Private Practices

by Linda Wolfe

  It made considerable sense. Distressed over the imminent exposure of his research, Sidney was behaving exactly as he himself had behaved when confronted with feelings of failure. He was drugging himself. But was it really possible? Perhaps he ought to try the theory out on someone else.

  It would have to be someone he could trust. Someone who wouldn’t, if he turned out to be wrong, say anything against him to Sidney. Abruptly, he got to his feet and left the changing room, hurrying toward the covered ramp that connected the main building of the hospital with the Alanson Wing, the neurological annex in which Mulenberg was still confined.

  “Hi there. How’s it going?” A nurse was standing in the corner of Mulenberg’s big room, arranging one of the dozens of bouquets of flowers that arrived from former patients and professional acquaintances daily. Ben nodded to her and sat down in the visitor’s chair alongside the bed.

  The old man’s face looked as white as the crumpled pillow beneath his head. His condition had not improved since his last stroke, although the hospital had done all it could for him. Now there was nothing further to be done and plans were being made to send him to a nursing home unless his wife, from whom he had separated the previous winter, agreed to care for him.

  The care would be strictly custodial. He would either recover his speech or he would not; he would either be subject to another massive stroke or he would not. Those who visited him, including Ben who had come on several occasions, always left his room shaking their heads. But in Mulenberg’s presence they pretended to a brisk cheerfulness. Ben attempted it.

  Waiting for the nurse to finish her flower arrangement, he began telling Mulenberg hospital gossip. Herron was leaving to affiliate exclusively with Midstate next year; Arnie Diehl was getting married; Alithorn was trying to talk his new wife into quitting medical school. Whenever he finished communicating a tidbit of information, Mulenberg raised his eyebrows and blinked his eyes several times, suggesting that he had understood.

  The nurse, her arms stuffed with green tissue paper, let herself quietly out of the door.

  As soon as it closed, Ben looked cautiously at Mulenberg’s locked, slightly scowling lips and said, “Sidney’s pill is no good. He’s suspected it for a while, but now he’s sure of it.”

  Mulenberg’s lips remained fixed but his eyelashes danced.

  “It’s worrying him badly,” Ben went on, lowering his voice a fraction. “I think he’s on drugs. Barbiturates. He hasn’t said anything, of course. But it looks to me as if he’s got all the signs. Trembling. Excitability. Paranoia. Loss of judgment.”

  Mulenberg made a harsh gutteral sound in his throat and for a moment Ben thought nervously that perhaps he shouldn’t go on. But when the old man’s lips remained as frozen as they had been before, he decided to continue. Mulenberg certainly couldn’t, at least at present, repeat confidences. Perhaps he would never be able to. Besides, his eyelids were opening and closing repetitively as if to encourage greater communication. Ben began talking again, words coming more easily now, sentences forming on his lips before he even had time to consider them fully.

  “I really love Sidney, you know,” he began. “He’s a remarkable person. And he’s more than a brother to me. Our father died when I was very young and in a way Sidney’s been the only father I’ve ever known. A mentor. A role model. I respect him tremendously. But at the same time, he can be a stubborn son of a bitch.”

  Pausing for breath, he was aware that he had never before allowed himself to speak disloyally of Sidney or to reflect aloud on any of his failings. Even as a child he had kept silent. Staring at Mulenberg, he remembered a game of Monopoly he and Sidney had once played with two older boys who had lived across the street from them when they were children. An hour into the game, Sidney, the banker, had pilfered a handful of peanut-butter-colored hundred dollar notes and slipped them under Ben’s cushion, smiling slyly. A moment later he had shouted, “Someone here is cheating. Admit it! Admit it!” Ben had shivered and one of the boys from across the street had grabbed and searched both him and his chair until the notes cascaded down and then the three of them had held him and, tickling and pinching, begun to pummel him. He had cried and they had laughed. And Sidney had laughed the hardest. But he had never once defended himself sure that if he did, Sidney would invoke the punishment Ben had always found the worst, the refusal to speak to him for an entire day and night.

  Suddenly, he leaned forward and spoke more loudly. “Sidney’s so fucking sure of himself all the time.”

