Into That Fire

by M. J. Cates

  “One of the hazards of our profession,” he went on, “is a tendency to over-interpret the ordinary ups and downs of life. I’m sure you know.”

  “Yes. I do know.”

  “Mm. And knowing this, why do you say he hates you, and not choose some other, less extreme, word?”

  “You mean like indifference? Unfortunately, when you are a rat in a swimming jar it makes no difference if the man who put you there hates you or is indifferent.”

  “Mm. Please don’t feel compelled, but you know you can rely on my absolute discretion, and I would like to help any way I can. Would you care to tell me what has happened that has made an attractive young woman, a brilliant physician and loving mother, feel like a rat in a swimming jar?”

  16

  The waiter, clad in the French manner in black and white, came and took their order—quiche Lorraine for Quentin, sole meunière for his editor, Griffin Burke—and went away again. Griffin talked on as Quentin looked around at the decor of Le Papillon. The mauve banquettes, the etched glass and potted plants, managed to look quite French but the patron, a shy man named Nick (much hounded by his fearsome wife, Alex), was decidedly Greek. Le Papillon had the virtue of being both moderately priced and located just a few yards along 48th Street from Essex Taylor Bradkin, where Griffin plied his inky trade.

  “What are you working on these days?” Griffin asked at last. He always asked it lightly, as if the answer were of no consequence, but the question filled Quentin’s heart with trepidation. It was impossible to summarize a work in progress without feeling one’s genitals shrivel. “I’m not sure. It’ll be something totally different, I know that much.”

  “Not an obsessive love story?”

  Quentin shook his head.

  “People seem to like ’em, Quentin. Oh—reminds me.” Griffin opened his briefcase and pulled out a plump manila envelope. He handed it across the table. “Your fans.”

  “Not always. Some of them want to tell me a thing or two.”

  “Oh, everyone hears from the loonies.”

  Quentin put the envelope on the banquette beside him. The waiter came with their meals, and asked if he could bring them anything else.

  Griffin inhaled the aroma of his sole meunière with a theatrical toss of the head. “Dear me, I could use a glass of Meurseult with this. A bottle, in fact.”

  “I know, monsieur. The law is a great pity. Bon appétit, gentlemen.”

  “Why can’t we be civilized like other countries?”

  “Which countries would those be?” Quentin asked.

  They ate in silence for a while. The food was far better than anything he’d ever eaten in Lake Placid, and he enjoyed spending time with his editor, feeling himself part of an industry, a literary community. When Griffin asked him how life was treating him upstate Quentin surprised himself by saying, “Actually, I’ve been thinking about moving to Manhattan.”

  “That would be swell if you did. I could introduce you to all sorts of people, and it would make our work together a bit easier.”

  “I think I’m ready for a bit more company these days.”

  “Let me know if I can do anything to help—you know, keep an eye out for an apartment or whatever.”

  Having stalled a little, Quentin now allowed the talk to move on to possible follow-ups to his last novel.

  “What about a war story?” Griffin said. “Been some decent efforts lately, but I think you could really knock one out of the park. You could write it under your own name, maybe.”

  “That’s the last thing I want to write about.”

  “Of course. Sorry—I’m sure it was terrible.”

  “No one would believe it, if I wrote the truth.”

  He heard the tremor in his own voice and knew that Griffin heard it too; he certainly changed the subject fast enough.

  “I’ve become fascinated the past few years with psychoanalysis,” Griffin said. “I tried to talk Brett Essex into grabbing translation rights to Sigmund Freud but he hemmed and hawed and Boni and Liveright snatched them up. I got on to it a couple of years ago. Friend of mine had a nervous breakdown. Fellow who works in a difficult field—a sensitive, cultured man with a beautiful English accent. Suddenly couldn’t face people, couldn’t do his work, couldn’t do anything but roll on the floor and cry.”

  Griffin hesitated, took a drink from his water glass, and set it back down, then dabbed at his mouth with his napkin.

