by M. J. Cates
“What does it matter what I want?” he said. “What I want is clearly of no relevance.”
“That’s not true,” Imogen said. She wanted to say that, in fact, it was precisely because Quentin wanted something she did not that she was forced to do this. It was hurting him now, but would save him from far greater pain down the line.
Quentin was staring at the ground. “This—this hurts.”
“That’s the last thing I—” Her hand reached for his sleeve as if of its own volition. She was unaware of it until he tore away from her and strode back across the bridge.
“Quentin,” she called. And then, “Your book!”
Stupid, stupid. He doesn’t want the damn book.
The sun had retreated once more and a deep cold suffused her from head to toe. She looked around at the little island, the garden that was still in its winter ruin. She had sat here often. Sometimes alone, reading. But mostly with Quentin, talking. Laughing. It was quite true what she’d said—she had been happy.
2
At least the housekeeper is glad to see me, Imogen thought. Mrs.
Bidwell had gone out of her way to prepare a meal of baked salmon with dill sauce, and had set the table with the special-occasion candles.
“You’re home,” her father said, as Imogen took her seat. “How good of you to grace our table.”
“I’ve been looking forward to this,” Imogen said. “Miss Sedgwick’s cooking wasn’t exactly haute cuisine.”
“You require haute cuisine now, do you?”
He passed the salmon plate to her. Imogen served herself and passed it on to Caroline, the youngest, on her left. Her father busied himself with potatoes, beans, and sauce, and did not so much as glance at Imogen. Although she had closed her heart to him long ago, she experienced a contradictory yearning for his respect. He had the look of easy masculine authority—from his perfect moustache to his centurion’s nose—that attracted women, dogs, and small children. People, not just daughters, naturally wanted to please him.
He inquired of Caroline about her French exam, and then of his second youngest, Victoria, about her history. Both girls were passing—barely—a circumstance that would have provoked a withering lecture when Imogen was in high school, but now he just gave each girl a nod that acknowledged their having met expectations.
And now he turned back to her. “Of course, if you’d stayed at home you could have enjoyed perfectly good meals without incurring extra expense.”
“Yes, but I would have spent so much time on the streetcar I would’ve had little time to study.”
“Oh, I know you had no shortage of justifications.”
Imogen looked to her mother, but Rose made no effort to intervene, looking instead at Victoria, who had adopted the blank I’m-not-really-here face that Imogen herself used to use not so long ago. “Pass the sauce to your sister, Victoria.”
“Rose,” Lang said, “Alice had quite a triumph today. She’s too modest to tell you herself, of course.”
“Tell us, my dear,” Rose said. “What is your triumph?”
Alice dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, and cleared her throat before speaking. She had her father’s long nose, which seemed to lend a certain gravity to all her utterances.
“I won my appeal. Against Illinois Textile. They’ll have to pay back wages after all.”
“It’s criminal what they pay those women,” Lang said. “It’s a tremendous victory.”
“I’m so glad,” Rose said, smiling faintly.
“I imagine you’ll be itching to set up your practice,” Lang said to Imogen. “Where will you go, I wonder. You won’t want to tarry with the likes of us very long.”
“I’ll be staying here for the summer.”
“And then what—Boston? New York? A shingle in Harley Street?”
“I’m not setting up anywhere, Father. In September, as you know, I’ll be going to Baltimore.”
“Baltimore. ‘Home of Turks, Jews, and infidels.’ ”
“That’s actually Rhode Island,” Alice said. “People called it that, owing to their tolerance of Quakers.”
Lang snapped his fingers and pointed an approving finger at his eldest. “Well done, Alice. I stand corrected.”
He concentrated on his plate for a few moments, as Imogen’s mother talked, to no one in particular, about her plans for the garden. The arbour was near collapse and needed replacing. And she’d had her heart set on American Beauties this year but the squirrels were merciless with rosebuds.
“Tell us about Baltimore, Imogen.” Her father held his water glass up to the light and squinted at it, as if he suspected health violations. “What is the nature of your business there?”
“I’ve told you. I’ll be doing my residency in psychiatry at the Phipps Clinic under Jonas Ganz.”
“Ganz, no less.” He raised his water glass again, as if in a toast. “Jonas Ganz, everyone.”
“He is the most famous psychiatrist in the country,” Imogen said.
“I grant you that,” her father said. “But it’s rather like being the most famous tap dancer. Impressive to the tiny circle of those who care. Who have psychiatrists ever cured?”
“Lots of people. Ten years ago half the beds in the asylums were taken up by paretics.”
Alice paused with fork in midair. “Paretics?”
“Paresis…” Imogen began, but then had to search for an explanation that did not include the word syphilis. “Paresis is a permanent paralysis that occurs in the late stages of certain common psychoses. The discovery of Salvarsan has practically wiped it out. Tens of thousands of cases—so hardly a ‘tiny circle.’ ”
“And did Dr. Ganz have anything to do with this miracle?”
“No, Father, but his clinic includes a laboratory that will be searching for similar cures. I can’t wait to work in that lab. I want to learn everything I can about the human mind—both in its physical and mental aspects.”
“And in the meantime, a summer of indolence.”
