Friedrich took note of her use of the personal pronoun. Dr. Winton caught herself as soon as she said it: “I say ‘my’ because we were all such a long way from home, and the young men in those hospitals suffered so much, we were all possessive and protective of our patients.” Friedrich wondered if the emaciated officer in the dugout canoe next to her was her lieutenant.
“I think the worst part for him was the things he was made to do to others in order to survive that left him feeling . . .” She turned back to Friedrich, “. . . less than good about being alive. He was severely depressed; he had attempted suicide twice. I had thirty patients under my care; it was just a matter of time before he succeeded, and so I gave him gaikau dong.”
“Did you administer it, or the shaman?”
“I did.”
“Was the lieutenant aware that it came from a witch doctor? Cognizant of any mystic connection or magical powers the natives attributed to what you were prescribing him?”
“None other than that we were fond of one another. Soldiers in the middle of nowhere have almost religious faith in doctors.”
“Especially pretty doctors.” Friedrich wasn’t flirting; he was just being a good clinician.
“That, too. Anyway, a few hours after I administered the first dose, he experienced mild hallucinations. I had no idea of the strength of the stuff, so I followed the shaman’s instructions; I gave it to him twice a day. Before the week was up he was able to talk openly about what had happened. He told me how they had to play soccer with a Dutch officer’s head, and about sex acts he had to perform with the guards, horrible stuff. The interesting thing was, after a week or so, it didn’t upset him in the slightest to discuss the degradation in detail. As a psychiatrist, all I can tell you is, he seemed totally at peace with the idea that he had done these things to stay alive. He spoke about them almost as if they had happened to someone else. Now that he was free, he was a different person, and there was no need to be ashamed.”
Friedrich was so excited about the possibilities of what he was hearing, he didn’t notice that Dr. Winton had tears in her eyes. “Have you ever thought about testing these kwina leaves, isolating the psychoactive ingredients, see if they work on patients here? I mean, a drug that could put people back together again emotionally after life has dismantled them. . . . A pill for depression, something that actually works?”
“Yes, I’ve thought about it.” Dr. Winton had thought about her lieutenant, but not about what Friedrich was suggesting.
“Well, not to be blunt, but what are you waiting for?”
“The Institute of Human Relations is having enough trouble getting used to a female psychiatrist. I think it might be pushing them to accept a woman witch doctor.”
“We could work on it together. You’ve worked with drugs. I read your paper on administering hypnotics. Sodium amytal. I did my dissertation on psychological testing. During the war, I worked for the Army. . . .”
She held up her hand. “To begin with, gai kau dong is made with kwina, and kwina only grows in New Guinea and we’re in New Haven.”
“I’m way ahead of you.” Friedrich flipped opened his suitcase like a Fuller Brush man. It was filled with the waxy pale green serrated leaves of the kwina. Dr. Winton picked up one that had fallen to the floor. It smelled of rot.
“Where did you get this? The botany department doesn’t even have . . .”
“I helped out a botanist at the University of Illinois who had a schizophrenic daughter. He knew someone who was doing field work in New Guinea.”
“But how did you get it here?”
“Friends in low places. I did some testing of pilots at a flight school.”
“What kind of testing?”
“Personality, aptitude, ability to perform under stress . . .” Friedrich didn’t like her, but suddenly, he did trust her. “They were trying to figure out who were the best guys for suicide missions. I didn’t know that until after the war.”
“Would that have made a difference to you, Dr. Friedrich?”
“I probably would have failed a few more.”
Friedrich thought about that for a few heartbeats, then pushed on. “Anyway, the chicken colonel in charge of the project owed me. He’s stationed in the Philippines. Flies all over. I sent him a telegram about The Way Home. He checked it out, and now I have four two-bushel sacks of it in my garage. And best of all, I have one of these . . .” He handed her a small snapshot of a Bagadong shaman standing next to a hip-high wooden figure.
