by M. J. Cates
“I overheard Jasper Bylsma talking about someone named ‘Snake’ Walcott—that wouldn’t be the same…”
“I know!” Donna exclaimed. “I know! He’s quite beyond the pale! But he’s also brilliant, and you’re just going to have to meet him. I’ve told him all about you and he’s invited us both to dinner.”
* * *
—
William “Snake” Walcott lived and worked in a modest townhouse near the very pricey area of Eutaw Place. He was six foot four of red-faced, mutton-chopped garrulity and good humour, dressed, as Donna had said, in a British naval uniform. He greeted both women eagerly, telling Imogen, “Your reputation precedes you. Artemis here can’t stop singing your praises.”
He herded them into his front parlour, which was furnished with the psychoanalytic couch, a desk, many overlapping oriental rugs, and (Imogen estimated) about a thousand books. Sherry was served by a Chinese houseboy in a white jacket, a shiny ponytail vivid down his back.
Imogen pointed to the arrangement of couch and armchair. “You don’t sit behind the patient?”
“Never. Sit where the patient can see me. Don’t go in for all this disembodied nonsense. Grandiose. Counterproductive, too—patients spending years trying to sort out what the analyst is thinking. Let ’em see, I say. Let ’em see.”
Grandiose seemed an odd objection, coming from someone dressed like the commander of a dreadnought, but Imogen was already trying to absorb the other oddities of the place. The glass cases that lined one wall housed a collection of motionless snakes. They varied in size from twelve inches to about twelve feet.
“Don’t worry,” Donna said, “they’re stuffed. Dr. Walcott is a herpetologist, among other things.”
The evidence was everywhere, from fanged skulls to rattled tails bleached white as chalk. They hung on walls, curled in corners, and lounged on top of a baby grand. A twelve-foot display case housed a motionless python.
News of Prohibition had apparently never reached the house of Walcott. When they were seated in the dining room, the houseboy ferried bottle after bottle of Château Talbot from kitchen to table. Walcott gulped his wine from a flagon that required constant refilling; the women’s places had been set with sparkling crystal. Dinner was served by a silent maid who darted in and out of the room like a hyper-efficient sprite.
Walcott was a swiller of claret and a teller of tales, a veritable Niagara of knowledge and spewer of facts, ideas, and opinions. “Look, I worship Old Siggy, I truly do, but he wants to be the St. Benedict of psychotherapy, and it’s just not on. We’re all medical people at this table. Do we really want to confine ourselves to a monastic rule that applies one idea and a handful of techniques to every suffering being who comes begging for help? What do you say, Lang?”
Far from being offended at being thus addressed, Imogen glowed. At the Phipps, the men all referred to each other by their last names, often in a tone that conveyed both affection and respect, but always addressed the women as Dr. This, Nurse That. Had Jonas Ganz addressed her in this way she would have swooned with pleasure.
She put down her glass, which the houseboy instantly refilled. “Are you talking about new techniques,” she asked, “or actual alternative therapies?”
Walcott winked at Donna, said “I like her” while simultaneously stifling a belch, and turned once more to Imogen. “A change of technique, depending on degree, may well amount to an alternative therapy. I talk of counter-transference—yes, she who must not be named. You can’t sit back and pretend it isn’t happening, but that’s what Freud would have us do. Patient says, ‘Hang on, Doctor, I’m sensing a certain disdain on your high and mighty part,’ and we’re supposed to emit a low, ambiguous noise—at most.”
“But the point is for the patient to work through their feelings for the analyst.”
“Six months into treatment it’s quite common for a patient to say, ‘I know I’m not as important to you as you are to me.’ How would you respond to that, Lang?”
“If I were doing analysis—which we’re not, at the Phipps—I wouldn’t reply at all. I would acknowledge I’d heard it and wait for the patient to turn her own analytic power back on herself—Why do I think this way? Does it remind me of other relationships? Am I generally a suspicious person?”
