“The material.”
“With you.”
Mary experienced a numbing sensation beginning at her temples, spreading under her forehead. This wasn’t rage; this was shame, pure and simple. Shame that her mother had confessed to Roz Biedelman feelings she’d never been able to express to Mary, or to anyone else in their family. Mary would have felt betrayed if she didn’t believe, on some level, that she deserved it.
“You mother came to me after she learned that she was sick,” Roz continued.
Mary stared at Roz, the numbing sensation subsiding.
“She came to you,” Mary said.
Roz nodded.
“Out of the blue,” Roz said. “Trust me, I was as surprised as you are now.”
“Out of the blue,” Mary said, her shame loosening further as she touched the letter in her pocket. Roz, as usual, was full of shit. “She just picked up the phone and called you.”
“Your mother was a complicated woman, I don’t need to tell you that.”
“Right,” Mary said. “Do you know why I’m here out of the blue?”
“What matters is that you know why you’re here.”
Mary nodded. “I think I can answer that question.”
Mary withdrew the letter from her coat pocket. She handed it to Roz.
Roz did not take the letter. It dangled between them, shuddering in a draft from the partially opened windows.
“I wonder which out of the blue came first,” Mary said. “My mother’s phone call to you, or the letter you sent to her.”
Roz still refused to take the letter.
“Read it,” Mary said.
“I don’t have to read it,” Roz said.
“No?” Mary said.
“No,” Roz said. “Does that make me guilty of something in your mind?”
“Me, and my perception of things, are not the issues here.”
“Fine,” Roz said. “What are the issues?”
“Despite how you’ve characterized my mother’s actions, in fact you were the one who contacted her first.”
Roz nodded in a tolerant way that Mary did not for a second mistake for agreement. Roz, Mary realized, was as attached—if not more attached—to vagueness than she was. Her approach to therapy was about obfuscating every obvious thing. Maybe it was nothing more—or less—cynical than a business survival technique she learned in graduate school. A way to ensure a consistent patient base. Shy away from anything concrete; shatter it into a diffuse powder. Maintain the mystery above all else.
“I had a very good reason to contact your mother,” Roz said.
“A good enough reason to lie to me, apparently.”
“I had a good reason,” Roz repeated.
“Does it have anything to do with Bettina Spencer?”
Roz removed the glasses from her knee, breathed on the left lens and scrubbed it on her sleeve, returned the glasses to her face.
“Bettina Spencer-Weeks,” Roz said. “What do you know about Bettina?”
“That she left your office building today at five. That she had tea at the bookstore you bully into selling your books. That she shoplifted some greeting cards.”
“You were spying on her,” Roz said.
“I was coming to see you and I saw Bettina. I followed her.”
“How curious,” Roz said. “In all senses of the word. You’ve obviously chosen the wrong profession—you’re a high-school gym teacher?”
“I work for the admissions department.”
“Your talents for subterfuge are going to waste.”
“As are your talents for career counseling,” Mary said.
Roz flashed Mary a bemused grin. She enjoys this, Mary thought. This sort of tinged-with-hostility repartee was Roz’s idea of a great way to pass the early evening.
“But about Bettina,” Mary said.
“What about Bettina? She remains a narcissist with a minor shoplifting problem.”
“It’s an improvement over a sociopath who burns down libraries.”
“She recently set fire to the potting shed of a neighbor she dislikes. By the way this is not to leave this room, this information.”
“You think I’ll trust you because you’ve shown trust in me.”
“I’m satisfying your curiosity about Bettina.”
“But you’ve broken another person’s trust so that I’ll trust you. Eventually I’ll put two and two together and realize that you’ll break my trust in order to gain the trust of another. A risky gambit.”
“One that, with you, will pay off.”
“You’re so confident?”
Roz shrugged. “You dislike me, Mary. I’m appealing to your sense of curiosity, which is the only thing I can appeal to. I have information that you need.”
Mary didn’t respond. Roz was irritating. She was not stupid.
“Bettina suffers from a personality disorder that most in my field consider incurable.”
“Which doesn’t prevent you from taking her money every week,” Mary said.
“Narcissists can’t be cured, but they should be managed. They can cause a lot of harm otherwise—as Bettina has already proven.”
The fish tank emitted a loud belch.
“I suppose you’re referring to Bettina’s lawsuit against Dr. Hammer,” Mary said.
“Actually, I was referring to the arson incident.”
“But still, if she’s a harm-causing narcissist, then there’s a good chance that her case against Dr. Hammer was just another opportunity to make her mark via destruction of an innocent person, right?”
“Dr. Hammer was not an innocent person,” Roz said.
“So you maintain. But of course you would have to, given you aligned yourself with Bettina during the court case.”
“Aligned,” Roz said. “You make me sound so sinister.”
“You aligned yourself with Bettina.”
“My lawyer’s idea,” Roz said, swiveling away from Mary to attend to a non-important diversionary something on her desk.
“Which couldn’t have pleased you more. You hated him.”
Roz flipped through her date book; she uncapped a pen and copied something onto a notepad. She swiveled back toward Mary.