  Quentin knew his editor was trying to be discreet, but he also knew he was talking about another writer. He could even guess which one, English accent and all.

  “Anyway, somehow he ended up in the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore—have you heard of it?”

  Quentin kept his face neutral. “Yes, I believe I have heard something.”

  “Part of Johns Hopkins.”

  “Yes, sure. Supposed to be a good place.”

  “I was impressed, I can tell you. Nothing at all like you hear about the state asylums. More like an expensive hotel crossed with a college. So I visit my friend and we sit outside in this courtyard they have—charming little place with cloisters, fountain, birds…the whole deal. Most intriguing of all, at least to this old fogey, his psychiatrist was a woman.”

  “Really. Who was that?”

  “Aha! Now his ears perk up! She was a delightful person, very informal. Smart as a whip. And pretty?”

  “What was her name?”

  “My, my, you are interested, aren’t you? She had an unusual name—Donna Artemis. Isn’t that lovely? Dr. Donna Artemis. I gather she did fine work with my friend. He saw her in private practice after he was discharged. Still does.” Griffin leaned across the table and adopted a confidential tone. “Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s in love with her. And he got so excited about psychoanalysis, he got me excited about it. Have you read any?”

  “Not a word. Not interested.”

  “You’re not fascinated by the idea of the unconscious?”

  “Only in the sense of hidden motives—hidden even to the person they’re motivating. The last thing I want is someone else’s idea of how people work.”

  “Mm, yes. I suppose I can see that.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so pompous. I’d probably enjoy reading Freud—but he’d kill me as a novelist.”

  “Oh, well. Just an idea.”

  Quentin sat back and took a sip of his water. “The place, though. That’s a different story. The place is definitely interesting.”

  * * *

  —

  So interesting that it was only a matter of days—well, a little less than two weeks—before he found himself in Baltimore, a city he had previously given no thought to visiting. He told himself he was there because he was embarking on a new kind of writing—more texture, more context, more rooted in the here and now—that called for a new way of working. Which was why he had come to Baltimore and the Emerson Hotel.

  On the train he had begun jotting notes for his story. Young man in love with his psychiatrist—she doesn’t know—believes it’s just part of the “treatment”—he remains unshakable—whole effort not to be cured but to win her love. Such a storyline was completely in keeping with the novels he had already published, stamped with his signature combination of obsession and misunderstanding, “leavened,” as one critic had put it, “with near-suicidal loneliness.”

  Quentin didn’t think his books were that sad. Certainly the readers who wrote the letters Griffin had given him did not think so. Most of them were young men who seemed profoundly relieved that there was “someone out there who knows what it’s like.” Quentin was grateful to them for buying and reading his books, but it was really his pseudonym they were writing to, and he restricted his replies to postcards.

  When he got to the hotel, he unpacked his suitcase and laid out his shaving kit in the bathroom. He had every intention of just going for a walk—a constitutional to stretch his legs after the long train trip, nothing more. He would not try to s
ee Imogen, or to contact her in any way. He went back downstairs to the lobby and asked the uniformed desk clerk to secure him a telephone line. The clerk picked up his own phone, spoke into it briefly, and said, “Number four, sir,” pointing to a row of wooden booths.

  Quentin entered, shut the folding door, and sat down. He picked up the receiver and a woman said, “Number, please.”

  “I don’t have the number. It’s the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic on North Wolfe Street.”

  “Just a moment, sir. I’ll connect you.”

  He wondered how many operators had listened in on tales of madness and catastrophe, or overheard the ravings of psychotics.

  “Phipps Clinic.”

  Quentin had prepared for this. “Good afternoon. I’m addressing correspondence and I just need to know if I have the details correct for Dr. Imogen Lang. She is in fact a physician at the clinic?”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “Six hundred…”

  “Six hundred North Wolfe Street, Baltimore, Maryland.”

  “And would she be in today?”

  “No. Dr. Lang is only here on Thursday and Friday.”

