Psychology and Other Stories

by C. P. Boyko

  Dr. Preston was a man of scruples. It was his own policy, entirely self-imposed, to only sign commitment papers after a half-hour interview with the lunatic—or, when this could not be arranged, a one-hour interview with a member of their family. Because Douglas Singleton was well-dressed, well-spoken, and had an honest face, Dr. Preston agreed to waive the direct interview with the father, who in any case could not just then be located.

  Fortunately, the facts, gently and deftly extracted in under sixty minutes from the son, spoke for themselves. “Difficult to get along with.” “Eccentric,” “arrogant,” “sure of himself.” A “risk-taker,” a “fast talker,” a “bully.” “Bossy,” “unrealistic,” “suspicious.” “Irrational,” “naive,” “restless,” “sloppy,” “irritable.” It was from such crude ore as this that the clinician refined his hard, gleaming, diagnostic labels: J. Jerome Singleton, he concluded, was impulsive, overtalkative, overactive, antisocial, hostile, mendacious, agitated, and paranoid; he suffered from inflated self-regard, monomania, flights of fancy, loose associations, and emotional lability. As for the one hundred and fifty thousand barrels of sheep dip that the old man was at that moment trying to buy in New York City with his grandchildren’s inheritance—well! Dr. Preston doubted that he would ever encounter a more perfect illustration of delusions of grandeur. Sixty-three minutes after Douglas Singleton had entered his office, the doctor inscribed his diagnosis on the commitment forms—“mania with intermittent depressive features”—and signed his name with a solemn, sympathetic, and (because of those three extra minutes) more than usually confident flourish.

  Douglas was stunned. He had heard the term “manic depression” before, but, like “syphilis” or “elephantiasis” or “homicidal psychopathy,” he had never applied it to any living person of his acquaintance. And this, what his father had, was apparently even worse. Not knowing that the doctor’s roundabout diction had been cultivated to avoid needless professional squabbles over terminology, Douglas saw in the wordy diagnosis the embarrassed periphrasis of the doomsayer: A man might survive a heart attack, but never a “cardiac infarct.” That word “mania,” too, shocked him as “manic” never could have, for it revealed more clearly the horrible truth: A manic person, one suffering from mania, was a maniac.

  Douglas was stunned—and moved. All his guilt evaporated. His father needed help.

  To Germaine Singleton, “finding help” for Jerome meant finding for him a “retirement” or “care” home—in other words, a place for him to die. She was relieved that Doug had seen what she had seen—that Jerome was cracking up—but even more relieved to realize that Doug did not expect her to nurse Jerome through his dying.

  Some part of her still believed that marriage entailed such obligations, even when the marriage had not been a happy one. Her grandmother had nursed her husband through eight years of consumption, and Jerome’s mother had nursed her husband through what had probably been but which no one would call prostate cancer.

  Five years ago, Germaine had nursed her own mother through an even more catastrophic deterioration. Celine’s mind had crumbled like a stale cake months before her body started to fail. In her senility she became flamboyant and maudlin, as if she were patterning her dissolution after that of a drunk from a radio play. She wept, raged, smashed things, then became lugubrious and childishly stubborn, refusing to do anything but sit on the floor and sulk. At a later stage she became bizarrely and violently anti-religious: she berated the poor Anglican minister in the street, smashed two of the Catholic church’s stained glass windows, and tore the arms off crucifixes and planted them in the garden like tomato stakes. One time Germaine tracked her down in the cemetery, barefoot and bareheaded in the rain, babbling to herself and weaving wreaths of dead flowers. Another time—one of the worst—she discovered her in the cellar, completely naked, filling jars with her own feces. (Weeks later, when Celine was in one of her communicative periods, she revealed that she had been trying to disprove the existence of the soul: if her output, she reasoned, equaled her input, then none of what she consumed could be going to the nourishment of her spirit.)

  Germaine could not go through that again. As far as she was concerned, she had done her duty once, and once was enough.

  She should by rights have been the first to die. It was only fair. After all the times Jerome had left her, it should have been her turn to leave him; after all the times she had taken care of him, it should have been his turn to care for her.

  But of course it could never have happened that way. He would never feed her, dress her, clean her. Had she been the one to fall ill, he would not have stuck around. He would have run off again, and the responsibility would have fallen to Katy or one of the boys. Yes, J. Jerome Singleton was a great one for running away. He was doing it again, now. He was leaving her again, one last time.

  It had been amusing at first, watching him grasp at ad hoc excuses for his little confusions. When she caught him removing his socks in the middle of the day, it was because his feet were hot. When she found him sitting in the car in the garage, it was because he needed tobacco from the store. (It was ten years since he’d given up chewing, fifteen years since he’d driven a vehicle, and more than that since he’d visited a shop.) When he lost his bearings or failed to understand what was going on around him, he blamed his eyes or the poor light. When he handed her the telephone in dismay, it was not because he had forgotten to whom he was talking, or why, but because the goddamn receiver wasn’t working, or because the idiot caller refused to speak up. To abet these excuses, he stopped wearing his hearing aid and his eyeglasses—claiming, of course, that they were uncomfortable, ineffective, broken, wrong.