“If you don’t mind me telling you a few things about yourself, Mary: You cling to an extremely simplistic and infantile way of viewing the world, and the people in it. You’re unforgiving. A grudge holder. In my business, we might say that you haven’t properly separated from your parents. In your case specifically, your mother.”
On the contrary, Mary thought. She’d never been so separated from a person.
“You still haven’t explained why Bettina is your patient.”
“I thought I just explained her problems in detail.”
“Why you,” Mary said. “If that’s not a conflict of interest…”
“Bettina and I were engaged in a patient-doctor relationship long before the lawsuit,” Roz said. “Read through the code of conduct manual published by the Massachusetts Psychiatric Board. I’ve violated not a single subsection.”
“I’m sure Dr. Hammer wouldn’t feel violated to know you’re still seeing his most infamous patient.”
“You’re so protective of him,” Roz observed. “You must think he needs protecting.”
“Exactly,” Mary said. “Which should tell you something.”
“It tells me that your mother’s not the only person from whom you’re seeking forgiveness,” Roz said. “Fortunately for you, Dr. Hammer is still alive. It’s not to late to find him and set things right.”
“What it should tell you is that I lied to him about being abducted,” Mary said. “And he correctly wrote a book detailing how I fabricated the whole thing. Then his life was ruined.”
“How powerful you must believe yourself to be,” Roz said. “A sixteen-year-old girl ruining the life of an adult man.”
“I didn’t ruin his life,” Mary said. “You did.”
“Really,” Roz said. “I didn
’t see you rushing to his defense when it counted. When I claimed that your fabrications weren’t fabrications at all. When I claimed that you had actually been sexually abused by an adult man. If I was wrong, Mary, why didn’t you say so?”
Mary grew light-headed. “It was—a difficult choice,” she said. “I was young. I didn’t realize what would come of it.”
“Only good things could have come of it,” Roz said. “Dr. Hammer’s career would have been saved. And your mother—nobody was more invested in Dr. Hammer’s theory than your mother. She wanted so desperately to believe that you’d been lying. That you’d never been abducted or sexually molested, that you merely suffered from an overactive imagination. So I find it hard to accept, Mary, given the many benefits of testifying on behalf of Dr. Hammer, that you couldn’t bring yourself to do so. Where was this ‘choice’?”
Mary locked eyes again with a stone-faced fish. Exactly, the fish seconded. Where was this choice? From this distance—fourteen years—she was having a hard time recapturing the difficulty of the choice. It seemed so obvious in retrospect. Testify that Dr. Hammer was right. He had rightly created his hyper radiance theory, about girls who come of age in a sexually repressed society, girls who fabricate abduction and abuses because they’re unable to act out in a directly sexual way without risking cultural shame. He had spun her testimony into a theory involving adolescent girls in New England and regardless of what you thought of his theory, it had been based on this supposed truth: she’d lied.
“I can see this conversation is upsetting you,” Roz said.
“I’m fine,” Mary said.
“Maybe we should return to your original reason for coming here tonight.”
“My original, selfish reason.”
Roz View-Mastered from defensive to sympathetic.
“Seeking closure is selfish business. That doesn’t make it unworthy. Just don’t expect too much solace to come of it. While Dr. Hammer might yet forgive you, your mother never will.”
“But you said she’d changed…”
“She may have forgiven you in her lifetime—I’m not at liberty to say. But what good would it do you, even if I could say ‘Yes, Mary, your mother forgave you’? The fact remains that you will never be forgiven by her. That’s what I meant when I said I was sad not to have seen you before she died. I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”
“You accused me of being selfish,” Mary said.
“Yes,” Roz said. “You’re being selfish. And what an improvement that is.”
Mary’s face and neck grew hot—as if she’d received a compliment for something she hadn’t realized it was good to be good at.
“I should go,” Mary said.
“But I haven’t given you what you came for.”
“What was that?” Mary said. She was too muddle-brained to remember why she’d come.
“That good reason your mother had for contacting me,” Roz said. “The letter you found in her desk. Aren’t you curious?”
“Maybe not anymore,” Mary said. She was embarrassed, suddenly, by her quest. How silly it was, as Roz wisely pointed out. How pointless and silly. It was as pointless and silly as her own mother’s obsession with clearing the name of Abigail Lake. Abigail Lake was dead—so very, very dead, she was three hundred years worth of dead, her body nothing but a black lichen imprint on the bottom of a pine box. Forgiveness being sought for the dead, or from them—a vain endeavor. Vain, pointless, selfish. She should return to the West Salem living room and learn how to be sad. Sad that her mother was dead. Sad that she’d blown all opportunities to rectify their relationship while her mother was alive. A classic example of “failure to yield.”
Roz tore a sheet of paper from the pad on her desk. She folded it in two. Mary shoved the paper into her pocket without reading it. Uncertain how to end things, she extended her hand.
Roz took her hand but did not shake it. She held onto it with the firm-yet-light grip of a psychic trying to get a surreptitious read off a stranger.
“Maybe I’ll see you again,” Roz said. “But I’m guessing I won’t.”
“OK,” Mary said dumbly.
“You have a chance to set things right for yourself, Mary,” Roz said. “Don’t screw it up.”
