* * *
—
As my announced reason for being in her office seemed to be resolved, Carrie’s approach shifted from active listening. She said what I was telling her was a little more unusual than talking to undergraduates who missed home. She was curious what else I might want to discuss. Her program allowed her to extend therapy for one client per year if she thought it would be fruitful. Obviously I had some life experience to process. Was there anything I wanted to explore?
I didn’t hesitate. Of course there was. “Your program? One of the founders was Franklin Baum. He was my psychiatrist. And my mother’s. And it’s possible he was sleeping with her.”
“Pardon?” She needed me to explain that. More than once.
I was saying that Dr. Baum, who lived nearby, who was part of her school’s theoretical framework, might be a sexual predator. I saw some uncertainty cross her face. I’d told her about my upbringing, my mom, Daniel’s death, and yet this was the first thing I’d said that made her stumble.
She said that we surely had more to work with, and she asked if I was okay. This made me laugh. Of course I was okay. I’d been okay for thirty-two years. I asked if she was okay, and she said she would probably be eating some chocolate later. As I left, I felt honored, in that my problems had sent her to comfort food, and that meant I was stronger than she was.
Afterward I told Alice what had happened. She said my therapy was over. I had just gotten fired. I explained that no, I wasn’t fired. Hadn’t she heard about my sessions being extended? In response Alice gave me the kind, sad look you give a good student whose work has been based on the textbook.
When I went back the next week, Carrie had brochures. They were about patients’ rights, and how having a therapist seduce you was wrong, and there was a board you should report that to. I remember her explaining this while nodding, trying to get me to nod with her. She was wrapping up our therapy. She told me that it had been good to see me make such progress, please keep in touch, goodbye.
Alice had called it. I was asking a graduate student to help investigate the possible misconduct—based on twenty-five-year-old hearsay related by the son of a strange woman who had already denied making the claim—of the pillar of her own institution. This outweighed how fascinating my problems were.
Which I understood. Being fired made me feel like a hard case. My problems are bigger than any of you can handle, I thought, except Alice. I loved her a little bit more now.
Dr. Baum was in the phone book. I called him.
THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
WHEN HE ANSWERED, I couldn’t focus on what he was saying, because his voice was the same as it had been twenty-five years before. He remembered me immediately. Clients called as adults. He didn’t even need to ask why I was coming back. We made an appointment to meet again. “You need to double-check your memories,” he said with a purr.
I don’t mean to make you further distrust him by saying how soft and careful his voice was. He was a professional and this was his professional persona. His voice means nothing.
I went to his house looking at every detail for confirmation of what I knew for sure, and for some sight or sound that would unveil memories, even banal ones. Ranch house, patient entrance to the left, a little tranquil garden to the side, office inside with leather couch, chairs, toys, and The Wolf Man among other books on the shelf, just where it had been in 1972.
The house was on a street high above Newport Beach. The first thing I asked him was about his backyard, which apparently ended in a cliff side. I’d never seen it, as its approach was on the side of the house he lived in, not for patients to see.
He chuckled while confirming a fairly complicated memory. During the 1969 rains, which coincided with my first few weeks of therapy, the soil had started to erode. His lawn had started to collapse into the bay, dramatically. It had been on the news. So, yes, he said, I remembered that correctly.
And now? It was fine now. It had been fine for years. He looked at me quietly.
It’s too formal to say I had a plan. I felt that this was going to help me answer the question of why my mother was the way she was. Not with a diagnosis, but with the professional impressions of someone who’d once wondered the same thing. I was aware Dr. Baum had a template for returning patients. He asked me questions about the outcomes of my life (no, I wasn’t married; yes, I was fulfilled, generally speaking), but offering little unless I asked.
Then he asked about my mother. I was reluctant to spill much yet. I was interested what he might say without decades of subsequent events to influence him.
He asked, “Do you remember why you were here?”
I overexplained, because he kept looking at me gently, and as a kind of encore returned to one of my greatest hits, saying Mom still hadn’t forgiven me for saying, “Mommy’s brain is slow.”
“Yes. You said many pithy things then.” This wasn’t exactly sympathy.
“She tends to call me a ‘real put-down artist’ because of that.”
After a longer silence, he continued, “Your mother didn’t know how to be a parent. She wanted not a son, but a companion.” He shrugged. I should pause here long enough to include the silence that followed, creaks in the house.
There was a little more, but not much. He encouraged me to have sympathy for her, as she’d had a hard childhood. I said I knew about it. He nodded.
I’m not sure how I ended up leaving so quickly. Twenty minutes, maybe a half-hour of stops-and-starts. Right before I left, I handed him a draft of the memoir I’d written about my mother and Daniel. At the time it felt both like we’d had a full accounting and yet I was aware on my motorcycle ride home that I’d been hustled on a conveyor belt through the attractions like a patron at the Haunted Mansion. I hadn’t confronted him. We’d made arrangements for me to return in a week, to see if I remembered further things I wanted to talk about.
