I felt myself relaxing under the spell of that contralto voice. Warm, clear, lying in the ear like liquor under the tongue. I reminded myself that this voice belonged to the Chief of Psychiatry of a major metropolitan hospital. She would be coolly aware of it, her instrument of healing.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked without reaching for the packet. There was one butt in the ashtray already.
“Be my guest.”
My companion, as I was about to learn, smoked incessantly with a quiet contemplative air and drank noisily with a great swirling and crunching of ice. With what afterwards seemed a startling willingness, I let her lead me on a long detour of agreeably aimless talk. I was aware that this was her art. But, anything to hear that voice, the rich chalice of her throat welling now with humour and warmth as she put her glass down.“I’m afraid I’m becoming a drunk. My husband says I see too much.”
“Men always feel that about their wives,” I offered. She smiled gratefully, somehow making me now her host. Quite remarkable. A lush, a chainsmoker—a virtuoso. She gave off the impression of a very clear mind and—this phrase, is it from Beulah’s notes somewhere?—a complicit heart.
We were already on a first-name basis. My trust at this point was implicit. Where was the cross-examination I’d prepared?
It was only after the waiter had set down our third round of drinks, her fourth at least, that I noticed he was having trouble taking his eyes off her. Hearing that she was married had made no impression whatever on me. But I now looked at her more closely.
In this low light her complexion was somehow the voice’s complement—that creamy translucence of skin tone favoured by the Dutch masters. Looking younger, she must nevertheless be at least in her mid-forties. Hair cut in a coppery pageboy, bangs slightly jagged as though she’d trimmed them herself. An air not particularly feminine, yet of an incongruous delicacy for a woman her size—athletically built, with the proportions of a speedskater. Mrs. Hans Brinker. Her face was oval, her mouth small, lips a pale rose, slightly pursed, as if in faint concern rather than disapproval. Light, china-blue eyes.
The Dutch rustics of Vermeer’s time would have thought her face too frail, sickly. What I now saw, thanks to the waiter, was a casual and undeniable beauty. Is it, I wondered, that I am henceforth to be surrounded, on my happy hunting ground, only by beautiful women? Or is it that all women shall now be revealed as beautiful to me?
A further revelation was that I stood in serious danger of getting sloshed. But this glimmer of alarm too quickly faded. “What’s your denomination?” I burbled, warmly. “Reichian, Jungian …?”
She cocked a reproving brow.
I waited.
“The latter. Though as a team, we’re pretty ecumenical.”
“I’d hoped the former.” As the words left my lips I had a brief sense of delivering a little bundle of emotional junk mail of the kind some women are all too weary of receiving: Dear Occupant of Beautiful Lodgings…. I felt my face flush. I always let the woman lead.
“Her family has been unhelpful,” she said gently. The transition was sudden without feeling brusque. She could easily have chosen to intensify my discomfort. “In fact the father’s been a problem. Or may be….”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Dr. Gregory—”
“Don.”
“Don, I’m asking you for help.”
“Yes.”
“You understand I’m taking a risk.”
What I understood was how much I was suddenly looking forward to talking about this with someone even slightly sympathetic. She would know this, of course. There flashed through my mind the wry notion that Beulah had gone to rather extravagant lengths to get me into therapy.
“Risk?” I said. “Yes, I imagine you are.”
“If a cabinet minister or a CEO has a heart attack within a thousand miles of here, Jonas Limosneros is one of two or three surgeons with a police escort to the nearest helipad. He’s also on a first-name basis with every major contributor on the hospital’s donor list.”
“And this is a problem….”
“A treatment history like hers indicates family issues. Yet the parents have been obstructively vague about the day-to-day of their daughter’s life. The mother, I think I understand.”
“Champagne brunches start at 10. Seven days a week.”
“He has his secretary call me twice a day for updates.”
“He wants progress,” I suggested.
“What I think he really wants is to send her to a private facility.”
“Where the doctors follow orders.”
She nodded.“And prescribe a good deal of medication.”
“Preferably somewhere distant.”
“I have my own little fan club, but if I’m going to stand up to him I need to know what’s going on.”
“What’s going on, I suspect, is the good doctor’s scared shitless. It has been my lawyer’s pleasure to explain to me that the media machine has made Beulah into Sleeping Beauty. When she wakes she’s going to be surrounded by microphones.”
“Don, I know you’d rather not … and I know you’ve already gone through a lot to protect her privacy, but I need background here.”
“How will you be treating her?”
“Do you have her diaries?”
“How,” I repeated.
She sighed. “We’ll take a multi-disciplinary approach. Obviously the neurological issues are primary at the moment—”
“So why put a Jungian in charge?” I’d known all along it would have to come to this, but I’d been so enjoying the ride.
“I’m the one who decides the composition of each treatment team.”
“And keeps the interesting cases for herself….”
“Our group sees some very difficult cognitive work ahead, yes.”
“Oh?” They had no idea.
“Anytime someone tries to stage their own vivisection….”
I sat for a moment over my scotch.“Is that what you think?”
“Or C-section, or whatever—I just want to help her, Don. You tell me.”
“How is she?”
