“He knows. I just don’t smoke in front of him. Are they all crazy?” she asked without a transition. “Was it the money? They—” she nodded at the temple. The lot was full. The service was due to begin in five minutes. I had arrived late. Traffic was worse than I expected—every route I tried was under construction. “They act like God has died.”
“Maybe He has, for them. Remember, he pulled them out of poverty and he saved them again fifteen years ago.”
“He’s also fucked them up permanently.” Julie blew out some smoke and then covered her mouth with her free hand. “I’m horrible.”
“No, you’re not. You’re just stronger than they are.”
Julie came to a rest. Her nervous movements were frozen, cigarette dangling, eyes on me. “What do you mean?”
“You refused to be dependent on him. And you made it. You made it on your own.”
“How about you? You—”
“You know I never would have made it without Uncle’s help.”
“He also hurt you. Hurt you horribly.”
“Yes. But he meant to do the opposite. And when it came right down to it, he did help me.”
Julie let go of her cigarette, stamping it into the gravel. “Let’s go in before I piss you off too.”
It turned out she had had a fight with her mother. Ceil was angry that Julie had left her kids and husband behind in California. Julie was right. The surviving Rabinowitzes did seem to be a tribe who had lost not merely their chief, but their god. In particular, Aunts Ceil and Sadie were devastated. Uncle’s daughter, Helen, was also stricken, although grief seemed to improve her character. Back at the house, she didn’t drink at all, a remarkable difference, given that she was, in my judgment, an alcoholic. Helen tended to her aunts with grim concentration and told poignant stories about her father that surprised me; anecdotes of Bernie teaching her to ride a bike, dancing with her on her thirteenth birthday, all from before I lived with them, when, apparently, he spent more time with her and Aaron. Even Helen’s husband, Jerry, who must have felt some relief to be finally rid of his boss, was quiet, modest, a little frightened. Aaron did not come, although I had tried to coax him. My cousins, Daniel and the others I had raced against for the Afikomen, were there, with spouses and children, some content, some a mess. All were awed, convinced a great man had died. Julie did not fit in with them, either intellectually or emotionally.
When the visitors thinned out, leaving the immediate family, Julie’s quarrel with her mother started up again. Ceil complained that Julie coming alone to the funeral was disrespectful. I stepped between mother and daughter and took Julie outside, onto the sloping lawn. We walked toward the tennis court where I had had so many lessons, sweating to impress Bernie.
“Will you tell me what this is about?” Julie said. “My kids are three and seven months. I can’t bring them to a funeral. And how is it disrespectful? To Bernie? To this bimbo wife of his? Mom hates her.”
“Your mother wants her grandchildren here. She wants to feel life, that’s all. To know that it goes on.”
“That’s why I want her to come back to L.A. with me and stay for a couple of months. I know she’s lonely—”
“She wants you to honor the life she’s led. That life is here. Here in gracious, sensitive, cultured Great Neck.” Julie laughed at my mocking tone. “You don’t have to. It’s not your obligation to shore up her fantasy.”
“You do. You play along. They were mean to you, they were so fucking mean to you, and they still don’t appreciate you. They think you’re some sort of failure. Jerry talks to you like you’re a family retainer. But you take it all so patiently. You give and give and give to them and they don’t notice. I don’t know how you can stand it.”
“I do?” I had learned long ago that a degree in psychology doesn’t confer perfect self-knowledge—or perfect anything for that matter. We had reached the court. I found the switch for the lights and flipped it, curious if they were working. A white glow, not harsh, but brilliant nevertheless, flooded the area. Swarms of bugs appeared, gathering at the large rectangular bulbs. I wondered if the painted asphalt of the tennis court had been maintained. From outside, it was hidden by green bunting to camouflage the fence’s interruption of the lawn. I opened the gate, to check on the condition of the surface. When Bernie bought the house from his first wife, Charlotte—she left the U.S. to marry a businessman who worked in South America—I assumed he intended to resume the old family gatherings, the huge Seders and birthdays. But there had been no family parties. Uncle used to resurface the court every five years. The—gate creaked loudly, a bad omen. But the surface was smooth, the lines bright, the net tape shiny. It was a ghost to me, an apparition from my childhood.
