by Eva Pohler
Chapter Eight: Hortense Gray
After a sleepless night alone—Cam had answered none of her calls and had seemed to vanish from the island—Daphne received a phone call from the girl at the courtesy desk asking her to come in a half hour to Dr. Gray’s office on the second floor of the main building, room 200. Daphne hadn’t planned on going to breakfast—there were still plenty of fruit and things in her room—but now she quickly showered and dressed, wondering what this was all about. She supposed she could refuse to go, but she had to admit she was curious to know why the doctor wanted to see her.
She slipped on another one of the sundresses her mother bought her for the trip, put on her sandals, and headed over to the main building. The pool was full of swimmers and sunbathers, including Gregory Gray and others from yesterday’s sunset cruise—all but Cam. She avoided making eye contact with any of them as she shuffled by, quickly, hoping they wouldn’t notice. She wasn’t in the mood to be around people.
She climbed the stairs to room 200. She lifted her hand to knock, but hesitated when she heard opera music coming from the other side of the door. In a low vibrato, and in a language that sounded like Latin, Hortense Gray’s voice rang out, and it was not good. Daphne covered her smile with her hand and listened until the music stopped, and then she raised her hand and rapped on the door.
“Enter.”
Daphne gasped before she had even crossed the threshold, because the doctor’s office wasn’t anything like what she had expected. Every square inch of wall space was covered with either book cases overflowing with books or with paintings from many different eras and styles, looking gaudy and crammed together. In the middle of the room were sculptures—three free-standing, life-sized ones and two smaller busts on pedestals. A loom sat in one corner with threads and a half-woven tapestry, and stuffed in another corner was an upright piano, covered in sheet music, some of which had fallen to the floor.
The doctor stood behind her desk wearing a large purple hat and purple velvet suit, which looked ridiculous. She lifted the needle from an old-fashioned record player, plunked on one corner of her messy desk, and removed a record and slipped it into a paper sleeve as she said, “Well, don’t just stand there. Come in and have a seat.”
Daphne had to weave around the many pieces of art to reach the green chenille chair in front to Dr. Gray’s desk, and before she could sit on it, she had to remove a painting.
“Oh, just put that over there on the piano bench. I haven’t decided where I’m going to hang that one. Do you like it? It’s a Pre-Raphaelite imitation. A recent gift from a patient.”
The painting was of a woman in a beautiful dress lying in a stream on her back with flowers all around her. She only had to lay her head back to be completely submerged.
“Is the woman going to drown herself?” Daphne asked as she carefully sat the painting on the piano bench.
“I guess we’ll never know. That’s the thing about paintings. They’re frozen.” After Daphne had taken her seat, the doctor asked, “Do you like my costume?”
Daphne was relieved that it was a costume. She hadn’t been sure how to take the purple hat and suit and white bowtie. “Yes.”
“I’m the mad hatter; can you tell? We’re having a costume party in the ballroom next week, and I’ve been trying to decide how to dress. I think this one suits me.”
“Yes,” Daphne agreed. “It does.”
Hortense Gray removed the purple hat from her head and tossed it on the floor behind her desk. “Well, now.” She sat down and opened a manila folder on the top of a heap of folders. “Thank you for meeting with me. I wanted to discuss a few things with you. First of all, I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about what happened yesterday evening during the cruise. Gregory told me. You must have been terrified.”
Dr. Gray wore a strange smile that made her words seem insincere.
Daphne shrugged and asked, “So why am I here?”
“Interesting question and one we all ask from time to time, don’t you think? But as I like to say, ‘It’s not why but what,’ for life’s meaning isn’t something assigned to us but rather made. Therefore, it’s not why we are here, but what we do with our lives that matters.”
What? “I mean, why did you ask me to your office?”
“Oh, yes, of course.” She removed the bowtie from her neck. “You and I haven’t had much time to chat. I want to make sure you understand a few things about my domain.”
“Your domain?”
Hortense laughed. “That’s my little inside joke. I like to think of myself as Prospero. Are you familiar with Shakespeare’s The Tempest?”
Daphne shook her head.
“Well, it’s very good. You should read it. In fact, I have it here somewhere.” Hortense crossed the room to one of her book cases, ran her finger along the spines of several books, and then stopped on one and pulled it into her hands. “You see, I’ve created a place where science, art, and even religion come together in one cause.” She chuckled. “Nietzsche would be impressed. Here. Take it. You can keep it.”
Daphne took the book from Hortense’s outstretched hand. It was a black leather-bound copy and not too thick. She doubted she would have time to read it, but she didn’t want to appear rude. “Thank you.”
Hortense returned to her high-back leather chair behind her desk. “I want you to know there’s very little that happens on this island that I’m not aware of. I know Cameron shared some information with you, and I wanted an opportunity to explain.”