Elsa Aspen’s eyes narrowed, then her expression softened.“Coma triggers some pretty concrete connotations. It’s actually quite complex and fluid. I wouldn’t make too much of it. We prefer the term ‘brain trauma.’ Scientific shorthand for ‘we don’t really understand this.’ Certainly no two cases are alike.”
“And this case?”
“No major physical trauma. A concussion is about all. That’s a good sign. Truth is, we can’t even be sure what caused this, there are so many possibilities.”
“Like?”
“Maybe some combination of contributing factors—endocrine imbalances, ileus, uremia, dehydration. Blood loss, shock. Also some kind of drug cocktail, probably ingested with wine. Trace amounts—the paramedics induced vomiting on the way—phenobarbs, Librium, lithium. Digitalis—what may have been foxglove. Peyote.”
“You’re not serious.”
“And GHB, which is mainly why the police considered foul play.”
“GHB …?”
“Date rapists use it. Something fairly new. Even on its own it can cause more or less permanent brain trauma. It’s been all over the papers. Any idea where she might have gotten it?”
“You don’t think this is … permanent.”
“Opinions vary. Until a few days ago, all the signs were hopeful. Often there’s a surfacing pattern. The first four or five days she progressed steadily to the point of flinching at sudden loud noises. But not much new since.”
“What were you looking for?”
“Next they often open their eyes. But then remain in an unresponsive state.”
“At first.”
“At first, yes. Sometimes forever. Are you going to help us?”
Was I supposed to just cave in now? “Why the diaries?”
“Why? Because these people wake fresh, frail, like newborns. Even before they s
urface they can be terribly vulnerable. Staff and family have to be coached to speak only in the most hopeful terms. Patients often quote back whole reams of what was being said around them. They find any negatives devastating. The loneliness is appalling.
They’re still highly suggestible when they wake. They take soundings. But the chrysalis hardens quickly. Sometimes into catalepsis, catatonia …”
“You need to understand.”
“Don’t we both? I want her to wake to hopeful signs. I need to know how to reach her.”
Still I hesitated.
“If you’ve been following this in the press, then you know the family has her diaries. You’re not suggesting I try to persuade them—”
“I need you to get real with me,” she said, her voice rich and reedy—timbre of an English horn. “You’ve safeguarded her papers this far—you won’t have handed them over without making copies.” She waited for me to deny it. “Show me anything, Don. I never judge.” She looked down at her empty glass.“I’m told it’s a gift.”
I believed her. I looked into those eyes, I listened to the voice. I let myself be convinced.
“It’s in the car.”
Outside we stood in the strip mall parking lot. The air was bright. The wind lifted the copper bangs away from her face. We stood before the open trunk like traffickers in stolen radios. I had made a copy of everything for her in the event she could convince me, everything, including my notes to that point.
I placed the box in her hands but was slow to release it.“Beulah was interested in Jung.”
“Really,” she responded, patiently now. “She had an interest in psychotherapy?”
“No. In insanity.”
Dr. Elsa Aspen took up the box’s weight. Distracted, she seemed about to turn away. I held onto the box an instant longer. “Maybe you’ll be able to tell me if she’s crazy.”
She stared at me across the width of a file box, then around us at the strip mall.“You know, it seems to me, a little more with each passing day, we’re all completely wacko.” I let go. Reached up a hand to shut the trunk lid.“My job, Don, is the ones who can’t get themselves through that day.”
During the drive back to the cabin I asked myself for about the hundredth time. Was she insane? No. I do not think so. But then my judgement has proved unreliable.
Beulah’s, on the other hand, seems impeccable today. She knew I would run from this. I am hand-picked. Plucked from her twisted tree of knowledge. Craziness or insanity? I would very much need to make sense of the difference. She knew why.
So she filled these papers with notes to me like a blood trail. She knew I’d run, even as she was making her last phone call to me. She counted on this. I run from everything. Her salamander, fleeing the insane swamp of family romance, lighting out for the cool temples of reason. I save myself. This is my function. The record survives through me. But I almost didn’t go. There are things she could not know.
I was not always quite such a coward.
As a boy I even won a medal for bravery, though my father would not let me collect it. Instead we left town. He would find another job. This was the next story I would have told Beulah, had our game of chicken lasted that long. Truth or dare….
My father was a drinker and a brawler. But he loved church music, perhaps still does, alone in his motorhome somewhere in Arizona. In his love of gospel, he took after his mother. Like her, he knew God existed. Only, he hated him for it.
My father’s father taught all of his children—boys and girls both—the manly arts. Fishing, hunting, hockey, boxing, a steady escalation of brutalities. Towards the end of the war, with my father still in his early teens, my grandfather drove him from town to town for improvised bouts of backlot bareknuckles. All comers, men and boys, against a sweet-faced kid with a sneaky overhand right and a vicious left hook. Some of those contests must have been desperately, inexpressibly savage. Most of the men, read here ‘real’ men, were away in France, dying like cattle. My grandfather couldn’t go. He’d been disqualified from the service because of a metal plate in his head—an ice-skating accident, the infamous slew-foot incident a hundred times retold to us.
