“I kissed her that day.” I saw Maggie Tupy with her brown curls, snake grass rising on either side of her. All at once, I had a memory of her bare knees under the smudged white slip. They were stained green with grass, gray with earth, and red with new blood from the shallow abrasions that never healed because the tiny scabs were always reopened. Maggie was squinting at me through one eye, and she had screwed up her mouth so as not to burst out laughing, but I wanted to kiss those tense lips the color of raspberries, and I bent near her, pressing my mouth to hers quickly but emphatically. I had felt a great happiness. “Maggie Tupy,” I said aloud.
Inga lay back and closed her eyes. “And then there was the day the birds really ate our breadcrumbs. Do you remember?”
I saw the uneven patches of sunlight on the ground, scattered by the foliage above us as we stood at the top of the steep embankment behind our house that led down to the creek. Then we heard the rush and saw the sudden rising of a flock of starlings in the trees over our heads, and the sound of the creek’s moving water became distant as the noise of shuddering wings grew loud and we watched the birds dive for the bread we had left in a long trail below us.
My sister closed her eyes. “It was like magic, wasn’t it? As if the story had come true, and the world really had been enchanted.”
I took Inga’s hand, squeezed it, and after a brief pause I said, “It was.”
MY FATHER STARTED college at Martin Luther again, this time with money from the G.I. Bill. He was twenty-four years old. I imagine him sitting beside his friend Don at the choir concert. They are seated in a pew, because I’m guessing that the choir sang in the college chapel. One of the numbers, my father wrote, “O Day Full of Grace,” triggered in me a recall of events, pleasant ones at first that led step by step to the horror images of the unnecessary killing of the Japanese officer. To Don’s alarm, I began to tremble. I lied and said it was a touch of malaria. This was my only daytime flashback, but I lived in fear that more might come. I read these sentences to myself many times, trying to penetrate their meaning. “O Day Full of Grace” wasn’t listed in the red Lutheran hymnal that found its way into my possession years ago, but I wondered if perhaps somewhere in the text or in the music there was a cue that set off a train of images my father couldn’t stop.
Traumatic memory arrives like a blast in the brain.
“I thought we were going to die in the apartment,” the young woman told me. “But a policeman found us. He got us out and we started running.” She took a breath. “We could hardly see or breathe. It was dark and we walked in this dry choking rain. And then on the ground, I saw a person’s hand. The blood was a strange color. I even thought that.” She began to breathe harder. “I had to step over it. We were running. I thought we were going to die. But that’s what happens to me, mostly at night. It’s that feeling of blind running. I’m there again. I wake up with a shock, like I’m exploding, my heart beating. I can’t breathe. It’s not a dream.” Her mouth contorted. “It’s the truth.” She closed her eyes and began to cry.
That day, we waited for the injured in emergency rooms all over the city, but they never arrived. They came to us later with their wounds of indelible memory, the images that were burned into them and then released again and again in a hormonal surge, the brain flood that accompanies a return to unbearable reality. O Day Full of Grace.
The choir sings. A young veteran sits in his pew and listens to the collective voice thanking a beneficent God. Perhaps he remembers a hymn he used to sing in church when he was a child with his father beside him. It is a warm memory. He recalls the low mumbling of prayers in Urland Church as the congregation beseeches the deity for forgiveness, and then there is another vision that imposes itself with brutal suddenness: a man is kneeling in the grass with his hands pressed together. He is praying for his life.
“SOMETIMES,” MAGDA SAID, “an analyst can suffer too much with a patient or be so afraid that it strangles the treatment.”
I looked at her small, old face, at her white hair neatly cropped to the chin, at her elegant embroidered jacket. With age Magda had become thinner, but her mild eyes and small mouth were exactly as they had always been. “There are obvious reasons to fear patients, patients who stalk you or threaten you and so on, all quite straightforward. I had a patient once who told me his sadistic fantasies in great detail. I was appalled, but not frightened until I began to feel his arousal. I found it intolerable. It took me some time to acknowlege material in myself I had kept safely buried.”