Daphne’s heart rate increased and she sat up in the chair. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”
“Of course not. This isn’t a school and he a pupil. Do you see me as a strict principal? How interesting. No, maybe you see this as a prison and I the warden? Cameron’s a volunteer. This is a therapeutic retreat. Relax.”
Daphne sat back in her chair.
“I want you to understand that I come from generations of psychologists. My father was a great psychologist, and his father before him, and so on. Have you heard of the Stanley Milgram Experiment?”
Daphne shook her head.
“What about Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment?”
“No. Sorry.”
Hortense shook her head in disgust. “What do they teach kids in school these days? That’s a shame. Well, my father, Malcolm Gray, was one of a great generation of psychologists back in the sixties and seventies who discovered important insights into human behavior. Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment…”
“Wait, he shocked people?” Daphne asked.
“No. But he made the subjects think they were shocking people, and he discovered that the majority of his subjects would continue to obey authority even in the face of begging and pleading on the part of the actor pretending to be shocked.”
“That’s horrible.”
“The behavior, yes, but the experiment was brilliant.” Hortense leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers “You see, this generation of scientists were trying to explain how regular German citizens could have participated in the annihilation of over six million Jews during the Second World War. You are familiar with the holocaust?”
“We learned about it in school.” Plus, Daphne had read several novels on her own, such as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and The Book Thief and Number the Stars. She shuddered. “It doesn’t seem real.”
“Yes, but it was real. And so psychologists wanted to study how such atrocities could be committed by everyday people. Zimbardo was another of my father’s colleagues who created a remarkable experiment by simulating a prison at Stanford University. He assigned some of his subjects with the role of warden and others with that of prisoner. He and my father and their team watched in astonishment as the wardens—regular university students—committed barbaric and atrocious acts against the prisoners—their fellow classmates.”
Daphne shifted nervously in her seat. “That was allowed?”
“Well, Zimbardo made the decision to end the experim
ent early, against my father’s wishes.” Hortense leaned forward on her messy desk. “It’s unfortunate. We might have learned a great deal more.”
At the expense of the subjects? Daphne wondered. She frowned. “So am I a lab rat?”
Hortense Gray narrowed her eyes. “I’m running an operation here that is guaranteed to make you glad to be alive. Although our resort is less than ten years old, I have been perfecting my techniques for my entire career. My success rate is impeccable. I give hope to family members with depressed and suicidal loved ones when no one else can. Currently, people see me as a last resort because they consider my methods…dubious. But one day, I will be the premier clinical psychologist, like my father was in his day. I’m already quite well-known in my field, though I wasn’t always as successful with my patients as I am today.”
Daphne listened to Hortense, but she was growing bored with all the self-praise, and her eyes couldn’t avoid looking around the strange room at the different pieces of art and at the books packed onto the book cases and stacked on the floors.
“You like my collection?”
“Hmm?” Daphne felt the color rush to her cheeks as she spun around to meet the doctor’s curious gaze. “Yes. It’s quite large.”
“I know. I have a hard time parting with anything, even though I rarely read a book twice or look at a painting more than a few times. They’re so dead, you know? So frozen…so…what’s the word I’m looking for—unsatisfying—after a while, anyway.”
Daphne couldn’t relate to the doctor’s words. She had never had a problem reading a book more than once.
“Life can get that way, Daphne. It can become stale, frozen, dead. We can get stuck, and sometimes it takes something truly profound to bring us back to life.”
“So you scare the crap out of people to wake them up?”
“Not exactly, though terror is definitely an impetus for awakening one’s soul. I prefer to think of my domain as living art, and a place where science and art come together. Here at this resort, you have the rare opportunity of stepping into a painting, or a musical composition, or a book and of bringing it to life as you resurrect your own stale, frozen, dead self.”
Daphne didn’t get what the doctor was trying to say, but she didn’t like all this talk of death and resurrection. Truth be told, Hortense Gray sounded crazy, and Daphne just wanted the hell out. She would stay, though, because it was what her parents wanted.
“And Arturo Gomez knows what you’re doing here at his resort? He’s okay with it?”
Dr. Gray smiled and flapped a hand in Daphne’s direction, like she was swatting a fly. “Arturo Gomez was one of my first patients. He adores me. I saved his life, and now he is my Ariel.”
“Your what?”
“In The Tempest, Prospero, frees a spirit from a tree, where the spirit had been imprisoned by a witch for many years. The spirit, Ariel, made Prospero’s domain possible. He gave him the magic Prospero needed to orchestrate his world. So, you see, Arturo, who is wealthy beyond imagination, is my Ariel. I freed him, and he gave me his magic.”
Daphne nodded, thinking, How nice for you both, but kept her thoughts to herself.
Then Daphne gasped. As Dr. Gray removed her purple velvet jacket and laid it across one side of the desk, one of her arms, usually covered by long sleeves, was briefly exposed. Daphne caught sight of a number of scars, where long gashes must have once appeared. The doctor noticed and quickly pushed the wrinkled sleeve back down across her arm. Daphne wondered how the doctor got the scars but was too afraid to ask.