“Hah.” Walcott slammed down his flagon. “But what have you really done? Here the patient has made an accurate observation. If you respond your way, Freud’s way, you undermine her sense of reality—which is why she’s there in the first place! A patient says, ‘Doctor, why are you so cold? I feel that you don’t like me—perhaps even hate me.’ I tell her straight out, ‘It’s not that I don’t like you or lack sympathy. But I cannot bring the same warmth as you to our sessions because I have forty patients, and you have but one analyst. The imbalance is built in. Voilà. The patient is reassured that on this one point, at least, she is not crazy. Do it your way and you consign her to an endless undertow of suspicion.”
“Do it your way,” Imogen said, “and you short-circuit her ability to work things through for herself.”
Walcott turned his florid face to Donna. “You neglected to warn me that your friend was so argumentative and apparently oblivious to a woman’s proper place in the medical world.”
Imogen’s cheek grew hot. “Really, sir.”
Donna, beautiful in the candlelight, placed a warm palm on Imogen’s hand. “He’s teasing you, my darling.”
“Oh.” Imogen dropped her gaze to the tablecloth. “Well.”
“An analyst who refuses to admit his feelings,” Walcott went on, “condemns a person who is already confused and anxious—perhaps even paranoid—to intolerable ambiguity. I have one patient who is exceedingly demanding—jealous of other patients, always wanting sessions when I’m not available, always angling for free treatment, often angry. Three weeks ago she said, ‘I know you don’t like me.’ And I said, ‘I get irritated by your constant demands. I find your jealousy of other patients tiresome. I’d rather you didn’t behave this way. But I’m quite willing to keep seeing you as long as you want to keep coming.’ ”
“And how did she react?”
“With outrage. Tears. Accusations.”
“Well, now who’s replicating the patient’s other experiences and problems?”
“I am—but with one big difference. I am setting my feelings before her in the bright light of day. Her exigent temperament causes her to alienate colleagues, suitors, even friends. They don’t tell her why, they just abandon her.”
“But you’ve prevented her from realizing it for herself. You’re trying to force insight on someone who is not ready for it.”
“Rubbish, Lang. I’m giving her a crystal-clear glimpse of her reality, and she knows it. Of course it hurt at first—she missed three sessions that week. But since then her behaviour has improved; therefore her relationship with me has improved. Our sessions now focus on her life outside my office, rather than her demands on me. Consequently I’ve every reason to think her life will improve. Friends will stay. Perhaps lovers too.”
“You should work with Robert Taunton. You’re clearly a behaviourist.”
“Artemis! Save me from this horror!”
“She has a point,” Donna said.
“She does,” Walcott acknowledged. “And I dare say Mr. Taunton does too.” He pushed his plate forward and placed his elbows on the table. “The art, Dr. Lang, is to know when a silence is likely to be productive and when it is not. Otherwise, our patients might as well book appointments with department-store mannequins.
“Eight out of ten patients come to me because of childhood trauma. Sometimes it’s physical abuse—horrendous whippings, beatings, what have you. Other times, it’s sexual. Papa gets into the whisky and next thing you know his four-year-old daughter is hemorrhaging from her vagina. Twenty years later, here she comes begging for help because she can’t walk without pain, she has dysmenorrhea, and finds herself compulsively masturbating. Such patients, aside fro
m the sexual assault, were damaged in their childhood by the lies and hypocrisy of those whose duty it was to protect them. By those who spouted loving words while ravaging their little bodies and souls, and heaping on them a legacy of guilt and anxiety.
“This does not mean they cannot be burdensome. I emit a sigh, and they sense I am fed up with their evasions and repetitions, and they get up the courage to say so. Freud would have me either deny it or not reply at all, thus repeating the earlier trauma.” He stabbed the table with a stubby index finger for emphasis. “Those whose duty it is to heal are now inflicting new damage, thus repeating the earlier trauma. It’s preposterous.” He took a few glugs of his wine and wiped his mouth.
“So you make your feelings the subject.”
