On Monday I followed my routine. I concluded there was no point in taking action or speculating until I had seen the data. Phil’s packet arrived by Federal Express on Tuesday. I read most of his paper during my lunch hour, enough to know the extent of the damage. I decided then that further delay in telling Diane was unconscionable; besides, the objective situation was urgent. At two o’clock, fifteen minutes before I was due to lead a group session, just as I packed Phil’s study and video in my bag to show Diane at home, Sally buzzed me to say that Gene Kenny was on the line.
Don’t answer it, a primitive voice warned. I knew then that I was in bad shape mentally. An unhappy, dangerous Rafe had been given a voice again: “He’s bad news,” it said. “And you’re not fit to treat anybody.”
I picked up. “Gene?”
“Oh hi,” he sounded relieved. “I’m sorry to call.”
“Why?”
“I mean, I know you’re busy. I just—I’m a little upset, that’s all. And I didn’t know who else to talk to.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know where to start.” I explained I had only fifteen minutes, but I could see him tomorrow morning. (Was I reaching for distractions? I wondered and then cursed Phil. What had he done to me? Was I going to doubt my every move? That isn’t fair, I decided. Phil didn’t invent my insecurities.)
“No, I can’t tomorrow. Maybe next week. I just need to talk for a few minutes, that’s all.” And he did, saying he left Cathy some six or seven months before; two weeks ago they completed negotiations and signed a divorce agreement. He ended the marriage because he wanted to be with Halley all the time. It was terrible to do this to Pete, but living with a woman he didn’t love was making him a bad Daddy too, he felt. He was distracted with his son, quick to anger, and eager to avoid being at home. By divorcing Cathy at least he would get to spend quality time with Pete—quality time was Gene’s phrase. In fact, a number of artificial phrases had crept into his speech. I associated them with marketing. He said at one point, “And I needed to get my energy focused on the future, not a dead-end relationship. I need to create opportunities and maximize my potential,” explaining why he also believed that living with Cathy was holding him back at work.
“But the real reason is that you wanted to be with Halley, is that right?”
“Yes,” Gene said solemnly. And a natural tone returned. The harried executive was replaced by a vulnerable man. “I love her. I’ve never felt like this about anybody. I get sick to my stomach thinking about losing her.”
“Why do you worry about losing her?”
“I am losing her,” he said and his voice broke.
He reported they had been virtually living together for a couple of months, not openly because of the ongoing divorce talks, but they were free to do so now, even to plan marriage, which is what he wanted. Halley was resisting, however. She felt they shouldn’t rush into marriage, that Gene couldn’t be sure he wanted to make that commitment right after his divorce, and that probably moving in was premature. After all, she pointed out, they were together almost every night anyway. “Let’s keep things the way they are for a while,” she said.
“That’s sounds reasonable,” I commented.
“She’s letting me down easy,” Gene said, desperate and convinced.
“She’s not breaking up with you. She’s not refusing to see you.”
“She doesn’t have to. She’s going to be away anyway. We’ve bought a French company—I mean, Stick, you know, he’s CEO now, and the majority owner. He was part of a leveraged buyout of Minotaur and then we took over—well, I’m sure you read about it.”
I told him I hadn’t and that it didn’t matter for the moment. I asked him how long Halley was going to be traveling.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Gene mumbled. “I mean she’s supposed to help set up this liaison office in Paris. She’ll be going back and forth and there’s talk about maybe, I mean now that the Soviet Union is open to us, that maybe she’ll take some trips there—”
Sally buzzed me. My group was ready. I urged Gene to make an appointment. He said he wasn’t sure about his schedule. He would call tomorrow. “Just tell me, what do you think? Am I exaggerating?”