“I have a job lined up. I’ll be starting at a pharmacy in about two weeks.”
“Exciting,” her father said. “We’ll have to stop by for a strawberry phosphate, won’t we, Alice.”
It was only upon returning home from her boarding house each summer that Imogen realized that while she hadn’t missed the unhappy members of her family, she had missed her room. The boarding house could not match the downy comfort of her bed with its fine linens. Nor could its windows compare with her bay window and reading nook, her shelves lined with the works of authors she loved: George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and Thomas Hardy for fiction; Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley for science.
At one time, she had shared this room with Laura, the twin sister she had lost when they were both five. There was a silver-framed photograph on her vanity of the two little girls in identical dresses, except for the white ribbon that dangled from Imogen’s shoulders and the tiny notebook attached to it. At that time, Imogen could not speak owing to a severe tongue-tie—at least, could not speak without intolerable distortions of vowel and consonant. Surgery not being deemed advisable until the age of seven, Imogen often chose to communicate by printed note.
All that seemed a lifetime ago. For now, she had every intention of enjoying her two weeks of freedom. She vowed she would go for long walks, she would sit in the garden, and she would read anything but medical texts.
Unfortunately, Chicago’s climate thwarted this plan with a series of bruise-coloured skies, unseasonably low temperatures, and almost constant drizzle. She resolved to remain cheerful despite her father’s hostility, but found herself penned in and unable to stave off unhappy thoughts, harbingers of the dark mood that soon invaded her, robbing her days of all pleasure. Even her pretty room began to pall.
She forced herself to get up in the mornings and have breakfast with her mother. But afterwards she would go back and lie on the bed, curled up on her side. So an hour would pass—two—as the tide of depression flowed into her yet seemed nev
er to ebb. She found herself counting all the reasons to be sad: she had broken her best friend’s heart, her family thought her vain and selfish, her father clearly hated her and, worst of all, she found she could not blame them.
Sometimes she wrote in a notebook about her own state of mind, mostly questions. Was it depression, or was it a rational assessment of her situation? Was it driven by hormones? Certainly the onset of such moods had coincided with puberty. Had she inherited the tendency from her mother?
These were the kinds of questions that had initially sparked her interest in the human psyche. Of course, her mother had ample reason for unhappiness, having married a man who turned out to be far from the good, kind man she deserved, and that Josiah Lang had once been. Or seemed. And she had never fully recovered from the death of Laura. Despite her efforts to deal with them rationally, Imogen’s feelings so oppressed her that it sometimes felt as if she were being smothered.
One day, catching her own reflection in the window, she thought how it could be Laura—grown-up Laura—arrayed in sunlight, the white muslin curtains billowing around her. She had always been a little bit bossy, in an affectionate kind of way. What would her twin say to her now, if she could see her?
“I’m not sure I recognize this Little Miss Gloom,” Laura said gently. “The Imogen I recall was always chipper, eager for adventure.”
“Yes,” Imogen thought. “Because life was better when you were around—I was better.”
“We were five years old, you goose. Life’s more complicated now—for you, anyway—but it’s going to get better, you’ll see.”
Imogen recognized the irony that her dead sister should be the one to reassure her. Scarlet fever killed many children, but it let many live; why had it not spared Laura?
She went to her desk and pulled out her notebook.
“No, I am not going mad,” she wrote. “I know this ghostly Laura is just me—my better me. Which doesn’t mean I should ignore her advice. This darkness will end,” she added in heavy letters, and underlined it twice. “I must remember that life will be brighter again.”
She was reminding herself of this again one day in early June when there was a light tapping at her door. She closed her notebook, picked up her copy of The Lost Continent, and sat in her reading nook.
“Come in.”
“Who is writing you from Lake Placid, dear?”
Rose Lang’s interest was not sparked by much but apparently the neat little envelope she held out to her daughter qualified.
“I don’t know anyone in Lake Placid,” Imogen said, taking it. And then she recognized the fine nib, the indigo ink, the machinelike cursive. Quentin had mentioned his family’s summer place in upstate New York without being any more precise. Until now his letters had been coming from Rochester, and Imogen had managed to snatch them up before her mother noticed.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s a friend from UC.”
“Eccentric handwriting.” Her mother was standing over her, looking down at her with eyes slightly less melancholy than usual. “Oddly masculine.”
Imogen tucked the envelope into her book. “I’ll read it later.”
When her mother was gone, Imogen went to her door and made sure it was latched. She opened the envelope and took out the letter—double-sided and closely written.
Dear Imogen,
I have a table to work on here that looks out on a veranda that in turn looks out on what surely must be one of the prettiest lakes in all of North America. Breathing the air here is like drinking from a spring that gushes pure oxygen. Woodpeckers, jays, flying squirrels, chipmunks, deer, groundhogs and who knows what else wander into view all day—the deer especially in the late evening light. Amid such beauty, it’s hard to believe all of Europe is awash in the ugliness of war.
My father has not yet come down from Rochester. Jack came to visit for a week. As usual he was proposing mad ideas of travelling to exotic places together. We commiserated over our broken hearts—he is still brutally ignored by the famous Emma whom I’ve yet to meet. Even so, I’m afraid I annoyed him by being able to talk only of you. Even a midnight swim couldn’t cheer us up.
