by Leslie Glass
After nearly a year, according to Clara’s notes, Ray had agreed to marry his fiancée. When Clara and Harold discussed this in their supervisory sessions, Dickey applauded the patient’s decision. Nine months later, Ray Cowles was married and securely adjusted as a heterosexual. Since his marriage, he told Clara, he had not once engaged in any self-destructive activities. He and his wife had sex fairly regularly. The couple socialized in a predictable way. They had a staunch yuppie, upwardly mobile life. At this point Ray had raised the question of termination of his analysis.
Clara had told him she would think about it and then had a brief consultation with Dickey about it. Two things bothered Jason about this termination. It seemed clear to him that although apparently “cured” of his homosexuality, Ray was chronically depressed. His sessions with Clara were marked by long, arid silences. After he married, he produced no fantasies or free-associations about pleasure. He described his experiences at home and at work in gray, unemotional tones, expressing anhedonia and a low self-esteem. He said he was afraid he could never feel really loved or have any genuine satisfaction. He felt guilty and frequently had fantasies about dying. Cowles was an adjusted, stable, deeply unhappy homosexual, living the heterosexual life his analyst and her supervisor enjoyed together. Clara Treadwell and Harold Dickey had no intention of marrying each other but satisfied their own needs by getting Cowles married off.
Jason imagined that the consultation to terminate Ray’s therapy probably lasted two minutes. Clara was clearly bored with him—he was no longer a lively and poetic patient. In the last months, unable to engage with him, she had made up crossword puzzles, thought of other things, drifted off during his treatment sessions. Her notes commented frequently that this was because Ray wasn’t saying anything anymore. He was finished. He no longer had anything to say. On these grounds, Dickey, too, recommended termination. So, after four years with Harold and Clara, Ray Cowles was released to his own recognizance.
Jason found the notes regarding their last session particularly poignant. When Ray had asked if he was ever going to see his analyst again, Clara had responded by asking him what his fantasies on the subject were. Here Cowles finally produced a pleasurable fantasy. He said he imagined Clara as a kind of fairy godmother he could visit every Christmas. They could exchange Christmas cards, maybe even presents. Or they could have coffee on their birthdays and meet yearly like the couple in the play Same Time Next Year, only he and Clara would be friends, not lovers. Clara squelched this by remarking that termination was termination. She asked him to analyze his fantasy of reunions with her.
“Why do I have to do that?” he wanted to know. “It’s so rejecting,” he said.
“Termination is termination,” Clara insisted, and refused to allow the fantasy to stand. She was treating him like a rejected lover and at the same time telling him that was not the case. Ultimately, to please her, Ray came to the conclusion that he “was proud” to be able to leave someone in his permanent past. And on that note, the treatment ended.
Would that Ray Cowles had left Clara behind in his permanent past. If he had, he might now be alive and well and living with the man he loved.
Clara wrote up the case as the unqualified success of the conversion of neurotic homosexual to well-integrated heterosexual. Ray Cowles’s being nonimpulsive for a long period meant to Clara and Dickey that his superego had developed as a result of his Oedipal conflicts being resolved under their guidance.
Jason brooded about this as he prayed there was no more champagne to give him a headache later. Clearly Clara had organized her treatment of Ray Cowles around the firm beliefs of her mentor and supervisor, Harold Dickey. Jason knew at that time the concept of homosexual acts as impulses that were voluntary and governable was still widely held, in spite of the change in psychiatry in the definition of homosexuality as a perversion. The official change was written in stone in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), the textbook used by psychiatrists throughout the country, but old biases die hard, and clearly Dickey had clung to outdated convictions. Jason’s diagnosis of the Cowles case was that it was a bad analysis. Clara had been supervised by a professor in the department with whom she was having an affair. The fact that the patient survived for more than fourteen years was offset by the fact that he died almost immediately after renewing contact with her. Clara had had a six-minute conversation with Ray just before he died. Could what Clara said to the man have triggered his last destructive act? And if she had said something, surely, Dickey could not have been responsible for that. Clara was claiming that a former nurse had murdered Dickey in revenge for being fired. She’d insisted that Dickey’s death was not related to Ray’s. Jason couldn’t help wondering about that.