“Maybe you’re scaring her. She might be right. Perhaps you’re so eager to get married because you’re anxious about the divorce from Cathy becoming final. But let’s meet,” I urged him. “I’m more interested in why you feel so strongly about Halley—”
“I love her! I can’t live without her,” Gene said with such conviction I was startled. It was rare, surprisingly rare, to hear. Of course my patients were adolescents and children, nevertheless I had treated adults at Susan’s clinic and I worked with parents or other caretakers. I was nonplussed. I wanted to say, “But that’s absurd.” Instead, I mumbled, “I see.” After we hung up, I caught myself wondering: how do you know it’s absurd?
[My vanity doesn’t wish to leave the reader with an impression of intellectual naiveté. Naturally, as a professional, I would hear any patient’s assertion that he or she can’t live without someone not as an expression of true love, but some other disturbance. I confess this random thought, or feeling rather, to show the depth of my confusion at the time.]
Our conversation influenced me. I decided to make a clean breast to Diane. That was a struggle. Diane and I were supposed to go out to dinner with friends. I canceled the date. She found out before I had a chance to inform her. She confronted me in the clinic’s parking lot when we met to drive home together.
“Lilly told me you canceled tonight. Something about an emergency.”
“Did I say emergency?” I managed to summon a smile. “I guess I am panicked.” I lifted my briefcase and said, “I’ve got Phil Samuels’s new study.”
Diane frowned. “Fuck him,” she said. Her pert nose wrinkled. “It’s so bad we can’t eat dinner?” I noticed the few hours we spent out in the sun down in Tampa had already manufactured many new freckles. It wasn’t anatomically possible for her to appear threatening. I knew I was in trouble with her, and that did frighten me, but I couldn’t be scared of her.
“It’s so bad we may have to give up breakfast too. Anyway, this isn’t the place to talk about it.” I got into the car. She stayed outside, still frowning. Her short bobbed black hair trembled faintly as she tilted her head. Her right index finger made a circle around her temple, and then she pointed at me. One of our teenage patients, who was playing basketball on the half court adjoining the lot, saw her do it. He let the ball dribble away while he laughed uproariously, clapping slowly as he doubled over. Diane blew him a kiss and got in.
“So what does this motherfucker’s brilliant new study say?” she asked in a mock English accent, as if she were a duchess.
“I’d rather talk about this at home,” I said.
“No chance, bub. You canceled dinner, so number one, you’re cooking and number two, you’re explaining yourself right away.”
I tried a distraction. “You’re in a good mood.”
It worked. “I had a great day,” Diane told me and went on to explain that she’d had a breakthrough with a seven-year-old girl who, a year ago, had been found by the police locked in a closet, her legs scalded by immersion in a tub full of hot water. She talked enthusiastically about her patient’s progress for a while. Diane was saying, “She actually made a joke about her burns,” when she caught herself and figured it out. “Wait a minute. Nice try. Tell me about Phil. Or at least give me the study to read.”
“Now?” I asked, merging onto the Henry Hudson Parkway.
“Cut it out,” she said as sternly as she could. “Quit stalling.”
“Remember the construct? Kids six and under were brought in for a routine physical examination by a pediatrician. Everything is videotaped, of course. The doctor does a few unorthodox things: listens to their feet with a stethoscope, puts a paper cup on their stomach. Clothes are never removed. Then they were interviewed by therapists, as
if there had been a charge of sexual molestation. Almost half the kids made up outrageous things about what the pediatrician did. Vaginal penetration, anal penetration, foundling of the genitals, the works.”
“In how many interrogations?”
“Most of the kids who made up stuff did it by the second session.”
There was a silence. I didn’t look over at her. It was a lovely end to a mild spring day. To our left, the West Side of New York stood guard over the broad river on our right. The brown, silver, and white buildings were aged by grime and neglect; yet they were standing, to my eyes, as timeless as the flat shimmering water.
When Diane spoke, her light tone had darkened. “What aren’t you telling me about this, Rafe?”
