Wax Apple

by Donald E. Westlake

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “I understand you’ve had an accident.”

  I was sitting there wearing a pajama top, with my cast-enclosed arm sticking out the bottom at my side, which made the fact of the accident fairly obvious, but I understood he had merely used a polite form of statement. Still, just about anything the man said could immediately get my back up. I quelled an impulse to be sarcastic, saying only, “Yes. I fell and broke my arm.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve ever broken a bone?”

  It was. I’d been shot in the leg once, seven or eight years ago when I was still on the force, and had spent five weeks in the hospital, but no bone had been broken. “Yes, it is,” I said.

  He studied me with impersonal interest through his horn-rims. “Do you recall what you were thinking as you were falling down the stairs?”

  Here was an unexpected problem. Doctor Fredericks not being privy to the truth about me, he was unconsciously skirting close to areas of questioning I might have trouble finding the right answers for. Hoping he’d switch to someone else soon—after all, this was supposed to be group therapy—I said, “I guess I was just frightened.”

  “That’s all?” The eyes seemed to glint behind the glasses. “No feelings of guilt? You weren’t blaming yourself for having been clumsy?”

  “I wasn’t clumsy,” I said, but this line of questioning was difficult to deal with. I tried to think what my reactions would have been if it had been a true accident. Would I have been angry at myself for stumbling? Probably, it would only be natural. But not very angry, and not guilty. But what was I to say, beyond the denial that I’d been clumsy. Lamely I said, “It was just an accident.”

  He smiled, a large false smile that made me think of an animal trainer who’s just gotten a fairly stupid dog to roll over on command. “Very good, Tobin,” he said. “You understand why I asked that, of course.”

  I didn’t, and I suppose I just looked blank.

  “Because of your history,” he reminded me, frowning slightly. “Wasn’t it an overpowering feeling of guilt that sent you to Revo Hill in the first place?”

  Then I remembered the false background Doctor Cameron and I had prepared. It had made me someone who believed he was responsible for the death of a co-worker—as in fact I was—and who had become unable to function as a result of the conviction of his own guilt. (The false background had been uncomfortably close to the truth in a number of ways, but Doctor Cameron had assured me it would be much easier for me to behave like a facsimile of myself than as, for instance, a suicidal transvestite or an irresponsible schizophrenic.)

  So I said, “I’ve gotten all over that. That’s why they let me out of Revo Hill.”

  “I’m glad to see they were right,” he said. “Since you’re the new man, would you like to fill the others in on your background, how you happen to have been at Revo Hill and so on?”

  Which was just exactly the sort of detailed question I couldn’t possibly handle at all. Doctor Fredericks would see through me first, and some of the others might also smell a rat. Mental patients would know whether someone in their midst was a real mental patient himself or not, unless he kept his mouth discreetly shut. I said, “I’d rather not today, Doctor. I just got here, and had the accident, and I’m feeling a little shaky still.”

  He frowned at me again, more thoughtfully this time. I knew it was a false note I’d just struck, that the whole concept of group therapy is built on the fact that mentally sick people enjoy describing their symptoms just as much as physically sick people do, and that it wasn’t properly in character for me to attend this session and not want to talk, but this was the lesser discrepancy when compared to the Swiss cheese I’d create if I tried to narrate my fake history to these people. So I had to remain silent.

  Doctor Fredericks said, “Then why did you join us today?” Exactly the question I knew I’d raised in his head.

  I said, “I wanted people around me, I guess. I didn’t particularly want to be alone.”

  Up till now, the other six residents had merely sat and watched the doctor and me, their eyes on whichever one of us was talking, but not one of them joined the conversation. It was Molly Schweitzler, the fat woman, who was sitting across the table from me. Almost glaring at me, as though in some sort of challenge, she said, “Did anybody laugh at you?”

  I looked at her, not understanding the question but relieved at distraction in any form. “Laugh at me?”

  “When you fell,” she said.

