Scott pulled a beer out of the fridge. She gestured for him to hand her a bottle, but he didn’t.
“Isn’t that risky with the clozapine?”
She shrugged. Fed up with the side effects, she’d stopped taking the clozapine, and was nearly off Vicodin and working hard to quit Xanax, a withdrawal process that was far from easy because it exacerbated many of the symptoms—anxiety, tension, paranoia, irritability, intrusive memories—that had pushed her into taking too much of the tranquilizer in the first place. Scott had no idea.
“I thought you wanted to write more about her childhood. That you’d underplayed the stuff about the Wolves.”
“This leads back to the Wolves. He was another Wolf. I think that battling him for six or seven years could’ve led her to reappraise her entire life.”
“Should I order takeout?”
“Are you listening?”
“I’m trying. I’ve got forty-seven tests to grade. I missed lunch because we had an incident with a senior who was acting up, making threats. They searched his backpack.”
Backpack searches happened every month. Serious threats happened at least once a semester. “Can I finish?”
“Sure,” he sighed.
“So, here’s the amazing thing. Annie Oakley is famous in the annals of American libel law because she won so much money. Hearst even pressed for new legislation to stop her.”
“That’s great,” Scott said, waiting, phone in one hand and grease-spotted restaurant menu in the other.
“But here’s the key. As much as she won, she didn’t make a profit. She and Frank probably lost money in the long run. Sometimes Frank or Annie’s nieces would travel with her, but not all the time. She must’ve spent a lot of time on trains, not able to perform, not able to do much else—and even when there were months between trials, she couldn’t jump into a new production. That was how much it mattered to her. To be right. To get back at Hearst. To reclaim her reputation. To undo that feeling that must have gone all the way back to the Wolves, back to her two years essentially being a slave with no control over her mind, her body . . .”
Scott was studying Ruth’s face. “Are you still taking the clozapine?”
Sometimes Ruth thought he preferred her drugged to undrugged, because drugged, she couldn’t work. She couldn’t search, focus, persist.
“You’re usually groggy when I get home,” Scott said. “Right now, you’re wired.”
“Being groggy sucks.”
“I’m sure it does.”
“Can I please finish what I’m trying to tell you? So that at least I have it straight in my head when I try to write it up tonight?”
“Tonight? You’re not supposed to be working at all.”
“I still have a chance to finish this book, if I can get my head straight.”
Scott set down his phone. “Ruth, are you taking the clozapine?”
She looked away. “I don’t need it.”
“That’s what the kid at school said when they asked why he’d gone off his antidepressants. That he didn’t need them anymore.”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
“But then again,” Scott said, pitch rising as he lost patience, “he started making threats against kids who’d bullied him. You don’t know when a kid like that will act up.”
“I’m not going to ‘act up.’”
“I didn’t mean that. I’m just worried you’ll suffer in ways you don’t have to. Those attacks, and the feeling you’re dying—”
“The clozapine isn’t for the panic attacks.”
“What’s it for, then?”
“They’re not even technically panic attacks.”
“This is new information. Do you want to explain?”
“Not when you sound like that.”
“How am I supposed to know what’s going on in your head?”
“Trust me, you don’t.”
“Well that sounds like a great recipe for a relationship.”
Scott glanced at his phone on the table, but he didn’t pick it up. It was the wrong time to order takeout. The wrong time for just about anything.
His next comment feigned interest. “What did Oakley’s husband think of her vendetta?”
“Vendetta?”
“She’d made her point. The whole country must have known after the first retractions and the first trials that she wasn’t a drug fiend. Hearst was punished. But she kept going.”
“Why shouldn’t she have kept going?”
“Because it didn’t change anything. It only continued to cost her.”
“Because it was justice.”
“Was it?” He asked again, more gently now. There was no malice in his voice. “I have a feeling that Frank Butler might have wished she’d given it a rest.”
“He was amazingly supportive.”
“Yes, supportive enough to want her to be happy. I know he wouldn’t want to see her waste a good part of her life due to an unhealthy obsession.”
“Why are obsessions only unhealthy when women have them?”
“I think all obsessions are unhealthy.”
“Well, Frank didn’t see it that way. I’m sure about that.” She knew no such thing. She just wanted Frank to be extraordinary—for his time, for any time. “Anyway, you don’t know anything about Frank Butler.”
“I know that . . .” He stumbled on the next words. “I know that he loved her.”
At the sound of her normally stoic fiancé choking up, Ruth didn’t keep debating. He’d won the argument, but there was no prize in it.
Scott seemed to think their ending was inevitable, but to Ruth, it felt more like a roulette wheel that could have stopped in just a slightly different position, changing everything.
Two months after their last big argument, Scott went on a cycling trip with his brother. He could have come home an hour sooner, an hour later: all of it might have changed. As it happened, he walked in just as the realtor was on her way out.
