A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  She opens the closets and drawers. Either the police have taken most everything belonging to Reed or he had been only temporarily parked here. Under the bed, she finds a pair of men’s running shoes and a set of barbells. In the kitchen cabinet, a can of the loose green tea Reed drank by the potful when they’d roomed together. There’s no desk, no bookshelves, just a pile of fashion magazines and paperbacks, mostly romances in Portuguese it seems from the covers, on a table pushed against the living room wall. Only one book jumps out at her as Reed’s: the Michelin Atlas Routier.

  She carries the atlas to the couch. It’s a spiral-bound collection of detailed maps of France chopped into a hundred-some sections, either, she imagines, a souvenir from his last job when he’d worked on Franco-American trading agreements or something collected during his Columbia years when he’d gone through a Francophile period in which he’d revered Godard and slept with the French 101 teaching assistant, a girl with beaded cornrows from Port-au-Prince.

  Camping in the Sierras, Reed had shown her how to read a topographical map, how to imagine a landscape from the shadings of brown and green and the density of the switchback squiggles.

  The couch reeks of perfume. She puts the Atlas Routier in her tote. It’s hard to imagine Saul in this room with Reed and Bria, how he found his way here.

  She covers her face. The answer is obvious. Through her.

  5 Leonard

  The morning we’re scheduled to be visited by Ms. Sandra Wright, the probation officer doing the presentencing investigation, your mother announces the worst sinus infection she’s had in ten years.

  Ten years, I think. Not eight? Not twelve? I pull out the legs on her bed tray and set it across her lap.

  “After you’ve eaten, we’ll see how you feel.”

  Your mother turns her face to the wall, though not before, I notice, stealing a glance at the croissant.

  I call Morton, who reassures me that I can do the interview on my own. Although he doesn’t come out and say so, his tone suggests that Ms. Wright’s visit is a formality, that nothing could incriminate you further. Still, I cannot help feeling it’s important, if for no other reason than it’s the only thing at this stage I can do.

  At three, a taxi stops in front of our house. I cannot recall having ever seen a cab in our neighborhood. A young black woman carrying a raincoat and a briefcase gets out of the back. I wait for her to ring the bell before going to the door.

  I take her coat, ask if she had trouble finding the house.

  “No. Piece of cake. I don’t get out of the city too often doing these things. Unless you count going up to the Bronx.” She smiles. My heart sinks. “Sure is pretty.”

  I ask if she’d like some coffee.

  “Love it. That afternoon slump.”

  I settle Ms. Wright in the living room while I start the coffee and put cookies on a plate. The tray is still upstairs with your mother, so I end up shuttling what seems like a ridiculous number of times back and forth from the kitchen to get everything onto the coffee table.

  Ms. Wright eats two cookies and puts three spoons of sugar in her coffee. I cross my fingers and hope this bodes well for you. She takes a clipboard with a stapled form that looks like a medical history from her briefcase. “Well, I suppose we should get going.”

  She reads from the form. “The purpose of this interview is to assist the probation department in making its recommendations to the judge for the sentencing of …” She looks at a sheet of paper at her side. “Mr. Dubinovsky.”

  “Dubinsky.”

  “Sorry about that,” she says sotto voce, as if there is an official exchange between us and then some other parenthetical, more human one. “I’m batting oh-for-eight this week.”

  She finishes reading the bureaucratese, then hands me something to sign: paragraph after paragraph of informed consent. I skim the words. Foolishly, I’d imagined that the people going over your case would find you so anomalous, such an interesting case, that everything would be handled delicately. If Morton and the penal officers have found anything curious about a shy, intellectual psychiatrist being held for conspiracy to commit armed robbery, they have given no sign. As for this Ms. Wright, there seems to be nothing new under the sun, life a series of daytime talk shows—transvestite lesbian nuns, men who love women with bad skin, people who believe vegetables have a soul.