Grandfather did not forgive. There was an iron in the men of that generation, a kind of metal plate in their heads. He never once forgave. That is, until he forgot everything. To forgive, he had to forget.
Once, he caught a man exaggerating, about something not terribly important. A mild criticism of my grandfather. No one remembered anymore what, exactly. But at the time, the man was my grandfather’s best friend. For the next forty years that former friend lived on only in infamy, a spectre referred to ever after as ‘lyin’ Thompson.’
Meanwhile, over that same forty years of his own domestic violence and silent remorse, he could not allow himself to apologize. Never once told anyone he was sorry. It was a word my grandmother never heard him use. She once said she didn’t hold it against him.
When she died, he took her effects—and his silences and his sorrows—back to the Ottawa Valley, where he had several distant cousins. For the last ten years of his life he walked from farm to farm. Helping with the harvests, the planting, repairs. Sinking deeper into the purgatorial half-light of Alzheimer’s. Each time he came to stay somewhere, he would clear—on a dresser, a night table, an apple crate upturned near a bed—enough space for three mementoes. Grandma’s amethyst broach. Her silver hairbrush, with the sort of clip that slips over the hand. Their wedding photo. He continued to do this even when he could no longer recognize the woman in the picture next to him, and then himself.
I saw him around that time. One summer, when I was still an undergrad. My father brought him to see me, the Gregorys’ first college boy, to say good-bye.
“I don’t remember you,” he said, unsteadily, with a lost look. “I’m sorry.”
Good-bye then, old man.
My mother had a beautiful singing voice. She had looks. Her marriage prospects should have been better but she was said to have had a head for figures. This was farm code for intelligence and ambition, as much to be concealed as her hand for sketching, code phrase for a suspect creativity. Dirt-poor offspring of an Irish Protestant family scarred by legends of famine and a prairie Depression that raged on in their heads, her only permissible social recreation was singing at weddings. For the first year of their marriage the young couple sang duets together in little churches all over northern Manitoba. Eventually, some of my father’s other formative influences took over.
She first started running away from him when she was pregnant with me. It was the fifties. Any self-respecting husband had better know how to keep a firm grip on his property, even if she was half crazy. Into the early sixties he kept finding us and dragging us back. It was usually to an unfamiliar town; her flights served up the little incentive he needed to move on.
He did finally feel the urge to settle down, though, get a double-wide, have his flighty wife institutionalized. It was supposed to be a short stay. A rest cure of the kind then widely available to the hysterical daughters of a Victorian colony. A cure that worked wonders for the colony’s sons.
I quit boxing when I turned twelve as my mother died in captivity. The hunting I quit soon after. It was late November, the last time we went out. Hunting season over, not that it made any difference, half-drunk father and sullen son were driving home late after a weekend’s unsuccessful hunting, about to take a shortcut across the ice. When I expressed doubts, he boasted it was a lake he’d driven out on a hundred times for ice fishing. Only twice, I countered. And only in mid-winter.
No, it was shallow at this end, ten or twelve feet, would already be frozen hard. The cut across would save an hour. See, two or three fishing shacks out there already. A shack is not a car, I said.
He was right about the depth, wrong about the ice. The precision-welded cars of today would have floated for several moments. In 1967, ten-year-old Mercury station wagons sank in less than a minute. The car heater was broken, so we were w
earing our heavy clothes, hunting mitts and overcoats. To mock my anxiousness he’d buckled on his seatbelt, pulled imaginary goggles down over his eyes, then revved the engine before we shot out onto the ice.
We were both good swimmers. The conditions were less than ideal, true. But he might have made a serious try at getting out of the car. He was a big man, by then with a big gut. With the car filling fast, he couldn’t find the seatbelt buckle lodged under his paunch and in the folds of his parka. Slipping my head under the chin-deep water I found it for him. I thought he’d follow me to the surface.
I stood on the car hood and my shoulders cleared the water. It wasn’t deep. It was stunningly, mind-numbingly cold.
All I had to do was get my feet under me on the roof. From there, half-jump and clamber onto the ice. I wasn’t sure how long I would have the strength. Not long. Huge air bubbles were bursting up around me, and as each broke I told myself it was him. But it wasn’t.
I filled my lungs with air. The hardest thing was ducking my head back under water so cold it struck your skull like a hammer. I like to imagine that I could see his eyes. I’m not sure. I could, though, see the outline of his head, shaking, no. The window was still up, the door was locked. I don’t remember ever seeing him drive with his door locked. No? No?
The part of my heritage that I have most wanted to escape is the homicidal rage that rides as a quiet companion to even the most casual family cruelties.
My father loathed quitters. Had tormented me for years by claiming to detect such tendencies in me. I should drive down to the Sun Belt now, look him up in his trailer park and compliment him on his prescience. At that moment, I wanted to kill him.
Was it the drink, the cold? Was it his embarrassment, a long-held despair? I couldn’t have cared less. I planted my feet in the mud, gripped the door handle in my right hand and struck the window glass again and again and again with my left elbow. I wanted to feel the satisfaction of breaking something—my elbow, the glass, his face, my lungs.
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