by M. J. Cates
Imogen was momentarily stunned into silence. Then, “I cannot believe you just said that to me. Are you really trying to undermine scientific facts with this?”
“Clearly there’s a good deal of transference going on in your relationship to me. You came here very young, away from your home, following a recent breakup, and I—speaking psychologically—took you in, gave you a home. You found a father figure who offered you respect and even affection, in contrast to your actual father, one who even cared for you when you were ill. It’s only natural that you should transfer daughterly feelings toward me, given our therapeutic relationship, which comes on top of the teacher–student, and employer–employee relationships, which are already fraught with transference and always must be negotiated with care.”
“Exactly. And as psychiatrist, teacher, and employer, you are in a prime position to exploit that transference. Which is perhaps why you kept me labelled an intern, for God’s sake, after years on the job, and still grossly underpay me. There is your counter-transference—you can’t bear to see one of your birds with broken wings do really well, develop her own therapeutic techniques, publish a book, or assert her independence. That’s why Donna had to go. Can you really be so blind to your own counter-transference?”
Dr. Ganz walked to the door and held it open. “I bid you good day, Dr. Lang. You may come and apologize when you are ready.”
Imogen didn’t move. Dr. Ganz was at least partly right about her transference, and the old buried anger he had provoked would not be silenced.
“What would make you betray me and my work in this horrible way,” she went on, “if not counter-transference? Why would you insist on keeping Carl—my tormentor—on staff, when policy clearly states he should be removed? You never wanted me to marry in the first place—perhaps you now want to make sure I never marry again. Why would that be, Dr. Ganz? And you talk to me about transference?”
“Mr. Penn,” Ganz called to the outer room, “please see Dr. Lang out. We are quite finished here.”
“Please, Dr. Ganz. My career and my happiness may be of no concern to you, but think of those poor patients. You know they deserve better, even if I don’t. Suppose I were to publish on my own.”
“You can’t. You haven’t the right. The Trenton contract was with the Phipps—a loan-out agreement for your services on a work-for-hire. You do not own the report and you cannot take it anywhere outside these walls—or Trenton’s.”
“Dr. Ganz—”
“Enough.” Ganz raised a peremptory hand. “This conversation is concluded. I’ll expect a written apology on my desk in the morning. Otherwise you can consider your employment terminated.”
That night, after the children had gone to bed, Imogen composed two letters. The first was to the director of the juvenile court in Lower Manhattan, accepting the position of psychiatric consultant. The second was to Jonas Ganz, resigning from the Phipps, accompanied by her final report.
22
Less than a month later, Imogen moved to New York. Carl offered no strenuous objections to her taking the twins with her, provided he had ample access to them. Three days after her arrival, she began working as a consultant to the juvenile and family court system. Her job was to provide psychiatric assessments—sometimes of the little criminals, sometimes of their parents—which the judges used in determining appropriate punishments and occasionally to assess an inmate’s likelihood of reoffending upon release.
Sometimes she was asked to assess children who were not charged with any crime but who were unmanageable at home or in school. It was strange work, because none of the parents or children were her patients. She would interview them for an hour and then type up her assessment. She had the use of a cramped little room on the second floor of the courthouse for the purpose. The interviews took place in a larger space that was made even more depressing by its efforts to look cheerful: amputee Teddy bears and one-eyed dolls. Most of the interviews could have been done by a competent social worker—the root problems being social rather than psychiatric.
Soon after her arrival, she followed Donna’s advice and began training as a psychoanalyst under the auspices of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. The institute supplied a patient. Their beautifully produced syllabus assured the prospective analyst that much care went into matching patient to trainee. The case would be challenging, but not so challenging that a beginning analyst could not make progress.
Imogen’s patient was a man who was exactly her father’s age, and it was clearly no accident he’d been assigned to her. He was unethical in his business practices, unfaithful to his wife, and hypercritical of his daughters. If they had tried to find a patient most likely to stir up her own difficulties, they could hardly have done better.
