by M. J. Cates
“Well, I don’t know that the Phipps loves me,” Imogen said.
“You’re joking. Everyone knows you and Carl get invited to the chief’s home for dinner. That’s the highest honour available in this place.”
“Do you know what my job title is?”
“Associate psychiatrist, I should have thought.”
“It isn’t.”
“What then? Third assistant?”
“I’m still classed as an intern.”
“That can’t be right. There must be some mistake.”
“Believe me, I’ve asked. There’s no mistake. Do you know how embarrassing it is when I’m corresponding with other institutions? The chief pathologist at McLean wrote back and said, ‘I beg your pardon, I thought I was communicating with the head of your histology lab, and now I see you are an intern. Please direct my inquiries to someone with the proper authority to answer them.’ ”
“How humiliating. You must thrash this out with Ganz at once.”
“Oh, I’ve tried to raise it with him, but you know how he is—when you raise anything that involves money he gets extremely tense. He seems far more comfortable talking about sex than money.”
“That’s true of all psychiatrists.”
“It wouldn’t be so disturbing if he didn’t seem so warm to me sometimes—almost like a father. He can’t be unaware that this tightfistedness feels like rejection.”
“Well, look how he treats me. One minute he’s praising me as brilliant beyond compare, the next minute he’s practically calling me a delinquent little whore.”
“Donna, he’s not. He’s just concerned that you aren’t respecting Phipps policies.”
“Which are what, for God’s sake? Do you know where he stands on psychoanalysis?”
“Yes. He sees it as valuable in general but far too expensive and time-consuming for public patients at the Phipps. Which is why I study it in my off-hours.”
“But you know he’s making a fortune analyzing his own patients.”
“He can’t be. They don’t stay long enough.”
“Where do you think he goes every summer?”
“Los Angeles. He likes it there.”
“Hah! He likes it there because the McCormick family pays him two thousand dollars a week to psychoanalyze the son they’ve got locked up in his own house.”
“The McCormicks? You mean the McCormicks?”
“The ones who manufacture every tractor on every farm in every country on earth. Those McCormicks.”
“How do you know he gets two thousand a week?”
“Because Snake gets the same when he treats him.”
“But I heard the McCormick son is totally psychotic—beyond all reach.”
“You heard right.”
“Two thousand a week. That’s more than I earn in six months.”
“Private practice, sweetheart. Do you realize how many people—people who can afford it—would pay for psychiatric treatment if it didn’t involve going to an asylum or a hospital? The so-called nerve doctors are getting rich and they’ve never even heard of a ‘schizophrenic reaction.’ ”
Donna swept up her coat and bag and kissed Imogen on the cheek. “Write him a letter, darling. Point by point, telling him your situation. You’ve got children now, for pity’s sake, you can’t live on intern money.”
“I know you’re right, I just…”
“Just what?”
“I don’t know. I just feel this block against doing anything that might upset him.”
“You don’t want to annoy Daddy, you mean.”
“Me? You should talk if we’re getting on the subject of upsetting Daddy. You do it on purpose—why do you suppose that would be?” Donna laughed. “Don’t you love being a psychiatrist? It makes everything so simple.”
* * *
—
Despite the issues of money and status, the next few years of Imogen’s life seemed to fly by. Not only did she manage to avoid even a single bout of depression, she was actively happy most days, waking up in the morning to the sound of Carl’s coffee grinder or the squeals of the twins, and looking forward to the rest of the day. Her work on the blood chemistry of schizophrenics looked promising, and she enjoyed overseeing the work of the occasional graduate student. On the wards, she found it deeply rewarding to help a patient through a transient psychosis, a suicidal depression, or the inevitable crash from a period of mania.
Although she enjoyed the logic and quiet of the lab, she gradually discovered that talk therapy was the highlight of her workday. There were many hours of no progress, of course, but the occasional moment of insight, when a patient came to recognize a truth about herself she had long denied, made up for those. She read and reread the works of Freud, Jung, and Ferenczi, and without adopting the full range of psychoanalytic treatment (which would be sure to anger Dr. Ganz), managed to incorporate their thinking into her own clinical skills.
