Page 79 of The Bad Weather Friend

The whippet had fallen asleep, as if so accustomed to her mistress’s rants that they no longer entertained her. She was snoring.

After patting her lips with the napkin, Urnfield said, “Very well, Mr. Catspaw, now you will tell me how you made your way from Handy Duroc, that hopeless striver, to Upton and hence to me.”

Recalling his uncle Talmadge Clerkenwell’s admonition never to reveal the truth of Spike to anyone, Benny said, “I can’t say. I’m under an enjoinment in the matter.”

“‘Enjoinment,’” said Harper, “meaning he’s under an injunction not to speak about this.”

“A sacred injunction,” Benny said.

“‘Sacred’? Are you out of your mind, using such an excuse with me of all people?”

Spike said, “Before our friend, the perky piece of fluff, is instantly incinerated, allow me to explain who I am, what I am, and how we came to be here. Unlike Benjamin, I am not enjoined from doing so.”

WAITING WHILE MS. URNFIELD EATS MORE STEAK TARTARE, BENNY REMEMBERS DR. FERNSEHEN LIEBHABER

For five years, until he turned eighteen, Benny lived in a suburb of Los Angeles with Dr. Fernsehen Liebhaber, while his mother found her bliss on the fabled shores of Lake Como, in Italy. Naomi never returned to the United States during those five years, but she sent Benny a check for five hundred dollars on every birthday and one thousand at Christmas, always with a different postcard of some picturesque spot in that far corner of the world. On each postcard she wrote a few endearing words. Toward the end of her second year abroad, she wrote,Vittorio is everything Big Al and Jubal were not. I am the luckiest woman alive! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and to the good doctor.Naomi did not explain who Vittorio was, but by then Benny was fifteen and could figure it out.

Fernsehen Liebhaber was a retired child psychologist, not a medical doctor, but she was good. Good enough. She didn’t torture Benny either physically or mentally. She was pleasant but not companionable. On Benny’s first day in her house, she said, “Child, I have nothing against you. But I don’t want to spend more than fifteen minutes of the day talking to you. I will provide you with excellent meals, but we won’t take them together. Please understand that I spent thirty-five grueling years counseling the children at the finest, most expensive private school in Los Angeles County, listening to their whiny complaints, quieting the many fears their parents actively instilled in them and the fears their parents unintentionally saddled them with, treating their neuroses, walking on eggshells around those among themwho had developed into full-blown psychopaths. While I do wish you and all young people the best of everything, I am exhausted, burnt-out. While I believe you are different and unspoiled, I am nonetheless sick to death of children. Read the schoolwork I give you, complete assignments diligently, stay out of trouble and out of my hair, and we’ll be happy together, or as happy as anyone can be in this mad world populated by legions who have lost all understanding of why they’re here, where they’re going, or what it all means. Do we have an understanding?”

“Yes.”

“This house,” she continued, “contains a few thousand books. They are mostly novels. I grew so disillusioned with psychology and all the social sciences that I trashed every book of that kind. At one time, I enjoyed reading history, but most of what is published these days is so unhistorical that one of my primary arteries, less elastic year by year, will pop if I read more of that. I engaged a document-disposal company to come by with a truck-size shredder and watched while they turned all those volumes into confetti. I came to the conclusion that truth could be found only in good fiction, and for years I took enormous pleasure in reading well-written novels. But a moment came when I’d had more than enough of the truths those works conveyed, and since then I have read nothing other than books of jokes intended to be left by the toilet for those occasions when one’s system is not functioning optimally. I’ve kept all the novels for sentimental reasons. You may read any you wish, but you must never attempt to have a conversation with me about them. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“I have now said more to you than I am likely to say in the next two weeks. If there is anything you need or desire that is notan urgent matter, write your request rather than come to me with it, and fix it to the door of the fridge with the magnet that looks like a waif out of a Dickens novel. Are you all right with the terms as I have outlined them?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any questions?”

“No.”

“I like you already, child. Now go be happy like me.”

Dr. Fernsehen Liebhaber had two interests that, fully indulged, made her so happy that sometimes she broke into song, upbeat tunes like “What a Wonderful World” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Crocodile Rock.” The first of her passions was food. In her youth and even to the end of her career, she’d been tall and thin, a bit long in the face and lanky, but attractive. Now she was as round faced and rosy cheeked and ample as Mrs. Santa Claus, matronly and fun to look at because she was pleased with her life. She was so light on her feet that she seemed always to be dancing. Her second enthusiasm was television. Every room of her house featured a set with a screen as large as could be accommodated. She spent her days watching game shows, old film comedies, hit TV comedy series from decades ago, and talent competitions. She said that by filling her brain with works of merriment and frolic, she might be able to empty it of everything she wished she had never put in it.

During that half decade, Benny read all the many novels that Dr. Liebhaber had collected. He learned more about her from the books she liked than from the interaction he had with her. More self-schooled than homeschooled, he lived in her residence as if they were two hermits in a hermitage. He gained no friends during those five years except for the acquaintances he made inthe pages of his favorite stories. Considering the nature of his former life under the roofs of Big Al and Cosima Springbok and Jubal Catspaw (where he was tutored by Mordred Merrick), this period provided him with a peace he’d never known before, an absence of sociopaths and the dark dramas they so effectively authored. In the strangest way, the loneliness was medicinal; those years were a time of healing.

Of course it came to an abrupt end.

When Dr. Liebhaber’s five-year contract with Naomi expired, the good doctor said, “You must be out of my house by noon Friday, your eighteenth birthday. You have been an exemplary tenant, clean and quiet, in no way any bother. I wish you well, but I’ll be relieved to be rid of you. For five years, there has been something about you that troubled me. During the second year of your time here, I put my finger on it. Niceness. Unrelieved niceness. You’re too nice to be real. For two years, I couldn’t be rid of a certain tension arising from the conviction that such niceness must be a pretense, a ruse, a cloak under which hid someone more complex and problematic. I have lived all my life among dissemblers, pretenders, impostors, and deceivers. I know what to expect of their kind. Incredibly, halfway through your fourth year, I realized your niceness was genuine. To no degree whatsoever a pretense. This unsettled me more than the possibility that you might be a monster masquerading as an angel. I have seen what life does to those who are sort of nice but much less nice than you are. They suffer. I don’t wish to suffer. With concern that your niceness might exert a damaging influence on me—that it might, so to speak, rub off on me a little—I began making a greater effort to avoid you, and in my private moments, I have practiced mean thoughts about you and the world in general.”

Bewildered, Benny said, “But youarenice. You’ve always been very nice.”

Dr. Liebhaber’s expression of abhorrence would have been more appropriate if Benny had flung a handful of feces at her. “Do not put that burden on me, young man. I am a selfish old bitch, and I love who I am. Don’t you go trying to change me. Between now and noon Friday, we will see no more of each other and exchange not another word.”

And so it was.

On Thursday morning, an attorney named Emmet Spoils rang the doorbell. Thin and hairless, he looked like a gecko in a suit. He was accompanied by a slinky notary public named Imogene Mott. Benny welcomed them into the parlor. Mr. Spoils represented Naomi Catspaw. He had brought a cashier’s check for $206,455. This sum would be settled on Benny as a gift to get him started in his adult life.

“To receive it,” Spoils said, “you must sign a nondisclosure agreement, a release, and other documents required by your mother.”

“Okay,” Benny said.

“You must read them first, in front of me and Miss Mott, who will witness your signature. You will be acknowledging that this is an act of pure generosity, that you have no rightful claim to your mother’s estate either when she is living or after she is dead.”

“Sure,” Benny said.

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