Russell Donahue was standing next to the twin chair to the one Caroline was sitting in. He sat down himself, abruptly. Caroline felt wonderful. She almost felt high. It had been ages since she had confronted anyone with these things except other people who knew all the theories she did—and what was the good of that? People who had heard it all before thought they knew it all. They didn’t really listen.
“Look,” Caroline said. “We’re each and every one of us born with a unique capacity to feel and think and love and create. There isn’t anybody on earth who isn’t born with that. Then, while we’re growing up, in an effort to control us, our parents and the other adults around us try to make us feel unworthy. That’s the key. We’re all brought up to believe that we aren’t worth the best that life has to offer, that we’re means instead of ends, that we have to justify our existences. This is especially true for women, of course, because we’ve been assigned the role of nurturer and caretaker in society. But it’s true of men too; they just have to fight through it a different way. To become whole, we all have to learn that we are ends in ourselves, that we deserve the best in life just by the fact that we exist, that we don’t have to propitiate anybody or anything, that we don’t have to apologize for ourselves. But that’s the sort of insight Mother Teresa has never come close to. She’s the ultimate diseased personality. She’s not living as an end in herself. She’s living for other people.”
“Mother Teresa,” Russell Donahue said slowly, “has spent sixty years of her life with her hands in pus and excrement to make sure that a lot of people too poor to eat have access to halfway decent medical care.”
Caroline nodded sympathetically. “It’s terrible, isn’t it, to see someone throw away her life like that. She has such enormous energy. She could have had such a deeply fulfilling and emotionally significant life.”
“Right,” Gregor Demarkian said. “You were talking about Hannah Krekorian?”
“Oh, yes.” Caroline sighed. “The thing to remember is that codependents in denial are very dangerous people. They’re under such pressure and they’ve got such deep reserves of shame and self-blame and untapped anger and rage, they’re likely to do anything. I met this Hannah person Daddy was going around with. I think she was a time bomb ready to go off. I think she did go off. Daddy wanted to go out and buy her a valentine, but I warned him against it. Women like that always take that kind of gesture as the next best thing to a proposal of marriage.”
“Do they?” Gregor Demarkian asked.
“Trust me,” Caroline told them emphatically, “when you get through all the nonsense you have to get through, that Hannah woman will be at the bottom of it. A world-class codependent, desperately unhappy and fanatically in denial. It’s inevitable.”
2
The young woman behind the desk at the florist’s shop wanted $578.50 for the delivery of one hundred and one roses to Lida Arkmanian—and she wanted a few explanations too, although she wasn’t going to ask for them and Christopher Hannaford wasn’t going to volunteer them. The florist’s shop was at the far end of Cavanaugh Street just where it dead-ended into Elman. There was an Armenian name on the sign outside and a pile of those powdered-sugar-covered Armenian cookies on a plate next to the cash register. Christopher had considered going to a florist somewhere else in the city. He hadn’t seen what good he would do by it. The only person left on Cavanaugh Street who didn’t know what was going on, or at least suspect, was Gregor Demarkian. It amazed Christopher that the man could be so dumb. Then he wondered what Gregor would think if someone told him about it. Then he gave that up. Christopher Hannaford had done some fairly obsessional things in his life, but obsessional thinking wasn’t one of them. He had always been able to chuck useless lines of inquiry and occupy his mind with something else.
The other reason Christopher hadn’t gone off Cavanaugh Street to buy the roses was that it would have been silly in the long run. Eventually the roses were, going to have to be delivered. That would mean a florist’s van and a lot of flowers going to Lida Arkmanian’s door. How in the world was anybody going to hide that? It wasn’t as if what was going to be delivered were one long white box.
Christopher paid for the roses in cash. Having spent much of his earlier life in serious debt, he didn’t like credit cards. There was a box of heart-shaped chocolate-covered strawberry-creme-filled candies on sale on the counter, and he threw down three of those to eat on his way to breakfast. The young lady behind the counter glanced at the candies, nodded, and rang them up. Christopher had the uncomfortable feeling that she knew he liked to eat a lot of chocolate and that everybody else on Cavanaugh Street knew it too. Christopher just hoped the local radar didn’t extend to his private practices in private places. The last thing he wanted in his life was a morning sitting across the table from Bennis, knowing that she knew that he liked to—oh, never mind.