Home life was exhausting—especially once the twins became mobile and discovered every breakable or dangerous object within their ever-lengthening reach. She took the usual pictures of birthdays and milestones and discovered in the process that she was a perfectly terrible photographer. (Carl, of course, was an instant expert.) It was fascinating to watch the twins’ personalities become more and more distinct—Aubrey essentially sunny and chatty, Charlotte quieter and more watchful but also more imaginative. Best of all, they loved each other’s company—almost always preferring to do things together. As they got older, Imogen began to fret more and more about their health—the spectre of scarlet fever loomed large in her worries—but the two of them managed to reach the age of five without suffering anything worse than chicken pox.
Myra was a constant, cheerful presence in the children’s lives during the week. On weekends and the occasional evening, one of Carl’s graduate students, a young woman named Cynthia Bee, would babysit. She was a plumpish brunette with a big laugh and a self-deprecating sense of humour. Carl had brought her home for dinner more than once, and Imogen took to her right away. One of Cynthia’s most attractive qualities was that she loved children and showed great interest in Charlotte and Aubrey—tossing them about and tickling them and making up silly stories for their entertainment.
Being blessed with such an abundance of happiness made Imogen want to share it. She made efforts to keep in touch with her mother, sending her the occasional letter and tiny square photographs of the children. Her mother’s letters in response were characteristically dry and factual, but Imogen thought she detected a certain peace of mind in them as well. This may have been wishful thinking on her part. She invited Rose several times to come and visit in Baltimore, but her mother always found a reason to put it off for “another time.”
Money matters became more urgent when their landlord announced yet another increase in their rent. Carl, like Donna, advised Imogen to raise the issues of position and salary with Dr. Ganz. “You work hard, he respects you, you deserve better,” he said more than once, and Imogen promised to do it soon.
Recently Carl had lodged a half-amused complaint that she never showed any interest in his work. This was unfair; they discussed his work quite often. The truth was Imogen had trouble keeping track of Carl’s multitudinous experiments—he worked on so many projects at once, wrangling a platoon of graduate students to assist him.
She decided to remedy this one afternoon by visiting him in the psychology lab. They rarely dropped in on each other, even though their labs were both on the third floor. Carl was delighted to see her, immediately introducing her to a cadaver-pale graduate student clutching a clipboard, who was tending to an array of bubbling cylinders along one wall.
“This is Mr. Codwell. Mr. Codwell, this is my wife, Dr. Lang.”
Codwell gave a sickly grin and, clutching his clipboard even tighter, turned once more to his bubbling cylinders.
“What’s the experiment of the day?” Imogen asked, looking around.
“Mr. Codwell
and I are hoping to put together a paper by next week on the phenomenon of sudden unexplained death in man and animals. I told you about the voodoo deaths, remember?”
“Oh, yes. Men dying within days of being cursed by the witch doctor.”
“Turns out it’s more common than I thought. Anthropologists are finding it in Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, as well as Haiti. And in our own culture as well. Do you have the time—can I explain in full?”
“Yes, of course—that’s why I’m here.”
“Well, in our culture you’ll find responsible surgeons won’t operate on patients who are truly terrified of the procedure. Such patients have been known to die on the table before the first incision. You also get sudden deaths from fright, the sight of blood, hypodermics, sudden immersion in water, and no one knows why.”
Carl’s eyes brightened and his hand motions became more emphatic as he spoke, and Imogen was glad she’d come by. How often had he listened to her as she rattled on about the subtleties of blood samples, the miseries of a patient, or the beauty of psychoanalytic theory?
