His eyes remained focused on the road ahead of him.
He said, “I wouldn’t go in there. Not even for an old friend, Doc. But then an old friend of mine wouldn’t live there. With you, it’s different.”
He paused. I was accustomed to his pauses during our conversations. But this pause was different. I sensed that it did not simply mark a lull in our conversation. Franz continued, “I know a man. Good driver. Very reliable. Friend of mine, too. He would wait for you as long as you want.”
“You’ve never refused me before, Franz,” I said.
He said, “I’m old, Doc. It’s time for me to retire.”
He had said this before. Always, he had looked in the rear-view mirror and smiled, saying it. And, always, I had answered him, “You’ll be driving for the next hundred years, Franz. You know that.”
I said so now. In the past, his eyes would have sought mine. He would have smiled in the mirror back at me. I felt suddenly cut adrift and exposed to all in the city that he had, until this moment, insulated me from.
He said gravely, “It’s time, Doc. You want a replacement for me. That man, he’s a good man. You’ll like him.”
He had made up his mind. There was nothing I could do. He didn’t need the handsome salary I paid him. His taxicab company was very successful. He could repay, easily, not only the loan, but – if there had been, though there wasn’t – any interest on it. Franz and I had been more than borrower and lender. We had been partners and I had to admit that he was much more important now to me than I was to him.
“Franz?”
“Doc.”
“Is he as good as you?”
He heard the appeasement in my voice. He looked in the mirror at me and smiled.
“He’s excellent.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By 4:30 I had seen all but one of my scheduled patients. The one was a forty-five-year-old divorced woman whose name I feel it prudent not to mention and whose ancestors included North African Jews, English Catholics and Irish and Italian Protestants. We had reached the stage in her treatment where I had made her sick with apprehension about what would happen to her if people like me disappeared from America. I had convinced her that in such a society she would no longer be identified as white, in contrast to those of us who obviously were not. For Americans like herself who could only group themselves in terms of ethnic, religious or national classifications derived from Europe, there would be no group for her, ancestrally mixed as she was, to belong to. I had rendered her so pathologically fearful of being excluded, marginalized and discarded that the first thing she always did when she entered my office was to hug me and say, “I love you, Doc. I hope you never die. Thank God for people like you.”
She was so obsessively punctual for her appointments that, when she did not show up on time, I knew better than to expect her. But I was concerned. I did not want to risk having her suffer a relapse. I asked Jennifer to call and remind her that she had missed a session and should reschedule another for as soon as possible. Jennifer then gave me the list of the next day’s patients and I saw, with some pleasure, that Walker’s was the first name on the list. I hoped he would show up for this appointment. He had missed the last three or four.
He was the only patient left from those early days of my practice when I was obsessively inventing fictional patients. One day, I opened the door to my office, and there he was, standing before it. His camel hair coat was like the one hanging in my office closet and I recognized his cheery silk necktie as similar to the one I had chosen not to wear that morning. He was about my height and, though he was bigger about the chest and shoulders, I had, for an instant, the slightly unnerving impression that I was looking at a reflection of myself.
“Mr. Bellow?” I had called out and smiled at the man standing in front of me – whom I knew not to be Bellow.
The man said, “Walker. I.M. Walker.” He took my free hand and began to shake it.
I said, “Hi, Mr. Walker. My next patient is Mr. Bellow…”
Walker said, “I gotta see you, Doc. Now. It’s urgent.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Walker,” I said, and looked past him and called out again into the waiting room,
“Mr. Bellow? Mr. Bellow?” I saw Mr. Bellow sitting apart from my other patients, nattily dressed, with his elfin face and his sad eyes with the flesh-pouches under them. He was one of my few patients at this time who was white. He waved a hand nonchalantly and said, “That’s all right, Doc. I can afford to wait. Let the gentleman tell you his story.”
So Walker and I entered my office together.
