Gaits of Heaven

the table and put away the food, she didn’t dispose of small bits of leftovers by eating them as I often did myself. When the kitchen was clean, Leah invited Caprice to watch a video with her, but Caprice said that if we didn’t mind, she’d just check her e-mail, take a shower, and go to bed. I was only a little surprised. She’d had a draining day. And I was happy to realize that if Ted Green called, I’d be justified in telling him that Caprice was unavailable. Shortly after Caprice went upstairs, the phone did ring, but it was a friend of Leah’s. Ten minutes later, he turned up at the door, and the two of them took Kimi for a walk.
    Steve and I opened a bottle of wine and took it, together with two glasses and the remaining four dogs, out to the yard. Even though Caprice’s room was on the opposite side of the house, we kept our voices low.
    “I want to tell you,” I said, “how good I felt today when Caprice had nowhere to go, and I knew I could ask her here without checking with you. I knew you’d feel the same way I did.”
    “The poor kid. What the hell is wrong with this father of hers? He just might e-mail her. If she’s lucky. And he’ll be swamped with work. What kind of bullshit is that?”
    “Typical bullshit, I think. I ran into Barbara Leibowitz outside Ted and Eumie’s. After I found Eumie. She and George live next door to them. She said that Caprice will be lucky if her father shows up at all but that Caprice is better off not understanding what he’s really like.”
    “How could she miss it?”
    “I don’t know. At some level, she must get it. But with a family like hers... Steve, dysfunctionality would constitute a cure. The scene this morning was more horrible than I can possibly say. And then this afternoon, Ted Green just had to call here and badger Caprice because he was upset about the idea of an autopsy. He was trying to enlist poor Caprice to object to it. That’s nuts! Families can’t just go around saying that they don’t want autopsies. It’s not like requesting donations to charity in lieu of flowers. The law requires autopsies in cases of unexplained death. Period. Plus, trying to involve Caprice? That’s unpardonable.“
    “What did Eumie die from, anyway?”
    “Oh, an accidental overdose, I imagine. Ted kept saying that her trauma history, whatever it was, had caught up with her, and Caprice insists that her mother was murdered. What child wants to believe that her mother killed herself? Even semi-accidentally. It sounds to me as if Eumie had a habit of swallowing anything that was in the medicine cabinet. If she took who knows what at bedtime, her judgment would’ve been affected, and in the middle of the night, she could easily have taken the wrong thing. Or taken two doses when she meant to take one.”
    “What kind of trauma was it?”
    “I didn’t ask. When I was there on Friday, Eumie said something about their trauma histories, and then today, of course, Ted kept mentioning hers, but somehow I just couldn’t come right out and ask for details. I mean, trauma could be... well, except that Rita said that Ted’s book defines trauma very broadly. His book is called Ordinary Trauma. So in his terms, it wouldn’t necessarily mean sexual trauma, incest, something like that. It could be something less—”
    “—traumatic," Steve finished. As Rita is always pointing out, he is quite unpsychological. Miraculously, they are good friends anyway.
    “But it really couldn’t be something trivial, either, could it?”
    “It depends on what you mean by trivial. If the thesis of his book is that seemingly trivial events are actually traumatic, then it could be something that gets dismissed as trivial. I can’t think of what that would be.”
    “Steve, when you’re talking about Ted and Eumie, who knows? Take the way Wyeth treated Caprice today. Now, I wouldn’t offhand consider his behavior to be traumatic. Abusive, yes. But maybe if she gets treated like that over and over, the result probably is traumatic or something close to it, anyway, especially if no one stops Wyeth from doing it. Here you and I are, taking the greatest possible care to make sure that our dogs can’t hurt one another, and meanwhile, Caprice doesn’t have the protection we routinely give our dogs. That’s horrible. Maybe it’s even traumatic. I don’t know. What I do know is that the whole situation is enough to drive anyone crazy. Here’s one more example. Ted and Eumie