He very quickly stopped paying. Sessions through the institute were not free but fees were adjusted according to what a patient could afford. It soon became apparent that this man was not the humble clerk he had claimed to be; he was in fact an officer of the firm and earning much more than Imogen. But he always had an excuse, always promised to pay next time.
He had a daughter the same age as Imogen and at whom he was constantly angry. This manifestation of his repressed desire was cartoonish in its extremity, and though he professed to seek help he was in fact seeking medical justification for his nasty behaviour. As the process of transference began to take hold—as Imogen came to stand in for the daughter he could not possess—their sessions became fraught in the extreme.
Imogen’s training analyst was a Viennese Jew named Reinhardt—a smug, short-tempered bully who constantly belittled her efforts. He made much of the idea that you can’t analyze anyone without first analyzing yourself, and that it is a painful process. Imogen knew that patients must come to their insights at their own pace, whereas Reinhardt would hurl them in her face. “Are you so bound up with your own absentee father that you can’t see what this man is telling you? It’s obvious to everyone else: he has been ejected from the bed of his wife and now he lusts after his daughter, who resembles whom? His wife at the age he married her! His mother at the age his father died! His lust is profoundly disturbing to him and is therefore masked by his attempts to control his daughter and his rage when he cannot. On top of this, he is being rejected by another cold female—you! The very analyst to whom he has turned for help. And you, not wishing to see it, allow it all to be buried under what you see as proper analytical decorum but is in fact your own desire for daddy!”
In addition to the four sessions a week with her patient, she had to endure two of her own with Reinhardt—two sessions in which he would endlessly berate her. “You’re angry with this man because he is the father who abandoned you! You are withholding your empathy from him!” Imogen would deny it, saying she was allowing him to reach his own insights. “You are hostile to him. You think he cannot see this?”
She wondered if Reinhardt was trying to trick her into becoming supportive of this patient, but he was not there for support, he was there for analysis. Whenever she wavered, and said something commiserating, Reinhardt would say, “Tea and sympathy. You should open a tea shop. This is not what you are paid for.” As if she was being paid.
The whole field of psychoanalysis seemed to be dominated by these Viennese characters, but Imogen told herself they couldn’t all be bullies, and they weren’t all men. Anna Freud, Frieda Fromm, and Karen Horney were becoming quite prominent, as was Donna Artemis, who had a thriving practice on the Upper West Side, and whose presence in the city made all else bearable.
* * *
—
Imogen’s days were crowded, stuffed with people and appointments, assessments to make, reports to write and sometimes to defend in court, and yet real human contact was rare. Where her days had previously been filled with patients, students, nurses, and fellow psychiatrists, she now found herself surrounded by lawyers, judges, juvenile delinquents, and parents of breathtaking incompetence.
And Judge Hollis Wainwright, with whom she
seemed fated to have more cases than anyone else, could have been a male avatar of Lila Quinn. He had no great respect for psychiatry and none whatsoever for Imogen. One depressing day, Imogen had just given a report favourable to the parents of a delinquent boy.
“The boy threatened his neighbour with a knife,” he pointed out, “and you’re telling me he is not by nature violent.”
“I believe this was an isolated incident and a reaction to circumstance,” Imogen responded, sounding to herself like a junior version of Jonas Ganz. “If his circumstances change—as his parents promise they will—his behaviour will very likely improve.”
That got the boy a year in reform school.
Later that same day Judge Wainwright castigated her in front of another set of parents: “You never say anything useful. It’s always ‘maybe this’ and ‘maybe that.’ ”
“Yes, Your Honour. That often reflects the nature of the case.”
“I suppose you think this young girl is suffering from penis envy.”
“I can’t know that, Your Honour. Even if I were a certified psychoanalyst, which I’m not—yet—I couldn’t analyze her in a one-hour interview. No one could.”
“Then what good are you, that’s what I want to know.”
