Second Sight

by David Williams

  “Of course. I understand.”

  “Now. I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”

  “Well—do you have an opinion? Have you formed any conclusions yet?”

  “It’s far too early for that, I’m afraid. I’ve seen the medical reports from Dr. Shapiro, and it is clear there is nothing physically wrong with her.”

  “That means it’s her mind.”

  “Her problem undoubtedly has emotional roots, yes. But how serious it is remains to be seen. In general, I would say that hallucinations are never not serious. However, I’m far from convinced that Jennie’s experiences are hallucinations. It just doesn’t fit in with her medical history, her mental condition, or anything I’ve been able to determine about her.”

  “But can’t you give me some idea how serious it is?”

  “Oh, I would say the prognosis is very good. Jennie is bright, alert—except for these blackouts, these irrational episodes, she seems a healthy, sensible woman.”

  “Did she describe these hallucinations or whatever they are to you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “The thing that struck me was that they all seem to take place in an earlier time. Horses and buggies and all that. I think this urge to move to the country had something to do with it. She came from farm country as a kid, and I think she has this idealized image of a rural past where life was good and everything was right.”

  Salzman allowed himself a smile. “She’s not alone in that.”

  Michael shifted in the chair. There was something disconcerting about sitting in the dark like this. The light from the one lamp illuminated Salzman’s face from below, like that of an interrogator engaged in the third degree. He could imagine how it must be sitting here as a patient. Especially if you had something to feel guilty about.

  “Did Jennie say anything about my . . . about our life together?”

  “Yes,” Salzman said. “Certainly.”

  “Do you think that could have anything to do with all this?”

  “If you’ll clarify exactly what you’re referring to . . . ”

  “Well, I mean, she must have told you I’d been seeing another woman before we left the city. Do you think that could have anything to do with the way she is?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “Could you elaborate on that?”

  “Those dreams, or fantasies, this ‘other world’ she goes to. It seems to center around this young man. Now it’s possible that he represents some romantic ideal, that Jennie is creating some idealized romantic figure in her mind. That indicates to me that there may be something amiss in the way she feels about her marriage.”

  “That’s very interesting. Because we’ve talked about this, she’s told me how she feels. This man, for instance, the one she sees in the dreams or whatever they are, she says she feels very attracted to him. ‘Like a young girl in love for the first time’ is the way she described it. I’ve been thinking about that, and it seems to me she could be getting back at me this way, getting revenge for the affair I had.”

  Salzman smiled. “An interesting theory.”

  “Then you think there’s something to it?”

  “It’s a possibility. Or her discovering your affair could have triggered something she’s been repressing since early childhood. That of course is one of the areas I’ll be working on with her, trying to illuminate as best I can.”

  “Yes, but assuming I’m right, why wouldn’t she just get angry? How could it do this to her?”

  “Repressed hostility can seek outlet in many ways, Mr. Logan. In our culture women especially have been taught not to express hostility. Jennie could be repressing her resentment, which then, naturally, would seek expression in some other form—in this case, the fantasies, or hallucinations. As you suggest, having a romantic divertissement in her mind as a way of punishing you. And, of course, even though it’s subconscious, she would possess guilt for her resentment and hostility, so at the same time she would be punishing herself for it. Hence the blacking out, the fainting spells, the headaches. Of course, this is all theory, you understand. I don’t know that this is the case.”

  “Well,” Michael said. “What now? What should I do?”

  “Nothing extraordinary. I’ve scheduled appointments with Jennie every Monday morning—she’s said that’s not inconvenient. At this point, I think it sufficient if she sees me once a week.” Salzman got up and came around from the desk. “The most you can do is allow her the freedom to progress. Beyond that, I’d say treat her as any loving husband would—with affection and understanding.”