“You brought a shaman to New Haven?” Dr. Winton was looking at him as if he was wearing women’s underwear again.
“No, but the colonel brought me one of the wooden jugs they ferment it in. We have to duplicate the procedure; this way we can get a yeast culture from the residue inside the jug. Of course, there’s the possibility it’s something in the local water, but I don’t think so. At least it gets us started.” Friedrich had the enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old farm boy entering his prize pig in a 4-H contest.
“Why me?” She looked at him like she suspected someone at IHR had put Friedrich up to this. “Surely you know other psychiatrists, more experienced and influential.”
“Yes, but I came to you first because I couldn’t think of anyone else with more to prove.”
“You want to work with me because I’m a woman psychiatrist.”
“That, and you gave me the idea. I just thought I should give you a chance to share in the credit.”
“As optimistic and opportunistic as you are fair.”
“I’m an old-fashioned guy. What do you say to my proposal?”
“I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re proposing.”
“Partnership. Want to see if it works?” Friedrich held out his hand. When she didn’t shake it, it occurred to him to ask, “What happened to your friend, the English lieutenant you gave it to?”
“He died.” She said it like she blamed the lieutenant for running out on her.
“Because of the stuff?”
“It was in a bombing.”
“I’m sorry.” Friedrich was anything but.
Bunny Winton had told Will Friedrich, “Let me think about it for a few days and get back to you.” But as soon as he left the office, she knew her answer would be “no.” She had struggled too long to be taken seriously at the med school to risk having her name linked to a study based on oceanic folk medicine, especially one inspired by anecdotal evidence culled from her efforts to save the life of a patient she had lost her virginity to.
Bunny did not want to think about The Way Home, and she resented Friedrich for barging in on her with the disappointments of her past, though she did recognize she felt a vaguely therapeutic release talking about it to someone other than her own analyst. After she saw the last of her patients that day, she sat down at her typewriter and wrote him a short note,
Dear Dr. Friedrich,
After careful consideration, I have decided not to take part in your research project. The story I told you about my experience with gaikau dong was relayed in confidence, and I trust it will remain so. I wish you the best of luck.
Sincerely,
Dr. T. L. Winton.
Her decision was signed and neatly folded. Her tongue was tasting the glue on the flap of the envelope when she suddenly stopped and thought about what she was doing. A moment later, she ripped up the letter and put the cover on her typewriter. No, on second thought, she realized it was better that she relay the above to Dr. Friedrich over the phone. She did not want any connection to gaikau dong in writing. An eavesdropping psychologist who shows up at your office in a cheap suit with a suitcase full of kwina leaves might be trustworthy, but he was definitely what her uncle called “a loose cannon.” The more Bunny Winton thought about it, the angrier she was that Friedrich had intruded on her life.
Not wanting to put things off, she looked up his phone number and immediately called Friedrich’s office. No answer.
That was Friday. It wa
s Saturday now and Friedrich was out of her mind as she closed her eyes and listened to the last notes of Schubert’s String Quartet in C Major at the recital given by a faculty chamber music group at Branford College. She was by herself. Her husband, Thayer, had stayed home to meet with a naval architect about a new racing yawl. He liked to sail, she liked to listen. The last two notes of the piece were what made it special, supertonic and tonic played forte. The effect they had on her eardrums prompted her to wonder if Schubert knew he was dying when he wrote them. A moment of silence, then applause—she considered the possibility that psychiatrists hear music differently.
Having forgotten to bring her own tea, Bunny had half a glass of sherry, asked after a neurologist’s wife and children, and was putting on her gloves to leave when she realized that the second viola was also head of the psychology department.
Over a foul dip made of onion soup mix and sour cream, Bunny Winton made just enough small talk with Dr. Cunningham about his work so as not to make him curious when she inquired, “Someone at IHR was asking me about your Dr. Friedrich—any thoughts?”
“Unusual mix of things. He’s the only person in the department who can do a standard deviational analysis in his head.”
“So Friedrich’s a numbers guy.”
