by M. J. Cates
The dreaded question When is Papa coming home? became gradually less frequent, but when it did surface it did so with anger and tears.
“You told him to leave,” Charlotte accused her one day. “That’s why Papa took us away.”
“I didn’t tell him to leave, Charlotte. Your father and I simply don’t get along anymore and have to live apart. No one’s to blame.” It cost her something to say that, but Charlotte wasn’t buying it.
“You sent him away,” she insisted, “just like you send us to our room.”
“No, my darling. It’s not that way at all.”
“I hate you,” Charlotte said. “I hate you.”
Aubrey was sobbing on the end of the sofa. When Charlotte stomped out of the living room, Imogen put her arm around him.
“Hurts, doesn’t it,” she said.
Aubrey managed a miserable nod.
“It hurts me too.”
Aubrey sniffled and peered up at her. “Really?”
“Yes, of course, dear. It hurts me terribly.”
He blinked at her, upper lip glossy with mucus, pale brow creased with suspicion: mothers feel pain? It was clearly the first he’d heard of it, and he looked far from persuaded.
The Saturday morning shopping was grim. To the twins, the trip to the market without their father was not just a pale imitation but an outright abomination. They screamed and fought and wept and in general made it impossible to get anything done. After the first two weeks Carl agreed to take them on Saturday mornings, and the weekly shopping became peaceful but lonely. She saw with hyper clarity that modern civilization was built around couples. The first Saturday she went to the market alone there was not one woman of her age who was not accompanied by either a child or a husband. Not one. The second time she did see one—a blond woman with mousy features, even younger than Imogen—but she was dressed in mourning. Imogen knew it was peculiar, but for the rest of that day, for the rest of that entire weekend, she envied that young widow the simplicity of her situation. She envied there being no one to blame, no questioning looks. Then again, she told herself, I probably just wish Carl was dead.
“What a bundle of negative emotions you’re becoming,” Laura said to her on the streetcar home.
“Not without some cause, wouldn’t you say?”
“Plenty of cause. But you don’t want to become bitter. Such a horrible feeling and decidedly unattractive.”
“Oh, don’t you turn against me too.”
“I’ll never turn against you, my darling. I shall love you always. And I’ll always be here when you need me.”
A woman took the seat next to Imogen, an older woman who did her marketing on the same schedule and had spoken to her and Carl a few times over the years.
“No little ones today?”
“Not today. It gets so tiring for them.”
“It does, poor things. Husband away?”
“Yes. Yes, he’s away.”
“You must miss him. I’ve always been struck by how good he is with your twins.”
“Yes,” Imogen said. “He is.”
One day, as she was leaving work for the evening, she was halfway down the stairs when she had an impulse to visit Carl in his lab and tell him to please stop telling the children she had sent him away. Not that she knew he had, but she felt the need to snarl at him.
His lab was deserted. Imogen called his name but no one answered. Perhaps they were out hunting rats, a pursuit that consumed an increasing portion of Carl’s time. She went into the first research room. The swimming jars were lined up in a corner, empty of water, fogged with dust. In the second room a dog lay curled in a cage. Beyond this, stacks of smaller cages housed rats. Some slept, some watched her with pink-rimmed eyes of polished jet, whiskers twitching.
Imogen went out to the main lab again and into a third research room on the far side. Test tubes, microscopes, funnels, and slides. She returned to the main lab and called Carl’s name. She could hear the coldness in her voice, any note of love silenced. She opened the hall door and checked both ways. Taking a deep breath, and moving with deliberation, she walked through the first research room and into the second and set about opening the rat cages. One by one the little doors clattered open. Thirteen, fourteen, she had opened all fifteen cages before the first rat scuttled onto the counter and made the leap for freedom, hitting the floor with a squeak. She was about to open the dog’s cage—he was looking at her with mournful eyes—but she feared he might kill the rats.
As she went down the marble stairs, she experienced a tiny chime of triumph. She heard again Ganz’s assurance that all was not darkness, and thought she heard, somewhere above and behind her on the third floor, a flurry of squeaks and a skittering of tiny paws.
21
Now that Imogen no longer had to travel back and forth to Trenton, she was able to resume her work with patients. She found a solace on the wards that was not available in her lab. Bingham’s fixation on focal infection had soured her on the search for somatic causes of mental disease. Perhaps, too, her anger at Carl had destroyed her passion for lab work. And somehow her patients seemed more reachable than before, more amenable to treatment—in a word, less loony. She found herself enjoying the talk therapy sessions, could feel herself becoming more skilful. Patients would meet her gaze, and a spark of recognition would pass between them.
“You’ve lived more,” Dr. Ganz said when she described it to him. “You are understanding your patients more quickly. They will be sensing your greater empathy and responding to it.”
“I thought I had empathy before,” Imogen said.
“Dynamic range,” Ganz said, and fluttered his long fingers over an invisible keyboard. “You have greater dynamic range, emotionally.”
“Well. I’d rather just be perceptive.”
“Dear me, yes,” Ganz said. “Wouldn’t we all.”