  It was Tuesday; there would be no risk of bumping into her. He left the hotel and walked out into the late afternoon sun. The streets were thronged with people heading home from work. He didn’t mind; it was all research. Many of the workers were women. They waited at the corners for their streetcars, many clutching novels or magazines, oblivious to the swirling crowds as only those who face them every day can be. When the streetcars arrived, the Negroes entered by the middle doors, white people by the front. There were many streetcars, but also more horses than in New York or Chicago. Crossing the avenues Quentin had to watch where he stepped.

  Eventually he took a smaller street to get out of the crowds. It did not look a particularly prosperous street, and yet it was lined with stately, if compact, townhouses. And even though it was October the southern air was fragrant with flowers. The breeze from the harbour was cool, damp, benign. A cheerful atmosphere, all in all, and he was happy for Imogen, that she had lived so long in so pleasant a city.

  He took a zigzag route toward the Phipps and did not even have to consult his hotel map, having memorized the location without trying. He wanted to see the building where his slowly germinating novel might be set.

  The neighbourhoods became less cheerful the closer he got. The apartment buildings went from modern to weathered, then to dingy, and the homes turned into rooming houses. Here the coloured people far outnumbered the white, and he wondered for a moment if he had not taken a wrong turn. But no, North Wolfe Street was just ahead. As soon as he saw the sign a tremor started up in his injured leg.

  The Phipps was a handsome building of red brick that matched the other Johns Hopkins buildings in that respect, if not in style. Over the portico, in incised letters: The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic 1912. The place would have still shone with newness when Imogen had arrived in 1916.

  1912. It seemed a lifetime away. Any time before the war now seemed antiquity, back before human beings knew the true depths of stupidity they could plumb, before they knew that boys could be ordered into the fire of a hundred machine guns. What different people we were back then, Quentin thought—what a different person I was, marching off to war with the stupid idea of killing myself by proxy.

  And then, witnessing blood and death up close, he had come to love life. All the soldiers did. They had all come to adore the animals that withstood the man-made hell, the birds blackened with smoke and soot hopping along the parapet, the solitary green shoots that sprouted in the blood-soaked mud of no man’s land. It was for this reason they had adored Gerhard Goetheimer and all the squirrels, lambs, and dogs that became battalion mascots. They adored their luck. Gerhard’s luck had ultimately run out at Avesnes. A letter from his lieutenant had informed him the goat had been killed by a whiz-bang.

  Two women emerged from the front door of the Phipps and broke Quentin’s reverie. Thrown into momentary confusion, he backed away.

  “Were you looking for the dispensary?” one of them asked. She had a hard face but her voice was kind.

  “Well, um. I don’t have an appointment.”

  “That’s all right. If you need to see someone just go inside and take the stairs on the left down one flight.”

  “Thank you.”

  He tipped his hat to them and started up the stairs. He had not intended to go inside but now he felt compelled by social convention.

  The interior of the building impressed, as it was meant to, but he was more excited by the knowledge that Imogen had walked these marble halls for years, and still did. He went downstairs as instructed and entered through a door marked Out-Patients’ Waiting Area. It was an oddly shaped room of many benches, only a couple of which were occupied at the moment: one by a ragged-looking woman in the care of a policeman, another by a child who was kneeling on the bench and rocking violently, obsessively, back and forth beside his pale, thin mother on whom exhaustion hung like a shroud.

  Quentin sat on a bench toward the back and wondered how many thousands of patients had passed through here. The air smelled pleasantly antiseptic, but he had a sense that there yet lingered in the atmosphere coils of paranoia, strands of delusion, not to mention the boundless sorrows of the suicidal. How odd to think that he had once numbered himself among them. Who would have prescribed the trenches as a cure?

  * * *

  —

  Quentin left the clinic through the dispensary’s side door and went back to his hotel. That glimpse of the waiting room had whetted his appetite for detail. He would have to know how the Phipps Clinic worked on a day-to-day basis. He wanted to inhale the place, memorize it, make it his own.