“He’s more of a seat-of-the-pants kind of fellow. Intuitive. Surprises you with things.”
“How so?”
“Well, it’s really a matter of, you don’t know how he comes to the conclusions he comes to, especially when he’s right.”
“Can you give me a for instance?”
“Well, a female instructor over in the Romance Languages department was receiving obscene phone calls, which were traced back to a pay phone at one of the dorms. The dean came to the psychology department to get our take on how it should be handled. Since there was no way of telling who was making the calls, there was nothing to be done, until a few months later Friedrich came into my office after having lunch with a bunch of students and gave me a name.”
“How’d he get the student to tell him?”
“The student didn’t tell him. It was just a notion Friedrich had, and since he couldn’t back it up with anything, we took no action. A few months later a student was caught in the act, and sure enough, it was the boy Friedrich had told us to take a look at to talk to. And when I asked Friedrich how he figured it out, all the son of a gun said was . . .” Cunningham paused for effect and another glass of sherry, “ ‘he seemed like the kind of boy who’d need to resort to anonymous obscenity with a stranger to make intimate contact.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
When Bunny Winton got into bed that night and turned out the light, her answer was still “no.” She and her husband had separate bedrooms but a shared bathroom was not the limit of their intimacy. They had tried to have a child, especially in the first year of their marriage. Theoretically it was possible she could still conceive.
But Bunny was not thinking about any of this as she lay in the darkness, her hair spread out across her pillow like a scarlet fan. She was thinking about how she had ended up in the bed she was unable to fall asleep in. When she married, right after the war, just out of uniform, it seemed a safe and sensible match to make. Not just because Thayer had so much money she wouldn’t have to worry about his being after hers. At thirty-five, she was old for a bride. She thought she wanted to be safe, to live in a world that was clean and starched and ordered. She wanted to be as far from the jungles of New Guinea and memories of her lieutenant as she could get.
Bunny’s eyes were open now. Still hoping for sleep, she tried to distract herself by thinking about the history of this bed she had inherited. It was made by an eighteenth-century master cabinetmaker by the name of Goddard, constructed of mahogany hauled out of the jungle by slaves. It featured four posters topped with finials shaped like pineapples and a carved scalloped shell on its headboard.
Her great-grandmother and her grandmother and her mother had died in that bed. And so, she guessed, would she. But before it was her turn, she wanted to do more than be the first woman on the staff of the medical school. It was at that moment Bunny Winton, née Rutledge, realized that she missed the jungle—in a way, even missed the war. Not the killing, but the sense that you were fighting for something. She longed to take a risk that would make her feel fully alive.
Without bothering to turn on the lamp on the bedside table, Bunny Winton got out of bed, sat at her desk, and by the light of a crescent moon picked up a fountain pen and wrote the following on a leaf of double-weight gray linen stationery:
Dear Dr. Friedrich,
After careful consideration, I have decided I am very much interested in researching The Way Home. As to how we might best coordinate our schedules . . .
APRIL 13, 1952
When Will Friedrich got in his car to go home after work that day, he felt better than fine. The Whale had started without his having to lift the hood, a rarity. The forsythia were in bloom, and he had been able to talk a promising tailback on the football team out of shock therapy. The kid had been arrested on his knees in the men’s room of a Greenwich Village bar called the Lily Pad. Will had simply listened to the frightened football player’s confession and said, “I don’t regard homosexuality as a disease and I don’t think shock cures anything.”
Well-intentioned was Will Friedrich. Even though he knew he had risked his job by reassuring the boy that he wasn’t sick, Will did not think of it as going out on a limb—he did not see himself as a beacon of enlightenment, just as a man doing his job. That afternoon he was as close to happy as a man who devotes his life to the study of unhappiness can be. Less than a mile into his journey home that day, Friedrich looked in the rearview mirror and saw a fine film of sweat collecting on his face. Suddenly, his throat tickled and his eyeballs felt like they needed to be scratched. Sneezing twice, rolling up the window, Will muttered to himself, “Christ, I’m getting a cold.”