Scott stood in the entryway in black bicycle shorts, calves painted in mud, smiling. He was handsome and fitter than ever, still tan from his long rides over the summer. Ruth was plump, pale, achy and hobbling. They had diverged. But that wasn’t the issue.
Scott stepped aside to make room for the agent’s peculiarly unfriendly exit. When the door closed, Scott said, “So? Good news? Bad news? Did she do a market evaluation?”
“No.”
“Isn’t she the one you’re going to use?”
“No. She was my mother’s real-estate agent, five years ago.”
“Wouldn’t that make her a good choice?”
“Not necessarily.”
“But she knows the house’s flaws already, right? Its charms, I mean.” He was still smiling.
Ruth finally met his glance squarely. “I wasn’t asking her to sell the house. I was trying to ask her if she remembered—about the timing. About why my neighbor sold the house so cheaply.”
There were more words, more questions, a few choice expletives. Ruth couldn’t remember them now. Her eyes had fixed first on the pulsing vein at Scott’s temple, and then on the bike pump in his hands. He was the gentlest of souls, but he looked like he wanted to swing that pump and crack something. He didn’t, of course. Scott never let his emotions get out of control. But his words were harsh.
“You decide. Give me one sign, one reason to hope we’re not actually wasting each other’s time, being civil roommates rather than real partners, building a life.”
“You want me to decide between Kennidy and my mom, and you?”
“Kennidy, your mom, Annie Oakley, Hearst, book deadlines, fucking up your meds—”
“Excuse me?”
“—obsessing over past questions, imagined mysteries, projects that will never end. Between filthy boxes and old papers—”
>
“Between all that and you?”
“Between all that and us, Ruth. The past, or the present.”
Now
11
Ruth
2018
Friday
When the kettle whistled, Ruth started and looked down at the spoon, clutched in her fist like a dagger, protecting herself . . . from whom? From what? Only her own disobedient body and mind. She had been so lost in thought that she’d forgotten why she was standing here next to the counter—making tea, ruminating, killing time in hopes that Nieman would see the email and get back to her so she’d have more information to work with.
Ten minutes was what Dr. Susan had prescribed her as a time limit for rumination. But Ruth deserved more than that, considering she’d gone several months barely thinking about the past at all. There was one good thing about that: she’d had no horrible attacks lately.
Ruth leaned against the kitchen counter, sipping her tea as she stared at the calendar on the far wall. All of October, and the only date marked was the minor incident she’d had behind the wheel of her car. But she hadn’t seen the worst. She’d remained in control, even retained consciousness. That incident barely counted.
Perhaps it was because she saw Scott so rarely and was otherwise removed from most reminders of their time together. Or maybe it was because her brain was so starved of any stimulation. Surely she could stand the smallest dose now.
When the phone rang, Ruth’s heart quickened. She’d included her phone number in the emails to Nieman. At last, they could cut to the chase.
“This is Ruth.”
“Hi.” Scott cleared his throat. “It’s me.”
“I know. How are you?”
“Hey, listen. I know I’m not supposed to call you out of the blue, per Dr. Susan’s recommendations.”
She frowned. “I don’t care about that.”
Even though a call from Nieman would have promised possible new revelations, she wasn’t disappointed. She turned to look at the boxes lined up along one side of the living room. The labels were written in his neat, square script: grad school files.
Another, unlabeled box contained old sweaters. She knew because she had opened it and worn his baggiest, spruce-green sweater around the house, amazed that it still harbored a faint scent of campfire smoke from the last time Scott had worn it. Did he know that she sometimes still lifted his old clothes to her face, searching for any scent that would bring her back to their happier months?
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” she said.
“I thought it was time for me to come and pick up my boxes. I’m sorry for leaving them this long.”
She could hear the contrition in his voice, the misunderstanding. He assumed she was annoyed.
“It’s no trouble. Believe me, my own boxes take up more room than yours do.” She was looking at one now, at her feet.
“Are they in the garage?”
“No, living room. The garage is too damp. I moved a few I was worried about. Just some little ones.”
“You shouldn’t be moving boxes. You shouldn’t have to deal with my crap at all. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I know your place is tiny. We agreed on a year. I really don’t mind.”
“Ruth, it’s been a year. Officially, as of a few weeks ago. I actually meant to email you back in September, but the first weeks of school are always crazy. Seeing you there reminded me.”
Her heart sank.
“You’re a really good teacher, Scott. I always told you that.”
“Yes, you did.”
“You’re a really good guy. I wish—”
“Honey.” He caught himself. “Ruth. I know. It’s all right. About the boxes. I did promise to get them out of your way this fall. I re-signed my lease, and the place hasn’t gotten any bigger, but there’s no point putting it off. Let me just find a friend with a truck and I’ll email you.”
“Really, no hurry.”
“No, it’s gotta get done. Hell, I should toss half that stuff. The past just weighs a person down.”
She summoned her courage. “You don’t ever have second thoughts?”
