by M. J. Cates
Carl was an energetic skater, constantly scooting ahead and then allowing Imogen to catch up, wriggling backward ahead of her so they could talk face to face. Skating was not a skill that came naturally to Imogen. A tendency to go pigeon-toed forced her to stare at her feet—distressing, when you wanted above all to look your best. When Carl had suggested the outing she had almost declined out of vanity. But he was such a physical entity, so clearly in need of action, motion, or sheer doing, that she couldn’t deny him.
“Ganz scribbles a note,” he told her now, “and Taunton scribbles a note in reply—they courier them to each other via graduate student.” Carl did a loop around her and swooped back. “The chief is constantly urging him to design this experiment or that and Taunton tells him to mind his own business. Try to keep your ankles straight.”
“They won’t stay, I’m afraid.”
“You’re doing well, you’re doing well. Your balance is good.”
“I think I’m more suited to seated forms of recreation. Perhaps canasta or bridge.”
“Ganz has no authority over what Taunton chooses to research of course, so he’s just wasting his time. You should hear Taunton. It’s not just about Ganz; he has nothing but contempt for psychiatry as a whole.”
“Oh, I’ve heard him all right.” Imogen had to swerve to miss a stumbling child and nearly upended herself.
“Stop looking at your feet.”
“I can’t see them anyway.”
“Don’t look at them. You balance by looking outward, not downward. Do you need to sit down?”
“Thank you, I’m perfectly fine.”
“Taunton and Sara have got their hands on a movie camera from somewhere. They’re planning to film one of their experiments with an infant. It’s to do with how we learn to be afraid.”
“You know, I think I will sit down. Keep skating if you want.”
“Don’t be silly—it’s your company I’m after. I’ve never had my own psychiatrist before. Did you know my last name is actually Bonaparte?”
“We haven’t had any Napoleons at the Phipps, so far as I know, but there was a Teddy Roosevelt at the state asylum. He was absolutely unreachable. It sounds funny, something like that, but it’s the saddest thing in the world.”
Carl skated to the little gate in the surrounding rail, opened it, and stepped through. He motioned for her to join him, as if she were unaware of the location of the gate or his current whereabouts. His rosy cheeks and curly hair—not to mention his plaid, flapping scarf—well, she could have kissed him right there in front of the whole skating crowd.
She came to a wobbly stop, skate tips meeting the wooden border with a clonk.
Carl offered his hand as she stepped through. “What are you smiling about?”
“You. You look sweet as a Christmas gnome.”
“Elves, my dear, not gnomes. How are your ankles?”
“In exquisite agony.”
They removed their skates and went upstairs to an open-air café where they bought hot chocolate and pastries from a man in a striped outfit. The day was cold and still, but it was warm in the sunlight, and warmer still under one of the gas-powered reflective heaters. Skaters circled the rink below them like a ragged carousel. The hills of the park were draped with a thin coverlet of snow.
“It makes me miss Chicago,” Imogen said. “Except it was always this cold there.”
“Stick with me, my dear…” He reached across the table and took her hand in his. “And I promise to keep you warm forever.”
Carl’s impetuousness was apparently contagious, because later, on the porch of the Phipps, in the darkness of the January evening, she allowed him to kiss her for a long time, and let his hands wander much too far before she finally put a stop to it. And not a moment too soon, for Donna Artemis appeared out of nowhere and said tartly, “You must be careful of psychologists—they’re notoriously unstable.”
“Not this one,” Imogen said. “Carl is the only person I’ve ever met who has absolutely no neuroses.”
“Well, this just gets more sinister by the minute. Be off with you, Satan. Dr. Lang is late for supper.”
* * *
—
Donna was at first amused by Imogen’s romance and charmed by her friend’s excitement, if not exactly bowled over by the man who provoked it, but she soon seemed to build up a wall against him. Imogen wondered for a time if Donna was jealous. With Carl in the picture, it was Imogen’s turn to be unavailable for tea, or a movie, or even a shopping trip. Perhaps it was only natural that Donna should resent the person who had stolen away her friend.
One Saturday afternoon she and Carl were taking a lazy stroll along Charles Street when they bumped into Donna coming out of Eichelberger’s book store. The three of them adjourned to a tea shop three doors down. The conversation went well enough. They talked about the Phipps, and tennis, and Ganz (the chief was always a reliable subject), but Carl was a little taken aback that Donna was so acerbic in her remarks about Taunton. Donna, perhaps sensing this, asked Carl about his work, and he chatted happily for a quarter of an hour about his rats. But as he talked, Imogen sensed a slackening in Donna’s interest, though she nodded, and kept a small smile fixed on her face. When Carl went to the counter to get some change for a tip, Donna got up to follow him. Imogen watched from the table, somewhat mystified, as they exchanged a few words.
The three of them parted on Charles Street. Donna had to hurry home to get ready for the opera Dr. Walcott was taking her to that evening, a career in psychoanalysis—or so Imogen teased her—apparently coming with a ticket to the high life. When they had walked a couple of blocks Imogen asked Carl what he thought of her friend.
