FRIC IN THE ROSE ROOM, IN A CHAIR BY THE windows, looked out at his mother’s love-affirming gift of high-piled bronze road apples.
The picnic hamper stood on the floor beside his chair, the lid closed.
Although he would spend time here to support the story that he had stupidly spewed out to Mr. Devonshire, he would not actually pretend to eat nonexistent ham sandwiches, partly because if someone saw him, they would for sure think Like mother, like son, but largely because he didn’t have any nonexistent dill pickles to go with them.
Ha, ha, ha.
At the time of the incident, almost two years ago, his mother’s publicist explained to the weasels in the scandal-hungry press that Freddie Nielander had been admitted to a private hospital somewhere in Florida. She was said to be suffering from exhaustion.
With surprising frequency, supermodels were hospitalized for that reason. Apparently, being wildly glamorous twenty-four hours a day could be as physically demanding as the work of a plowhorse and as emotionally draining as tending to the terminally ill.
Nominal Mom had done one Vanity Fair cover too many, one [426] Vogue spread more than had been wise, leading to the temporary but complete loss of muscle control throughout her body. That seemed to be the official story, as far as Fric could understand it.
No one believed the official story. Newspapers, magazines, and the gossipy reporters on the TV entertainment-news shows spoke darkly of a “breakdown,” an “emotional collapse.” Some actually called it a “psychotic episode,” which sounded like an installment of I Love Lucy in which Lucy and Ethel mowed down a bunch of people with submachine guns. They referred to her hospital as a “sanitarium for the richest of the rich” and as an “exclusive psychiatric clinic,” and Howard Stern, the shock jock on radio, reportedly called it a “booby hatch for a broad who’s got more boobies than brains.”
Fric had pretended not to know what the media were saying about his mother, but secretly he had read and listened to every scrap of coverage that he could find. He’d been frightened. He’d felt useless. Reporters disagreed over which of two institutions she might be in, and Fric didn’t have an address for either of them. He couldn’t even send her a card.
Eventually, his father had taken him aside in the rose garden, which had already been moved away from the house, to ask if Fric had heard any strange news stories about his mother. Fric had pretended to be clueless.
His father had said, “Well, sooner or later, you’ll hear things, and I want you to know none of it’s true. It’s the usual celebrity-bashing crapola. They’ll say your mom had some nervous breakdown or something, but she didn’t. The truth isn’t pretty, but it’s not half as ugly as you’ll hear, so Ming and Dr. Rudy are going to share with you some techniques for keeping your mind at peace through all this.”
Dr. Rudy was Rudolph Kroog, a psychiatrist famous in Hollywood circles for his unconventional past-life therapy. He talked to Fric for a little while, trying to determine if in a previous incarnation he might have been a boy king in Egypt during the centuries it was ruled by [427] pharaohs, and provided a bottle of capsules with directions to take one at lunch and one at bedtime.
Remembering that boy kings had sometimes been poisoned by their advisers, which he’d learned on Saturday-morning cartoon shows, Fric had carried the capsules directly to his third-floor suite, where he flushed them down the drain. If a green, scaly monster had lived in his toilet, he killed it with an overdose that day.
As easy as Dr. Rudy had been to endure, Ming was hard. After two days of “sharing,” Fric preferred to be consigned to the mercy of Mr. Hachette, the brain-diseased chef, even if he would be roasted with apples and fed to unsuspecting Bowery bums on Thanksgiving.
Eventually, everyone had left him alone.
He still didn’t know whether it had been a hospital, sanitarium, or booby hatch.
His mother had been to Palazzo Rospo only once since then, but she hadn’t mentioned the incident. That was the visit in which she told Fric that he was an almost perfect invisible little mouse.
Then they had gone riding on a pair of great black stallions, and Fric had been exuberant, self-assured, athletic like his father, and a superb rider.
Ha, ha, ha.
Sitting here in the rose room, gazing through the windows, he had gotten so lost in the past that he hadn’t noticed when Mr. Yorn, the groundskeeper, had entered the picture. Wearing green rain togs and black wading boots, Mr. Yorn must have been checking the lawn drains or investigating a clogged downspout. Now he stared through the rose-room windows ............