And there was Donna. Now that her friend was without a husband, she reappeared in Imogen’s life like a pet that had gone missing only to turn up on the doorstep years later. Same elfin nose and chin, same combative posture. Faint crows’ feet around her eyes only made her more attractive, adding a touch of wisdom to the spikiness. Donna called her at work one day and they made arrangements to go out to dinner. Imogen scrounged up a graduate student to babysit and the two of them went to dine at the Hotel Baltimore’s café. She had never been to such an expensive place before and would not have gone now except that Donna insisted.
“No, we must,” she said. “You’ve been through a lot and you look like hell, Imogen, you really do.”
“Kind of you to notice.”
“Oh, don’t take on. I just mean you look like you’ve been through the wringer, which you have.”
Donna herself looked trim and stylish and ready for fun.
“Now you mustn’t stint,” she added, when they were seated. “This is my treat and I feel like spending money.”
Imogen remonstrated, but it was hopeless when Donna had her mind set on anything. They each ordered a seafood cocktail for an appetizer—lobster for Donna, crab meat for Imogen.
“You’re stinting,” Donna said. “Stop it at once.”
“I like crab. And stop nagging.”
Donna sighed. “You’re such a little nun.”
“And you’re a termagant. So nothing’s changed.”
The Baltimore had recently modernized. In place of the usual waiters in black, the café was staffed by women in white aprons who served food from clanking trolleys.
“It’s like being at work,” Imogen said. “All the nurses.”
“We’ve got to get you out of that place. Honestly, Im, you can’t spend the rest of your life working for Jonas Ganz—what about that New York job?”
“It was kind of you to mention me, but I don’t want to leave the Phipps. I want Carl to leave.”
“That man should’ve been booted out immediately, given the stated policy.”
Imogen had told her Ganz’s reasoning on that score.
&n
bsp; “Well, of course you didn’t want him fired when you were still together. But surely Ganz can understand how things have changed.”
“I think he does, but—”
“Ganz always sees five sides to every story, you notice?”
“Apparently Carl has become indispensable.”
“Nonsense. Ganz is a fool.”
“He’s not. If he was a fool, it wouldn’t hurt so much.”
The waitress brought their soup, and Imogen tried a spoonful of her consommé Colbert.
“This is delicious. Thank you so much for prying me out. How is the turtle soup?”
“A touch over-turtled for my taste, but very tolerable.”
Donna talked about her practice for a while. She had many female patients, almost more than she could handle. She was on her own now.
“Really? What happened to Snake Walcott? I’m sorry—I can’t say his name without laughing.”
“He’s moved to California. He’s breeding cats.”
“No, really—what’s he doing?”
“Breeding cats. That’s really what he’s doing. Abyssinians, apparently. Don’t look at me like that.”
“But it’s hilarious. Surely you of all people see that.”
“He’s eccentric, all right? Lots of brilliant people are eccentric. You’re eccentric, too, you know—giving up a man you loved to marry a man you didn’t.”
Imogen put down her spoon, more loudly than she’d intended. “In the first place, Quentin was a boy, not a man. And in the second place, I was not in love with him.”
“No. You loved him. There’s a difference.”
“Let me finish. In the third place, I did love Carl. I was mad about Carl. I couldn’t wait to marry him.”
“And look where that got you.” Donna reached across the table and touched Imogen’s wrist. “I don’t mean it harshly.”
“How do you mean it?”
“Every time you would tell me about Quentin—and you talked about him a lot—you would get this, how do I put it, happy, enthusiastic look on your face. It’s the way people look when they’re telling you about a story they loved. A book. Except when you were busy blaming yourself for sending him off to war.”
“I didn’t send him off to war.”
“No, you didn’t. Exactly my point. And you were so shipwrecked when you heard that he’d been killed.”
“Because he was my friend. I was terribly fond of him. And he did join up because of his feelings for me, and he did get killed. It’s not a story, Donna, it’s a person’s life. And death. And it’s my life too.” They went silent as the waitress cleared away their soup bowls and served Imogen her sage hen and Donna her venison.
“Goodness,” Imogen said, hoping to change the subject. “This is the best thing I’ve eaten in years. A fancy dinner at home is boiled ham.”
“Did it not occur to you,” Donna pressed on, “that the intensity of your response to his death indicated something more than friendship?”
“Yes, it occurred to me, and no, that doesn’t make it true. Why are you harping on this?”
Donna went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Whereas your attitude to Carl, in the early days anyway, struck me as less like love and more like obsession. You didn’t want to be with him, you had to be with him.”
“It’s called being in love. It’ll happen to you one day.”
“Maybe. But I think you had to be with Carl because he looked like a good replacement for your father—yes, you of the absent Papa—handy with tools, take-charge manner, believer in progress.”
“Really, Donna. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You weren’t even around. I’m not going to deny I made a bad choice in Carl, but why don’t we talk about your romantic life. Lack thereof.”
“That’s my girl,” Donna cried. “Stick that knife in.”
“You did ask for it.”
“Of course I did. I always do.”