  She asks me to describe you in my own words, and I have to refrain from a nasty quip about who else’s words could I use. Spurred by Ms. Wright’s friendly lack of curiosity, I permit myself a touch of florid overstatement. I describe you as the dreamy grandchild of a socialist grandfather, as having grown up with a mother who was bedridden. I lower my voice and point upstairs. A pacifist who refused to fight the boys on the school bus who would stick their legs out to trip you. How you’d chosen Swarthmore because of its Quaker affiliations, been a student volunteer at a prison where you first became interested in the interface between social disintegration and deviant behavior. I watch Ms. Wright, amazed that she sees no irony in this.

  My anxiety ratchets up a notch as I see that Ms. Wright is taking only the most occasional notes on the clipboard. Worried how the judge will piece your story together, I add more and more details, hoping that if I say more, Ms. Wright will have to convey more. I describe your medical school years, how you always selected the rotations in the city hospitals rather than the private suburban ones, how you went into psychiatry thinking it would provide more of a home for a social analysis of illness.

  Ms. Wright leans forward, and for a moment my heart leaps as I think it’s to ask a question. She takes another cookie.

  I tell her how demoralized you felt during your residency by the focus on the biological aspects of psychiatric difficulties and the perfunctory hand-waving toward the social underpinnings. I describe your reasons for taking your first job at a hospital in the Bronx, thinking surely Ms. Wright will admire you for this. You’d come to feel that there was something wrong, intellectually and morally, I tell Ms. Wright, with treating patients who came to your clinic with depressions related to the depressing aspects of their lives as though their fundamentally economic problems were psychiatric disorders. For those patients with what you thought of as real psychiatric problems, you felt even worse—that the best you could do given your enormous caseload was a patch-up job.

  She runs her tongue over her teeth as if checking for bits of chocolate.

  Afterwards, though, after Ms. Wright puts her clipboard back in her briefcase and we call the cab to return her to the train station and she thanks me for the coffee and cookies, afterwards when I’m shuttling everything back into the kitchen and starting dinner for your mother, I realize that the judge will have no problem piecing my story together because he’ll never hear it. Too much to write, too much even to take notes on. The whole thing will, undoubtedly, be condensed into a paragraph or two, something like accused has long history of unrealistic expectations and disappointments in vocational sphere.

  WHEN WE CAME BACK from your grandfather’s funeral in that tenth year of our marriage, your mother took to her bed. It was May and, as I said, I believed her fatigue to be simple grief. In June, I enrolled the two of you in a day camp, thinking that she needed a quiet summer. A bus would come for you before eight and deliver you tired and dirty at five. After dinner, we would climb the stairs and the two of you would visit with your mother until I’d see her pressing her fingers to her temples, when quietly I would suggest that you say your good nights. She’d smile feebly at me and I’d smile back. For the first time, her complaints about me had ceased. Briefly, I felt cheered by this turn of events, but when the headaches escalated from evenings to all day—headaches that sent her to our bedroom by eleven in the morning where she would lie with a cold washcloth covering her forehead—I had to acknowledge that it was not a good sign, that it was as though with her father’s death, her whole system of resentment had lost its ballast and she’d collapsed en suite.

  Stone
did bloodwork. We went to see one of her father’s colleagues, who did an EEG and talked with her about stress. Tactfully, he suggested she might see a therapist to discuss this. Trying too hard to be offhand, I mentioned someone she’d once met, but she caught the scent of my growing suspicions, indignant that no one believed her. “No one’s saying that you don’t really have headaches,” I explained. “Rather, we’re wondering if they’re brought on by something of a psychological nature.” Your mother looked at me with disdain. She switched from washcloths to an ice pack on top of her head.

  By July, your mother was convinced that the headaches were the result of allergies, and we installed an air conditioner in the bedroom so she could keep the windows closed. By fall, she was complaining of dizziness, which she stated was worsened by noise. In November, we moved our bedroom up to the third floor of the house so she could be away from your after-school horseplay. The dizziness became pain in her back for which no orthopedist could identify the source. Conversation, never abundant, shrank to discussions of her symptoms: how the headache might one day be better but the dizziness worse; how she thought the houseplants were irritating her sinuses. From backaches, we moved to heart palpitations, and from there to nausea. This time not asking, I scheduled an appointment for her with a psychiatrist who specialized in psychosomatics. She went once and then canceled the next three appointments, claiming that the nausea prevented her from leaving her bed.