I waited. I swung around one of the highway’s sharp curves, made narrower by a lane closed thanks to perpetual construction. Litter flew up from the car in front of me and slapped the side window. We were near our exit, near our home. I was apprehensive as I let the secret out, but I have to admit to a little excitement also, a feeling that at last I would learn something I might otherwise never have known for sure about our relationship. “Remember when Phil came to town almost a year ago?”
“Un huh,” Diane said with such emphasis that I was convinced she had already guessed what I was going to say.
“I gave him the tapes of your sessions with the Peterson girls. He copied our technique.”
“Jesus,” she said quietly, but distinctly, making two widely separated syllables of His name.
“I haven’t looked at the video,” I continued. “I don’t know how carefully—”
“It doesn’t matter—” she began.
I talked over her, “And he doesn’t identify the source of the technique.”
“Oh, swell! Isn’t that just grand? What a wonderful generous guy.”
There was a long silence. I kept my eyes on the road. Perhaps a minute or two passed while I exited the highway, turning onto Riverside. Our garage was only a block away. I had to stop at a light. Then I looked at her. I was surprised, very surprised, and, at last, frightened by what I saw.
Diane’s youthful face was turned to me. There were her girlish freckles, without frowns or wrinkles. Her features were calm and settled. But behind the round wire-rimmed glasses, her eyes were full of tears.
Our argument—the first of many, but in a real sense, the only important one—lasted until dawn and ended with her packing a bag to move out. First we watched the tape. Diane read the study, I re-read it, we watched the tape again. Since she subsequently attacked the finding in many public forums, her reaction is no secret. She believed Phil’s study was corrupted by the pediatrician doing unorthodox, albeit harmless, things in the examinations. She complained—irrelevantly, I thought—that routine examinations are never conducted without a parent being present. And she asserted his graduate students merely imitated our techniques without any imagination, using the dolls right away despite the absence of preliminary indications of abuse.
“It’s bullshit,” she said to me at three o’clock in the morning. “You know it’s bullshit. We would’ve stopped the interviews after the first round of questions. I would never have gone to dolls, not without some symptoms of emotional upset. It’s just got nothing to do with the real world. He set out to prove kids are unreliable because that’s what he wants to believe.”
By then, I believed more talk was hopeless, but I spoke anyway. “We can’t guarantee the performance of all therapists. You might not have fallen into this trap. But there are lots of mediocre or poorly trained professionals—”
“How do you know that? And what does it mean, anyway? Of course incompetent people can fuck up any procedure. Jesus Christ, a surgeon can kill somebody doing an appendectomy. What the fuck does that prove?”
Our disagreement boiled down to this: Diane believed our work was under siege by a culture unwilling to take responsibility for its neglect; that even if a small number of child abuse accusations by young children were wrongful, that was far preferable to returning to the old days when incest, beatings, and killings went on without any attempt to halt them, or treatment being available to abandoned children who have no resources. I replied that I had no intention of giving up our work with children we knew were abused, but to participate in interrogations that would be used in custody battles or criminal procedures, unless there was physical corroboration of abuse, was immoral. “I can’t be party to something that might put innocent people in jail or cost them their jobs or make them pariahs to their families and their communities,” I said.
“But that’s totally impractical,” Diane said, apparently still unable to absorb the fact that I was more than merely rattled by Phil’s study. “Under the law, we have to report all accusations to the police. We’d have to close the clinic. Beside, we’d lose our grants. And even if we can somehow hobble along without funding, we’ll have to turn away half our prospective patients without bothering to diagnose them. What about them? What about the kids who will slip through and end up crippled or worse? We can only be responsible for what we do. And I’m sure we haven’t hurt any innocent people.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked her. I was sitting on our bed with my legs crossed under me. She had just taken a bath, in a vain attempt to calm down, and looked tiny in a big white terry cloth robe and somewhat blind too, since her glasses were off. The robe opened slightly as she paced, arguing. I could see her white thighs and the shadow of her sex. I felt regret, but no remorse. I was tired; not because it was past three in the morning; I was tired of uncertainty.