“I’ve tried to do that,” I said. “I’m aware that she’s touched sadistic elements in me, but there’s something hidden, something I can’t get to.” Inga’s words came to me: I had forgotten there could be frenzy.
“Years ago, I treated a girl who was admitted to the clinic after she tried to set herself on fire. She was seventeen. Grew up in Dominica. She lived with her mother for a couple of years, and then she was bounced from one relative to another, none of whom kept her very long. When she was nine, a friend of her father’s beat and molested her. The man went to prison, and she was shipped off to an aunt here in the city. It went well at first, and then there were scenes, accusations, and fights, physical fights. She ended up in foster care. I interviewed the foster mother. In the beginning, she said, Rosa had been a dream. That was the word the woman used, dream—helpful, sweet, affectionate. She wanted the woman to adopt her.”
“And then she turned.”
Magda nodded. “She fought, screamed, was out of control. She accused the foster father of sexual abuse. I believed her story at first, but then each time she told it, it changed. She didn’t seem aware that she had given me other, quite different versions before.”
“She was lying.”
“Yes, she was lying, and she was delusional, genuinely paranoid. After a while, she began to refer to herself almost exclusively in the third person. Rosa wants this. Rosa believes that. He did this and that to Rosa. Rosa doesn’t have anything to say.”
“What did you make of it? A dissociative symptom?”
“Well, the girl had huge identity problems, but I understood that she had also regressed with me back to a little child who identifies herself in the third person.”
“And Ms. L.?”
Magda shook her head. “It depends on what you can tolerate. You said your father has been dead for five months.”
I nodded.
“I know how strongly you identify with your father.”
I felt defensive. “You think that what’s happening with Ms. L. has something to do with my father. How could it?” I spoke too loudly.
Magda’s penetrating eyes suddenly reminded me of my mother’s, and I wanted to retreat. I admitted this to her. She smiled. “Erik, we all go to pieces with our patients at one time or another. We all go to pieces now and then even without a patient to help us along. Your grief makes you more fragile. You know I’ve always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We’re fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.”
“Were you able to help Rosa?” I asked.
“In the short run. After she was discharged, she was in school and living with yet another family, but when she turned eighteen, she was out of foster care, not in touch with her family, and no one could tell me what had happened to her.”
I thought about all the patients I hadn’t been able to track down, the ones who just vanished. Then I looked at Magda’s cane leaning against her desk and thought, I don’t want her to die.
“And what about the patient who bored you to sleep?”
“Oh, Ms. W.,” I said. “There have been developments there—good ones.”
Magda said, “Hmm.” The hum of empathy, I thought to myself.
When I left her office and walked out into the warm May air, I felt restored, despite the fact that I knew little more about my confounding case than when I had walked through her doo
r. Central Park looked green, and for some reason I thought of Laura Capelli. I wondered if I still had her telephone number.
MIRANDA WAS LOCKING her door when Eglantine saw me. “Dr. Erik,” she said in an accusatory voice, her hands on her hips, in imitation of a severe grown-up. “Where have you been?” I had expected this to happen, the inevitable chance meeting outside the house or on a nearby street. In fact, I was surprised it had taken so long. As I looked down at the child’s upturned face, her brown hair looked soft, and I had a sudden urge to put my fingers on those curls and pat her head, but I resisted it.
Miranda walked toward us, carrying a large bag.
“I’ve been here,” I told Eggy, avoiding Miranda’s face. The child hadn’t been up to see me either. I wondered if her mother had said no to the visits.
“We’re going to the park to draw,” Eggy said, as she stood on tiptoe and lifted one leg in front of her, balancing herself with both arms before she let the foot drop. “Want to come along? You can use our paper and crayons and pencils and charcoal and everything.”
“I’m afraid I don’t have time,” I said, hearing the stiffness in my voice.
Miranda stepped toward me, and I looked down at her. Whether the discomfort I felt was revealed in my face, I don’t know. Her eyes were calm, steady. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” she said, and then added, “It’s a beautiful Sunday.”