“Up to now, anthropologists have thought that in the case of witch doctors, the victim is so terrified that he suffers a continuous outpouring of adrenalin. They can’t run tests in the field, unfortunately, but they surmise that the individual would hyperventilate, have a rapid pulse, and show hemoconcentration from loss of fluids from blood to tissue. Ultimately the heart would speed up until finally it contracted altogether and you’d get death in systole. Our studies on rats may throw light on the underlying mechanisms in man—in our own culture, as well as in Haiti or wherever. I should mention by way of prelude that a similar phenomenon has been observed in rats.”
Imogen looked over at pasty Mr. Codwell and the bubbling cylinders. They were a good twelve feet distant, and the glass was somewhat fogged, but she thought she could make out tails and paddling feet.
“A fellow over at Yale was studying rats’ eating habits and, in order to prevent separate food sources from being inter-contaminated, he had to shave off their whiskers. Well, a peculiar thing happened: most of the rats began incessantly pushing their noses into the corners of the cages or into their food cups in a kind of corkscrew motion. Eight days later the rats were dead.”
Carl illustrated this by mimicking a screwdriver action with his right hand. “Why are you smiling?”
“No reason. It’s fascinating.”
He gestured toward the cylinders.
“In our studies on responses to stress we’ve been measuring endurance by means of swimming survival times.”
Imogen followed him over to the cylinders, and Mr. Codwell stepped nervously aside, gripping his clipboard. The cylinders, about thirty-six inches in depth and four inches wide, each contained a rat frantically paddling.
“We have a jet of water shooting into the centre that prevents them from floating, and the collar on top makes it impossible to escape. We’re tracking the relationship between endurance and water temperature. We’ve found a direct correlation between average survival time and the temperature of the water. Their swimming times range from ten to fifteen minutes at 65 degrees Fahrenheit, to sixty hours at 95 degrees, to twenty minutes at 105 degrees.”
“I’m sorry,” Imogen said. “These are averages?” Her mind had snagged on the phrase “survival times” and could not get free. A darkness pervaded her stomach, as if she had swallowed a litre of something not meant to be swallowed.
“Averages, yes. We found marked variation in individual swim times. I mean, some rats died within five minutes. Others swam as long as eighty-one hours. The elimination of these large variations posed a real problem and—”
“I’m not sure I understand. A rat swam in one of those cylinders for eighty-one hours?”
“Yes, several of them.”
“Three and a half days straight.”
“Remarkable, I know. Then it occurred to me to examine the effect of trimming the rats’ whiskers on performance in the water. I wondered if they’d show the strange behaviour of the rats in the metabolism experiments. We shaved a dozen of them. Well, the first rat swam around in great excitement for about forty seconds, then dove to the bottom where it began to swim around, nosing its way along the glass wall. Died two minutes after entering the tank. Didn’t come to the surface a single time. Three of them responded in this way. The other nine swam forty to sixty hours. Those were domesticated rats. Wild rats performed much worse—all thirty-four died within fifteen minutes of immersion.”
Imogen fixed her gaze on Carl’s mouth as he spoke, the full nether lip slightly wet, the slightly uneven incisors. She dared not look at the bubbling cylinders with their miniature, paddling cargo.
Carl continued in full flow. “Conclusions are preliminary at this stage, but it seems trimming the rats’ whiskers destroys their most important means of contact with the outside world and this is disturbing enough to cause their deaths. Especially the wild rats. Now we come to the interesting bit.
“Are we in fact dealing with a flood of adrenalin as the anthropologists surmised? Turns out we’re not. We rigged up our own EKG, you see, and far from showing increased heart rate, it shows a marked slowing of the heart. We’ve got the results taped up over there.” He pointed to a wall covered in long, narrow sheets of paper.
“At the terminal stage, the heart stops in diastole, not systole, and autopsy shows an enlarged heart filled with blood. We removed the adrenals from the next batch of rats and got the same results, so we know absolutely that death is not adrenalin-related.