  He was rambling, but he drew comfort from the fact that Mulenberg still seemed to be agreeing with him, his eyelids as expressive as a nodding head. He looked down at him fondly and hoped that the nurse would stay away a long time. He felt he had a hundred things to say, and with a luxurious sigh he began unburdening himself further, continuing to speak rapidly and without any of his usual guardedness. “I had a drug problem myself for a while,” he confessed. “But I was careful. I never went above tolerance. I think Sidney’s taking a lot. And if he is, it isn’t going to be easy to get him to stop. He’s so pigheaded.” Crossing his legs, he sat up straight, thoroughly enjoying himself. But just as he opened his mouth to speak again, he heard a door opening. Startled, he turned and saw the nurse he had seen before, her arms filled with flowers.

  He was bitterly disappointed and his shoulders slumped into their usual stoop. He had only just begun to express himself, only just begun to find the thoughts he wanted to explore. But he couldn’t talk in front of the nurse. Standing up, he glanced again at Mulenberg, and thought that he too looked disappointed. “Well, most likely what I told you about Sid isn’t even true. Most likely it’s just my imagination.” Mulenberg’s eyelashes continued to signal to him as if he understood not only his monologue but his reasons for curtailing it.

  The nurse came up to the bed and began straightening the coverlet on which Mulenberg’s paralyzed hands lay immobile. “Isn’t it incredible the way he understands everything?” she said. “I mean everything.”

  Ben nodded and, leaning over, patted one of Mulenberg’s short-circuited hands. “We’ll talk more,” he said appreciatively. “I’ll come back and speak with you if I find anything out for sure.”

  Mulenberg died two days later, before Ben had a chance to confirm or discard his suspicions about Sidney, and he felt surprisingly desolate. He had hoped to have another opportunity to talk with Mulenberg about his brother. When Marilyn Mulenberg called to inform him of the funeral arrangements, he promised at once to attend.

  “Wonderful. See you there,” Marilyn said cheerfully, as if she had just obtained his agreement to attend a party.

  Listening to her, he puzzled over her attitude. She had cursed Mulenberg when, shortly after his first stroke, he had separated from her. She had called his departure an aberration, a madness, the late-life psychological crisis of a man who, experiencing his first intensely personal brush with sickness and mortality, had romantically believed he could still seize the day and live out youthful fantasies of solitude and lack of attachment. Later, once her anger had worn thin, she had become depressed and refused to go out of her house or communicate with any of the friends who had once been hers and Harry’s in common. But now that Harry was dead, she was suddenly sociable. “It’s going to be a huge affair,” she was saying. “So be on time if you don’t want to stand.”

  On the day of the funeral, Naomi, looking trim in a navy blue suit, was waiting for Ben in front of the funeral parlor when his taxi pulled up. Although she had never met Mulenberg, Ben had asked her to come to his services anyway. More and more, he had been trying to include her in his life, and while he had never risked having her to dinner at Sidney and Claudia’s, knowing that Naomi and Sidney were mutually hostile, he had taken Naomi to one of Herron’s cocktail parties where he had introduced her to several of his colleagues and once he had even gone to dinner with her at Sam Schwartz’s house. The funeral had seemed to him a particularly good event at which to include Naom
i. All his associates would be there, and they would see that at last he had learned to live as they did, in pairs, and could no longer be considered an isolate.

  “Nearly everyone’s gone in already,” Naomi complained as he hurriedly paid his fare.

  “Jesus!” he exclaimed. “I knew I was late but not this late.” He had been delayed by Sidney who had decided that he wouldn’t attend the funeral only moments before Ben stopped by his office to pick him up. He had spent ten minutes trying to persuade Sidney to change his mind, but it had been to no avail.

  “I never got on with Mulenberg when he was alive,” Sidney had declared sharply. “So I’ve decided not to go. Why should I pretend to have been his friend? Why does death have to make everyone so sentimental?”

  He had found Sidney harsh and yet, as always, been impressed by his resolute lack of concern for convention. If Sidney was taking barbiturates, they certainly weren’t altering the independence and nonconformity that had always marked his attitudes.