  On the first anniversary of your grandfather’s death, I hired Mrs. Smiley. She toured the house: the linen closets your mother had never bothered to put in order and that had further deteriorated this past year as you boys fetched your own sheets and towels, the basement piled with laundry I tried to do in the evenings, the dusty living room, the oven I’d never thought to clean. “I have my pattern,” Mrs. Smiley said. “Mondays I do laundry. Tuesdays I clean bathrooms and the kitchen. Wednesdays I vacuum and dust. Thursdays I shop. Fridays I bake and cook for the weekend. There’s a story I watch every day at noon while I eat my lunch. I have a coffee and piece of cake at four. I don’t use the telephone. I’ll need a car to do the shopping and a shelf to keep my things because I don’t work in my street clothes.”

  Within a month, the house was spotless and we had all fallen into Mrs. Smiley’s routine. Your mother’s ailments didn’t abate, but they ceased their previous expansion. I was certain this improvement, if you could call it such, was due to Mrs. Smiley, the only person I’ve ever known your mother to feel intimidated by. If your mother wanted something from Mrs. Smiley, she’d instruct me to convey the message: Perhaps you could ask Mrs. Smiley to give me a little more orange juice; this sinus condition leaves me so dehydrated. Tell Mrs. Smiley to make more of that applesauce cake. When I’m nauseous, it’s the one thing that goes down easily. As for Mrs. Smiley, she seemed to have a precise instinct as to how much she could push your mother. Slowly, she laid down her rules. “If she’s going to stay in bed,” Mrs. Smiley informed me, “the sheets have to be changed every day. I do beds at ten.” So every day your mother had to move downstairs while Mrs. Smiley tidied our room. A week later, holding at arm’s length a soiled dinner plate that had been left on the bedside stand, Mrs. Smiley announced that her pot roast could not be eaten lying down. Obediently, your mother took to joining us for twenty minutes each evening at the table.

  I knew that it was a devil’s pact. You boys got fried chicken and mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables every night and I got starched shirts and an immaculate porcelain tub and all the free time I needed and your mother got her retreat from us all. I taught two mornings a week, had office hours one afternoon. Other than that, I spent the days at home, behind the closed door of the study I set up in what had been our bedroom. I began my second book on the historical precursors of the psychoanalytic unconscious: a radical departure from my first book on the history of the asylum in nineteenth-century America, which had been about the history of a “thing,” involving what I thought of as “proper” research including, one summer, what your mother called the loony bin tour—the three of you splashing in Howard Johnson swimming pools while I rummaged through hospital storage rooms inspecting old hydrotherapy tubs and primitive electroshock machines.

  Your mother’s retreat suited me in another way, as well. It gave me the two of you. Not that she’d ever been possessive of you; rather, her focus had been on efficiency, and for that reason she’d left little room for my involvement. When you were babies, this had taken me by surprise because she was in other ways impulsive and disorganized. She’d prided herself on what she seemed to think of as the tricks of the trade: preserving her own sleep by leaving bottles hidden in the corners of your crib for you to grope for in the dark, toilet-training Marc before you were born so there’d be only one child in diapers, putting the two of you on the same schedule so she’d have her evenings free. You both seemed reasonably happy, so it was hard for me to put my finger on what bothered me. All I knew was that there were times when we’d be around other families and I would sense something different in the way things worked, a back-and-forth flow between the children’s needs and the parents’ attempts to bring the children into the world, something like the way waters of different temperatures mix together.

  Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that you and your brother weren’t attached to your mother. You’d run crying to her when something happened, when Marc’s shove as you reached for the toy he had in his hand would result in your chin hitting the bookshelf, and she’d pick you up and put you on her hip. But it was always pat-pat and a brusque, or so it sounded to me, come, come, forget about it, let’s find a different toy for you. It was not until after your mother took to her bed that I came to understand her approach—the very one I found myself using with her. Drawing you out to discuss how you felt must have seemed to her too dangerous. If possible, do not operate on an impaired system, I recalled learning during the first year of medical school. Even a tooth extraction should be delayed if the patient has an infection. That’s how at first I rationalized my approach with your mother. I was waiting for the infection to pass.