That afternoon has remained in my memory as a collection of fragments. Lying on my back on the plaid blanket studying the branches, the leaves, and the visible pieces of blue sky above me, an angle of vision I remembered from childhood. Miranda’s bare brown legs on the blanket and her shoeless feet with red toenails. Eggy on my lap as she examined my ears, her face close to mine, “They’re big. Did you know that? Very big.” Miranda’s improvised drawing of her daughter in an imaginary wide-brimmed hat and lacy dress. “No, Mommy, I want a long dress down to my ankles! Change it!” The sound of the eraser. Eggy humming. Miranda in sunglasses. The warmth of the sun on my back and a feeling that I could sleep. A red package of raisins in the grass inches from my nose. The clover. Eggy on her stomach, a thin stick in each hand, one slightly longer than the other. “I’m not going to listen to you just because you’re big, you gooney prune!” The short stick leaps into the air. “Don’t boss me!”
“You have to listen,” the long stick utters in a deeper voice.
“No, I don’t,” sings the little stick. “I’m Power Girl!” Power Girl flies over my head. “I want Dr. Erik to come and see me in my theater class. It’s Saturday. Right, Mom? Next time. The Mitten,” Eggy chimed. “I’m the mitten!”
I felt hopeful. Although Miranda showed no signs of flirtation, gave me no hint that her feelings had changed toward me, I had spent two hours with her body only inches from mine. I had daydreamed of reaching out and putting my hand on her thigh, of rolling over on that plaid blanket and taking her into my arms. That evening, after speaking to both Inga and my mother on the telephone, I read for a couple of hours in my study. Before I finally turned in, however, I found myself walking to the window. I have since wondered if I heard their low voices in some subliminal way or if I was drawn to look out, as I often am, and the sighting was pure chance, but, from the second-floor window, I saw Miranda and Lane together on the sidewalk in the light of the gas lamp. I saw him reach for her and pull her toward him. For a second or two, she resisted, and then her body gave way and she fell into him. I watched them kiss. I watched them walk toward the house and vanish behind the stoop. For a while, I waited there, hoping to see Lane reemerge, but he didn’t appear.
As I lay in bed, I remembered the last couplet of a John Clare poem.
Even the dearest that I love the best,
Are strange—nay, stranger than the rest.
I repeated those lines to myself twice, and then I took the little white pill.
AS SOON AS I saw Burton at the table, I had the impression that something had changed about him. After I sat down, I tried to puzzle out what exactly had created this sense of newness. Was it his posture? Was he less moist? Was he dressing better? My old friend was slumped in his chair, and his broad face was shining with sweat. I noticed that he must have left his bulky undergarment behind, because his shirt was several shades darker under the arms. He had looped an ocher scarf around his neck, but this frayed article served as a mere wave in the direction of dandyism; his worn shirt and trousers were pure Salvation Army. When Burton called me, I had happily accepted the dinner invitation, knowing it would distract me from thoughts about The Mitten. I hadn’t decided yet whether to attend the play, which had ballooned to dreadful proportions in my mind and come to signify the return of Lane, dubious father and suspicious lover, a man I had seen exactly twice, both times in the dark.