At that first session, he told me a jumbled tale of armed, masked men in white robes springing upon him out of the dark; of crosses flaming on the front lawn of his home; of bullets fired into its walls and bombs thrown through its windows. He wanted me, he said, to help him cope with the anxieties those events caused him.
I was so taken aback by this obvious appropriation of public information for his private purposes that I laughed outright at him. I told him I could not help him if he merely repeated, as if they were his own, experiences from the national past, that he had heard or read about. I could work with him only as a man with a private history who brought me experiences that had actually happened to him; as an individual, not a national product; as a person, not a member of a group.
Walker paid no attention to me. In subsequent sessions, he continued to behave as if he had no coherent memory of a private life that I could try to help him understand.
He was, for instance, at different times, sometimes a Christian, sometimes a Jew, also, sometimes, a Muslim. In his white robes, he praised Allah and spoke bitterly of having been excluded from churches and synagogues when he was a boy, even though he was a baptized Christian, and his mother had been a maid for Jews who had advised her to circumcise him. But for all his complaints he was patriotic. Once, when I said something – I no longer remember what – that seemed to him to raise questions about his status as an American, he answered testily, “I’m American same as you, Doc. This is my country. I belong here.”
I was, at the time, anarchically chronicling my unhappy experiences as an American and marketing them packaged cosmetically as the experiences of others. I could not understand Walker’s morbid, self-serving patriotism, his schizophrenic relationship with himself and with our country, his apparently wilful suppression of any private life important enough for him to remember and talk to me about. He behaved as if the only way he could obtain significance for himself was by identifying himself as national victim of the most shameful events of our country’s history. I understood his mythomaniacal need to draw attention to himself and grasp at a status and importance that was otherwise generally denied him, but, as a therapist, I could not help him. However, at this point in my career I had not yet begun to benefit from my fictitious case histories, so I cultivated him as my patient and was grateful for his fees. In the process, I became very fond of him.
I was remembering this when Jennifer buzzed to say that Mrs. Lynch had insisted on coming to see me. Without delay the door opened and Fiona Lynch entered my office.
“I did it,” she said.
I was cautious. I didn’t dare believe what I wanted to. I invited Fiona to sit down.
“Did what, Fiona?”
“I killed him.”
My heart began to beat quickly. “Mr Johnson?” I asked quietly.
“Yes. I shot him.”
My heart lit up triumphantly. But I did not get up and throw my arms about her shoulders.
“His wife, too.”
“The woman in the wheelchair?” I asked. “The invalid? The one you said you felt sorry for?”
Fiona nodded. She said, “May I use your telephone?”
Not moving in my chair, I watched her as she began to flip through the pages of the telephone directory.
The plush-carpeted corridor of her new apartment building, she told me, had quickly become a jungle for her. She often did not hear
Mr Johnson until he was upon her. Then, softly, always softly, even though there was never anyone else to hear him, he aimed his special greeting at her.
When Fiona first came to me, I had immediately detected the Scottish brogue beneath her new American accent. When she told me of her trouble with her new neighbour, Mr Johnson, I immediately became interested. I was writing a book – as a warning to white Americans – about the dangers to them of playing out, in America, the divisive national, ethnic or religious antagonisms that had been so destructive in the old continent. A chapter about Scottish Fiona duking it out with the Anglo Johnson would have fitted nicely into the book.
But when she told me the names Mr. Johnson called her – “nigger-lover”, “prostitute” – I was angry that she had chosen to come to me. I had long rejected the role of victim. I had my own victims now. I didn’t want to be bothered by things I had long since painfully worked my way through. I wanted to send Fiona to Reginald in the ghetto, or to the free clinic that Porter held there for those whom he called underprivileged. But Fiona would probably not have been welcomed in the ghetto; she was underprivileged only through her marriage to a fellow student from the West Indies whom she had met in Scotland. I asked her if she knew what my fees were. She didn’t. I told her. I had doubled them, but she didn’t flinch, and I was stuck with her.