  All this had been more or less entertaining. But one day she had come upon him in Doug’s room, standing at the window, eyes unseeing, hands trembling with anxiety or frustration—reminding her exactly of the stray cat she’d once found cowering and hissing in the pantry: having wandered in somehow from the street, it had not known how to get back out.

  She had spoken his name, twice. He had looked at her like she was a porter or a maid: impatiently, and without recognition.

  He was leaving her, a bit at a time. That was just like him, too. He could never make a clean break. He would leave this life the way he’d left his marriage: trying not to burn any bridges, so that he could return if he didn’t like what he found out there in the world.

  Well, he had never left a note or made a speech any other time he had run off; so why should she be given the satisfaction of a proper goodbye this time?

  Actually, that wasn’t quite true. The time he was in the hospital, seven or eight years ago, for a polyp on his lung, he had thought he was dying. She got her deathbed farewell then. Breathing laboriously, looking small and pale and very sorry for himself, he confessed to her that he had never really loved any woman, that he was simply not capable of it. He said he was sorry.

  That was it. That was his idea of making amends, of tying up loose ends: telling her he’d never loved her. What a burden that secret must have been to him all these years; how happy he must have been to finally get it off his chest! Shriven, he collapsed back onto the bed and … fell asleep.

  She called that dying badly. A good death was one that gave others as little trouble and sadness as possible. Reassuring lies whispered through teeth clenched in agony—that was her idea of dying well. Jerome Singleton had died a bad, selfish, inconsiderate death. But again, why should it have been otherwise? He had lived a bad, selfish, inconsiderate life.

  He had loved no one; he had cared for no one. He never would care for, or take care of, anyone but himself.

  And if he wouldn’t have done it for her, why should she do it now for him? Why should anyone have to care for someone who would not care for them?

  She would do it for her children, of course. If the obligations of a wife were sometimes conditional, those of a mother were not. And if there was one key theme to her self-story, it was that she was a good
mother. It was a mother’s job to care for her children—not vice versa. She had been a good mother; she would not let death undo that. She would not be babied by her babies. If it had to happen, if she was doomed to fall apart like her mother and her grandfather before her, let it happen among strangers. If she could not die with dignity, at least, please God, let her die quietly and anonymously, somewhere out of sight, out of mind. Let someone else take care of her.

  Now, hopefully, a precedent was being set. If Douglas agreed that none of them, none of the family, should have to take care of Jerome, then perhaps he would, when the time came, do the same for her: “find help” for her; find a place for her to die.

  “What day is it?” asked the man behind the desk, as if he knew, but couldn’t, just at the moment, remember.

  Singleton, circling the chair he had been offered, said (because he did not know), “Never mind what goddamn day it is. It’s tomorrow in Japan and we’re twiddling our thumbs in Memphis and cooling our heels in Atlantic City like a bunch of goddamn greenhorns.”

  The man behind the desk squeezed his nose thoughtfully. “And what month are we in now?”

  “Look,” said Singleton, alighting briefly on the edge of the chair and looking the man first in one eye, then the other, “I don’t want to get in your way here, but then you’ve got to not get in mine, neither. Man can’t scratch his own back. Those goddamn cornpones brought me to the wrong office, you hear what I’m saying?” He indicated that the room they were in was too small to belong to anyone important by shaking his arms at the walls, like an epileptic on the verge of a fit warning bystanders to stay back. “I’m here to see the big cheese, the man in charge, your boss. Understand?”

  The nose of the man behind the desk was soft and porous. When he squeezed it, it took some time for it to return to its normal shape and size. “Could it be … May, for instance?”

  “Talk to me about time,” sneered Singleton, resuming his pacing, “when time’s wasting. Ten thousand dollars a day!” he roared. “That’s a thousand dollars every one hundred forty-four minutes you’re costing me,” he said, making calculations on his fingers, “that’s five hundred every seventy-two, nearly a hundred dollars every fif-goddamn-teen minutes and we’re standing around here like a couple of monkeys at a movie show.”

  The man behind the desk squeezed his nose and listened to the crackling it produced in his ear as it reinflated. On the sheet of paper in front of him he wrote, Sensorium impaired. When the old man ran out of breath, he asked casually, “Have you ever had syphilis?”

  Singleton stopped mid-stride. His hands gripped and shook fistfuls of empty air like a pair of ravens grappling with garbage. A cloud of rage engulfed him.

  Two minutes later, the man behind the desk, who was the resident in charge of morning admissions that day, wiped Singleton’s spittle from the back of his hand and wrote on the form, in the blank provided for syphilis, Undetermined. A few more strokes of the pen were enough to bring the interview to a conclusion. One stroke ratified the referring doctor’s diagnosis (the resident thought of the manic-depressives that came in as “the loud ones,” and Singleton certainly fit that description); other strokes prescribed what Singleton would eat, where he would sleep, what drugs he would swallow or be injected with, and to a large extent how he would be treated for the next several weeks or months of his life. After the new intake had been led away, still uttering imprecations, the resident went to the toilet and washed his hands vigorously—in defiance of the doomed and self-pitying part of him that said it was futile, it was too late, he’d already caught another cold. The colds that you caught in the nuthouse were not like normal colds. They were worse. They were more like flus than ordinary colds. He didn’t know why, but crazy people just got sicker than regular people.