Emma returned with another frosty bottle. “Look what I found.”
Jason groaned. There went his evening’s work. Still, Emma’s eyes were less stormy now. The neckline of her sweater had slipped down over a bare shoulder. She was smiling, and tipsy, happy to have Jason to herself. Clever girl. He resigned himself to marital bliss.
fifty-two
The sound of the radiator in Harold Dickey’s office sounded like a hammer pounding on a lead pipe in an echo chamber. It felt about the same to April as Chinese water torture. She wondered how anyone could think in such a place. The radiator clanked relentlessly all through Saturday as she moved around the office sorting through the scattered personnel files while Mike sat at Dickey’s desk retrieving and printing out what Dickey had labeled “special cases” from the dozens of documents in his laptop computer.
The laptop had been impounded to certify the chain of evidence. The D.A.’s office and the hospital lawyers had ruled that nothing in the computer could be tampered with or changed, nothing removed from it without being initialed by witnesses. That meant Maria Elena Carta Blanca was there with them all day, hanging on Mike’s neck and peering over his shoulder at the screen, clicking her tongue at the sensitivity of the material that she had to initial as it spewed forth from the printer.
April glanced up from her perch on the ugly green couch from time to time to observe Maria Elena’s large breasts grazing at Mike’s shoulder like some hungry animal. By midafternoon April had a bad headache. Most parts of her job she enjoyed, but she was not enjoying today. The files she was searching represented disharmonies of monumental proportions. She was also sickened by Maria Elena’s blatant play for Mike.
The sheets of papers from the files were a hopeless tangle of reports to and from and about social workers, nurses, nurse’s aides, residents, supervisors, attendings, and private physicians. They involved case accidents with outcomes of varying degrees of seriousness and contained some hair-raising stories. Dickey’s notes in the computer revealed his own thoughts about the more egregious cases of staff negligence—and a completely different set of cases involving young doctors.
“Listen to this, querida,” Mike said in a rare moment in the early afternoon when Carta Blanca was out of the room relieving herself and they were alone.
“ ‘Second day of July.’ That was last summer. ‘Resident with one day of experience screens a suicidal person in ER. Suicidal person had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse and numerous visits to ER. Resident wrongly diagnoses situation, discharges patient who walks out of hospital and suicides an hour later.’ ”
Clank, clank, clank from the radiator and not the slightest hint of warmth. April shivered. “What was the outcome for the resident?” she asked.
“Not a thing. Dickey says, ‘Why ruin a young doctor’s whole career?’ ”
“What did they do, alter the chart?”
“Looks that way. Here Dickey says about the suicide, ‘I hate these Goddamn coke addicts fucking up the system.’ I guess they protected the resident.”
“You see anything in there about a resident or a doctor being dismissed?”
Mike gazed at her contemplatively, stroking his mustache seductively. He shook his hea
d. “Not so far. The disciplinary action seems limited to the staff.… And they say we’re a blue wall.”
“You find anything about Boudreau in there?” April was thoughtful, too. Dickey had collected these personnel files because he was concerned about another patient’s death. So far, they hadn’t found the details of the one they were looking for.
April sat cross-legged on the green couch used by patients telling about their dreams and desires—their sex lives. She had read about therapy in psychology courses she’d taken at John Jay. It sounded disgusting. The last file listed off her lap. She held the papers down with one hand.