At first I had not known how to deal with Fiona. I could not make whiteness indispensable to one for whom it was obviously already dispensable. I could not heighten her fear – since she obviously did not possess it – that she might not always be white. I was baffled about what to do with her. Then she told me about her dreams. Horrible dreams, she called them. Dreams in which she stalked Mr Johnson night after night after night. She cornered him, just as he cornered her in the corridor, and shot him in the face. But nothing happened. And as she shot and shot, her rage and her frustration growing, his smiling, confident, handsome face only got bigger and bigger, until it engulfed her within its cottony softness, its terrifying warmth. She always woke up then, she said, and was unable, for a long time, to fall asleep again.
Now I had something to work with. I reinforced Fiona’s sense of herself as an individual free to do whatever she thought was right, regardless of the perception of her actions by others. I set out, that is, to reinforce her idea – which by her marriage she had demonstrated – that she was an individual, and not just another member of a group. I was delighted to make her feel that in America she was, like me, a tribeless outcast and that she was morally and ethically free to devise her own solutions to the problems America placed before her. She had told me about her domestic unhappiness. Of Tom, her physicist husband, devoted to his classified research and proud of his contribution to the cause of a free world, so much so that when she, frightened by Mr Johnson and tired of her dreams, asked him to leave America, he refused, saying his work was too important. This left her virtually alone to rear Mike. She was bitter that her happy marriage in Scotland seemed to have been just a preparation for being a wife to a black man and mother to their black child in “this wretched country”.
The words were hers. She had spoken to me of her alienation from the other mothers with whom she spent afternoons in the park, watching her child play with theirs, unremarkable as yet to those he played with, but remarkable to her, and to the other mothers who pretended he was not. All the time, she would be chatting amiably with them, but thinking bleakly about his future. She had never said to those friendly women that she was angry and resentful because she despaired of her son’s future in this country. She felt herself a hypocrite and, in some sense, their accomplice, because she was sitting and talking pleasantly with them, as if there was nothing for her to be fearful and resentful about, and the future they contemplated together was equal for all of their children.
She had told me how ashamed she felt because she sometimes wanted to lay down the burden of being wife to Tom and mother to Mike. She was tired of being constantly stared at whenever she walked with them in public; wanted, sometimes, to go away and be by herself, alone, forever.
She had told me of her feelings of being imprisoned in America and chained to Tom; how she doubted her ability to raise her son adequately on her own; of her feelings of dependency, inadequacy; how miserable, lonely, afraid and unhappy she was, tired of constantly feeling that her child was imperilled, and herself and her family constantly demeaned. She wanted to leave America and be rid of this need to protect her son and preserve herself, to have nothing more to do with this obsession with blackness and whiteness. She had told me all of this and I had sought to reinforce in Fiona the idea that she should kill Mr Johnson because it was exactly what I myself would have wanted to do.
I made progress slowly. Fiona was deeply Lutheran. There were severe limits to what she believed she was permitted by God do. That was why her dreams of killing Mr Johnson were horrible to her. She resisted my attempts to make her a murderess, and I had for some time concluded I could not persuade her to kill Mr Johnson. I was glad now that he was dead, but I could take no credit for his death. I wondered what had persuaded Fiona to kill him.
She said, still flipping through the directory, “Did you hear about the strike? That it’s over?”
I told her I had.
She said, “They’re tearing down the old apartments on the east side of the park. Did you know that?”
I didn’t.
She said, “Those building were old, but they looked so strong, so solid! They’re only rubble now. Nothing but rubble.” She seemed to be having trouble finding the number she was looking for. She said, as if to herself, “Poor Mrs Johnson”, and then, “You know, I don’t think I ever told you this.”
She had been shocked, she told me, the first time she saw Mrs Johnson. The poor woman’s head moved ceaselessly in every direction. Her tongue hung uncontrollably out of her mouth. She drooled. Her hands, the fingers forced open like claws, were never still. Fiona, then bearing her child, had been moved to pity – for the woman, and for the man who pushed her in the wheelchair, spoke to her and stopped every now and then to wipe the spittle from her chin. But later, whenever she saw the invalid wife of Mr Johnson, she had been unable, she said, to still the jubilation ringing in her heart.