  “Nobody was there when I fell,” I told her. “The people I’ve seen since then have all been very kind. Nobody’s laughed at all.”

  Doctor Fredericks, thank God, hared off on this new scent, saying to Molly Schweitzler, “Why should anyone laugh at a man with a broken arm?”

  “Well, they sure laughed at Rose and me,” she said, “when that table broke on us.” She turned back to me. “That was about a month ago,” she said, “and I still got bruises on my legs.”

  Doctor Fredericks said, “Molly, no one laughed when they found out how serious the situation was.”

  “No, they had their fun first, and then they came around to see if Rose and me were okay.”

  Doctor Fredericks was off in hot pursuit of this new quarry by now, and it was with a great feeling of relief that I sat back and let the hunt go on without me.

  Molly Schweitzler’s feelings of having been laughed at when she’d hurt herself were easily plumbed, of course. A grossly fat woman like Molly could hardly go through life without running into cruel humor now and again, and of course in overeating Molly was hurting herself, just as much as when the table had hit her. Her anger at the laughter that apparently really had gone around the dining room when the table first gave way was really much older anger than that. She was angry at all the people who had been funny at her expense all her life, and angry at herself for never having done anything about it. She’d never fought back, never stood up for her own dignity, and she had the angry frustration of someone determined to fight back when the last round is already over.

  Still, however obvious Molly’s misplaced anger, it proved interesting to the group at large, and led to a discussion which shortly switched to another woman, Doris Brady, whom I was seeing for the first time. Doris Brady was a young woman suffering from a fairly recent addition to the list of mental illnesses, called culture shock. She had joined the Peace Corps at twenty-seven, after a childless marriage of five years had ended in divorce, and was sent to one of the most backward and poor of the emerging African nations. She was expected to be a schoolteacher, in a society so totally different from anything she’d ever known before that her mind was incapable of encompassing it. This doesn’t happen frequently, and the Peace Corps people try to weed out ahead of time those to whom it might happen, but when it does occur it is a brutal and terrifying experience. Doris Brady had found herself suddenly cast adrift, between two cultures neither of which she could any longer see as viable. The values and assumptions she’d grown up with in the United States had been swept away by the realities of the African village to which she’d been sent, but the values and assumptions of the village were too alien for her mind to live with. Life without some safe bedrock of accepted truths is insupportable for most people, among them Doris Brady. From what she was saying now, as the focus shifted to her from Molly Schweitzler, the hospital where she’d spent the last three years had done an adequate job of rebuilding her faith in the assumptions we live by in the United States.

  The session lasted two hours, and in that time everyone present got a chance at the limelight. I found it fascinating to sit and listen to them, watching them reveal themselves a thousand times more freely than if they’d known they were suspects being observed by a hired ex-cop.

  I finally got to resolve the O’Hara/Merrivale problem, when the one in this room turned out to be William Merrivale, the young man who had once tried—almost successfully—to beat his father to death. He had neve
r been as sick as his home situation, and the last year in a private sanitarium had helped him primarily by giving him somewhere other than his own home in which to live. Now The Midway was performing the same function, and it developed in the conversation that he was still ambivalent about where to go and what to do when his six months here was ended.

  So if this was Merrivale, the missing one must be Robert O’Hara, who had begun his career as a child molester while still a child himself, and could never for very long keep his hands off little girls. O’Hara and Merrivale were both twenty-one, the two young males at The Midway, both blond and muscular, both looking like Marines or college football players.

  The day twelve years ago when Jerry Kanter took a rifle downtown and killed seven people he’d never met before was so distant in his mind these days that he didn’t even mention it. All he wanted to talk about was his brother-in-law’s car wash operation, and was the brother-in-law trying to cheat Jerry, and would Jerry be happier working for strangers who didn’t know about his past, and so on and so on. He was still chipper and cheerful, the same spry little man who’d first showed me to my room, but even though I knew he’d been insane and not in control of his senses on that day twelve years ago, I kept thinking of those seven dead people and wondering about their questions about brothers-in-law and job opportunities and the rest of it, clicked off now, silent forever. And the man who’d clicked them off was now cured, happy, cheerful, weighing his possible futures. The seven, unfortunately, were uncurable. I knew it was an unfair reaction, but I disliked Jerry Kanter intensely all the time he was talking.