It was too beautiful a day for him or anyone else to be sick. The sky was the same shade of blue as a set of sheets he had liberated from an Army Air Corps hospital outside Chicago where he had worked during the war, when he and his wife were first married and the clouds on his horizon were as invitingly white as freshly fluffed pillows.
But when traffic stopped and he looked over at the big plate-glass window of a department store over on the avenue, the promise of the day flew out the window, even though it was rolled up. It was a store he couldn’t afford to shop in. Usually, the sight of the expensively dressed mannequins in its window would prompt superior thoughts such as, ideas are important, not things. Or, shopping’s the opiate of the people, not religion. But that day, due to the clouds and the angle of the sunlight on the glass, the windows became a gigantic mirror, and all Dr. Friedrich could see was himself smiling inanely behind the wheel of a vehicle that belonged in the junkyard and he should have been embarrassed to drive. What did he have to be smiling about? He’d gone to college for eight years, and as his wife had reminded him that morning, their checking account was overdrawn . . . again.
Traffic began to move, but the reflection of himself stayed in his head. He turned on the radio, forgetting the tuner was broken and that the only station he could receive was the AM colored station out of New York. Usually the dark rhythms were all static, but today he heard them as clear as the bell that seemed to be going off inside his head. Ain’t no doctor in all the lan’ can cure the fever of a convict man. Leadbelly’s wail didn’t make Dr. Friedrich feel any better. But he did wonder why he identified with a Negro field hand who’d been sent to prison for murder. Though he’d given up on psychoanalysis—time and manpower prevented it from ever helping more than a handful of people— Friedrich never tired of psychoanalyzing himself.
Gunning the White Whale up the steep incline of the short driveway, Friedrich swerved just in time to avoid running over his six-year-old daughter Lucy’s hand-me-down scooter. By the tim
e he hit the brakes he’d flattened the new Schwinn bicycle he had just given Fiona for turning eight, the one he’d told her to put in the garage that morning.
“Why do I bother talking? No one ever listens to me,” Friedrich muttered to himself. Of course, it was unrealistic to expect an eight-year-old, even his eight-year-old, to have the retentive abilities to comprehend the repercussions of her irresponsibility. If he’d had the money to buy her a new bicycle, he could have turned it into an object lesson by refusing to replace the bike she should have put away. But because he was unable to afford to replace the bike, his predicament was exacerbated by shame. Friedrich was well aware that he’d feel even more foolish for blaming his child and his wife, but knew he’d probably do both. He was embarrassed by his embarrassment.
Will Friedrich slammed the flat of his hand against his frontal lobe and was about to ask himself “What the fuck is happening to me?” when he looked up and saw a flock of hungry parrots dining al fresco in his mulberry tree.
If Dr. Friedrich had been a psychologist practicing on the citizens of Caracas, or Manila, or even Miami, the sight of eleven noisy parrots shrieking red, blue, green, turquoise, and tropical gold in his fruit tree would have been nothing out of the ordinary. Dr. Friedrich’s mulberry tree being full of parrots in the front yard of a little two-story ersatz Cape Cod cottage in a housing development just outside of New Haven, Connecticut, this was an incident of greater magnitude. He was a thousand miles too far north to believe his eyes.
Having labored that morning in a poorly ventilated, jury-rigged chem lab taking the first of a series of tedious steps necessary to isolate the psychoactive ingredients of a drab little shrub native to the island of New Guinea, Friedrich’s mind jumped to the logical conclusion: “I’m hallucinating.” He said it out loud, like a miner who’s just struck gold.
He climbed out of the White Whale without bothering to turn off the engine or close the car door. Hat on the back of his head, necktie blowing in the wind, he’d left the world of a broken bicycle behind. A spiderweb, woven between a climbing rose and a leafless apple tree that had died over the winter, broke across his face.
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