Was Julie right? Did these people think I was a failure after all? Had they taken the fantasies of my childhood to heart and continued to think of me as Bernie’s failed prodigy? And was I concealing something from them, accepting scorn while feeling superior? “I play along?” I asked Julie again. “I’m not aware of being phony. I feel sorry for most of them. For Aaron, certainly. And for Sadie. She’s always been very close to her family. I think she took my mother’s suicide harder than any of them and she loved Bernie, really loved him.”
“Jesus.” Julie slumped down onto the grass outside the gate. She reached for a cigarette. “You’re making me feel like a shit.”
I kept my eyes on the glowing, pristine court. “I’m in love with you,” I said, too cowardly and too ashamed of giving in to this feeling to look at her. “It’s been seven years. Supposed to go away. But I think of you every day and I realize today that I want you more than ever. I made a mistake. I should have taken you on any terms.”
I didn’t hear anything from her. I thought, in the distance, someone shouted joyfully from the house. That didn’t make sense, a whoop of happiness from people in mourning.
Finally, I heard her lips make a noise as she took another puff. But she didn’t speak.
“Maybe that’s why I keep bringing up family obligations,” I continued. “Just a sneaky way of complaining that you didn’t …” I couldn’t go on. I felt alone. I leaned against the fence and remembered a perfect shot I had once hit against someone, I wasn’t sure who, a down-the-line backhand on the full run, a typical stroke for a professional, but the only one I ever hit, a taste of greatness. Pointless in my life, yet I could still see the ball spinning over the net for a winner as if it were yesterday, as if it were full of meaning. “I’m sorry,” I said and turned to Julie.
She was huddled beside the open gate, head down. I knelt beside her. She looked up, face wet. She spoke passionately, but clearly. “That isn’t fair. You ended it. I said we should just go on—”
“In secret? For our whole lives?” I argued, passionately, as if no time had passed.
She straightened and pushed me with one hand, like an annoyed kid. “You have no right to keep it alive now. I love Richard and I love my children. Don’t make me feel guilty about that.”
I took hold of her shoulders and moved her toward me intending to kiss her. “I wanted to force you to—” I stopped.
“Force me to what? Tell them?” She nodded at the house. The tears had abated. She wasn’t in conflict. I was. These were settled matters for her. “How could we have made a family together in front of them? I have beautiful children. You don’t know. You’ve ignored them.”
“You know why.”
“You’ll do anything for them, for Aaron, for Helen, you’ll gush over their kids and you won’t even look at pictures of mine.”
“You can’t expect me to be glad that you’re happily married.”
“I am happily married.”
I let go. The impulse to kiss was certainly gone.
“I know you don’t want to believe that,” Julie said. “But I am. I love Richard. I’m furious at you that you won’t let go and see me for who I am. I’m a middle-aged woman with two kids and a husband. I was never as complicated as you wanted me
to be. I loved you and I was willing to give up having a family to be with you. I couldn’t do better than that.” She sighed and covered her face. “I’m just as conventional as they are,” she mumbled. “That’s the truth.”
She was right, not about the last remark, but about me. Losing the fantasy of Julie was as painful as actually losing her, maybe more so. Her hands came away. I stared and tried to see the real woman. Was she there, the girl who had fought my mother and my uncle on my behalf? The woman who had once brought me the grace of mature love? The tennis court’s clarifying light left nothing for my imagination. She looked tired and her eyes were dead to the silent pleas in my own. She was a stranger and that meant in some way I was still a stranger to myself.
In the distance, a voice called, “Ray-feel!” A figure ran toward us from the house, a shape I didn’t recognize.
Julie squeezed my arm. “Be happy, Rafe. You deserve it.” She stood up. “Get away from us. We’re not good for you.”