  The last two new faces turned out to belong to Nicholas Fike and Helen Dorsey. Nicholas Fike was forty-three and looked seventy, a man who had gone from simple alcoholism to mental collapse. The only trouble was, he’d done it twice now, and neither his body nor his mind was up to that kind of punishment. He talked with a very bad stutter, blinked constantly, and was in an obvious agony of self-consciousness whenever Doctor Fredericks asked him a question. Why he’d come here when it was such plain torture for him I couldn’t guess, unless it was some belief that if he forced down every bit of bad-tasting medicine he could lay his hands on, sooner or later a cure would result.

  Helen Dorsey was forty-five, a stocky, brutally girdled matron with a harsh voice and a tendency toward playing the drill sergeant. She was clearly trying to control that tendency, with only limited success. Four years ago, when the last of her three sons had departed for college, Helen Dorsey and her husband sold their house and moved to a smaller ranch-style house in a new development section outside their city. Helen had always been a neat housekeeper, but in the new house she gradually became obsessive about it. Her husband would wake in the middle of the night to find her scrubbing the kitchen floor. Late the next summer, with the two still-unmarried boys home from college and overcrowding the little house, Helen Dorsey went berserk, driving husband and sons from the house, barricading herself in alone. The police had to go in after her, and now, three years later, she was deemed sufficiently in control of herself to be released from the sanitarium.

  The pecking order in the session was also interesting. Helen Dorsey, bossy and perfectionist, pecked everyone except Molly Schweitzler, the fat woman, who in her turn pecked only to counterattack and was therefore mostly left alone. Jerry Kanter pecked everyone but Molly and Helen, but was himself occasionally pecked by William Merrivale. Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike, the culture shock victim and the alcohol victim, were pecked by everyone and pecked no one, not even each other.

  Doctor Lorimer Fredericks was somehow simultaneously separate from the pecking order and deeply a part of it. He pecked away at everybody from the security of his position as psychiatrist, and yet he went overboard so consistently that he was frequently pecked right back, particularly by Molly Schweitzler and Helen Dorsey. William Merrivale betrayed a sullen desire to turn Fredericks into a substitute father two or three times, his clenching-unclenching fists on the table demonstrating that the paternal hostility was still very much alive. Jerry Kanter tended to express his irritation the most openly, and thus to get rid of it more quickly than the others, turning irritation into a joke more often than not. Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike both merely wilted before Fredericks’ tongue until rescued by someone else, usually Helen Dorsey.

  I couldn’t understand how someone with a personality as generally repellent as Doctor Fredericks’ could possibly hope to get anywhere in psychiatry. In a way, I was pleased to see that my reaction to him was echoed by everybody else, but on the other hand it seemed to me the man’s manner could only wind up doing more harm than good. It seemed to be bringing out Helen Dorsey’s worst characteristics, for instance, and at the same time confirming Doris Brady’s belief in her own inadequacy.

  By the time the two hours was up, I was about convinced that whoever was setting these booby traps was doing so purely in hopes of sooner or later catching Doctor Fredericks. I determined to go directly from the session to Doctor Cameron and find out if he had any idea how his assistant treated the residents.

  But when the time was up and we all started to leave, Doctor Fredericks said, “Mr. Tobin, would you mind staying on a minute? It won’t take long.”

  What wouldn’t take long? I stood where I was, and the others filed out, and the two of us were alone.

  Doctor Fredericks took off his glasses and leaned back in his chair. He put one wing of the glasses in his mouth, a gesture I have always thought pretentious and stupid. He said, “Sit down again, why don’t you?”