* * *
—
When I came back, the atmosphere was remarkably different. I knocked; he told me to come in, but he hadn’t left his desk. He was hunched over sheets of paper, reading them with a face unlike what I’d seen from him before. He looked ashen. He was reading my memoir.
“Is this all true?” he asked eventually. He tidied the manuscript up with hands that were actually shaking. I took in the cause and effect of that—what I’d written had done that. I had never seen him look distressed before, and I hadn’t known it was possible.
When you’re a therapist, he said, you hope for positive outcomes for your patients. That her therapy had failed so miserably made him feel awful. It was clear his experiment hadn’t been useful.
It took a moment for me to catch up with that. When I did, at least one word he’d said was confusing.
“Experiment?”
“I took your mother on as a patient as part of your own therapy.”
“I thought you were seeing her for her migraines.”
“That was an aspect of it. But you were my patient. She was part of your problem, and I hoped if I could treat her, it would help you.” I was confused, and it showed. He said, “You were manifesting her symptoms.”
He said this evenly, as if it was the conclusion of a persuasive argument. I shook my head—I didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t planning on talking about your mother today, but I’m deeply affected by this.” He asked me further about her current life, and he interrupted me several times with a strange sensation of heat coming from him.
“Charming,” he said, which was not a name I’d used in the memoir. I hadn’t said it to him today. He’d remembered it on his own, twenty years after the fact. “Peter Charming.”
“Yeah.”
“She deserted the marriage for Charming. She deserted therapy—me. She deserted me for Charming. I guess his influence over her was stronger than mine.
”
I nodded. See this. Remember, I was thinking. It is a sign of the elasticity behind my sense of how the world works that I was unsure if it was troubling that a psychiatrist would say that.
Dr. Baum said, “You know, he said he was a trained psychologist?” This, I filed with “attorney” and everything else Peter was supposed to be. Dr. Baum looked at me. “I don’t think he was a mental health professional,” he said.
“Oh, but he was.”
A pause. “In the sense that he was a psychopath who preyed off of people?”
“Right.”
He asked, “Do you talk to her?”
“Funny you should ask. I did, yesterday.”
“Who called whom?”
“She called me.”
He ran his fingernail across the edge at the corner of the first page of my memoir. “She’ll try to move in with you.”
“My girlfriend said the same thing.”
“Sometimes women know women.” I could see him trying to decide how to add something. He said my essay was a frighteningly accurate portrait of her. I had well described her “magical thinking,” a concept I hadn’t heard of before, and which I needed him to explain, because it just simply sounded as transparent as the oxygen my mother breathed. It also described my old relationship with Lindsay. And maybe much else in my life. So there my mom and I were, united by worldview.
“Your mother has post-traumatic stress disorder from her childhood.” He explained that she was continuously drawn to re-creating the trauma of her life on the edge. It was the only way she felt comfortable. This was only going to continue, he said. “Your mother’s life has been a tragedy.” He was evaluating me now. “As a therapist, when I read this, I was left with one question. What about you?”
“Me?”
“I see you’ve nearly written a therapeutic history of your mother, and yet, emotionally, you’re almost entirely absent. The question is how did you cope?”
He was a good therapist; he had put the answer into the question: distance. I reacted now with pride. I was so objective and such a good journalist now I could hear anything he said without flinching, I thought. But he didn’t seem to be complimenting me.
It was ironic, Dr. Baum said (and when I heard how he drew the word out I realized that my mother had probably adopted it from him), that I had omitted myself, in that I was the center of my mother’s world. More so than most mothers, he said.
“Your mother’s affection for you was problematic,” he finally said.
“How so?”
He answered by saying, “You cannot imagine the horrors of her childhood,” which I didn’t think was an answer.
“I know.”
“You don’t. Not the mother, not the father. The rest of it.” He reached for a file. It was mine. He’d pulled it for reference. He hadn’t planned on showing it to me. Inside were my intake papers from 1969.
He directed me down the page, to a section showing a statement someone had typed into a small box. Mother says that her own mother locked her in a closet with servicemen at age seven so that she would “get in trouble the way her mother had.”
A closet. I remembered my strobe light.
Dr. Baum then said that my mother had been repeatedly raped as a child. He provided more details, but I was starting to have a problem. I sat there in his office, but I was also nine years old, on the back porch, looking for Kohoutek. Dim objects, deep space. My father glances toward the house, where my mother is inside, somewhere, alone, having a migraine. We always secretly knew that there’s a dim, huge, monstrous planet exercising gravity.
“The rapes were only some of it,” Dr. Baum said. “It was a house of horrors. She never really escaped it.” He then added, skipping the other steps in this proof, “Your mother looked upon you with the feelings one usually reserved for a lover.” He paused. “Or a father. She also gave you the same authority as one gives a father, looking to you for approval.”