He let slip a soft, strangled note of exasperation. “Sometimes I do. And then I remember how every fight ended the same way. They just got louder at the end.”
He waited a moment before adding, “I’ll be in touch about the boxes. Have a good night. Really.”
“Good night.”
The call from Scott had left Ruth heavy-chested, like she was coming down with the flu.
If those feelings had overwhelmed her a week ago, she would have resorted to putting on some old movie she’d seen a dozen times, accompanied by too many beers and culminating in a sad late-night stagger off to bed. But she couldn’t keep doing that. She had to engage her brain, or she would just keep spiraling downward.
She rallied. On to Vienna.
The Austrian capital was the most untapped lead to follow, a place about which Ruth knew next to nothing. That blankness, at the moment, felt like a relief.
As for early analysts in Vienna, there were indeed more than a handful. The easiest ones to track had belonged to a discussion club run by Freud, and the master himself was easiest to start with, because scholars had done a good job of listing all his analysands—psychoanalysis patients—both the well-known and those who had hidden, for a time at least, behind pseudonyms.
Ruth reviewed over forty and felt confident Freud hadn’t been involved with Annie, but even so, she emailed herself dozens of database links to his writings for more leisurely perusal later. Repression, denial, projection, sublimation.
Nearly all of Freud’s archives had been open for public inspection since 2000. There were still a few restricted items—the strangest, a letter from his mentor Josef Breuer, sealed until 2102. Often, items were sealed for several generations, but waiting 177 years after Breuer’s death definitely counted as strange.
It was Breuer, as it turned out, who’d invented the talking cure, not Freud. He was the one who’d counseled Bertha Pappenheim, “Anna O.,” and Freud was associated with her only because the two men had co-published the book that included her case, Studies of Hysteria, in 1895, more than a dozen years after Bertha had stopped being a patient.
Drilling down into Breuer’s life was a little trickier. The Library of Congress had his papers, 425 items in all, mostly correspondence, and included as a subset of the Freud collection. Ruth felt a pang of sympathy for this mentor who was so quickly eclipsed by his protégé. Ruth could find no listing of his analysands, besides the famous Pappenheim, a Jewish woman descended from an old and wealthy Viennese family.
Still, Ruth did locate one felicitous detail: scholars mentioned that Bertha, a polyglot whose “hysteria” often prompted her to jump from one language to another, often insisted on speaking English. Clearly, this presented no problem for Breuer.
The details of poor Bertha’s case were disturbing. Her physical and mental distress was severe: paralysis, hallucinations. Breuer’s goal was to lead his patient toward a catharsis as she expressed previously repressed emotions. This therapeutic talk, which Bertha herself called “chimney sweeping,” proceeded not randomly, but backward, moving from the present day to the source of Bertha’s most disturbing images.
There was no guarantee a method like Breuer’s would work. But then again, a woman who was desperate and unable to confide safely in the people she knew best might be willing to try anything. Ruth considered this from her seat at the kitchen table, where she’d been writing up her notes for the last hour. As the whole yard within view of the table turned slowly dark and her windows turned into dim mirrors, she felt the presence of possibility.
Ruth wrote an email to Mariette, a researcher friend based in DC who was well versed in the history of psychology, asking for her insights in
to Breuer’s known analysands.
It was time to cook dinner, something Ruth skipped all too often until she found herself suddenly ravenous and gave in to an unsatisfying frozen burrito or can of soup. This time, she resorted to something even more pathetic: a bowl of overly sweet granola. Because she wasn’t quite done yet.
All roads seemed to lead to Breuer, especially patient notes referring to lungs, ears and eyes. He’d become an analyst only by chance. Conventional doctoring and physiological research had been his real trade, as Ruth discovered while perusing online mini-biographies. He’d demonstrated the reflex nature of respiration, discovered the function of the semicircular canals and published twenty papers on physiology, many quite long.
Ruth felt a bubbling-up of gratitude for Nieman. She’d initially been disappointed by the eighty-some pages of non-Annie material that filled most of the journal, but she should have known better. Documents, like archaeological artifacts, were most valuable in situ.
The granola was gone, leaving speckled milk at the bottom of her bowl. Still hungry. She shook the granola box—empty—and contented herself with sipping the milk. She was several days overdue for a trip to the grocery store, but as long as she had anything at all in the house—cheese and crackers, a few spotted apples—she’d keep putting it off. Grocery store aisles had started seeming long after the accident.
It didn’t matter. Food didn’t interest her. The manuscript did. If this journal was a hoax, its maker had definitely planted as many links to Breuer as one could. Then the best way for Ruth to assist Nieman was to provide negative evidence: that ZN couldn’t be Annie, the analyst couldn’t be Breuer, or both.
12
Ruth
Saturday
Ruth didn’t remember falling asleep, but she had, with the laptop on the couch near her feet. She opened her email and found the best possible morning gift: a message from Nieman.
Annie and the Wolves Page 9