Babbicam

by Rod Madocks

  “You lookin’ for Hermina?” he said, “She fell over ’bout two weeks ago. She’s in Memorial Hospital up in Belleville.”

  Nurse specialist Tammy Pozner addressed me at the entrance to Orthopedic Trauma. I knew it was her name because her badge tag wobbled around at eye level. She was a big woman.

  “Yes, Mrs Parks is an in-patient here. You’re family?” she asked.

  “No, sort of friend of the family,” I muttered, “I’m really not sure if I—”

  She interrupted me, “It does her good to see folks, I’ll have to stop these though. We don’t allow flowers on the ward; we find they harbor bacteria.”

  I gave her the bunch of bronze and gold chrysanthemums I’d brought and she immediately plunged them into a clinical waste bin. I moved obediently down the ward behind Nurse Pozner but I kept thinking that I shouldn’t be there. I should have stuck to book and internet knowledge and not got involved in reality directly. I tried to veer off but Nurse Pozner ushered me firmly into a room and all of a sudden I was confronted by an elderly lady in a blue-flowered smock, sitting up in bed. Mrs Parks’ round apple face looked doubtful on seeing me, and her gray eyes blinked uncertainly.

  “I can’t quite place, you, son, come closer.” I reluctantly approached her and said quietly,

  “I’ve come here to ask you about Howard.”

  “Howard?”

  “Yes, Howard, your brother.”

  “Gee, son, Howard? No one has mentioned him for years.” She smiled, “Now I see, you’re one of his doctor buddies. You seem mighty young though. You should have said. Now then Howard, yes, he was always going to be something special. I knew that from when he was small. I’m his big sis.”

  “What happened to Howard?” I asked, “Can you tell me where he went after retiring from the VA?”

  Her gaze sharpened to sudden suspicion “Why are you asking me that? You should ask Howard yourself. He never visits me. If you are his friend how come you don’t know where he is? I think I’ll ring for the nurse. Ward D7, they will know. You call that nurse back in here at once, young man. Do it at once. D7, they’ll tell you.”

  “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Mrs Parks,” I said, “I just wanted to hear more about your brother.”

  “I’m not listening to you no more. You are definitely not a friend of Howard’s.” She grimaced as if in pain then yelled out, “Find D7. Get hold of Ward D7 at once!”

  “This is Ward D7,” I said. That did it. She really became agitated then. She kept struggling as if about to rise up out of bed.

  “Let me up, let me up,” she called out. She pushed behind her with her thin arms but could not raise herself, then searched for the bed buzzer, which had fallen out of reach. Thankfully, the old lady began to tire. Her head dropped back onto the pillow and she closed her eyes. I could see her chest rising and falling with shuddering breaths. I sat for a while and looked at the TV. It was showing Sesame Street. Mrs Parks seemed to have gone to sleep and I watched the screen as the room darkened. It had been a long day’s travelling to get to this. After a while, I became aware that Mrs Parks was speaking again. She seemed calmer.

  “Poor Howard got wrecked by his no good wife Lina. She left him you know. That and Clyde getting killed. He spent all his time on his doctoring after that. Lina ended up in charge of the Majestic Theatre at Madison. She told us she had shaken the hand of Leonard Bernstein. That’s all I know. Guess she’s passed now. I’ve not seen Howard in a long while. I heard he went to California. I think maybe he’s passed. My poor Randolph has gone also you know? Did you know?” She looked at me and I nodded back at her. Mrs Parks looked saddened to have her fears confirmed.

  “My husband, he worked at Lehr’s meat market. He came home for his lunch every day. He was a man of regular habits. I can’t get used to him not being around. I’ve been on Lost Dog Road ever since he’s gone. Guess I’m on Lost Dog Road now.” Tears gathered and fell. I handed her a Kleenex from a box on her bed table. She rallied after a while.

  “How is your mother?” She asked brightly with a little shake of the head.