“As I mentioned on the telephone, we would like to recruit you,” Burton said over his lasagna. “Well, recruit, that’s rather too military. These days I avoid all reference to the martial, solicit, encourage your attendance, that is, at our monthly meetings. This meal, the official cause of our get-together, has the extra benefit of making the bill tax deductible, as it were. I use the plural, you understand, we being members of the Institute of Neuropsychoanalysis, the herald of a new day, a rapprochement between disciplines: brain and mind, the old quandary reexamined. First Saturday of every month. The sessions begin at ten sharp. Neuroscience lecture followed by a discussion. Luminaries have lectured, Damasio, LeDoux, Kandel, Panksepp, Solms. We’re about twenty, sometimes thirty, I’d say, a contentious cabal of neuroscientists, analysts, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, neurologists, and a couple of AI and robotics fellows thrown in as well. I’m the only historian. Met a fellow there, David Pincus, doing brain research on empathy. Terribly, terribly interesting. Mirror neurons, you know.” Burton took a deep breath and swiped his forehead with his handkerchief, a gesture that somehow resulted in the transfer of tomato sauce into the rather long hairs of his right eyebrow and left me in the awkward position of wondering whether I should point this out to him or not. His embarrassment would be extreme either way. While my gaze was fixed on the sauce, Burton gave me a notso-brief elucidation of an example of the connections in question. Freud’s 1895 idea of Nachträglichkeit, he said, was remarkably similar to the far more recent notion of reconsolidation in neuroscience. Our memories are forever being altered by the present—memory isn’t stable, but mutable. When he paused, I told him as gently as I could that he had managed to get a small part of his dinner onto an eyebrow. Flushing deeply, he began to rub blindly but vigorously at the soiled hairs until I confirmed that the area was food-free. Then he went silent and eyed his plate. A couple of seconds passed before he lifted his chin, opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came. After he had repeated this pantomime, I said, “Burton, what’s on your mind?”
“I’m somewhat anxious about revealing this,” he said. “It’s in reference to Inga.”
“Yes?” As I looked at Burton across the table, he suddenly reminded me of a walrus. It may have been the bags under his eyes, which accentuated his already forlorn expression, but the image led me to think idly of Lewis Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter as I waited for him to muster his courage to continue. “ ‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of many things.’ ” Here we are, I thought, the squat, wet Walrus and the high and dry Carpenter, an absurd pair: cabbages and kings.
“I think I should warn you, well, alert you to the fact that there may be some unsavory, yes, unpalatable, even disreputable aspects to what I intend to divulge.” Burton sighed, rubbed his streaming face all over, and plunged ahead. “It has to do with, revolves around, yes, that’s better, around, around”—Burton’s chin shook— “Henry Morris.”
“Henry Morris, Inga’s friend?”
He nodded, then gazed fixedly at the table. “I, uh, I’ve been keeping a watch on Inga.”
“What?” I said loudly.
Burton waved his palms at me, a sign to keep my voice down.
Then he muttered, “Been maintaining a degree of vigilance on her behalf.”
“Inga asked you to be vigilant about something?”
“No,” he said. “No, I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“What way would you put it?”
“After the, the incident in the park and the dinner party, so very pleasant, wasn’t it? Well, I took it upon myself to, well, keep an eye on things.”
I leaned forward. “Things. My God, Burton. You’re not saying that you’ve been following Inga and Morris. What’s gotten into you?”
I knew perfectly well what had gotten into Burton. Love. He confessed as much, employing every word but that one to make me understand that his spying was somehow made legitimate by the strength of his feeling for my sister. Besotted, Burton had given up whole days to trailing Inga and then Morris “for her protection.”
“I believe,” Burton said, “Morris is trafficking in private stories.”
“What does that mean?”
“I saw him with the woman in the park,” Burton said darkly. “The same person I saw with Inga. I overheard them talking about letters.”
Burton picked up his napkin instead of his handkerchief and began to dry his face with fierce strokes. “Her name is Edie Bly. She was in Max Blaustein’s film. Pardon the expression, but I think those two are in cahoots.”
“Didn’t Morris recognize you? He was at the dinner, after all. How on earth did you get close enough to hear their conversation?”
Burton’s forehead was dripping again. He used both his napkin and handkerchief to pat himself down, and then in a hoarse whisper croaked out a single emphatic word: “Disguise.”
It turned out that, even incognito, Burton hadn’t been all that close to the two of them, who had met in a restaurant in the Village and had been talking together in low voices, but he believed that he had distinctly heard the word “letters” uttered by Morris a couple of times. At one point during the conversation, Edie Bly had begun to weep loudly and then at some later moment had mentioned her AA meetings and had brought up the name Joel. She had drunk three espressos during the talk and lit up a cigarette on the street as soon as they walked out the door.
The Sorrows of an American Page 15