“Oh, yeah, here it is. Dickey writes, ‘That troublemaker Boudreau has really done it this time.’ Yeah, this is it. Unipolar depressive, sixth floor north, checked in Monday A.M. At four P.M. guy goes manic, walks off the ward in his pajamas to the next floor. That’s the manics-on-lithium floor. Door’s locked, he can’t get in, trots down another floor. It’s an office floor, stairway door is not locked. The patient goes to the end of the hall, where there are French doors and a small terrace. It’s a beautiful day and the doors are open. Apparently smokers go out to that terrace to smoke. Guy walks out on the terrace, jumps off before anyone can stop him, and hits the spikes on the fence around the garden. Guy’s impaled on the spikes. According to Dickey’s notes here, guy came down by the windows of the adolescent outpatient clinic, where a dozen kids saw the body. Boudreau was the one who gave him the overdose that made him manic. Dickey says, ‘Bobbie Boudreau can’t weasel out of this one. No one trusts him. It’s just the last straw.’ Well, there’s more …” His voice trailed off, and he suddenly looked sad.
“What?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing. I may not be at the Two-O for long. I’ll miss this.”
“Oh.” For a few seconds April’s headache had eased. Now it started pounding again.
“But then, neither will you,” he added with a smile.
The son of a bitch. April’s head split in half. “We going somewhere, Sergeant?” she said, struggling for calm.
“Maybe, baby,” he teased.
“You going to tell me where?”
“You want the short-term or the big picture?”
Who had Mike gone to? What had he asked for? How could he make requests on her behalf when she didn’t even know what she wanted? She stared at him, furious. “How do you know these things?”
“After you’ve been around for a while, you get a few friends. Some of them move up.” He shrugged again. “You have some friends, too. You just haven’t discovered it yet.”
April’s cheeks burned. Hijo de puta jumped into her head. She didn’t say it. Mierda. It occurred to her that she knew Spanish.
“Pendejo,” she muttered.
Mike laughed uproariously, almost exploding with mirth.
“What’s so funny?” April put the file down carefully.
“Pendejo, querida? You think I’m a pendejo?”
April lifted a shoulder. “What’s it mean?”
“I’m a pubic hair? I’m a good-for-nothing, a coward, a pubic hair? Is that what you think?” Now the laughter was gone. Mike’s voice rose with anger at his injured honor.
The door to the tiny office swung open. It wasn’t the pushy Latina lawyer. It was the pushy FBI. Special Agent Daveys shoved himself into their space, his humorless face gray as stone. “Hi, kids. What’s up?”
“Just wrapping for the day.” Mike checked his watch.
“Did you find that file on the boy nurse?”
“I told you it wasn’t here,” April said.
“Bastard must have taken it.”
“Yeah,” April muttered. Or someone else had. Gunn had sworn Dickey never mentioned Boudreau. She tapped her fingers on the files. Time to go.
“There’s a neat coffee bar over on Broadway. Let’s go there and make a plan of action,” Daveys said. It was not an invitation.
Mike glanced at April. “We’re still investigating. We’re not ready for action yet.” He pushed a few buttons to shut down the computer.
“All the same, it’s time to powwow.”
“You going to tell us something we don’t know, Daveys?”
“Many things, many things, children. This way to truth and justice.” Turning around, Daveys bumped into Maria Elena, who was charging through the doorway.
“Oops, sorry.” She backed her breasts out of Daveys’s chest with a big smile.
“All yours, sweetheart. You can lock up now.” Daveys swept by without even a peek at what he was missing.
fifty-three
Sunday, November 14, dawned clear and bright. Maria Sanchez awoke deeply worried about what the day would bring. For two Sundays in a row Diego Alambra had walked home from church with her, and she was disturbed because she didn’t know what such a handsome man could want from an old woman like her. She also worried because Señor Diego Alambra was something of a mystery. He had a Spanish name but spoke Italian.