  Singleton’s belief, that he had been brought here by a competitor to make some business deal, had never had much more substance than a dream recalled a few minutes after waking. The strange gift-giving ceremony of the fat man in the shower cap could not be reconciled with that belief—and so the dream faded. No alternative hypothesis came to mind, however, for this scene was quite unlike any other in his experience.

  “This is the only towel you get,” said the clothes-room attendant, shaking a swatch of cloth the length of his forearm in Singleton’s face like a penalty flag. Singleton tried to snatch it from him, but the man had more to say. “So don’t lose it,” he concluded. Then he relinquished the prize with a huff of resignation, as if he knew for a fact that his warning had fallen on deaf ears, that Singleton was going to burn or tear or bury the towel as soon as he was out of sight. “Well, let’s see what you have in your pockets.”

  This struck Singleton as a good idea. By showing his tickets, he could perhaps figure out what train he was on.

  The clothes-room attendant took his job seriously. Because it was his duty to confiscate all potentially dangerous items, he felt that the safety of the hospital depended on him. Because the safety of the hospital depended on him, he felt entitled to more than the starvation wage the hospital paid its attendants. To bring his salary more in line with his responsibility, he confiscated each week a few items that would, perhaps, have made dubious weapons (although, to be sure, a watch chain can, in a pinch, be used as a garrote; some cigarette cases have rather sharp corners; and even a cufflink would not feel so nice stabbed into your eye). Because he stole from the patients, he felt tenderly and paternal towards them. Because he felt a little guilty, he did his job well.

  So he applied himself to the matter of Singleton’s eyeglasses and hearing aid with the same fastidious deliberation he brought to more dangerous or profitable items. It was his general policy to let anyone who came in the front door wearing glasses keep them—reasoning that, if they had managed to get around in the world without losing or breaking them, they could probably be trusted to preserve them in the more circumscribed world of the hospital. Singleton, however, kept putting his glasses on and taking them off, so the clothes-room attendant did not know if the general policy pertained. Finally, recalling that three of his intakes had smashed their glasses already that month, he decided, somewhat vindictively, to commandeer these. To avoid a dispute, he reassured Singleton that he would not miss them because nothing visibly interesting ever happened here anyway. He kept the hearing aid too, because it was fragile and presumably expensive (though not, he thought, pawnable), and because he could not imagine where the old man would get replacement batteries for it. Yes, it would be better to save the hearing aid for special occasions, such as visits, or Christmas. In any case, Singleton apparently had one good ear, and that was more than some people could say. He also took Singleton’s sport coat, tie, shoes, and suspenders. He let him keep the comb.

  Singleton was too bemused to protest. He had found in his left front trousers pocket not his wallet, but a wad of newspaper folded to look like a wallet.

  When her brother called, Katherine was either having a midlife crisis or an affair.

  The man she was in love with (if she was in love with him) was nearly young enough to be half her age. He also was obnoxious and emotionally fragile, already had a girlfriend, and happened to be one of her husband’s graduate students.

  But it had been such a long time since any man had given her the unambiguous compliment of his desire; and the reminder that she was still a sexual being, a bundle of nerves still capable of becoming excited and exciting other bundles of nerves, had been as poignant as a glimpse of a forgotten self in an old high school photo.

  Her heart had only started thudding after Elroy left the bathroom that night of the party, but it had not stopped thudding since. She was a wreck; anything was possible. She was going to smash everything, throw everything away, for a fuck. Was she?

  Yesterday she had finally called him. He hadn’t even given her a chance to offer the pathetic, flimsy cover story she had prepared (shopping, errands, lunch?). He had cut her off, affably enough, saying that he was “with people
” and would see her soon. (The affability was somehow worse than curtness, which would at least have acknowledged the impropriety of her call, and what it signified.) To the interpretation of those two minutes of words she brought all the flailing, anguished creativity she had brought to her reading of Restoration poetry, twenty years earlier, when she’d needed to churn out another essay. For twenty-four hours she churned out brilliant hypotheses, each of which, in the moment she considered it, was absolutely convincing. He wanted her—yes. He loathed her—correct. He had been drunk that night, didn’t remember groping her in the bathroom—unquestionably. Everything was possible.

  She was still producing hypotheses when Doug called to tell her about Jerome.

  The incongruity struck her like an affront. She felt as if, on page 500 of an 800-page novel that she was engrossed in, the author had suddenly embarked on a completely new story or introduced a completely new character without even so much as a paragraph break to announce the divagation.

  She agreed (too readily) that their father was crazy, but scoffed at Doug’s claim that she was his favorite, and denied that she could do anything to help. She wanted nothing to do with any scheme to clap anyone in a nuthouse—not even J. Jerome.

  (Years later, long after Elroy had vanished from her self-story, this was the version of events she clung to: she told herself that she had told her brother that she washed her hands of the whole matter.)

  But that night she was ruffled. Three hours later, when the phone rang again, she did not even pick up. She was thinking about her father.