  8

  * * *

  THE SESSIONS WITH DR. SALZMAN, the acknowledgment that something was wrong with her, left Jennie feeling uneasy. She was grateful that he hadn’t asked her to use the couch, with that ominous box of tissues on the floor beside it, but his placing her in a chair facing the wall in front of his desk was, in a different way, almost as bad. She felt exposed, unable as she was to see the reactions on his face. And when she did risk a glance in his direction, he seemed almost sinister, half hidden in the shadows from the little lamp on his desk.

  He seemed, surprisingly, not very interested in the hallucinations. Those were symptoms, he said; constantly analyzing her symptoms would lead to nothing. He was much more interested in her childhood, in her relationship with her father—and, of course, her relationship with Michael. What, Dr. Salzman wanted to know, had she felt when she discovered Michael was having an affair? What did she really feel toward him now? She knew by now what the answer to that should be, but she couldn’t honestly tell Dr. Salzman what he wanted to hear. And that, he suggested, could be the problem. That she wasn’t feeling anger, even hostility, could mean those powerful repressed feelings were driving her into unreality.

  Whenever she approached that subject, she found her mind shying away, wanting instead to drift toward the memory of her hallucinations. And that frightened her. Why, in spite of the fear, did she feel such nostalgia for that spectral grape arbor, that horse and buggy rushing toward her along the road, that carriage full of women climbing the hill? Why the spasm of excitement whenever she remembered the man she had seen each time it happened? Either something frighteningly supernatural was wrenching her out of her own world, or she was going mad. So why then did she cling to the secret knowledge that she could make it happen again, that all she had to do was put on the dress?

  She hadn’t told Michael it was the dress which transported her into that other world. She hadn’t, for that matter, told Dr. Salzman. Occasionally she would think that if she was sick, if everything she had experienced was a trick of her mind, then the dress itself had no power at all, it was only the device her subconscious used to bring on the hallucinations. If she brought it out in the open with Dr. Salzman it might rob the dress of whatever mythological power she had invested it with. But each time she acknowledged that, something within her recoiled. She couldn’t give up the dress. Not now. Not yet.

  Now she kept discovering within herself an insistent impulse to visit the local historical society. She kept remembering what the real estate broker had said: that the attic studio had been finished by a nineteenth-century painter and that Mrs. Bates at the historical society could probably tell her more about him. Through her sessions with Dr. Salzman, she had learned enough already to be wary of this sudden impulse; it felt suspiciously like what he called “resistance” to therapy. She vacillated for a week; then, reluctantly, she told him about it.

  Surprisingly, he encouraged her to go. “If I understand you,” he said, “you find yourself hoping this woman will somehow prove your hallucinations are real, is that correct?”

  “I know it’s silly,” Jennie said, “but I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  “I see no reason why you shouldn’t talk to her,” he said. “It could be beneficial in ridding your mind of that fantasy. I’d go and get it over with.”

  With his approval, she gave in to the impulse and went t
he very next day.

  The historical society was housed in a large old three-story house on a tree-shaded corner. A sign on the lawn said CHESAPEQUA HISTORICAL SOCIETY. In the foyer, on an easel, stood a placard—Paintings, by Gladys Moore—with an arrow pointing into a room on the left. Straight ahead, through a half-open door, she saw a small office with a desk and a wall of filing cabinets. There was no one in the office, but she heard sounds in the room on her right. She went in and found herself in a small library.

  A stout, elderly woman sat at a table near the window, smearing glue from a glue pot onto rental card envelopes and pasting them into a stack of books beside her. On the opposite side of the table was a coffee percolator, cups, spoons, containers of cream and sugar. Seeing Jennie, the woman got up and came over to a desk near the door.

  “Do come right in. I’m Mrs. Bates. May I help you?”

  She was short and very stout. Tortoise-shell glasses, attached to a beaded chain around her neck, rested on her massive bosom. She wore a dark print dress that fell below her knees. Thick brown stockings stretched over her thin ankles.

  Jennie hesitated. “I thought I’d browse around a bit. We’ve just moved here from the city and, well, I’ve become rather interested in the local history.”