  He mentioned none of this to Naomi, but simply grabbed her arm and hurried inside to take the elevator to the chapel floor. Something kept preventing him from telling Naomi his suspicions about Sidney. It was the fact that she was already so unqualifiedly negative about him, he thought as they boarded the elevator. She was still angry with Sidney for the way he had spoken to her the day she had come for the IUD, and she was outraged by the fact that he hadn’t yet done anything about the potential dangers of his pill. If now Ben were to tell her that he believed Sidney was deadening his judgment with barbiturates, she would simply use the information as further ammunition in her nagging efforts to persuade him to pull away from Sidney. To set up a practice of his own.

  Upstairs, the chapel doors were still open; the service had not yet begun. He was relieved to see that there were quite a few latecomers like himself still crowding the entranceway to the chapel and trying to make their way inside. He slowed his pace and waited for Naomi, who was trailing a few steps behind him, attempting to remove her suit jacket while still in motion. She had gotten her arm caught in the lining. He paused to help her free it. Then he looked at her, dismayed. Underneath her jacket she was wearing her violet silk shirt.

  “Couldn’t you have worn something more subdued?” he grumbled disagreeably.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Naomi said, chagrined. “I was late for work this morning and I had to get dressed so fast it slipped my mind that we were going to the funeral.” She looked up at him worriedly. “Is it terrible? Here, let me put my jacket back on.”

  “No,” he said, affected by the rush of her apology. “No. You’ll be too warm. Forget it. It’s okay.” But when he led her into the chapel, he walked ever so slightly in front of her.

  It was jammed. Most of the seats in the blond wood pews were filled and there was a great crowd standing in the back of the heavily curtained room. He saw Claudia among the standees, talking quietly with Alithorn and his newest wife, a statuesque young woman. Claudia looked exquisite.

  She had gained very little weight. Her pregnancy was cunningly disguised, apparent chiefly in the attractive swell of her breasts against the soft, dark crepe of the loose dress she was wearing. It had always been one of his favorites. Sidney had gotten it for her at Halston’s for her thirtieth birthday. He wished again that Naomi had dressed more appropriately, if not more fashionably, and then led her over to meet his sister-in-law. He had mentioned each woman to the other, and both had been saying for weeks how much they wanted to meet.

  “You must be Naomi,” Claudia said, even before he’d introduced them. Her face was paler than usual and although her blue eyes were clear, the lids were puffy. Nevertheless, she rallied to the social necessity of greeting her brother-in-law’s girlfriend. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said in a quiet voice. “I’m so glad we’re meeting at last, even if it did have to be at a time like this.”

  Naomi’s manner was equally gracious, he noted with pleasure. For all her occasional awkwardnesses and lapses of style or forethought, she could always be counted upon for warmth and empathy. “Yes,” she was saying to Claudia. “I feel so bad for you. I understand Dr. Mulenberg was a good friend of yours.”

  “Of so many people,” Alithorn interrupted, looking over Naomi’s head. “Did you ever see a crowd like this one?” he added, speaking to no one in particular but shaking his head proudly as if taking personal satisfaction in his old friend Mulenberg’s popularity. Then, “I see some seats!” he announced and waved to a man in one of the front pews who was standing and beckoning at him.

  “Better get them,” his wife worried.

  “Right!” Turning toward Claudia he said, “We’ll save you and Sidney some space,” and moved briskly toward the front of the chapel.

  Naomi glared at his retreating back. “What a rude man,” she exclaimed to Claudia. “Just offering to save seats for you and Sidney. Not for Ben and me.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t mean to exclude you and Ben,” Claudia tried to soothe Naomi. “Come on, let’s all go and join him.” But Ben shook his head. “No, he meant it all right. He doesn’t socialize much with his staff but Sidney’s always been his fair-haired boy.”

  “Where is Sidney?” Claudia interrupted, suddenly realizing how late it was getting. “He said he was coming with you.”

  “We had an emergency in the office,” he lied, embarrassed to tell Claudia the truth of why Sidney hadn’t come. If Sidney wanted to tell her the truth, that was his business. And most likely he would tell her. But looking at her swollen eyelids, and remembering how long she had known Mulenberg, he was sure that if he were Sidney, he’d never do it.

  Claudia nodded, accepting his explanation, and turned toward Naomi. “Did you see the body?” she asked.