“A nice enough woman,” he allowed, “and very smart.”
“Yes, she is that.”
“D’you know what she said to me, over at the counter?”
“No. I did wonder.”
“She said, ‘So, do you love her?’ Just like that.”
“Did she? And you said…?”
“I said I certainly do. And she said, ‘You’d better. Because if you ever hurt her I’ll probably have to kill you.’ ”
“Oh, that’s just Donna. She’s all bluster, you know.”
“Well, yes—I don’t think she was actually threatening me with death—but still I thought it an extraordinary thing to say. I mean, why would I hurt you?”
“It’s just her peculiar way of telling you she loves me.”
“It put me off, to be honest.”
“You’ll get used to her.”
* * *
—
One evening in early June, Carl stopped into the lab where Imogen was co-ordinating research on possible linkages between clinical observations of patient behaviour and the composition of their blood. Most of her student assistants had gone home for the summer, so she had pages of tabulations spread out on the centre table so that she could further develop the bar graphs for comparison.
Carl was struck by the number of graphs, and the details they illuminated. “I had no idea of the scope of your work,” he said, picking up one of the sheets. “Korsakoff’s syndrome?”
“Yes, we’re looking at what happens to blood composition as the patient withdraws from alcohol dependency. How does it compare to non-toxic cases of transient psychosis as the patient gets better. You can see rough similarities right away.”
He picked up another chart. “Sedation and insomnia.”
“There, we want to see what happens to blood chemistry as a patient gets more sleep. The ward nurses have been so helpful with their observations. They’re getting quite curious about our results too.”
“This is good work, Im.” He tapped the chart with a forefinger. “This should be published. It would be helpful to everybody—clinicians, hospitals, drug researchers. You could expand it to the asylums—get a wider scale. You could—”
“I know. We could have everybody researching. That’s what I’m going to propose to the chief
when I hand this in—assuming he thinks it’s publishable. So far he’s only let me publish a single paper. He’s had two more sitting in his inbox for months.”
“On this research?”
Imogen nodded. “One on manic-depression. One on non-cyclic depression.”
“Well, he won’t sit on this one,” Carl said. “It’s brilliant.”
“I don’t know about brilliant.” Imogen looked around at her charts and graphs. “It’s just common sense.”
Carl laughed and put his hands on his hips, looking her up and down as if she were a racehorse. “You are wonderful.”
“Not really, but I’m—”
“Yes, really.” He stepped closer and hugged her tight. “And I love you, Dr. Lang.”
“Carl, you mustn’t.” She tried to pry his arms away but he was strong. “Carl, please—we’re at work.”
Just as suddenly, he let her go, stepped back, and dropped to one knee.
“Say you’ll marry me.”
“What?”
“Say you’ll marry me, Imogen.”
“Is it really what you want?” She had sensed this was coming for some time now, and knew what she would say. “You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”
“Never.”
“Because I’d want to keep working. I’m not cut out to stay at home.”
“I wouldn’t want you to. I consider your career just as important as mine.” He took hold of her hand. “Truly. I can’t imagine you not working.”
“Did you always plan to propose in the lab?”
“It just came over me.” He kissed her hand. “Please marry me, Imogen. I don’t know what I’ll do if you say no. I’ll have to become a behaviourist and develop a heart of stone.”
“Well,” Imogen said. “We can’t have that.”
* * *
—
They did not set a date because certain financial and bureaucratic matters would first have to be addressed. For one thing, there was the university’s policy against marriage between staff members. What if the board refused to make an exception? And Imogen’s cost of living would go up when she moved out of residence: the expenses of meals, rent, and transportation would mount. She was still categorized—and paid—as an intern, despite the fact that she had completed all her courses and now performed the same duties and worked the same hours as any of the associate psychiatrists.
“I don’t feel I can raise the issue with the chief,” she said one day when they were walking downtown. “If I’m worth promoting, the idea should come from him, not me.”
“I’m not sure what my career prospects are either,” Carl said. “The chief considers me flighty.”
“Flighty?” Imogen said. “How could anyone apply that word to you?”
“Because I used to be in engineering, and then I changed my mind and went into psychology.”
“But of course you would study engineering. I’ve never met anyone who had such a passion for finding out how things work.”
“Ah, but then I did it again, you see. When I got here, I told him and Taunton I was going to study animal learning and then I decided to study cyclical behaviour.”
“I think you may be misreading Dr. Ganz’s facial expressions—everybody does at first. I’m quite sure he admires your ability to strike out in new directions. He’s much like that himself.”
Carl paused to look in the window of a hardware store.
“Well, he’s hoping I’ll turn up something that will explain manic-depression. But he still thinks I’m flighty. Also, he knows Taunton and I are on good terms, and that counts against me.”
Imogen considered this. She would not have thought Dr. Ganz would hold Carl’s closeness to Taunton against him. Not until recently.