  “If this won’t take long—”

  “It’ll be even shorter,” he said, “if our heads are at the same level. Do sit down.”

  So I sat down. Why was the man so irritating? What I really wanted to do was hit him in the mouth.

  He studied me cavalierly for a minute, and then said, “I don’t know what it is about you, Tobin. I’ve read the reports on you, of course, and you just don’t stack up. You’re hiding something, or faking something. Or you’re afraid of something. Is that it? Are you afraid somebody here will decide you really shouldn’t have been released yet, and we’ll bundle you up in a restraining jacket and ship you back to Revo Hill? Is that the matter?”

  “It’s just that everything’s strange here, that’s all,” I said. The damn man was offensive, but he was sharp. His narrow nose had smelled something.

  He shook his head. He said, “You don’t behave like an overawed newcomer. You behave more like a spectator in a zoo. You feel superior to the rest of the residents, don’t you?”

  I had to deny that, naturally, and I did, but of course I automatically had felt superior. After all, I’d never had a mental breakdown, I’d never had to be hospitalized, though God knows there’d been strain enough. But my problems hadn’t defeated me, not entirely. I’d adapted, I’d found a way to survive. So yes, I did feel superior to the other residents, but without tipping my hand I couldn’t tell Fredericks so, or tell him why.

  In fact, it had long since become ridiculous to go on keeping Fredericks in the dark, and if he hadn’t been such an offensive personality I would have told him the truth long before this. But that finally explained why Doctor Cameron hadn’t told him, a question that had been puzzling me. Now I could see why he’d chosen to follow his own counsel and not expose his ideas to the insulting contemplation of his assistant. I was sure it had been that, and nothing to do with security, that had kept him from confiding in Fredericks.

  But why keep Fredericks around at all? Still, I supposed a psychiatric assistant for a place like The Midway might not be an easy post to fill. Doctor Cameron himself was here out of a labor of love, The Midway being his own creation, but an assistant would have to be here only as one step in his career. And wouldn’t the best men go to hospitals and sanitariums, where the real work needed to be done, rather than to a halfway house for the more timid former patients? Only the dregs would be left for Doctor Cameron to choose from, and Fredericks was the result.
/>
  At any rate, he brushed aside my denial of superiority feelings, saying, “I watched you throughout the session, Tobin, and you saw yourself as merely an observer, not a participant at all. You watched the others as though they were putting on a performance for your amusement.”

  “Not at all,” I said, and couldn’t add, “not amusement but enlightenment.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Tobin,” he said.

  I said, “Don’t talk to me like that, I’m not one of your—”

  He cocked his head to one side. “What was that?”

  “I’m new here,” I said, feeling embarrassed and foolish and frightened. “I’ll take part after I’m used to the place.”

  “You’re not one of my what, Tobin?”

  I shrugged, and looked away. “I just don’t like the way you talk,” I said.

  “Am I too alert for you?”

  He was, damn him. I shrugged again, not looking at him.

  “You prefer negligence, is that it?”

  If I were actually what my dossier said, that would have been a low blow, since the fake story was that my negligence had caused the death of a fellow worker. I looked at him, furiously trying to think of what the proper response would be from the Tobin he thought I was, but all I could say was, “Fredericks, you’re a true bastard.”

  He leaned forward, staring hard at me, his left hand tapping his glasses on the table top. Another irritating habit. He said, “You’re being an observer again, Tobin. What’s with you?”

  “Nothing’s with me.”

  In a beautiful shot in the dark, he snapped, “Did you cause a co-worker’s death?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How?”

  For some reason, I have no idea why, I blurted out the truth. “I was in bed with a woman.”

  He frowned, staring at me. There was nothing like that in anything he’d read about me. “In bed with a woman? What difference did that make?”

  “I should have been with him, to back him up. He was my partner, and I should have been with him, but I was with this woman. I spent a lot of time with her, I’m married, I had to do it while I was on duty, sneak off to see her and Jock would cover for me. My partner.”