  “No. We didn’t have time. We only just got here.”

  “She had him laid out in his pajamas.” Claudia’s voice, as always, was well modulated and controlled, but Ben thought she looked indignant. She gestured with her chin toward the front of the chapel where Marilyn stood in a tight huddle with her two daughters, their heads bent in intense conversation.

  “Marilyn said that Harry was the kind of man who had hated pretension and convention when he was alive,” Claudia went on, “and that he’d have wanted none of it in death. She said he’d have wanted to be laid out just the way he looked when he died.”

  “Well, I suppose there’s something to that,” Naomi said. “From what Ben’s told me, he was an unpretentious sort of man.”

  “Yes,” Claudia said. “But I find it a little strange.”

  Naomi wrinkled her forehead and Ben watched the two of them. He couldn’t help comparing them and noticing that although Naomi was a very good-looking woman, she did seem a little used-up, a little shopworn, when standing next to his youthful, glamorous sister-in-law.

  Claudia saved him from his disconcerting thoughts by saying, “Harry looks pathetic. And just a little bit ridiculous. I had the craziest notion when I looked at him. I thought that Marilyn wanted him to look that way. That she was taking her revenge. Do you know what I mean, Ben?”

  His eyes narrowed. In Sidney’s presence, Claudia rarely revealed her perceptions. Just then a hush began to fall over the chapel. One of Mulenberg’s daughters had stepped to the front of the room and was signaling for quiet. Claudia slipped away and went to join the Alithorns, sliding noiselessly into the aisle seat of their pew, and Ben and Naomi remained among the now even more swollen ranks of standees.

  “My mother and my sister and I are all very grateful to you for coming,” the young woman said, her arms swinging shyly at her sides. “You all knew and loved my father and you know deep in your hearts what a special person he was. He was an informal man who hated pomp and circumstance, a man who loved life and hated death, which he fought with a passion in others and in himself.” Ben leaned forward, listening with absorption, trying to catch the young woman’s soft-spoken words. Then her voice quivered for a moment and she glanced at her mother who
was sitting, blue-gray head bowed, in the front pew.

  “Well,” the young woman resumed in an even quieter tone, “Mother and Dad talked often about how he wanted to pass from this world. He wanted no words said over him. No religious ceremony. No fuss. I know that a number of those of you present wanted the opportunity to say a few words about Dad, and talk about his accomplishments and your memories of him. But it isn’t what he would have wanted. My mother is absolutely certain of this. And so, that’s all. This is what he would have wanted. Just to have you gather and remember him silently for a moment and then get on with your lives.”

  There was a stunned silence in the chapel. No one moved, not realizing at first that this was all there was to be of the funeral service. Mulenberg’s daughter, glancing at her mother and at her elder sister who was already helping Marilyn into her raincoat, had to call out, “Thank you again. Thank you for coming. The interment will be for the family only.” Only then did people understand that she meant them to rise and start filing out through the doors they had just entered. “We do appreciate your having come,” the young woman added flatly.

  Ben was dazed and upset. He had wanted to participate in mourning Mulenberg, in hearing him eulogized and praised, in contemplating his virtues and accomplishments. To have been denied that formality made him feel cheated, and he was certain now that Claudia was right about Marilyn. She had wanted to cheat his friends, and even the dead man himself. It was a demonstration of hatred. Although most likely Marilyn herself was unaware of it. Most likely she’d thought she was just being fashionably unconventional. And certainly she’d fooled most of the people in the chapel. Behind him Ben heard a woman speaking, her voice low. “Well, it was unorthodox. But she had a point. He was that sort of guy. Always telling dirty jokes.” A man answered the woman, saying, “Yes, I guess so. I guess it suited him.”

  Suddenly he searched for Claudia in the crowd filing out of the pews. She was, he thought, so much more sensitive, so much more interesting than he had ever given her credit for being before. She had understood and guided him to understanding Marilyn’s deviousness, the insidious way in which she had manifested her hatred. Naomi saw only the surface of things. Her world was black and white. She loved or she hated; there was no middle ground for her. Claudia was different. More complex. More subtle. He couldn’t help feeling that she and he had a great deal in common.