“I’m sure!” She walked up to me. She was small, but from my position on the mattress she looked big. “Are you telling me, are you really saying to me, that you’re not sure? Do you think there’s any chance Grandpa Peterson was innocent?”
This was our real fight. I bowed my head and said it. “Yes.”
“No,” she said, pleading really. “You’re not serious.”
“Yes. I think this means there was a chance we were wrong. I’m not blaming you …”
“Of course you are!” She pushed her hair up on both sides, forming a curly pile on top. Her neck was white and her ears small, perfectly formed. “I can’t believe it. Fuck you, Rafe.” There were no tears now. She glared at me while holding her head. She cocked it at me. “Why?” she asked and let go of her hair. She looked utterly bewildered, shrinking in the robe. “Why do you want to destroy us?”
No logic can answer such a question. For Diane, there was no significant distinction between this intellectual disagreement and the harmony of our relations. I had apologized over and over for lying to her about the tape, but, in the end, that wasn’t what had hurt her. I was betraying her beliefs, her work, and worst of all, I had betrayed something she felt she had earned many times over: my faith in her.
“Don’t you see what these bastards are doing?” she yelled after I didn’t respond. “They don’t give a fuck about this so-called truth you’re always talking about! He’s just trying to make a name for himself.”
“His motives don’t matter,” I mumbled.
“What kind of shrink are you? ‘His motives don’t matter!’” she mocked me. “And your motives don’t matter either, huh? You’re punishing yourself, that’s what this is all about. You’re letting your father beat you up.”
“That’s specious,” I said with utter contempt.
“That’s specious?” Diane arched her back and squinted at the ceiling. She was breathing hard, as if running to catch up to the meaning of our fight. “You’re right,” she said softly in a panted whisper. “I’m just a second-rate shrink. You must be so tired of living with an inferior mind.” With her eyes still raised, she opened her robe. Her skin was pink from the bath, her nipples dark and hard, the black hairs of her pubis matted and damp. “This is what I’m good for.” She lowered her eyes to me. The grief I saw in the car was now rage. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” She came over to the bed and grabbed my
hair. She pulled my head to her fragrant belly and pushed it down to her sex. “You want to be your Daddy, don’t you? I’m supposed to die for your fucking principles.” She lifted my head and came close to my face, her mouth opening. I thought for a moment she was going to spit. “You’re right. I’m so stupid. I keep letting you get away with being the bad bad boy with his bad bad secrets. Well no more, Doctor. From now on, I’m gonna be the Mommy you deserve.” She released her grip. “You’re gonna feel sorry about me too. Very sorry.”
From there, if possible, things got uglier. Despite my desire to make this a full account of the complicated interrelationship between my life and my treatment of Gene Kenny, I don’t feel I need to go step by step through the degeneration of the longest sustained love affair of my life. The position I took was straightforward: the clinic would no longer participate in investigations or I could no longer work at the clinic. Nor would I help to rebut Phil’s study until I had a response I believed in; Diane’s criticisms were unconvincing or beside the point.
Yes, I agreed with her that Phil’s study was part of a deep need in America to deny the dysfunction and abuse inherent in our society, a culture that permits, in some ways encourages, the systematic destruction of family life among the poor, especially poor urban minorities. From the popularity of biochemical determinism to the widespread use of Ritalin (ninety percent of its prescriptions written for black male children), from the disproportionate attention paid by the media to legal maneuvers that use child abuse as a means of getting profitable clients off to the cynicism about taxation for social services, all symbolized to me, as they did to Diane, that middle-class America wants to believe it is entitled to live only for its own satisfactions, that altruism is not only useless, but actually immoral. She was right about the motivation for Phil’s study and the use it would be put to. But, for me, as it had been my whole life, ideology is not an answer to an issue of fact. If our techniques were flawed, nothing could justify continuing their use.
Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil Page 56