She read American history. She gave up, while she waited to leave the building, her trips to museums and art galleries. Furniture for the new apartment ceased to be important. Beyond the double-locked door, in an apartment flooded with sunlight, the city spread out gloriously below her, she looked at appalling pictures of black men, women and children lined up to be sold like cattle; of a black man hanging from a tree, his head resting unnaturally on his shoulder, his hands tied behind his back, while white men, women and children looked gleefully up at him; of water cannons and lunging, fanged dogs held on long leashes by policemen with drawn revolvers; and of a young black man, his face contorted with rage, frozen in one triumphant second of a crazed dance over the bodies of the black and white policemen he had just killed.
It had seemed to her, she said, that nothing had changed. That the past from which the hanged man and his gleeful spectators had emerged in their antiquated clothes to horrify her was waiting, as Mr Johnson waited for her in the corridor, to surprise and ambush her child in the future. That, not yet out of her uterus, her child was already carrying as its own memory and its own actual experience all that she had read and been horrified by. Then, waiting for its birth, she had thought how cowardly she was because she could not bring herself to abort it, to kill it herself before the Mr Johnsons killed it for her. She had felt so guilty, so responsible, she said, that she wished she could make of the ugly past she read about, and the future she dreaded for her child, her past, the account of the life that she had already lived. She wanted to live and relive it endlessly, again and again, so that her unborn child might not have to, might be spared, because it was innocent and had not asked to be born. She could not carry it, kicking sometimes as if impatient to be born, safe in her womb
forever. She had wanted to assume to herself all the lack of worth that others had ascribed to her child in the past and were waiting to ascribe to it in the future. And, because she had been unable to do so, she, without whom it would never have existed, became worthless herself because she would bring it into the world and be unable to protect it.
She had found the number she had been looking for. She was dialling now. I heard her say into the telephone, “Hello? My name is Fiona Lynch. I’ve killed a man and his wife. I’m at…” and she gave my name and office address.
I waited for her to put the receiver down again, then asked, “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
She nodded and said, “I’ve had a very strange day.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She had slipped and fallen in the street. A man had helped her up. When she turned, embarrassed, to thank him, she had found herself face to face with Mr Johnson.
He asked her, kindly, “Are you all right?”
“He had not,” Fiona said, a note of wonder in her voice, “recognized me at all!”
Mr Johnson patted her on the shoulder. He said, “There. You should be all right, now.”
She had murmured, “Thank you.”
“How could I not be civil, too?” she asked me.
“You’re welcome,” Mr Johnson said. He gave Fiona a business card, “just in case”. Then he bowed, touched his hat and walked away.
Her sense of an ambush is deep. She says she feels like the deer in the last book she had been reading with Mike before Tom took him to visit his grandparents in the Caribbean. Stalked by hunters wearing the skins of deer they had previously killed, the frightened deer flare their nostrils, raise their heads, and see only other deer. Fiona, standing as if rooted to the pavement, Mr Johnson having disappeared into the crowd, can see nothing on the busy street to run away from or turn and present a lowered head to.
Her sense of herself as individual is outraged. She is disgusted by the all-else-effacing whiteness Mr Johnson has just conferred upon her. She has, very strongly, a sense of her annihilation. She feels stripped of her past, her formation in Scotland, of everything that made her who she was before she met Mr Johnson. She feels, she tells me, stripped of her very self. It is as if those other selves Mr Johnson had manufactured for her: the nigger-lover and prostitute of the corridor; the white woman he has so courteously helped up from the pavement; and the creature – hardly able to contain her rage and her wonder – whom he is unaware he has just created: it is as if all those manufactured selves can never again come together to form the person she was before she met him.
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