The mysterious Diego had started coming to her church some months before, and she could not help noticing him. He was a handsome man with hair still mostly black, like hers. Her hair was pulled straight back into a low roll at the base of her neck. His was swept up in a high curling wave above his forehead and cascaded gracefully down the back of his head to the top of his shirt collar. His mustache lay like a twig between his lips and sloping nose. He had full lips over slightly protruding teeth, a long face out of which deeply serious eyes watched her while she prayed. Sometimes his eyes were sad, sometimes thoughtful; always they seemed intelligent. He moved closer to where she sat in the very front so the priest would always be sure to see that she was there. He moved slowly, pew by pew, as the weeks passed, perhaps drawn to her by the intensity of her prayers.
Diego Alambra began by nodding at her, then bowing. And when he finally spoke, he called her “la bella signora.”
Maria Sanchez was an old woman, nearly fifty-five, and for a long, long time she had been oppressed with a deep sadness that made her feel closer to a hundred. This sudden attention from a handsome man when she had not expected ever to be noticed again made it not seem proper to leave the apartment without a touch of powder on her nose, a touch of color on her round, dusky cheeks.
She was deeply disappointed when Diego finally spoke to her and his words came out Italian. Maria Sanchez did not think highly of the Italian men in the neighborhood, so she ignored him, caressed the plastic beads of her rosary, looking severe, as the organ music swelled and the Mass ended.
“Bella signora, sì, sì” He nodded vigorously and told her his name. “Mi chiamo Diego Alambra, e Lei, cara signora?
What? The name made no sense.
Her lips curved up without her permission. A giggle as old as time rose from the deep well of memory and slipped out. “He, he.” She laughed.
Then came Father Altavoce’s command for the Kiss of Peace and suddenly, without her knowing how it happened, Diego Alambra had taken her hand and was holding it in both of his, gazing into her eyes so deeply it gave her a stomachache.
“Sì, sì. Molto bella.” This Italian who called himself Diego had to be over fifty himself but certainly had a young man’s enthusiasm for the single idea.
It was a small opening, but he bent so low over her hand, the gesture could not fail to be noticed elsewhere in the church. Maria Sanchez’s faded flower of a mouth, unrenewed for many years by lipstick or the hope of ever tasting a man again, smiled in spite of itself.
“Español?” she ventured tremulously.
“E.” He shrugged eloquently.
She had to turn the other way to move toward the exit. She felt a little stunned by the encounter and was glad she did not see him again on the street. Then later, when she was home, she worried that she had somehow done something wrong but wasn’t sure what.
This fear of being wrong was not a new feeling for Maria. For a long time she had been worried about doing things without meaning to and being punished for it. She was
deeply fearful that she might have grievously sinned in the past, that she was continuing to sin even now, and the constant accumulation of those unknown sins (for which she could never atone) was the reason for her past suffering, her present suffering, and quite possibly a future of suffering that would never end.
This was the deepest and most tightly held of her concerns. Maria did not know the nature of her sins but believed only sins committed by her could be responsible for her present condition, which was a sadness that went beyond reason. She was familiar with loss. She had lost her mother and father when she was very young, had lost two sons in infancy before she was twenty. Mysteriously, she could not have more children after Mike. She and Marco did not question that. They had their sorrows, but they had a long life together, nearly thirty-four years. She did not believe she deserved more.
It was the loss of life within life that defeated her. Her son who ran around all night, worked in places that worried her. Married a woman who was cursed with so many troubles she couldn’t go out, couldn’t shop or cook, just sat by the window and cried all day until finally one day her brother came and took her away. Inexplicably, Mike’s wife, Maria, had gone back to the pitiful, broken-down house in the border town she had come from.
After that Mike fell even further away from his beliefs. He fell away from her and his father. He went back to his old ways, didn’t call them and didn’t come home. Maria would never forget the night her son came home—how surprised she was to see him, how he took her arm by the front door of the apartment and led her back into the room. “Papi is dead,” he had told her. “He had a heart attack and died at the restaurant.” He took Maria in his arms and held her so tight, she could feel the gun tearing at the armhole of his jacket.