“If feelings aren’t the subject, Lang, I don’t know what is. Tell her, Artemis.”
“I’d much rather listen to you two. As you know, I only live to parrot everything you say.”
“Lying shrew. Would it were so.” He turned to the maid. “O’Brien, let’s have some more of that roast beef. How’s everyone for roast beef? Are we sated, all?”
The other two were indeed sated, but Walcott pronged two more slices from the proffered tray and sloshed them with gravy. He dug into them and, chewing with gusto, went on. “Just now I’m working on a theory of mutual analysis. Patient gets to analyze analyst.”
“Who would get paid for such sessions—you or the patient?”
“Sly, Lang, very sly. It’s an experiment.” He held up his flagon as if for a toast. “Experiment. That is the one thing I will say in my favour: I never cease to experiment. But really, sometimes one yearns for some bedrock science, don’t you find? Sometimes I fear we’re all mere collectors of anecdotes.”
The endless flagons were beginning to show their effect. Wine was spilled, a dish was brushed from the table.
“I have one patient,” he said, “not only did her father regularly have carnal knowledge of her from the age of four until the age of thirteen, he passed her around to his two sons as well.”
“She’s now a hysteric, I take it?”
“And hysterics always make things up—that your point?”
Imogen refused to shrink under his aggression. “That they are prone to fiction is well documented. I merely wonder if the father would really risk involving his sons.”
“He’s faced no serious consequences thus far. Through the efforts of a concerned teacher, the girl was brought to the authorities where, with the greatest reluctance, she told them of her suffering. She was only thirteen, and they were skeptical, to say the least. But they asked her to describe her experiences in detail and she said, ‘Papa’s penis was red and blue and black.’ Aha, you say, evidence of infantile fantasy right there! Hysterical mendacity! Well, the chief inspector, uniquely assiduous in my experience, took it upon himself to have the father’s genitals examined. Lo and behold: red and blue and black. It seems the loving patriarch had had his organ tattooed in the image of the devil. We’ll see what happens at his trial.”
“How was your patient’s demeanour when she told you all this?”
“Reticent. It took weeks for her to come out with it, and she was tearful in the extreme, poor girl. Not all hysterics are seeking attention.”
“The devil, indeed,” Donna said. “Now that you’ve upset and appalled my friend, perhaps we may talk of something else?”
“Not upset,” Imogen said. “Just thoughtful.” The expression, an echo of Quentin’s rejoinder in biology class so many years ago, laid a sudden weight on her heart.
“Do you like music?” Walcott asked.
“Very much.”
“Excellent. I have purchased a shiny new Victrola. Prepare to be astounded.”
* * *
—
They adjourned to a room furnished with overstuffed chairs draped with scarves and shawls, and piled high with silk cushions—thankfully, no snakes—and he played them the adagietto from Beethoven’s Seventh. Sombre and insistent, the music soon marched all thoughts of work out the door. Imogen resolved to buy herself a Victrola when and if she should ever have the cash to do so—and maybe even a house to put it in.
Walcott closed his eyes as he listened, his right hand inscribing maestro triangles in time to strings and trombones. When the music finished, the maid served tea and sweets, and Dr. Walcott plied Imogen with question after question about her studies and her background, which she answered circumspectly. He talked much of cats—he was considering breeding a particular type of cat, though his lodgings showed no signs of a feline inhabitant. He talked of hypnosis and near-hypnotic states, he spoke passionately about shell shock and how it took debating tactics that veered perilously close to violence to convince the military brass that shell shock was real. His passion on the subject was what had got him an early discharge from the military. His eyes watered as he told them of the horribly damaged men who were sent back to Flanders for more pointless punishment. And then, quite suddenly, his eyes closed and he began to snore. The streetcars having ceased to run, the houseboy summoned a taxi.
“Cats and snakes, indeed,” Imogen said in the back seat.
Donna, almost as sleepy as her mentor, rested her head on Imogen’s shoulder.
“Did you like him? You must like him. Tell me you do.”