I was thinking of the portrait of George that had lived in our house. I didn’t know where it was now, but the way I used to talk to it when I was young made some kind of sense. When enough time had gone by, however, I said, “I never trusted you.”
“That would be appropriate,” he replied.
“I used to stay in here for hours, playing games of gin rummy or pick-up sticks with you, and I promised myself I wouldn’t tell you anything. I thought you were sleeping with her.”
“Of course. We even talked about that then.” He made a small gesture with steepled hands, as if he was carrying one intangible thought from one place to another. “Your mother had very strong sexual feelings for you. It was inappropriate.”
“Her friend said you were sleeping with her.”
“Which friend?”
I named her. He knew the name. She was one of the responsible ones.
I could see, not for the first time, something shaking around, one loose moth just out of reach. “There may,” he said, “have been fantasies.”
That was the end of his sentence. He was looking through me with a face that forty or so years of practice had perfected. The passive voice was brilliant. The conversation continued in a brief circle, me bringing up, in different ways, that he might have slept with her; him conceding that regardless of what he said now, I’d never know. He added that no therapist would ever admit to sleeping with a patient—it would be suicidal.
Then, something happened that made me, even me, understand how far into the woods the conversation had gone. He returned to a previous topic, “You were my patient. She wasn’t.”
“She was.”
“Technically. But remember I was only seeing her as an adjunct to your therapy, Daniel. I thought if I could help her with her issues, it would help you.”
I still didn’t get it, and I was startled, but he continued:
“You infantilized yourself as a child to cope with your mother’s issues. It was the only way to deal with that anxiety, Daniel. She wanted to treat you not as a son but a lover.”
I felt fortunate that I was used to not feeling anything. I said, “My name is Glen.”
He blinked. “What did I call you?”
“Daniel.”
“I have a patient named Daniel,” he responded.
“My mother’s boyfriend, the one you were reading about just now, was named Daniel.”
“Where?”
I pointed out his name.
He looked back at the pages. “So he was.”
I said he had to understand why that slip was weird. While telling me about my mother’s attraction to me he’d called me by my mother’s boyfriend’s name. The guy who I’d called “the good son” in the essay. That was one hell of a mistake.
He nodded.
We sat there in nontherapeutic silence, me reading how red his face was. I knew less than when I’d walked in.
The rest of that conversation was brief. We agreed this was the last time I would see him.
I walked out of his office, trying to memorize the way the bamboo and pebbles were supposed to provide a Zen experience.
I was sitting on my motorcycle, and I was putting my helmet on. I looked at his house. I was shaking. I thought, “Motherfucker,” and then I got angry at myself when I laughed.
I never rode when upset, and so I just sat at the curb, breathing slowly. I thought about the house’s backyard on the cliff side. I would never know what it looked like, and so I would have to use my imagination. I pictured the heavy rains of 1969 and the land collapsing, the storm for the history books followed by so many years of stability that people didn’t know it had even happened. This didn’t soothe me.
I’d gotten confused over time. For some reason I’d thought that knowing whether they had slept together would be the missing piece that explained my mother. But that was a simplif
ication that didn’t do her or the world she traveled in any justice.
In the years since then I’ve checked in on Dr. Baum. He’s given up his license. A friend who knows how to interpret the language of bureaucracy said it was probably due to Alzheimer’s. When I realized this meant his memories were gone, it was like the Sphinx disappearing into a sandstorm.
An image I can’t shake, a crumbling yard high over tidal wetlands with danger signs plastered to a fatigued chain-link fence, soil eroding with the forces of time, wind exposing whatever bones are back there. It’s a thin metaphor, embarrassing in its insistence. It means part of me still believes there will be an answer. This will be part of my imagination as long as I’m around. It turns out growing up means accepting ambiguity. It’s a lesson I don’t like.
FASTER THAN FIRE OR WATER
FOR YEARS I didn’t write this memoir because I was unsure of myself. I was waiting for a specific perception to cascade down and surround me and I was hoping it would feel like radiance. Oh now I understand why my mother did that. I was waiting for the moment I would be a slightly better person. Only recently did I understand this meant I was waiting to become a person who agreed with my mom. That was for most of my life the definition of a good son.
* * *
—
When I was a freshman in college my psychology text had a pair of photographs: What happens when you give a baby monkey a warm cloth puppet as a mother? He clings to her. What if you give him a cold mother made of wire? The same: he clings to her. I teared up. Not because my mother was a wire mother—she wasn’t—but because the monkey’s situation was obvious.
I am infinitely secure, in the sense that I have created my own security, not to mention my own infinity, as best I can. But I am missing parts that I think other people have. When I was six or seven, playing in the swimming pool, eyes closed, I would say, “Marco?” and there was tension in my throat, the faint, irrational experience of suspecting I had, by closing my eyes and trusting, accidentally thrown off the veil that hides the silence we came out of, revealing myself to be alone in the universe. I live in that moment. I am alone. As are we all, but I see it more plainly than I should.
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