Now that I have the place to myself I should be turning out poems, stories, novels, but my thoughts flee me. They see me coming and hide. And so I think of you.
I know you well enough, after three years, to know that the concord between us was not a figment of my imagination. I know that you felt it too, saw it in your shining eyes, heard it in your laughter, felt it in the intimacy of your confessions, treasured it in your honesty and your trust.
Oh, Imogen, I whispered your name because I had to; I whispered I love you because it is true.
I miss you beyond all telling.
Quentin
Imogen folded the letter and stuffed it back into the envelope. What could she do to stop this? Several letters ago she had told him she didn’t think it was a good idea for her to reply. Perhaps she should have said she wouldn’t even read them. The truth was she didn’t want to think about Quentin anymore; she couldn’t. That part of her life was over.
* * *
—
It was a Saturday morning, two days before she was to start her summer job, and for once it was not rainy or even overcast. Her equanimity had slowly reasserted itself, and Imogen had plans to devote the day to the simple pleasures of a walk in the park, a visit to the natural history museum, and a good browse in a bookstore or two. She was heading for the front door when her father called to her from his study, which was just off the front hall.
“Imogen? Would you come in here, please?”
She was startled to see him seated at his desk, looking at her as if he’d been waiting; she had assumed he was away on one of his “working weekends.” She stepped into the office, clutching her bag and parasol.
“Sit down, please.”
She did so without removing her hat, to let him know that she had no wish to linger.
Her father sat with his hands, framed by their starched white cuffs, clasped before him on the desk. “You’re a medical person, now, and I’d appreciate your opinion on something. I’d like to know, in your medical opinion, what is wrong with your mother.”
“Why, Father—is she ill?”
“You know she’s ill. I think you’re familiar with her symptoms. These constant migraines, for example. She’s had them for years.”
“I couldn’t possibly diagnose her without examining her, and I doubt Mother would agree to that. Nor would it be proper to discuss any diagnosis with a third party.”
“Your punctiliousness is bracing.” Her father stared at her. “Then perhaps you would be so good as to speculate, based on your medical education, on a hypothetical. Suppose someone has been suffering constantly from headaches, has seen the doctors again and again over the years. Claims they can’t help her. They find nothing.”
“No one knows what causes migraines. It could be allergy, eyestrain, nervous distress—no one knows for sure.”
“You must have studied the symptoms, in your training?”
“They vary. The main one is intense discomfort on one side of the cranium. It can be accompanied by hypersensitivity to light or sound—sometimes with nausea and vomiting. Sometimes with visual distortion or even partial blindness.”
“And if the patient never shows those symptoms? No symptoms beyond headache and a desire to shut oneself away in a room?”
“Headache could be caused by many things.”
“Yes, yes, headache…” He waved this idea away. “Suppose that’s just a cover, an excuse. I’m talking about joylessness, a lack of emotion generally, in fact a kind of shrinking—from family, from life, from the world.” He leaned forward and enunciated his next sentence heavily, emphasizing each syllable as if his daughter were hard of hearing. “An inability to experience happiness or contentment.”
“Well, now you’re describing depression.”
“Your mother has everything a woman needs. I’ve made
sure of that.”
Imogen could think of several responses to this but made none.
“Suppose this hypothetical patient has every reason to be happy—a successful husband, four beautiful daughters, a beautiful house. Doesn’t have to work, but has interests—gardening, the City Beautiful movement, books—and yet seems to find it impossible, physically impossible, to smile.”
“Well, I’m not a psychiatrist yet, but I know that depression can be brought on by surrounding circumstances—overwhelming responsibilities, sudden reversals in romance or financial matters. Longer-term, it might be caused by an unaddressed grief. A death in the family…”
“People die, Imogen. Children die. You can’t grieve for sixteen years. You survive, you go on, what choice is there?”
“Or perhaps a hidden anger.”
“No.” Lang shook his head. “No. You know your mother. Your mother is not an angry person. She’s very even-tempered. Adults come to terms with things. Accept things.”
“Yes, well.” Imogen stood up, clutching bag and parasol. “Some things are harder to accept than others. Now really I must go.”
He looked her up and down. “I can’t help but observe that the benefits of a medical education seem few. Your mother is suffering, Imogen. We are all suffering. And you can’t be of any assistance?”
“Because the problem you’re describing, Father, is not medical. No one expects a doctor to cure heartbreak. Or loneliness. Or humiliation.”
“You said yourself depression is at the heart of this case.”
“What case is that?” Rose came in and set a tray down on the corner of the desk.
“A hypothetical, my dear.”
She poured her husband a cup of coffee from a silver pot. “Ah, yes, your hypotheticals. Shall I bring a cup for you, Imogen?”
“No, thank you, Mother. I’m just on my way out.”
“Shame. So nice to see you discussing case law with your father, though surely Alice is more qualified.” She turned to her husband and picked up the tray, her pale features expressing nothing. “I believe I’ll go and lie down for a while. These sudden changes in the weather always flatten one so.”