  “Uh, my mom she’s dead,” I said and I tiptoed out.

  Hospital security caught me in the exit atrium as I was trying to haul ass out of there. Two heavy guys all in black. One held me by the wrist as Tammie the nurse pointed at me and a middle-aged woman in a North Face vest kept saying, “Who is that man? We don’t know him. Why has he been allowed to see my mother?”

  Later when it all calmed down a bit I was able to explain that I had come seeking to explore family history and I hadn’t meant to cause distress.

  I spoke to Mrs Parks’ daughter outside in the parking lot. Her name was Carla Sokal. A middle-aged divorcée with soft gray eyes like her mother. I thought maybe they were Kaiser eyes, though Carla told me the Kaiser side of the family had died out. She said her mom had fallen but a scan had showed up a crumbling hip bone. She was being eaten at by bone cancer. Her advanced age would slow the speed of progression but it wasn’t looking good. The doctors thought that she showed signs of dementia as well. I told Carla how sorry I was about it all. It was a mistake coming. I was a harmless researcher looking into her family history. Come to think of it, maybe I wasn’t so harmless—you should beware the single-minded. Even the crudest grip on history would tell you that.

  Mrs Sokal was too preoccupied to ask me very much about what I was doing. She thought her mom might have told me something once but it seemed unlikely now with her memory problems. Carla herself had met with her Uncle Howard a few times. She believed he’d died of a heart attack while sea fishing in Southern California. The family had thought it odd because as far as they knew he had never shown an interest in fishing before that. He’d been cremated and his ashes were spread on Clyde’s grave. I asked where Clyde was buried. And she told me, Milwaukee. He’d been brought home, you see. She took my phone number in case she thought of anything else and as she leaned forward I could see she wore a silver medallion round her neck. On impulse, I asked her what it was. She said it signified “Our Lady of the Snows”. She told me that the national shrine to Our Lady of the Snows was there in Belleville. They even had their own replica Lourdes Grotto there, had a million visitors a year. No miracles yet but many had been healed. She and her husband were oblates. I only realized then that Doctor Kaiser was probably Catholic also. I had presumed he was a secular scientist type but maybe he hadn’t been like that at all.

  I rolled into the Super Eight Motel on East Main. It was low end but with wi-fi. It was hard to chill. I didn’t really like staying away from my own small rented corner of the world. Some Herbalife Calm Compound helped take the edge off of it. I lay there uneasily on the blue check counterpane.

  I didn’t know what an oblate was so I looked it up on Wiki. It turns out oblate came from Latin ‘oblatus’—to offer. An oblate is a secular person who offers up a private dedication to a religious calling. I liked the idea. Maybe I could be an oblate in my own style.

  I missed the routines that usually lapped around me. My fixed habits held me from chaos. I didn’t even like changing my breakfast cereal. I quite often had it at night. It was the melatonin in the milk that helped me sleep, I guess. I’ve always had Barbara’s Bakery Corn Flakes at $4.59 a box, I liked their yellow natural color. Then they changed it and put ‘new improved taste’ on the box. It’s weird how much that upset me. The new product was dry, brown and alien.

  I must seem like a goober with all this obsessional crap. I believe I will center myself one day. Maybe love will cure me if I find the right person. Anyhow back to that motel room: I tried to short-cut sleep and dropped another natural herbal tranquiller, some valerian and chamomile that time. I lay back on the king size and did my usual sleep routine. I have these special memories that I deliberately play in my mind like a relaxation tape to soothe me. They are always the same: riding the John Deere in sunshine at Grandpa’s place and me lying with Kimmie in a wooden vacation cabin by the lake at Minocqu
a. She got me used to being touched by a person.

  I was woken by my cell phone ringing. It was Carla Sokal. She told me she had got to thinking after meeting me and had dug out some stuff she’d kept since her Uncle Orville had died. Orville was a brewer who had come to work in the Pilsner brewery in New Athens. It had gone now, burnt down, she said. She also said she had papers, letters and such originally belonging to Doctor Kaiser. I was welcome to look at them if it was helpful and if I was still in town, though she wanted them back.

