“If I tried to?” I puzzled. “If I tried to what, Lucy?”
“If you tried to get somebody first.”
She angrily wiped away tears, her narrow chest heaving. I stared blindly at the family circus on TV and didn’t know what to say. My impulse was to retreat to my office and shut the door, to lose myself in my work for a while, but hesitantly I moved over and pulled her close. We sat like this for the longest time, saying nothing.
I wondered who she talked to at home. I couldn’t imagine her having any conversations of substance with my sister. Dorothy and her children’s books had been lauded by various critics as “extraordinarily insightful” and “deep” and “full of feeling.”
What a dismal irony. Dorothy gave the best she had to juvenile characters who didn’t exist. She nurtured them. She spent long hours contemplating their every detail, from the way their hair was combed to the clothes they wore, to their trials and rites of passage. All the while Lucy was starved for attention.
I thought of the times Lucy and I spent together when I lived in Miami, of the holidays with her, my mother and Dorothy. I thought of Lucy’s last visit here. I couldn’t recall her ever mentioning the names of friends. I don’t think she had any. She would talk about her teachers, her mother’s ragtag assortment of “boyfriends,” Mrs. Spooner across the street, Jake the yardman and the endless parade of maids. Lucy was a tiny, bespectacled know-it-all whom older children resented and children her age didn’t understand. She was out of sync. I think I was exactly like her when I was her age.
A peaceful warmth had settled over both of us. I said into her hair, “Someone asked me a question the other day.”
“About what?”
“About trust. Someone asked me who I trusted more than anybody else in the world. And you know what?”
She leaned her head back, looking up at me.
“I think that person is you.”
“Do you really?” she asked, incredulously. “More than anybody?”
I nodded and quietly went on, “That being the case, I’m going to ask you to help me with something.”
She sat up and stared at me, her eyes alert and utterly thrilled. “Oh, sure! Just ask me! I’ll help you, Auntie Kay!”
“I need to figure out how someone managed to break into the computer downtown.”
“I didn’t do it,” she instantly blurted out, a stricken look on her face. “I already told you I didn’t.”
“I believe you. But someone did it, Lucy. Maybe you can help me figure it out?”
I didn’t think she could but had felt an impulse to give her a chance.
Energized and excited again, she said confidently, “Anybody could do it because it’s easy.”
“Easy?”
I had to smile.
“Because of System/Manager.”
I stared at her in open astonishment. “How do you know about System/Manager?”
“It’s in the book. He’s God.”
At times like these I was reminded, if not unnerved. Lucy’s IQ. The first time she was given an IQ test she scored so high the counselor insisted on testing her again because there had to be “some mistake.”
There was. The second time Lucy scored ten points higher.
“That’s how you get into, SQL to begin with,” she was rattling on. “See, you can’t create any grants unless you got one to start with. That’s why you’ve got System/Manager. God. You get into SQL with Him, and then you can create anything you want.”
Anything you want, it dawned on me. Such as all of the user names and passwords assigned to my offices. This was a terrible revelation, so simplistic it had never occurred to me. I supposed it never occurred to Margaret either.
“All someone’s got to do is get in,” Lucy matter-of-factly went on. “And if he knows about God, he can create any grant he wants, make it the DBA, and then he can get into your data base.”
In my office, the data base administrator, or DBA, was “DEEP/THROAT.”
Margaret did have a sense of humor now and then.
“So you get into SQL by connecting System/Manager, then you type in: GRANT CONNECT, RESOURCE, DBA TO AUNTIE IDENTIFIED BY KAY.”