So Donna told her about the breakup with Snake Walcott—yes, she admitted, they did have an affair, but only after she ceased to be patient or pupil. She then related a condensed version of a shorter affair with a Hopkins professor of endocrinology. And an even briefer version of an even briefer liaison with a female psychiatrist at the MacLean Institute in Boston.
“Don’t look shocked,” Donna said. “Don’t look shocked or I’ll stab you with this fork and you’ll go through life with four adorable little holes in your cheekbone.”
“I’m not shocked,” Imogen said. “A little surprised. Or maybe not even that.” She was remembering the time Donna had kissed her full on the mouth.
“Look, I’m not an invert. I don’t lie awake at night fantasizing about women. It’s just sometimes one feels the need of someone else’s finger. Not to mention tongue.”
“Now I’m shocked,” Imogen said.
“Darling, I hope you don’t blush like that with your patients.”
“We’re in a restaurant, not the consulting room—darling.”
“Speaking of which, I had a very interesting visitor a while back—not a patient. But first I want to order dessert.”
Imogen ordered steamed raisin pudding with fruit sauce; Donna chose Bavarian cream.
“My visitor,” she said between spoonfuls, “was Jeremy West.”
“Jeremy West, the novelist?”
“None other. And very charming he was, too. I think he fancied me.”
“All men fancy you. How extraordinary, though, that you met him. You said he wasn’t a patient?”
“He’s researching a novel. Thinking of setting it at the Phipps, or somewhere very like the Phipps.”
“That’s a change. His books are usually set in some place that could be anywhere—another country, even—they’re so dreamlike. So how was he?”
“I don’t know.” Donna shrugged. “Pleasant, polite, a bit goofy. Shy, I think. I got the impression that talking to strangers did not come easy. He’s tall—masses of curly hair. Walks with a—not a limp, exactly—but carries himself carefully. I suspect a war injury but didn’t ask, obviously.”
“Weren’t you excited? I love his books.”
“I had read one of them—and quite enjoyed it. Can’t see myself getting very worked up about the stuff, but I see what you mean about dreamlike.”
“Which one did you read?”
“Vanessa—not a bad portrait of obsession.”
“Did he have a lot of questions?”
“Not really. And they were quite prosaic—where did we eat, where did we sleep, what was it like working for Ganz. Nothing about treatment, Freud, medication. Not even much about patients. At first I thought he was trying a cagey way of exploring treatment for himself, but I dropped that idea when he started with his questions. They weren’t the kinds of things a prospective patient would ask.”
“I’d love to meet him someday.”
“Maybe you will. I had the impression he’d have more questions.”
They moved on to other topics. Over coffee, Imogen told Donna about Dr. Bingham and his treatments, and about her findings.
“And Ganz is making publication dependent on Bingham’s signing off on your report?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Clearly that’s never going to happen. Which means you won’t be allowed to publish. Do you remember what happened to Daniel Mellon at MacLean? His research showed no difference between therapy with a psychiatrist and therapy with a nurse. His dean stood in his way and in frustration he sent his research to the New York World. They rewrote it, of course, which made his claims even more sensational and he was totally blackballed. He lost his position at Mellon and has not been able to secure another one, despite the fact that he’s one of MacLean’s brightest. It’s a club, Imogen, and they set the rules.”
“Ganz will let me publish. He knows Bingham’s treatments are dangerous.”
“Imogen, take my advice. Get yourself into a training analysis now. In two years you’ll be ready to take on patients
yourself, and you won’t have to work for idiots like Ganz or Bingham.”
“That’s not fair. Whatever you may think of Dr. Ganz he’s not like Bingham. He wants only the best for his patients. He’s not harming people.”
“I have to tell you something.” Donna reached across the table and took both of Imogen’s hands in hers. “I’m not sure this is the right time, but there may not be a better.”
“What is it?”
“I’m moving to New York to set up practice.”
“Oh, please don’t. Donna, you know how much I rely on you.”
“And I on you. Which is why you should come with me. With your experience it’s not going to take you long to get approval from the New York Psychoanalytic Society. You’ll make a hell of a lot more money.”
“Even if I wanted to go—which I don’t—I’d have to find some other job while I was in training. Who knows how long that could take?” Donna squeezed her hands.
“Come to New York.”
* * *
—
The Bingham meeting was arranged for the second week of January. Far from the sedate, scholarly atmosphere that might have been preferable, and despite all the advance letter-writing, it had the frenetic, panicky feel typical of a last-minute arrangement.
“I invited Bingham and his wife to stay with us,” Dr. Ganz told Imogen, “but they’ve parked themselves at the Emerson.”
“He’s probably only just now read the report,” Imogen said. “I mean, really read it. And he realizes what it means.”
“But you were keeping him up to date. No one could miss where your research was heading.”
“Well, I told you what he was like when I was in Trenton. Except for the last few weeks, he seemed to think I was certifying his success.”
Dr. Ganz frowned and stubbed out his cigar with some violence. “I fear we’re in for an unpleasant time of it.”
That was Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, Dr. Bingham went on rounds with Dr. Ganz, but Ganz could not get out of a series of appointments in the afternoon. The three of them finally assembled in Dr. Ganz’s office on the Thursday.
Before Bingham had even sat down, he went on the offensive.