  Still, I could not overlook that your mother’s retirement had a greater effect on you than on your brother. For a year already, he had begun to have a separate life centered on his sports teams and the friends he had through these teams. You would come home to the Saran-covered slice of applesauce cake Mrs. Smiley left on the kitchen table. Through the basement door, you’d hear the German radio station she listened to as she ironed or folded laundry. Upstairs would be silent.

  The first time I saw you sitting by yourself at the kitchen table with your plate of cake, your skinny eight-year-old legs still silky and hairless, your head resting on one arm, I nearly wept. Unable to bear the image of your loneliness, I took to breaking from my work when I heard you at the back door. After a week, I ceased working altogether after three, saving my day’s walk for your return from school. Together we’d walk the half-mile to the lake, where we’d circle the perimeter, watching out for our fowled friends: the family of magenta-headed ducks, the three white swans, the black male that appeared only on rainy days. Sometimes I’d bring along a blanket that we’d spread in autumn over crackly brown leaves, in spring over damp green shoots, both of us stretching out to stare at the sky or read the books we’d carry in our backpacks. When the weather was inclement, we’d walk to the public library, each of us disappearing into the stacks to rejoin with armloads of books. Sometimes you’d come find me to show me something you’d discovered (a chart of the evolutionary path from tyrannosaurus to iguana, a book listing the largest one hundred rivers in order of length and volume), and sometimes I’d help you look up something that interested you that day in the adult encyclopedias.

  Now, thinking back, I can’t recall when we stopped those afternoons, probably by the time you reached junior high school and I could sense your embarrassment at being seen palling around with your dad, but I do know there were times before then, walking home with you, talkin
g about the things we’d seen at the lake or discovered at the library, when it would seem that the planets had fallen strangely into order, your mother’s neurasthenia having bequeathed us this time together.

  MORTON TELEPHONES TO say that the sentencing hearing took place and there’d been no surprises; it had all gone as expected, the forty-eight months with the fifty days a year off for good behavior. I call Rena to tell her.

  “Morton said it’s good news when it goes as expected. Sometimes it goes worse.”

  “Yes, I can see that,” she says, like me, I suspect, not seeing it at all but somehow thinking it important that the sentencing be interpreted as having been in your favor.

  “He’ll be staying where he is. That makes it easier than being moved somewhere else.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  In the background, I hear what sounds like the tub running. She’s told me that in the morning she’ll fly to Denver, where she’ll be for the rest of the week.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” she says. “I’ll go see him when I get back.”

  “I can drive you. I’m going to try to go every Sunday.”

  “The bus is fine. I actually like it.” She pauses, taken aback, I imagine, by the gracelessness of her own response. “That’s very kind of you. Can we play it by ear?”

  I hear the creak of the faucets turning, then the quiet of the water no longer running. I chastise myself for wondering if she’s wrapped in a towel.

  We say our careful good-byes, both of us knowing there’s no way she’ll let me drive her. She couldn’t bear it, two hours in a car obliged to converse with me.

  THERE ARE TIMES when I no longer know if I am talking with you or talking with the you that lives in my head or writing to you in my mind or rehearsing what it is I will say when I next see you. This last week, what I keep going over is Mitch and how I could have acted like you’d moved on. Of course, we’d talked about it a lot at the beginning when it was in all the papers. Then you stopped bringing it up. I stopped asking. Behaved as if it was not on your mind while knowing all the while that it was. Did I think that by asking I would be encouraging you to remain bound up with the boy and that by not asking I was in some way spurring you to let go? Or did I make what you would call the physicalist assumption: assuming that mental life operates on the same principles as the body—that an emotional wound, like a cut to the skin, should be left after a point to heal on its own?