I’d become friends with more of Dr. Turcotte’s patients, as well as with Jim Clark and two of the doctor’s five daughters, June and Amy. All were involved in writing to one degree or another. Both sisters painted, and Jim was a serious photographer. After the Shutesbury house was sold on October 1, 1980, Chris and I moved to an apartment on Dickinson Street in Amherst. June, Amy, Jim, and several patients met in our apartment on Sunday evenings for a potluck supper and conversation. Several members of the group also participated in my Thursday-evening writing workshop. One group member was Helen Jackson, a young woman whom I had worked with on her writing and who’d come to stay with me while on vacation. Shortly after she arrived, I realized she was deeply troubled. She’d heard Dr. Turcotte give a talk in Amherst and wanted to see him as a patient, which she did. Because she didn’t feel up to going back to college, she became a permanent member of my household and of the group. Our home was always filled with creative people coming and going—sitting at the dining table writing, making collages on the kitchen table, Jim developing film in the basement, people spending the night sleeping on the couch or on the shag rug.
One Sunday evening during dinner, Dr. Turcotte called from Philadelphia, where he’d gone with Father Gray. “You’re trying to take my practice away from me!” he yelled.
“What?” I exclaimed, unable to believe what I’d just heard.
“You’re trying to take my practice away from me with those meetings of yours,” he repeated.
“I’m not trying to take your practice away from you. I teach people about the creative process. I’m not a psychiatrist.”
It was true that everyone in the group was becoming more open and emotionally expressive as they were growing more creative, but I saw no one pulling away from him. However, my relationship with Dr. Turcotte continued to change.
V
Chris was visibly nervous when he and Jim came into the kitchen where I was sitting at the table writing. I closed my notebook and lit a cigarette. Still standing, Chris explained that Jim had something to tell me. “I have to go to town. I’ll be back soon,” Chris said, hurrying from the room.
Jim sat down on a kitchen chair.
I can’t remember a word he said to me, but I remember his message with searing clarity—he and Chris were having a sexual relationship. Dr. Turcotte had already told me this, but to hear it in Jim’s words made the fact painfully real. This man whom I had known and talked with for years in Dr. Turcotte’s office, discussing my troubled marriage, his troubled childhood with abusive parents, and, hour after hour, the life and ideas of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Georg Groddeck; this man who had supported me when I was in Northampton State Hospital and—years later—had said he would stay with me night and day to keep the doctor from committing me to the Brattleboro Retreat; this man who had attended my Sunday-night potluck dinners and Thursday-night writing workshops, and who developed his film in a darkroom he’d created in my basement, was having a sexual relationship with my fifteen-year-old son.
When Dr. Turcotte told me about the relationship, he had warned me that I would risk losing Chris altogether if I opposed it. And he told me that Chris had been sexually active long before his relationship with John.
I remembered how—two years before that night—Chris had threatened to become a male prostitute in Springfield if I wouldn’t do something he wanted me to do. I had no idea that he even knew what the word prostitute meant. We settled whatever conflict we were engaged in, but that he had known enough to make that threat concerned me.
Now he was having a sexual relationship with Jim.
As I sat once again attempting to accept the fact, Chris burst into the kitchen with enthusiasm.
“I’ve bought you a gift, Jim,” he said, and handed Jim a gift-wrapped box.
Did Jim open his gift? Did Chris say anything to me? Did I say anything to him?
I do remember that his feeling of relief was palpable. I remember him touching Jim’s shoulder.
The rest of my time with them that evening is a blur, though I have a vague memory of them leaving the apartment together.
Life continued as always in the Dickinson Street apartment—the potluck dinners and writing workshops, the Turcotte girls and Helen and her friends coming and going, Jim developing film in the basement, and Chris sitting upstairs writing poetry or writing in his journal, while I too wrote. But somehow, nothing was the same after that night.
VI
After Dr. Turcotte returned from Philadelphia, nothing more was said about the accusing call he’d made. He invited me to go out to dinner with him one night, and I accepted. He often invited patients to join him for lunch or dinner. Usually the patients were either interested in or involved with one or another of the doctor’s projects, or they were in distress or in need of extra attention. Often he invited patients to accompany him because he needed someone to listen to and support him.
Over dinner that night he began to tell me a story about him being a lonely high school boy who was grateful for the attention of one of his teachers. The details of the story are gone now. What I remember is the image of him sitting across the table from me in a rattan wing chair. Whatever Dr. Turcotte’s teacher had said or done seemed to me to be such a small thing that it magnified his great emotional need. As he talked, his eyes filled with tears that spilled over and streamed down his face in a torrent of grief and gratitude.
“I don’t know,” he said, pulling his handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiping his eyes. “I’ve never talked about these things. For some reason, you’re so easy to talk to.” He blew his nose and continued to cry.