  “If you’ll just sign the register,” Mrs. Bates said. “We like all our first-timers to sign the register so we can keep you informed of our events. We have exhibits sometimes—ceramics, crafts. Just now we have a nice exhibit of paintings; I suppose you saw the sign.”

  “I’d be more interested in the books, I guess.”

  “Well, you just browse to your heart’s content. And in the meantime I’ll make you out a card. And anytime you like, why, just help yourself to coffee.”

  Jennie strolled along between the rows of bookcases. There were four of them, barely chest high, running the length of the room. Two or three paintings—evidently of the town in its heyday—adorned the walls. Some chinaware was displayed in a glass-doored cabinet much like her own, which stood in one corner. The books were mostly general history of New York, not specifically about Chesapequa. The Catskill Mountain House; Edmund Wilson’s Upstate; a picture book called The Good Old Days. She selected one called 19th Century Houses in Western New York and carried it to the table where the coffee was.

  Mrs. Bates came over from the desk. “Here’s your card, dear. That’s just for withdrawing books of course. Our events are open to the public free of charge.” She sat down across the table. “I see you’ve found a book. Are you interested in old houses?”

  “We’ve just moved into an old house, and that kind of got me interested.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Mrs. Bates said. “We have many outstanding old houses in the area. It’s so good to find someone interested. Most people take no interest, especially young people. Let me pour a cup of coffee, and we’ll chat.”

  While Mrs. Bates did that, Jennie examined the room. The ceilings were very high, with wood paneling reaching halfway up the walls. “This is a very nice house,” she said.

  “It’s lovely, but not nearly as old as some in town.”

  “Have you had the Society here long?”

  “I’ve been here, oh my, for years. Right here on this corner. The town contributes a little, you know, and we’re privately funded.” The coffee prepared, she returned to her chair. “Now,” she said, “if you’re really interested in old houses, you’ll have to take one of our brochures. I had quite a hand in compiling it. It lists all the really interesting houses by their location. Why, we have a house on Sycamore Street that was built as early as 1826. Of course, I find many of the newer houses even more interesting. Because of their stories, you know. Have you seen the old Chambers house? The big old three-story house like this one on the corner of Hudson and Bond Streets? Well, you want to go look at that house. There’s a lot of interesting things have gone on in that house.”

  “Is there—do you have a book or something that tells some of the stories about the town? From the past, I mean?”

  Mrs. Bates laughed. “Oh, my goodness, no. Though some of my friends keep saying I should write them down. I know stories—oh, my, there’s very little I don’t know about this town. And half the county, too.” She chuckled. “Of course, some people would pay not to have them published. Go back far enough, you’ll find a skeleton in anybody’s closet. I sometimes think I should have been a writer, though. Do you know any writers, dear? I mean, you’re from the city and all.”

  “I don’t, no. I have a friend who’s a magazine editor. She knows a few writers.”

  “Well, I often wonder if I couldn’t have been a writer. I’ve always loved books and stories so. My Aunt Betty would tell me stories by the hour when I was a child. She raised me, my father’s sister. Both my parents were killed, you see, in a train wreck. I was only three at the time, and Aunt Betty took me in and raised me. She’s way up in her nineties now, her mind wanders, but she was a grand storyteller when I was a child.”

  “Did she tell you . . . stories about the town when she was young?”

  “Oh, yes. This was a thriving town in her day, you know. Quite a lively summer resort. People from New York, wealthy people, spent whole summers here. We had three very good restaurants around the lake—quite acclaimed they were, for lake fish especially—and two excellent hotels. Do you know the Henry Hudson Hotel, dear? On Broad Street?”

  “The really big one?”

  “That’s the one. Well, in the eighteen-nineties, the Henry Hudson was a splendid resort hotel, very popular with guests from the city. The others went, I’m afraid. The last one, the Ben Franklin, was torn down in the nineteen-thirties, but we managed to save the Hudson. That’s the Ben Franklin there on the wall.”