And yet, when they passed each other in the halls of the courthouse, Judge Wainwright would nod to her as if their relations were perfectly civil.
* * *
—
She suffered bouts of guilt for having deprived her children of the father they so wildly adored. Two weekends a month, Carl would rent a suite in a cheap hotel on Eighty-Ninth Street so he and the children could visit. Nearly a year on, they still cried for him, especially when Imogen had transgressed against some statute in their junior sense of justice. Tears and tantrums followed any visit with Carl, the visits having gone so well that the twins could not bear them to end.
Despite all this, the family of three had developed a happy life. There was food on the table, a cheerful Irish nanny in the afternoons, and Washington Square to play in. Some of Imogen’s happiest times were sitting on a bench with a book while the twins played under the trees. All the local mothers got to know each other, and they were friendly until they realized Imogen was the very succubus they most feared—an unattached woman. They still allowed their children to engage with Aubrey and Charlotte, but from Imogen herself they kept a cool distance.
She didn’t even mind this, really; they had little enough in common. Besides, she had Donna Artemis to fill that need for female companionship. Donna adored the twins, enjoyed cooking, and even tended to enjoy the same books as Imogen. What more could you ask of a friend?
Although her departure from the Phipps was a sorrowful affair, Imogen was surprised—and gratified—to realize that she was not depressed in its aftermath, and there were times when she experienced something approaching peace. Of an evening in her tiny Tenth Street apartment, her work for that day completed, she could sit and read a novel, or the latest stories in the Saturday Evening Post, or sometimes listen to a humorous radio program. The children were asleep, the dishes were done, and the noise from Sixth Avenue had quieted to a rumble. Her miniature parlour was radiant with the heat of the gas fireplace.
Whether it was walking the twins to school in the morning—Charlotte chirpy and often singing, Aubrey either solemn and dozy or full of questions such as why do squirrels transport bits of bagel and newspaper everywhere—or giving them a bath in the evening—when Charlotte’s eyes seemed to exert a magnetic power over shampoo, leading to whimpers and soggy hugs—or listening to them read from their textbooks, Imogen absorbed joy from their merely being near. Sometimes she believed she wanted for nothing, not a thing in the world other than to protect her children from harm and raise them to be kind and useful to others. If she could accomplish this, their natural gifts for happiness would ensure them lives that were full and satisfying. At such times she forgot her own desires for love and meaningful work. At such times, in other words, she knew herself to be happy.
Since splitting up with Carl, she had felt it important to reconnect with her family—as much as she could bear—and for the twins to get to know their grandmother, at least. She had made two trips with them to Chicago, during which her father managed to be absent. But her mother made an effort with Aubrey and Charlotte—finding colouring books and various games to amuse them—and she seemed to actually experience a modicum of joy in their uncritical company. It occurred to Imogen, watching the three of them, that her mother was above all a fearful person, and her first grandchildren—so eager to love and be loved—were the company she had always been meant to keep.
In her work for the court she saw children who were devastated by abuse, abandonment, and neglect. Children who had been starved and beaten and never bathed, whose scalps were heaving with lice; children whose merest request for a token of affection or sustenance was met with derision or blows. Such children filled Imogen with wonder, not at the violence or deceit they had adopted as weapons in their quest for survival, but at their still being alive at all. She stood amazed at the unstoppable power of the will to live, and that it should be banked like an unquenchable fire in the bruised and wounded bodies of creatures so vulnerable. Her heart swelled with shame that she, with so little provocation, had toyed with the idea of suicide when these children, all but overwhelmed with reasons to hate their existence, chose obstinately—sometimes quietly, sometimes in a rage—to live.
* * *
—
One Saturday in late October Imogen sat on her favourite bench—the one on the uptown side about halfway between the arch at the foot of Fifth Avenue and University Place. There was a large hollow tree there that provided homes to several families of squirrels, some grey and some black, the virtues of segregation apparently lost on these scuttling New Yorkers.