In addition to compassion for him, I felt puzzlement and surprise as well. This doctor to whom I’d been going for so many years had not lived according to his own theories. He had never talked with anyone about these painful things in his childhood and youth. All those years his old unacknowledged pain had gnawed into his perceptions until they were like slices of Swiss cheese, each hole creating a blind spot in his vision. Surely we all have many blind spots, but that someone with such power over confused, distraught people was so unconscious of the lack in his own perceptions about himself frightened me. Now I saw Dr. Turcotte, whom I’d thought the most perceptive and creative therapist I’d ever known, as also the hurt child holding a heart full of unacknowledged grief and unfulfilled emotional need.
Had he been one of my students, I would have suggested that he write the story he’d just told me. I would have told him this, believing that finding a form for his pain would make it a story rather than a series of disconnected sentences spilled out through his tears; writing the story would be a second step toward his healing, just as his awkward and emotional telling me over dinner had been the first.
He finally stopped crying. He wiped his eyes, blew his nose again, put his handkerchief back into his pocket, picked up a piece of meat loaf with his fork, and lifted it to his mouth. I sat stunned at the realization that my therapist had explored his own childhood and youth less than many of the young people in my writing workshops had explored theirs. The realization made me feel less secure with him, but he was still my therapist, and I wasn’t ready to let that relationship go. I wasn’t confident enough to claim myself as person rather than patient.
VII
I began to take more short trips with Dr. Turcotte to different Catholic churches, and visits with priests, meetings of the Society for Religion and Mental Health, and short excursions to unknown destinations. Sometimes he’d follow his heart from one town to another. I thought of Saint Francis, who, I’d read, often tossed a coin to tell him which direction to follow when he reached crossroads in his travels.
Once the doctor pulled the car over to a large pond and sat for a long time, looking. On the pond floated more ducks than I’d ever seen gathered in one place. “What an example of the abundance of God’s creations,” he said with wonder. Then he started the car and pulled out onto the highway again.
Trip by t
rip, bit by bit, I began to piece together the story of his life, at least some of the highlights and major shaping events, or at least those things he felt moved or willing to tell me about. Dr. Turcotte told me that he’d never been able to please his father and how much that had hurt him. He said little about his mother except that she had actively engaged in life until her death.
He told me about the first patient assigned to him when he was still in medical school. She sat in a chair on the ward, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring off into space, saying nothing. Her hair was unwashed, and her dresses were someone’s ill-fitting castoffs. Her eyes were vacant, her body skin and bones. “I sat in a chair facing her,” he said. “I tried every way I could think of to get a response out of her, but nothing worked. So I just sat there and she sat there. I returned the next day, and the day after that. Day after day we sat there together that way. One day I looked at her, that woman stripped of personality, and it was like she was naked. That woman had nothing, absolutely nothing left but cigarettes. Then I saw her. I really saw her. And I thought: I’m looking into the face of God made visible. It was a holy moment.” There was tenderness in his voice. “I was humbled by the experience,” he said. “It changed my way of looking at patients from that day on.”
He went on with his studies until he graduated and became a board-certified psychiatrist. He told me that he was certain that the first patient he had after graduating from medical school was determined to kill him once she got out of the hospital, and how afraid he’d been, both of the patient and the patient’s brother.
There was the story of a patient who was a priest, who, Dr. Turcotte claimed, was determined to set fire to the rectory. The doctor could convince no one of this possibility but shared his thoughts about the priest with everyone in the diocese, trying to convince them of what he saw as imminent danger. The priest finally packed his things and left the diocese altogether.
The stories came in bits and pieces, but after hearing various fragments, I began to see that two themes emerged: that of patients out to kill Dr. Turcotte and other patients who were going to set fires, possibly killing themselves and others. While I wished no one harm, I did wish that something visible would happen to prove the doctor’s beliefs—a fire started, but extinguished before damage was done, a written death threat to the doctor that could be traced to the patient he claimed was threatening him. I wanted to visibly see that he was right about his patients, that he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t a paranoid manic-depressive who survived by projecting onto certain patients, while putting other patients in the position of supporting him and his delusions. He’d saved my life, and I still wanted to believe in him.
VIII
Dr. Turcotte fell in love with a patient, a young divorced woman with several children. He talked about her to anyone who would listen. He claimed that falling in love with her made him feel more in love with his wife, Claire, and with Ethel, whom he considered his “second wife.”
Claire must have been well aware of his long relationship with Ethel. He made no secret of his belief that men often needed more than one wife. Ethel worked part-time for him, and had become increasingly devoted to him and his teachings, both psychiatrically and theologically. Their emotional bond grew stronger. He told me of their struggling with what to do about their feelings for each other, their praying and reading the Bible. He said that a scripture convinced them to consider themselves husband and wife. According to him, they repeated vows to each other and made love. Ethel became his second wife. I suppose he wanted the patient as yet another of his wives.
I never knew Claire’s or Ethel’s response to this. Claire probably went on with her life as she’d learned to do years before. She was a loyal Catholic who would never divorce her husband no matter his behavior. If she was grief-stricken, brokenhearted, jealous, or angry, she was as silent about her emotional state as her husband was loud and public about his.