  We met in the motel entrance hall. She was carrying two heavy-looking canvas tote bags. She said she had quickly collected up a few things she thought would be useful to me. She always planned to do something with them herself, but she was always too busy to make a family history. She asked me again what I was interested in. I said it was for a book about a doctor, and I asked her if she had seen any wire spools. No, and she didn’t know what a wire recorder was. She thought Uncle Orville must have thrown out the rest of Howard’s stuff. The doctor had kept a house in Cudahy but spent most of his later time in California. He had heart disease and it was thought to be more healthy down there. I guessed that the original Lysol box that I had found must have been discarded by Orville and must have passed through several hands.

  I wished Mrs Sokal good luck with her mother. I’ve always found it so hard to say the right thing to folks, that’s why I stay alone. When I try and break out of my box then my intensities tend to scare everyone. Carla said that if God had not taken her Ma yet then it was not in his plan. I asked her if God’s plan ever got messed up.

  “Oh no, it might seem to be messed up but it’s always working its purpose out,” she replied. It was late. She had to get back as she was teaching school in the morning. I said I couldn’t sleep too well. She told me if I went to the “Our Lady of the Snows” for help I could get healed.

  “Will the Lady cure anyone?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she replied, “That is the miracle of it all. Even if you don’t believe in her, she will cure you anyway.”

  I laid out all the contents of the tote bags on the king size bedspread. There were many letters and quite a few articles clipped from what looked like medical journals, also heaps of photos, a whole album with a frayed fabric cover, some faded high school pennants, medical certificates, military stuff and a naval telegram. I stayed up all night studying it and marking up the stuff to be copied. I got it scanned at Office Max the next day, two blocks from the motel.

  It turns out Kaiser retrained as a shrink shortly after John Lee had died. He attended Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute in Madison and went on to do a residency at the Menninger Clinic, which was linked to a VA hospital for neuro-psychiatric casualties. It seems an enthusiasm for Freudian psychoanalysis had swept through psychiatric practice at the time. You can see its traces in Kaiser’s work but he seems to have kept his feet in the biological wing. There were notes on neuro-surgery treatment programs, on the treatment of chronic pain and the use of insulin shock for locked-in cases. He seems to have experimented with stuff called sodium amobarbital as a truth serum and relaxant to enable veterans to access repressed war trauma. There were many notes about mentally disabled returnees from World War 2, Korea and early Vietnam.

  One whole bag was full of more personal items. Photos: Kaiser, pipe in mouth, with that gray streak in his hair, standing with faculty members; colorized photos of Lina smiling on a porch, Clyde squinting into the sun with shiny plastered-down hair, holding a pup and posing next to an old automobile. There were so many of Clyde, with one whole album dedicated to him. That included the last pictures of him in uniform along with the cards and letters he sent from military camps. There were older pictures of unknown people in woolen swim suits at a swimming hole. I thought one of them might be a young Hermina. I found Kaiser’s staff name tags stored in a tin of St Bruno tobacco. There was also a large number of note books filled with his crimped, precise writing.

  What I really focused on was Kaiser’s articles. Some seemed to have appeared in the Journal of the Wisconsin Medical Society and others that looked like they were intended as discussion items for medical students and colleagues. I got to recognize the lucid measured style. Sometimes they were informal think-pieces under the pseudonyms ‘Wise Owl’ or ‘Suum Cuique’, sometimes they came out under his own name. There were no major academic or research papers. Kaiser seems not to have been ambitious. He seems to have remained a resident doctor on the house staff most of his career. It took me a time to recognize that ‘Suum Cuicque’ comes from Cicero—it means, ‘To each as they deserve’ or ‘To each his own’. It’s the idea that we should all achieve to the maximum of our abilities, although it also has the more somber sub-text that ‘we get what we deserve’. It was a while before I connected it to ‘To Each His Own’, the song by the Modernnaires on the last spool of the wire recorder. Kaiser must have recognized the connection of the catchy hit tune to the bleaker Ciceronian quote and that is why he recorded it. Maybe he enjoyed the irony of it.