Mary found herself fighting back a second humiliating bout of tears as Roz’s office door shut behind her with a scarcely audible click. She stood in the tiny hallway, made smaller by the space-consuming exhalations of the white-noise machine. How unportentious it all seemed, Mary thought. No definitive slamming of doors. No flickering streetlamps. No bolts of lightning. All these years of hating Roz Biedelman, and now the woman was—possibly—gone from her life for good. How many times a day do such disappearances occur without a person noticing? These final meetings between two ambivalent humans. The last opportunity she might ever have to speak her mind to Roz Biedelman. The last opportunity to apologize to Miss Pym for her “failure to yield.” The last opportunity to ask Bettina Spencer-Weeks why she did what she’d done to Dr. Hammer. Just like that, people are eradicated from your life, without any cosmic fanfare accompanying that final handshake, that final glance. It seemed useless to even remember a person like Roz Biedelman; what was the point? The Roz portion of her brain could be erased now. Forget the bad feelings. Utilize that nubbly area for something more productive. Amnesia was not a disease, it was a practical use of storage space.
Mary waited until she’d reached the lobby before withdrawing the folded paper from her pocket.
48 Water Street
Chadwick
He will want to see you.
Notes
MARCH 25, 1986
I would not be the first person to suggest a similarity between the job of a psychiatrist treating a patient faking a severe anterograde memory disturbance and that of a prosecutor cross-examining a witness of dubious integrity. This similarity was suggested by H-F in a paper entitled “ ‘Cross-examination’ and the Faked Severe Anterograde Memory Disturbance” that he delivered at the 1982 New England Psychiatric Conference. As H-F learned from studying prosecutorial techniques, abrupt transitions during the interrogation phase with the defendant—“the patient”—can reveal inconsistencies in his or her story; as the ground shifts, the defendant/patient does not have the opportunity to recalibrate his or her position, and the effect is as revealing as any lie detector.
Had I been more attuned to the similarities between a perjurer and a patient, I might not have been so easily duped by Bettina Spencer’s “false memory”—that she had been abducted and abused by her field hockey coach. In fact, had I been privy to her police testimony—at the time, such documents were off-limits to a psychiatric volunteer—I might have more immediately identified Bettina’s confabulation pattern and been able, thus, to treat her more effectively.
Call it curiosity, call it a hunch, or call it, as my own analyst might be inclined to call it, an attempt to rectify a past mistake. Regardless, after my fifth session with Mary, I thought it might be helpful to read the transcript from Bettina’s questioning by the police after she reappeared on November 7, 1971. (November 7. A brief glance at Mary’s file confirmed: she had disappeared on the exact same day that Bettina had reappeared, fourteen years earlier.) The transcripts were available through the the Massachusetts Mental Health Governing Board, the same board that assigned a caseworker to investigate my methods and procedures after I testified on Bettina’s behalf in a preliminary court hearing against her field hockey coach. Curiously, the revealing transcript had nothing to do with Bettina’s disappearance. Appendix F: Interrogation Transcript May 19, 1972, included the entirety of the conversation between Bettina and a police detective named Morse after she was arrested on suspicion of setting fire to the Semmering library. The relevant part of the exchange went as follows:
MORSE: You say you were not responsible for your own actions.
BETTINA: That’s what I said.
MORSE: Because you were under a spell.
BET
TINA: Yes.
MORSE: And you claim that your headmistress, Miss Pym, cast this spell on you.
BETTINA: That’s what happened.
MORSE: Can you describe this spell to me?
BETTINA: No.
MORSE: No?
BETTINA: I can’t remember.
MORSE: But you know you were under a spell. You remember that much.
BETTINA: The last thing I remember was a bright flash.
MORSE: What kind of flash?
BETTINA: The flash came from a solid object. An ax. Like those axes Indians use.
MORSE: A tomahawk.
BETTINA: Yes. A tomahawk. But it was made of gold.
A golden tomahawk. A coincidence? Impossible, unless you believe in spells—and even more impossible when you consider the corresponding dates of appearance/disappearance. The question was, how had Mary gained access to this exchange between Bettina and Morse? I phoned Miss Pym and was informed: Semmering sponsored an after-school internship program with the Massachusetts Mental Health Governing Board; the previous spring, Mary Veal had been one of these interns.
Now I had proof, even if circumstantial, that Mary’s “story” was a fabrication—or an unconscious confabulation—and that she was either hiding something by lying or that she was simply, like Bettina, suffering from an antisocial personality disorder. The latter diagnosis would be the more troubling, from both a recovery and a treatment perspective; the antisocial personality disorder patient will “play along” only so long as you do not resist their manipulations. Any attempt to confront them or criticize them typically results in the patient terminating treatment. A therapeutic alliance can only be formed by presenting yourself as an ally; a tone of accusation or judgment must be avoided at all costs, unless you wish to lose the patient’s cooperation. At the same time, a doctor must be careful not to condone the actions of an antisocial sociopath, for fear of becoming an enabler. The difference between an enabler and an ally, of course, is a difficult line to walk. And since I had been an enabler in the past, I was more than a little leery of making that misstep again.
The Uses of Enchantment Page 19