Hortense Gray cleared her throat and said, “I know more about you than you might have assumed, Daphne. I have a complete file on you. And there’s something about your case, a piece of the puzzle I don’t think you’ve noticed is missing.”
Daphne felt her neck and back go limp and wobbly, so she grabbed the arms of her chair. She wasn’t prepared to discuss her “case.”
“According to my records, your brother, Joey, exhibited symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia by age sixteen and was diagnosed at age seventeen, but your parents opted not to put him on medication until much later. Is that correct?”
Daphne nodded, her mouth too dry to speak.
“And he was nineteen when he attacked and killed your sister, Kara.”
Daphne waited. What was the doctor’s point?
“Your mother shared with me what she said to you the morning she discovered Kara’s body.”
Daphne stared at the floor as sweat tickled the back of her neck and the inside of her palms. She wanted out.
“She thinks she’s the reason you tried to take your life.”
Daphne’s mouth dropped open. She couldn’t believe what the doctor was saying. Her mother blamed herself? “But that’s not true.”
“She made you feel like it was your fault.”
“It was. You don’t know the whole story.” Daphne’s heart pounded.
“But if your parents had gotten proper treatment for your brother…”
“Stop! It wasn’t their fault!” Daphne stood from the chair. Why was the doctor saying such things? Was this part of her crazy therapy? Time to lie and blame others?
“So maybe this is about your need to believe in your parents?”
Daphne stared back at the doctor in shock. She heard a pounding in her head. “I don’t know what you mean, but you don’t know everything.”
“Look at me, Daphne.” Hortense Gray also stood. “Kara’s death was not your fault.”
But she was wrong. The doctor didn’t know what had happened that night.
Again, Dr. Gray said, “Kara’s death was not your fault.”
Tears flooded Daphne’s eyes and, since she couldn’t speak, she ran from the room.
She heard Dr. Gray calling after her, but she took the stairs to the bottom floor and ran from the building. The other kids were still at the pool, most of them lying on loungers. She avoided them again, feeling numb and weak. As she reached the door, Cam appeared around the corner of her cabana.
“Daph?” His smile faded. “What’s wrong?”
She ran inside and flung herself on her bed. “Nothing.”
He followed her inside and closed the door.
“Aren’t you supposed to stay away from me?” she asked accusingly.
He stretched out on the bed beside her, on his back. “I don’t care. Talk to me.”
“I’m tired of talking.” She couldn’t look at him, didn’t want to look at another person again. She wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
He turned to her and wrapped his arms around her and held her, stroking her hair, not saying anything, until, at some point, she must have fallen asleep. When she awakened, entangled in arms and legs, in that twilight between sleep and wakefulness, she looked at the boy beside her, expecting to see Brock. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw it was Cam.
Then he awoke with a start. “What time is it?”
She glanced at the clock. “Eleven. Are you hungry for lunch?”
“I’ve got to go. Promise me you’ll go horseback riding?”
“Is Bridget going?” she felt petty for asking, especially when she knew her heart still belonged to Brock.
He smiled and said, “No. She doesn’t like horses.”
“Okay then. Three o’clock?”
Cam nodded, before kissing the top of her head, and walked out the door.
Lying beside Daphne was the book Hortense had given her, The Tempest. She picked it up and carried it across the room to one of the striped chairs. The book fell open to a page that was marked with a folded piece of paper—a clipped, yellowed newspaper article:
May 1994: Harvard Professor Fired for Unethical Practices: New York: Dr. Hortense Gray, Harvard Professor of Psychology, was recently relieved of her duties by the Harvard School of Psychology when her paper, “Using Pain to Stimulate Pleasure in the Clinically Depressed,” was submitted to and rejected by the American Journal of Psychology. The paper was rejected beca
use it revealed methods the journal and the university deemed unethical. According to Dr. Fordham, chair of the Department of Psychology, Dr. Gray administered pain treatments to subjects diagnosed with clinical depression in order to locate the point at which a subject’s desire to die becomes replaced by the drive to survive. Dr. Gray hypothesized that when “the survival instinct kicks in, suicidal tendencies are overcome and the patient is cured”…
The article went on to say that Hortense was the adopted daughter of renowned psychologist, Dr. Malcolm Gray. The article also mentioned that Hortense was one of many orphans adopted by the psychologist who himself had been accused but never charged of using the children in his own experiments.
He used orphans—his own daughter—in his experiments?
Daphne looked through the rest of the book to see if there was anything more, and when she found nothing else, wondered if she’d been meant to find the article, or if the doctor would be mortified to know Daphne had it. Daphne also thought again about the long scars all over the doctor’s arms. Did her father’s experiments have anything to do with them? A shiver skipped down her spine.
Then she opened The Tempest and began to read.