  Next morning he called and asked to be put through to Dr. Artemis. He was informed that Donna Artemis no longer worked there, and all inquiries from the public would have to be directed to the office of Jonas Ganz—would he like to be connected?

  As Jeremy West, he wrote a letter on hotel stationery, explaining that he was writing a novel set in a fictional clinic not unlike the Phipps and wondered if a brief tour might be arranged. He sent the letter by messenger and was surprised when Dr. Ganz responded that very afternoon in the affirmative. He would conduct the tour himself, provided Mr. West could be at his office at noon sharp the next day. After that, he would be out of town.

  Quentin showed up at the appointed hour and thanked Dr. Ganz for agreeing to his request. “I was frankly surprised, sir. I expected to be flatly rejected.”

  “Another novelist might have been, but as it happens I have read two of your books and found them most interesting and entertaining.”

  “I would have thought—as a man of science and the overseer of a complex institution—you wouldn’t have time for any fiction, let alone mine.”

  “No, I am fascinated by fiction, as I am by all works of the imagination. Novelists, and of course the great poets, spend as much time thinking about human psychology as we do. Your books, in particular, interest me on that score. I have nowhere encountered a better rendering of states of obsession, depression, and even mania.”

  “Dear me. That doesn’t sound very entertaining.”

  “Immensely entertaining. Immensely. Now we haven’t much time so let’s get to it, shall we?”

  They left Ganz’s office, turned left in the marble hall and left again immediately after.

  “Our library,” Ganz said. “We are quite up to date with all the latest books and journals.”

  “What a beautiful room. Makes me want to sit right down and study.” The expansive windows, the angled spokes of shelves, and the heavy oak tables made for an inviting atmosphere of learning and contemplation. Quentin had a vision of Imogen seated in the window light, head bent over a book, making careful notes. How many times had he seen her in just that pose back in their student days in Chicago.

  “We encourage staff to contribute to the journals, although lately so many of th
em seem to want to write books and not articles. I am envious of your own productivity.”

  “Oh well, you know, novels. Novelists don’t actually have to know anything.” He did not really believe this; he was just trying to prolong his reverie by being agreeable.

  “But novelists have to observe, Mr. West, you have to be constantly observing both the inner and the outer man, whether you’re aware of it at the time or not. You’re collecting facts, facts, facts, and then you make of them what you will.”

  Ganz led him back along the corridor toward the lecture room, talking animatedly about the lecture series he had inaugurated, but Quentin was only half-listening. He was picturing Imogen seated in the audience, taking notes. She would be happy, doing that.

  They left the lecture hall and Ganz produced a set of keys and attacked a massive oak door with them.

  “The reason I asked you to come at noon is because the patients will all be taking their meal upstairs. Patient confidentiality, you know.”

  “Yes, I understand completely.”

  “This is the men’s semi-quiet ward. All the wards are pretty much alike, eight patients to a ward.”

  Ganz spoke briefly to a woman in an office on the right, nodded to a maintenance man carrying a tool kit, then they were in the ward itself. Quentin let out a bark of laughter.

  “Something amusing?”

  “It’s so lovely! It couldn’t be more different from the last hospital I was in. Woodcote, it was called.”

  “Woodcote? I don’t believe I—”

  “It was in Epsom. After the war. A lot of tin huts rattling in the English rain.”

  “The war, of course. I noticed you were limping. I hope they treated you with the honour and dignity you deserve.”

  Quentin went quiet. He had slipped out of character; Jeremy West had not fought in the war. In the secret biography he had given his pseudonym, he had been ruled “psychologically unfit” for active duty. Neurasthenia. It was only by thus surgically removing the war from his authorial memory that he was able to write at all. Quentin Goodchild, at least as far as literature was concerned, had been rendered mute by the war. He did not like to deceive this curious and engaging man who had employed Imogen for nearly a decade, but the deception was small—he was, after all, the real “Jeremy West.”