  Kaiser’s life seems to have been completely discarded, shelled off, lost and washed away. I’m a snapper-up of forgotten bits and pieces. I could have spent time on him to reconstruct his life but I really wanted to focus on Lee as my revenant. Kaiser’s role was to be my guide and signposter on the way. I noticed a particular article he wrote in 1956, just a piece to be read at an academic meeting I guessed. It was typed on thin paper, maybe done by Darleen Engstrom for him. He called the article: ‘Three May Keep a Secret: Confidentiality and Clinical Practice on Mentally Disabled War Returnees’. I guessed the title referred to the Benjamin Franklin quote, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead”. The article covered how the doctor had managing the freaky and upsetting material that psychologically damaged war veterans brought back. Those guys kept on having flashbacks to all that death, horror and repressed guilt at the things they had done, stuff like leaving buddies behind or shooting prisoners. A lot of the material was from the Pacific war against the Japanese. Later in the piece there was reference to more specific stories of lighting up Japs with flamethrowers, loosing Marine Dobermans on the prisoners, cutting off Jap heads and sticking them on jeeps as hood ornaments. Gnarly stuff. The article suggested that the patients should be helped by allowing them to ventilate bad thoughts, sometimes with use of sodium amobarbital to empty out their more clingy secrets.

  Kaiser seems to have treated trauma like a grieving progress. The piece described in long words how the libido bound up and hypercathected with the past. Hypercathexis is a shrink’s term for the intense emotional longing for something. Sort of like being intensely in love. Kaiser described how his serviceman patients held desperately onto a crippling mass of feelings about their war experiences. They were in love with their distress, he thought. He saw his job as starting a sort of mourning process where the ego has to learn how to get away and become free again from its grabby, intense attachment. The treatment encouraged a process of hyper-rembering and obsessive recollection. The therapist’s job seemed to be to rev up the hyper-remembering process. It appeared that he was encouraging an almost fictive process, a deliberate recreation of the past.

  I could see at once that Kaiser’s wire recordings of Lee looked like an early version of this unloading. I got a tad lost in the technicalities of the piece. The gist of it was the survivor was helped to bring the past alive again, replacing an actual absence with an imaginary presence. This magical restoration of the lost objects and experiences helped the mourner to get a hold of the value of what happened in the past and understand what he had lost by moving away from those experiences in time. By dragging out the existence of the lost past at the center of Kaiser’s grief work with his screwed-up soldiers then his patients came to understand that the past experiences no longer existed and had no power over them. In the phony- sounding language of Kaiser’s article—mourning and guilty agitation then could come to a decisive and spontaneous end and the libido was free to attach to new object
s and experiences.

  Okay, so far, so complicated. I can’t say I got all of it but what jumped at me from the pages of that old typescript was Kaiser’s introduction, He commented at the beginning:

  “Every patient is unique. Even the general practitioner will encounter the extraordinary within his everyday practice. I well recall a patient who confessed to me that he had committed serious crimes many years before in another country. In fact it turned out the fellow was notorious in his home country. This patient was in end stage cardiac myopathy, my treatment was confined to the palliative yet his chief concern was this confession about killing two women. The man was confused due to renal failure, I did not have a clear idea of the truth of his beliefs, but that was not my function, I was there to allow that hypercathexis, the intense desire to dwell on the things that bothered and perplexed him. My role was to help him complete his object and make a confession. I realized that if I was to help my patient then it was my duty to allow that secret to come out, and so to free him. What actually happened in historical time died with the patient, but the dilemmas posed by that case stayed with me.”