Imogen always purchased a bag of peanuts from the corner vending cart and she and the twins shared them with their furry, twitchy friends. Aubrey liked to place a peanut on his shoulder and allow a squirrel to scramble up his sleeve and snatch it away. A better mother, Imogen scolded herself, would never tolerate the risk of rabies, mange, and God knew what other rodent malady. But the delight on Aubrey’s face was irresistible.
It was a fine autumn day, brisk enough for scarves and bright enough to make the eyes water. Smells of fallen leaves mingled with the aromas of roasting chestnuts and pretzels, and a crystalline quality to the atmosphere made the colours of the leaves and sky and brickwork seem to jump as you turned your head. Beneath the arch two men were plunking ukuleles and singing songs—their sweet voices disrupted by their bursts of laughter when they forgot lyrics.
Imogen had just started reading a new Jeremy West novel. The dust jacket showed a man at an upstairs window—a man in shadow, leaning against the window frame in a thoughtful posture, observing the city below. It could have been a New York apartment, it could have been a London terrace, it could even be what she finally realized it was—a hospital. The ambiguity continued even into the title, an unusual one for West, who usually chose proper names for his books: Vanessa, Chloe, Mister Grimes. The book in her hand was called If True.
The protagonist, whose name was Gwen, is in a fever of excitement over her upcoming marriage to a railroad executive named Bannock. Bannock is an attractive person of the man’s man type. He likes hunting and boxing and drinking and running a damned sound railroad. But shortly after war is declared, he signs up and the wedding is put off until he should return. Gwen, aghast at the atrocities of the Germans, and understanding the nature of her man, encourages him to go, even though at night she trembles to think what fate he may meet.
Imogen was enjoying West’s nimble prose, but by the end of chapter two, Bannock is shipped off to France and Gwen’s life takes a turn that Imogen read with a thrill of recognition. For Gwen is not only a doctor, she is a psychiatrist about to take a job at the prestigious “Phelps” Clinic in Baltimore. That’s right! she almost shouted alou
d, remembering that West had visited Baltimore and had even spoken to Donna about the Phipps. And here he was writing about it.
To Imogen’s mind, Gwen seemed too naive to be a psychiatrist, and she found the woman’s enthusiasm for sending her fiancé off to war repugnant. West got much of the medical world right. He was somehow able to imply the setting while eschewing detailed description. And he managed to obscure his probable ignorance of psychiatry by focusing on a single patient named Hansen, a poet who dominates any room he happens to be in. Along the way, Jonas Ganz made a brief but recognizable appearance as a kindly eccentric whose ideas of staffing run to “hiring as many emotionally wounded women as possible.” Aha, Imogen thought. Donna got a word or two in there, I see.
Hansen, an able-bodied soldier at Fort Meade, has been sent to the Phelps as a test case. The army medical corps, although unable to certify that Hansen is malingering, wants and expects him to be found sane and sent back to the base and eventually to the front.
“Mumma! Mumma, Aubrey spit on my foot!”
Charlotte kicked her brother and a flurry of swats and counter-swats ensued before Imogen could sort them out and turn everyone homeward. Tears were dried, apologies made, tempers soothed, and by the time the family trio had made their way back to Tenth Street the Battle of Washington Square was relegated to childhood history.
All through the rest of that Saturday, Imogen felt the tug of West’s story, as if Gwen and Hansen and Bannock were waiting in another room to resume their conversation. But it was not until after the children had been tucked into bed and read to and kissed that she was able to change into her own nightgown and climb into bed with Jeremy West and his characters. Other than the cameo appearance of the director, none of his creations resembled anyone she knew. It was an aspect of West’s writing she had noticed long ago: he never described his protagonists in any detail. Occasionally he might endow one with a single vivid trait—an earlier book involved a hero with flaming red hair—but this novel featured no one like that. Gwen notes in her first assessment of Hansen that he has “attractive eyes with a perpetual expression of eagerness,” but other than that he was not physically described.