Fisch. Had George Foley been her lover? Gareth’s delusions, his sister claimed, were always somehow grounded in reality. This man, Oscar Fisch, murdered my father and married my mother! Gareth had raved. Was it possible that a lover of Claudia’s really had murdered her husband?
    By now, Gareth had abandoned his interest in the contents of the trash barrel. He was pacing and circling widely and wildly around it, shaking his fist at Oscar, accosting passersby, and haranguing Claudia with disjointed tirades about Harvard, electric wires, and experiments with rats. As Gareth’s steps brought him close to us, Rowdy’s tail stopped wagging and his beautiful eyes moved from Brat to Gareth to me. With no display of anything at all—no growling, no raised hackles, not the slightest flattening of his ears—Rowdy took a few casual steps that placed him firmly between Gareth and me.
    Eyeing Rowdy, Brat asked, “This doesn’t bother him?”
    “Not much bothers him,” I said. “On the rare occasions that something does, he has it for dinner.”
    Gareth’s resonant, educated voice now sounded feverish. Pacing and circling, he reminded me of an animal in a zoo, a polar bear, maybe, exhibiting stereotypical behavior that worried his keepers. Trailing after him, his mother kept plucking at the sleeve of his Masonic coat. As one of his long strides brought him within a few yards of Rowdy, I heard Claudia quietly demand to know where he’d left his new parka. “Gareth, this will not do!” she scolded, as if taking her little boy to task for showing up after Little League practice without his new baseball glove. “Now, Gareth, listen to me! We bought that parka at Eddie Bauer only a few weeks ago. You picked it out yourself. Don’t you remember? We had such a nice time shopping for it. Now will you please stop and think where you’ve left it?”
    Gareth produced a monumental roar: “RATS! RATS AND POISON!”
    With a sort of placid toughness, Brat said, “Good. Once Gareth seriously locks on to rats, the end is in sight.”
    “What is the end?” I asked, intrigued.
    “I pin his arms behind him and haul him into the back of the truck. Oscar drives.” As if to illustrate, she nodded to Oscar, who’d distanced himself from the action and now stood by the curb as if he had no idea who these people were and was merely waiting for the next bus.
    Reaching into his pocket, Oscar pulled out a set of keys and took calm, efficient steps toward the van.
    “When we get to the hospital,” Brat continued, “with luck, Gareth’s still nuts enough so they admit him.” She gave me a wry smile. “Timing is crucial. If he’s merely deluded, they won’t take him. The trick is to get him there the second he’s ready to turn violent.”
    “He does get violent?”
    “Yes,” Brat said, “but usually just with psychiatrists.” Oscar was now in the driver’s seat. As he started the engine, Brat asked me casually, “You ever find a copy of the book?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I found it in a used-book store.”
    “Claudia must’ve missed that one.”
    “When you told me she had dozens of copies, you meant library copies.”
    Brat finally moved from the panel truck and headed toward Gareth. Over her shoulder, she said, loudly enough for Claudia to overhear, “ ‘The portrayal is felt to be unflattering and unfair.’ Her very words.”
    It seemed best to remove Rowdy from the events that would follow. Watching for traffic, I led him across Huron Avenue. When we reached the sidewalk, I stopped briefly to glance back. As she’d foretold, Brat had her brother’s arms pinned behind him. She was so strong that even the big aqua backpack didn’t impede her. As if Gareth were a sort of semihuman piano, she was hauling him to the back of the truck. I felt inexpressibly sad. Rowdy eyed the proceedings with detached curiosity. Bizarre behavior is of great interest to dogs.
    When Brat finished heaving Gareth into the truck, she slammed the doors. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called to me across Huron Avenue. “Hey, he’s not heavy,” she hollered sourly, “he’s my brother.”
     

Twenty-Eight

     
    When I got home, I couldn’t sleep. I paced restlessly until I realized that I was unwittingly mimicking Gareth. My body, I decided, was making a freakish effort to understand behavior that had baffled my supposedly higher faculties. Reluctant to awaken Rita by going upstairs and