  The black-framed photograph on the wall was greatly enlarged, nearly two feet square—a grainy shot of a wide, tree-lined street crowded with carriages and people, centered by a huge hotel with a long pillared porch running the entire width of the facade. “It looks like pictures I’ve seen of Saratoga,” Jennie said.

  “In those days many thought we would become another Saratoga,” Mrs. Bates said. “We had the mineral springs and everything. But they say it was the gambling that did it—the town council wouldn’t allow casinos or horse-racing, and that was one of the attractions of a major resort, you know. And then of course the whole era passed. But it was an interesting place then, Chesapequa. It’s my one undying interest, the history of this town.”

  “I was wondering,” Jennie said, “if you could tell me anything about the house we’ve bought.”

  “And which house would that be, dear?”

  “Do you know the house on the other side of the lake, at the top of the hill? Where Summer House Road joins 8H?”

  “Why, of course I know that house. That’s one of our most interesting houses. Did you know a painter lived there once? An artist?”

  “The real estate broker mentioned something about it.”

  “Oh my, yes. Way back in the eighteen-nineties it was. He was evidently very talented—studied in Paris and everything. Unfortunately, he died young, still unknown, and only one of his paintings survived. They say, on the evidence of that one painting, that he could have been a very important American artist.”

  Jennie felt a small tremor of excitement begin in the pit of her stomach. “Could I—would it be possible to see the painting somewhere?”

  “Why, we have it right here. The Society bought it several years ago, when old man Meade died. His family had had it for years, and when he died with nobody to leave it to, why, the committee—which is mostly me, dear—thought it should remain in the community. It has no intrinsic value to anyone else, of course. So we bought it and hung it in the committee room. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes. Yes, I would.”

  Mrs. Bates led her out into the hallway, past the open door of the office, and into a dim, smaller room with an oblong table in the center of it. The sun was coming directly through the hi
gh narrow windows at the far end of the room, shining in her eyes, and at first she couldn’t see. Beside her, Mrs. Bates was chatting on about how beautiful the painting was and what a shame that all the others had been lost, but Jennie wasn’t listening. She stepped farther into the room, out of the sun’s glare. And then, on the far wall, she saw it.

  It was a painting of her.

  She was wearing the white dress, her blonde hair in an upsweep, standing half-turned away in the dappled shade of the tree at the rear corner of the house, looking back over her shoulder at the vantage point of the artist. Despite the impressionistic brushstrokes, she recognized her face, her mouth, her cheekbones, and the long sweep of the dress with its high lacy collar and ballooning sleeves.

  “Isn’t she pretty?” Mrs. Bates said. “You look remarkably like her. Put you in that dress and your hair in the same kind of upsweep . . . Are you all right, dear? You’re so pale.”

  Jennie felt suddenly cold; dizziness swelled and sucked at her insides. She grasped Mrs. Bates’ arm. “Could I lie down somewhere?”

  “There’s a couch in the office. Really, dear, you’re awfully pale.” Mrs. Bates guided her into the office and laid her down on the couch. “Are you all right, dear?” she said, hovering over her. “Can I get you something? Water? Aspirin?”

  “Please, could I have a glass of water?”

  She didn’t want the water, but she wanted Mrs. Bates to go away. She closed her eyes, letting the dizziness sweep through her. Something inside her was threatening to veer out of control. The painting was like a living presence in the other room, vibrating through the walls, unmistakable evidence that everything she had experienced was real, that what was happening to her was more than just a trick of the mind, and it was all she could do to keep from fainting right where she was. A faucet squeaked somewhere in the back of the house, followed by the rush of water in the sink. The sound of footsteps approaching brought her eyes open. She didn’t want to deal with Mrs. Bates’ questions; she didn’t want to talk—or even to think. She wanted only to go away from that frightening painting.