“Ray-feel,” the figure called. He was carrying two racquets and a can of balls. The dumpy shape reached the border of the court’s lights. It was cousin Daniel, in his black trousers, his jacket and shirt off. He looked like a photograph of a turn-of-the-century boxer: bare-chested, big-bellied, in long dark pants. “Tennis, anyone?” he said and laughed.
“You drunk?” Julie said quietly.
I stood up.
“Come on,” Daniel offered a racquet. “I bet I can still beat you.”
“I’m sure you can,” I said and walked Julie back to my dead uncle’s house.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Rosenhan Warning
TONI REPORTED THAT GENE TALKED A BLUE STREAK IN THE FIRST SESSION, but said nothing. He was preoccupied by an offer from his boss, Theodore Copley, the leader of Flash II’s creative team. Copley had confided in Gene that he was seriously considering a job at Flashworks’s main rival, Minotaur. If he accepted, he wanted Gene to come with him. Gene believed the anxious contemplation of this decision—to leave the company where he had been successful and move his family against his wife’s wishes to another state—explained his insomnia. Toni was unconvinced. I hadn’t sent her any information on Gene or told her details of our work together. She asked for them now. I declined.
“Why? It would save time, no?”
“Remember Rosenhan?” Rosenhan was a psychology professor who sent a group of his graduate students into a psychiatric ward with instructions to fake schizophrenia. None were exposed by the experts, despite the fact that the impostors had been briefed only superficially about what to simulate. To prove his thesis beyond doubt, Rosenhan then presented a group of experienced psychiatrists with genuine schizophrenics, telling the doctors ahead of time that they were fakers. The doctors interviewed the real schizophrenics at length and agreed they were phonies. Rosenhan’s chilling conclusion: the psychiatrist sees what he expects to see.
“I’m insulted,” Toni complained. “And intimidated. I feel like I’m taking a quiz.”
“No, no. I’m concerned that what I thought was a successful therapy with Gene was a failure and I don’t want to prejudice you. I’m not sandbagging. I have more faith in your working with Gene than me.”
“Rafe, that’s a crock.”
“No, I mean it. I’m not really good treating grown-ups. I’m mesmerized by the past. I get stuck in the archaeology. With children, I’m always in the here and now.”
“Sounds like a rationalization.”
“It’s not.” I thought back to the grown-up Gene, in his student clothes, his boyish manner. Was he a grown-up?
Toni interrupted my silence. “Anyway, I thought Gene was a kid when you saw him.”
“Yeah, a teenager.”
“So?” Toni sounded triumphant.
“So what?”
“You’re telling me you don’t think you’re a good therapist for teenagers?”
“Toni, remember Bertha?” Bertha was a fifty-two-year-old black patient during my internship at Hopkins, a mute whom I and my colleagues diagnosed as schizophrenic. Toni discovered Bertha was from Haiti, did some research and eventually uncovered Bertha’s conviction that she had been hexed by a neighbor who, like her, practiced an obscure religion, a kind of Santería, a mix of Catholicism and a Voodoo sect. Toni gathered a group of us in the cafeteria at midnight during a full moon, lit purple candles, and we performed a ceremony (our solemnity was aided by two bottles of cheap red wine) that involved borrowing a skull from the anatomy lab. One week later, a cheerful, confident Bertha was discharged. That was one of many instances of Toni’s unusual ability to avoid the Rosenhan syndrome.
“I don’t follow, Rafe. Bertha was basically a cultural problem. Nobody thought to talk to her in her own terms.”
“And that includes me. I didn’t mean Rosenhan was your problem. I’m not testing you. I’m testing my former treatment.”
“Well … Okay. I still think you could save me time. Anyway, Gene is convinced his problems are all about work. Actually, I believe work is the one place he’s comfortable.”
She could be talking about me, I thought later. I hadn’t taken a vacation in six years, I hadn’t allowed a woman into my heart since Julie, my friendships were really all professional, my evenings devoted to writing a book about “Timmy” and the Grayson Day Care case. I decided it was time to take time. Besides, I had decided to use half of my ten-million-dollar inheritance from Uncle (obviously, I was not his sole heir) to construct a two-story building to house a clinic for the treatment of abused children and there wasn’t any insight I could contribute to its design and construction.
