Ruffly Speaking

Looking almost regretful that Willie had missed an early evening snack, Rita said, “Holly, the point about this woman, Alice Savery, is that everything was part of a pattern of cutting herself off so that she became quite literally alone with her own thoughts. Yes, she had trouble hearing, but, from what I can tell, her attitude was, to a large extent, well, so what? What do other people have to say that’s really worth listening to? So, in part, when she dominated interaction, she was covering up her hearing loss. But, at the same time, she was expressing a certain arrogance that has more to do with character structure than it does with hearing or not hearing. Admittedly, there is a theory that there’s a link between uncorrected hearing loss and paranoid ideation. But what’s often overlooked is that it goes uncorrected because the person doesn’t care about what other people have to say, or, quite unconsciously, discovers that not hearing is a handy way to avoid potentially corrective input. The hearing loss and the paranoia sustain each other.”
    Moving at Rita’s sore-footed pace, we’d reached Huron, walked up a block, and crossed to the intersection with Sparks Street, which leads to Brattle. Like Highland, Sparks is affluent, verdant, and beautiful. Like Highland, it had also been the site of a murder. A feminist law professor, a very pretty woman, had been walking down Sparks Street early one evening when she’d been stabbed and killed by an assailant who was never caught. Since then, even with my big dogs along, I’d superstitiously avoided Sparks Street. But Rita minces along so slowly that it made sense to take the shortest route to our destination.
    “Except... Except, Rita, Alice Savery wasn’t totally cut off, you know. She listened to the radio. She could hear well enough for that. She had a TV. She got The New York Times. Her house was filled with books. And a lot of what she said was true. Rabies is incurable. The tobacco industry does have powerful lobby groups. And... Did I tell you this? There really is a tobacco mosaic virus, and it actually is spread by—”
    “But a carefully selected reality,” Rita said crisply. “And with several gross distortions. Like the insects.”
    “Yes, but... Rita, when the AIDS epidemic first started, there really was some concern about that. Some little town in Florida? I forget the details, but it was in all the papers. And it’s true that mosquitos spread heart-worm and malaria and some other diseases. AIDS just isn’t one of them. And about rabies, everyone in England —the entire country—is as paranoid as Alice Savery was. There’s a six-month quarantine on all dogs entering Great Britain, even if they’ve had their rabies shots, and if you sneak one in and get caught, they destroy the dog. It’s ridiculous, because there is absolutely no way that an immunized dog could introduce rabies, but if you point that out, all you hear is this huffy, pompous, ‘Well, there is no rabies in Great Britain.’ It’s their big fear about the tunnel to France, that it’s going to let in rabies. They’re completely paranoid about it.”
    “Phobic,” Rita corrected. “Paranoid is what Alice Savery was. Not only did this woman project her fears and impulses and whatever on to the external world, and not only did she latch on to realities that happened to mesh with her inner life, but, once having done so, she proceeded to elaborate the elements, to manufacture connections, to hook them up with one another in ways that they just aren’t hooked. The other crucial thing about this system of hers—and this is always true in paranoid people, Holly—is that this was a system in which she herself was the central object. Yes, radon is dangerous, and, yes, so are viruses and cigarette smoke and all the rest, but, in reality, they pose separate and impersonal threats. Alice Savery was not, in fact, at the center of anything.”
    “What I still can’t get over is... Obviously, I realized that there was something radically wrong with her.”
    “So did she. That business about aluminum? There used to be some theory that aluminum caused Alzheimer’s, and what that was about was her sense of her own deterioration.”
    “But, Rita, I honestly thought that Morris’s property had been stolen from her. She had me convinced that someone, a shady lawyer, I don’t know, but someone had gotten hold of it. Or I thought that maybe her brother owned it and got