“Here’s what I think. Adrenalin is the hormone of fight or flight, but the situation of these rats hardly seems to demand either. Rather, it’s one of hopelessness. These are animals in a situation against which they have no defence. In fact, the wild rats seem to give up as soon as they are firmly grasped in the hand.
“So, how do we show that the sudden death depends on the emotional reaction to restraint or immersion? We eliminate the hopelessness. What we did, we repeatedly held them briefly then let them go, immersed them for a few minutes then took them out. Very quickly the rats learn that the situation is not actually hopeless. They become aggressive again, try to escape, and show no sign of giving up. And what do we find? Lo and behold, the wild rats swim just as long as the domesticated, or longer.”
“Eighty hours,” Imogen said.
“Sixty to eighty, yes. Amazing, isn’t it.”
“Yes. Truly.” Imogen looked at her watch. “My, I completely lost track of the time. Must run. See you at home.”
“Oh.” Carl looked crestfallen. “You’re not impressed.”
“No, no, I just lost track of the time.”
She struggled to pull open the heavy door, then leaned against it. “It’s suicide, isn’t it? The rats that don’t surface? They’re committing suicide, don’t you think?”
“Suicide.” Carl cocked his head to one side, assessing Imogen, rather than what she had said. “Yes, I suppose it is.”
In the hallway, Imogen started back toward her own lab, got halfway, and stopped. She looked back toward the elevators. She fought an urge to go upstairs to the fourth floor and throw herself on the bed in her old room. She would pull the covers up to her chin and curl up and face the wall and not come out for days and days. But of course her old room was occupied by a new intern.
She went into the ladies’ room and sat in one of the stalls, overcome by a heaviness of spirit. The story of the rats had crushed her, and she could not get out from under it. Various phrases flared up in her mind: no defence, escape is impossible, hopelessness, and above all, eighty-one hours. Swam for eighty-one hours.
“Are you all right in there?” It was Ruth Fein’s voice.
“Yes. Thank you.” Imogen tried to lower her voice.
“Are you sure? I thought I heard moaning.”
“Cramps. That’s all. Cramps.”
“Well, perhaps you should lie down somewhere.”
Imogen waited unt
il Ruth was gone, and then waited another five minutes to be sure, the sad phrases sinking in her mind like tiny hopeless bodies.
12
“They’re rats,” Carl said, “in case you didn’t know. Not people.”
They were sitting up late in the cramped little kitchen on Reservoir Street. Myra had gone home long ago and the children were asleep.
“I know that, Carl.”
“I am not doing it for pleasure—I’m doing it for knowledge. It’s not frivolous.”
“Sweetheart, I know that too.”
“Sometimes as scientists we inflict pain on animals so that we can learn how to prevent it—or cure it—in human beings. You’re a doctor, for God’s sake. I don’t understand why you are so shocked.”
“I’m not shocked that it is done,” Imogen said, “I’m shocked that you are doing it. It’s just not how I’ve imagined you.”
“And now you think I’m a monster.”
“No, I just—”
“Just what?”
“I can’t stop thinking about them. Surely you see how cruel it is. How unutterably sad.”
“You can’t think such things and do the experiment.”
“Well, how urgent is this research into ‘sudden death phenomenon’? It seems a rare and occult problem, hardly a pressing concern.”
“Now you’re betraying your ignorance. Obviously insight into these emotions will give us insight into the biology of such things as shock, depression, and—as you so dramatically suggest—suicide.”
“Yes,” Imogen said. “I can see how that might be.” Then, abandoning the field of battle: “I’m going to make myself a hot chocolate before bed, would you like some?”
Carl said no, but she made some for him anyway, and they passed the rest of the evening in comparative tranquility.
* * *
—
One of the constraints of having children was that Imogen found it hard to attend any after-hours lectures, but when it was announced that Sándor Ferenczi was going to be giving the Tuesday evening talk at the Phipps, she made plans to go with Donna. Carl, who had no interest in Ferenczi, stayed home with the children.