I also arranged to pay for Isaac’s college education. I told Aaron it was Bernie’s wish—in a sense, that was the exact truth.
Aaron didn’t believe me. “Yeah?” he said. “Show me where it says that in his will.”
“There wasn’t time to change his will,” I said.
“Thank you, Rafe,” Aaron said. “That’s what I should be saying.”
With that off my conscience, I tried again to reach my father in Havana, writing to the last address Grandpa Pepín had for him. (Naturally one of the by-products of Susan’s therapy was that I reestablish contact with my father’s people. Although this irritated Uncle Bernie, my suicide attempt had frightened him enough so that he tolerated it. I was eighteen when I stood on the old porch and made my apology and explanation to Grandpa Pepín of why I testified against his son. He nodded when I was finished and said, “I understand. You were brainwashed by the barbarians.” Confused, I mumbled, “The barbarians?” Grandpa nodded in a direction over my left shoulder. I turned to look. Far in the distance, past the low roofs of what seemed to be miles and miles of modest homes, light in the windows of a new office building twinkled at me. I looked back at Pepín. “You mean the capitalists?” I asked. “I mean the barbarians,” he said and never raised the subject of my treachery again.) This was my fourth attempt to resume contact with Francisco since I petitioned successfully to restore his American passport and again there was no response. For almost a decade he could have returned to the States. To my knowledge, he hadn’t. Through a colleague, I was introduced to the Cuban attaché to the U.N. Other than confirming that my father was alive and well, residing where I had written him, all he could suggest was that I go to Havana to confront Francisco. Since my letters to Francisco were requests to come see him, and I now knew that he had definitely gotten them, I assumed such a visit would be unwelcome. Perhaps I was merely intimidated. From both Grandpa and the Cuban attaché (who claimed to know my father fairly well) I got the distinct impression that Francisco had money problems. I arranged for fifty thousand dollars—an American ransom, the Cuban attaché joked—to be deposited in a Canadian bank in his name. That was a legal and safe way to deal with both America’s and Cuba’s different brands of restrictions. The money wasn’t refused—indeed, a bank official told me the account was immediately activated—yet no letter or phone call was forthcoming. I had asked for forg
iveness and received none. Maybe that was just. I didn’t want to seek more punishment, despite my guilty feelings.
The spring and summer of 1988, I made an effort to relax and take care of myself, limiting my hours with the children to no more than eight a day, joining a health club (and using it), and, the most significant change, ignoring my reservations about becoming involved with a co-worker. During the Grayson Day Care case, Diane Rosenberg split up with a man she had been living with since college. We became close, apart from the intimacy of our work. I resisted, for more than a year, risking our friendship by introducing romance, not only because I was putting companionship in danger, I was also chancing the loss of an intelligent and dedicated colleague. I had no illusion that if we were to become estranged lovers we would be capable of returning to the harmony of our platonic relationship.
To be blunt, our first few attempts at sex were self-conscious and a little comic. If, as Freud observed, there are six people in every bedroom—the lovers and the ghosts of their parents—then the bedroom of two psychiatrists is as crowded with spirits as Halloween. I suggested a change of scene might relieve the awkwardness and we took our first vacation in years together. The two weeks in Paris were idyllic in every way. We shed more than our clothes. Assuming the naive skins of tourists, we discovered our bodies could dance in the dark without poltergeists mocking our rhythm.
Taking time away from my work seemed to improve my results. In July, “Timmy” made a series of dazzling breakthroughs—a rapid integration of his multiple personalities that began with a deeply moving and eerie scene in which the various selves were introduced to each other. Also, my book on incest was well received and debated in a healthy way, even by its critics. August brought the opening of the clinic, although some of the construction wasn’t finished; the revelation to our friends that Diane and I had become an item was greeted with less surprise and disapproval than either of us had expected; and I worked hard to finish the book about the Grayson trial, inspired by “Timmy’s” bravery facing his painful memories and what I had learned from his remarkable insights into the methods and motivations of his abusers.
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