Patients’ problems paled in comparison with the doctor’s needs. Many therapy sessions turned into opportunities for him to talk incessantly about his new love. “My heart,” he announced repeatedly, “is bursting with love.” After his proclamation of love to her, the young woman—I’ll call her Sally—stopped going to him. Dr. Turcotte went to her brother, begging him to persuade her to return to therapy. She refused. He called her, wrote notes to her, phoned her. He told her how much she needed him. He drove back and forth in front of her house.
Then he called me one evening and told me he needed to get out of town for a few days. Would I drive him? I threw some clothes into a suitcase and picked him up at his office. He was visibly shaken. Sally was going to have him killed. He was certain of it. She and her family had hired a Mafia hit man to execute him. She was also going to set fire to her house and kill the children along with herself.
His two great fears had been brought together in one person. He frightened me. So many of the things he’d said about people had seemed insightful and true, but this was too much.
Yet I went with him.
Chapter Eighteen
I
1980
WE ATTENDED A SPECIAL MASS AND HEALING SERVICE IN A CATHOLIC church in the eastern part of the state. He gave one of the priests a letter about Sally and her plans to burn her house down, trying to persuade the priest to intervene and avert a potential tragedy. The priest scanned the letter with no apparent interest, shook the doctor’s hand, and wished us well.
After the mass, Dr. Turcotte told me that he wanted to take me to Cairo to talk with my Aunt Curtis, Mother’s sister, who’d suddenly and without explanation cut off the financial support she’d been giving me since my divorce. I was shocked that she’d taken a major source of financial support away from me, but that she’d taken her emotional support as well left me devastated. I’d plunged into a more intense depression than I’d experienced before. I agonized at the thought of Dr. Turcotte going to Cairo to talk with her but agreed to go even though I felt certain that she would think him an outrageous, blundering, totally unacceptable man. My depression was dark and intensifying.
The doctor’s paranoia was also intensifying. Many times we’d rushed out of one restaurant or another because he was certain there was someone there who would pull a gun at any minute and kill him. That day, the day he decided to go to Cairo, I sat slumped in the car, smoking cigarettes, while sinking deeper and deeper into a depression that grew to psychotic proportions. By sundown we’d reached Newport, Rhode Island. Dr. Turcotte pulled the car into a parking space in front of a motel that faced the sea. “We’ll spend the night here,” he announced, and snapped off the ignition.
II
As usual, Dr. Turcotte was broke. He slapped Ethel’s American Express card on the motel counter and signed us in as Mr. and Mrs. Harold Miller. Then we went to the room, which had two double beds. I went to the bathroom, while he opened the Gideon Bible in the bedside table drawer to do what he called a “Bible dip.” I’d never heard the phrase “Bible dip” before he used it, but even as a teenager I often looked for guidance by opening the Bible at random and reading whatever verse to which my eye was drawn. I assumed Turcotte was looking for guidance about how to save his life from Sally’s deadly revenge. The story felt like a cheap crime novel. I didn’t ask what the Bible had told him. Then the two of us went to the motel restaurant for dinner. The table he chose was next to the bar.
A woman about my age was sitting on a stool, talking to the bartender. She had long, chestnut-colored hair, a few freckles across her nose, and a Southern accent much like mine. “Excuse me,” I said to her during a lull in their conversation. “You sound like you’re from the South. So am I.”
She responded in an open, friendly manner. “Yeah, you sound like you’re from Georgia, too. I grew up in Dalton.”
“I grew up in Cairo,” I said.
“I’ve never met anyone from Georgia up here!” she exclaimed.
“Neither have I! Would you like to join us?” I
asked.
“Yes,” she said enthusiastically, and came over and sat down next to me. We introduced ourselves. Then she began to talk in a rapid, animated way. She was divorced, had no children, and wrote songs that she sang, accompanying herself on her guitar. We talked about Georgia clay, live oak trees, and Spanish moss. I told her I was a poet. Maybe we’d write a song together. I was having a wonderful time when I felt a heavy darkness descend on Dr. Turcotte.
He turned to Jeanie, my new friend, and announced: “Margaret’s sexually attracted to you.” This was clearly intended to shock and intimidate her, but she dismissed him and his remark as casually as she might have flicked away a fly that had landed on the sandwich she’d brought with her from the bar. Without missing a beat in the cadence of our conversation, she continued: “Margaret, wouldn’t it be fun to write some music together and take it south?”
The doctor was clearly left out of the conversation. He sat glumly eating, while Jeanie and I talked about Georgia and music. At the end of the evening, she gave me her phone number and address, and we agreed to get together the next day.
From here on, the story of my stay in Newport with Dr. Turcotte is filled with memory lapses caused by shock and increasing psychosis.
We went to the room. Dr. Turcotte took his clothes off and stood at the window in his undershirt and underpants. I got ready for bed, got into my bed, and pulled the cover over me. Dr. Turcotte walked across the room, pulled the cover of my bed back down, and climbed in. I sucked my breath in and held it. This wasn’t supposed to happen. He said he was my brother; I’d always felt physically if not emotionally safe with him. Now he was pressing his body against mine. My heart beat rapidly and my breathing was shallow.
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