As Carl had mentioned, Taunton and Sara Sands had indeed got their hands on a movie camera. They had also once again secured the services of the infant Max a.k.a. Edward from the Harriet Lane Children’s Home next door. Their other requirements, in terms of equipment, were one white rat, one rabbit, a fur coat, and a noise-making source. For this, they chose a four-foot iron bar which, when struck with a hammer, produced a loud clang.
With the camera running, they showed Edward the white rat. He smiled and, displaying not the slightest hesitation, reached for it. The rat was taken away, and he was shown the fur coat. This produced coos and gurgles. The same was true for the rabbit. In the course of several sessions, by making a loud clang every time a rat or rabbit or fur coat was shown to him, they managed to change Edward’s response from coos and gurgles to tears and wails. He learned to fear these harmless things.
A few weeks later “Conditioned Emotional Responses” appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology—credited to Robert Taunton and Sara Sands—and the study of human learning and behaviour would never be the same. Taunton was confirmed as the shining star in the Phipps crown.
Ganz might have appreciated the lustre Taunton’s revolutionary experiment brought to the institution, were it not for how Taunton gloried in his new-found fame, becoming even more arrogant in his attitude to anything that was not behaviourism. The fact that his photograph appeared on the July cover of Time only made things worse.
Things reached their nadir, that year, at the staff Christmas party. Taunton’s department put on an elaborate skit—there was a house tradition for such entertainment—in which an “esteemed professor,” clearly meant to be Ganz, answered every question about his psychological theories in what sounded like Chinese. After that, Dr. Ganz not only refused to speak to Taunton, he refused to speak about him.
Imogen felt she had to warn Carl. “I don’t think he’s so small a man that he will hold your work association with Taunton against you. But you probably shouldn’t pal around with him in off-hours.”
“He’s my friend, Imogen. I can’t just drop him.”
But, she suggested, perhaps he could make his excuses for a few weeks until Dr. Ganz’s anger cooled. “Tell him you’re too busy seeing the woman of your dreams.”
“My angel, you mean.”
“Exactly.”
“The woman I adore and yet want to ravish.”
Carl put his hands on her waist but Imogen took hold of his wrists and kissed him on the nose.
“You can ravish me when we’re married.”
“We really must talk to Ganz about it,” Carl said. “If the university is going to stand in our way, the sooner we know the better.”
“I’ve been putting it off. The prospect makes me nervous.”
“Really?” Carl scanned her face. “You know he adores you.”
“He treats me the same as everyone else.”
Carl shook his head. “He looks at you like a proud papa.”
“Carl, he does not. He’s my employer. He’s just a fatherly sort of person. And don’t smile like that.”
“Like what?”
“With amused skepticism. It’s extremely irritating.”
“Consider it done.” He covered his mouth with his hand for a moment and the smile vanished. “I shall obey you in all things.”
“A sound policy.”
* * *
—
Imogen fretted about talking to Ganz the entire next day, and continued putting it off until a quarter to five; he would be leaving for home in fifteen minutes. She ignored the elevator and rushed downstairs. Mr. Penn was sliding files into cabinets, tucking other items into his desk drawers.
“I need to see Dr. Ganz,” Imogen said, breathless from nerves, as well as the stairs. “He’s still here, isn’t he?”
“He is about to leave for the day. Shall I book you an appointment?”
“No, it’s not a—well, it’s a personal matter, and—”
The door to the inner office opened and Ganz leaned out. “Mr. Penn, you may bring my car round front. I believe you have the keys.”
“I do, sir.”
“Dr. Lang—what brings you here?”
“I need to talk to you about
something, if you have a moment.”
“A personal matter,” Mr. Penn put in.
“Yes, but an important one,” Imogen said. “Please. If you can spare the time.”
Dr. Ganz opened the door wider. “Of course.”
She sat across from him, took a deep breath, and told him she and Carl were to be married. They had not yet settled on a date, but they hoped it would be soon.
“Mm, yes.” Ganz stared at her, fingering his goatee. “I feared it would be something of the sort.”
It was as if she had told him she had been diagnosed with TB.
“Oh, he’s a fine young man,” the chief added, as if overhearing her thoughts, “but it seems to me precipitous. He’s only been here, what, a year?”
“A year and a half—and we are very much in love. I hoped you would be happier for me.”
“Of course. I wish for you every personal happiness.”
“But?”
“To be honest, Dr. Lang, I wonder if you aren’t rushing into marriage as a kind of medication for your earlier unhappiness.”
“My depression, you mean?”
“Your depression, yes, but I am also concerned you may underestimate the impact of your earlier loss—your friend who went to war.”
It was disorienting, when she was feeling so lucky and optimistic, to be reminded of Quentin.
“He meant a lot to me,” she said evenly, “and I will never forget him. As to depression, I’m not looking to marriage as a cure. Carl makes me happy—that’s the simple truth of it. I love him. We’re good for each other. But I don’t see him as my saviour.”
Really, she was thinking, could Ganz not be a little less the psychiatrist for once?
“But what if children should come along? How will you afford them?”
“That is definitely a concern—in fact, I was going to write you a letter on that subject—but what I really wanted to discuss was the hospital policy against marriage between staff members.”