“He is definitely a force of nature,” Imogen said. “Equal parts frightening and inspiring.”
“Oh, Papa Walcott is a big pussycat.”
“Papa, is it?”
“He is a sort of papa to me,” Donna said dreamily. “I think everyone’s analyst is, or should be, in loco parentis. Walcott certainly thinks so. He believes the analyst should give everything he can to the patient. He even lets me kiss him.”
Imogen pulled away to look at her friend.
Donna gave her a little shove. “Don’t go all prim on me.”
“But I am shocked, Donna. Thoroughly shocked.”
“It’s not what you think. It has to do with my childhood.”
“It’s wrong, Donna. Will you have male patients kissing their female analysts? If their neurosis goes back to the breast will you suckle them?”
“Don’t be pious.”
“Well, don’t you be such a trollop, then.”
Donna rested her head on Imogen’s shoulder again. “You know I love you, don’t you?”
“I suppose.”
Donna snuggled closer. “Mumma.”
Fits of giggles ensued, which they tried unsuccessfully to suppress, and the driver turned around to scowl at them.
“You really are too naughty,” Imogen said after he’d dropped them at the Phipps’s gate. Banners calling on citizens to buy war bonds flapped in the breeze. “You’ll get in terrible trouble one day, and as I’m not your pathogenic mumma, you will have only yourself to blame.”
They walked arm in arm under the elms. Moonlight etched in light and shadow the elegant façade of the Phipps. The psychology lab on three gave off a dull glow.
“It’s nearly 2 a.m.,” Imogen said. “How are we going to get by the Duke?”
The Duke was the Phipps’s night watchman, so named not only because his last name was Marlborough but because of his exceedingly upright, not to say humourless, manner.
“I expect you’ll have to offer him sexual favours.”
“Donna, stop. You frighten me sometimes, you really do. Shall we go in through the dispensary?”
“There’ll be people there. Let’s just go in the front.”
There were no restrictions on the residents’ comings and goings, officially, but two single women coming in at this time of night would raise eyebrows, and the Duke would be honour bound to record their arrival. Luckily, his modest, pulpit-like station on the first floor was vacant—he must have been making his rounds.
They avoided the elevator, moving as silently as they could on the marble floors to the staircase. As they were going up, they heard footsteps descending from the third floor. They paused, each
on one end of a middle stair. It was not the Duke who appeared but Robert Taunton’s new—and annoyingly pretty—graduate student, Sara Sands, wearing her coat but in her stocking feet—a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, clutching her shoes in one hand and a book in the other. Seeing Donna and Imogen, she froze in a shaft of light.
“My, aren’t we working late,” Donna said.
“Good evening, Doctor. I forgot something in the lab.”
“Your shoes, apparently.”
“No, no, my house keys. I just—” Miss Sands, usually a remarkably self-possessed young woman, was momentarily flustered. “I forgot my keys.”
“Ah, yes—one’s elusive keys. Good night, Miss Sands.”
“Good night.”
Imogen and Donna continued to the fourth floor. When they reached their rooms, Donna paused at the door. She put a finger to her lips and whispered, “Listen for it: elevator next, stopping at three, going down to the dispensary.”
“No,” Imogen said. “Really?”
Something metal clanked in the elevator shaft next door. They could hear it open on the floor below, then close.
Donna said one word: “Window.”
Imogen opened her door and the two of them rushed to her window without turning on the light.
“Watch,” Donna said. “He’ll come from the dispensary side.”
A moment later they saw the confident form of Robert Taunton, hat in hand, overcoat flapping, crossing in front of the building and heading toward Wolfe Street.
“Told you,” Donna said. “The lecher.”
Imogen got up and switched on the light and took off her coat. “That poor, dim girl—she must know he’ll drop her the minute he gets bored.”
“Oh, hell,” Donna said. “Which of us knows any damn thing?”
9
For Imogen the following weeks and months seemed composed of nothing but rain. Her depression had lifted, but a deep sadness about Quentin remained.