Breaking the Silence

by Diane Chamberlain

  “I’m aware of his reputation, but maybe he doesn’t deserve it,” Sarah countered. “Do you have a record of the last report I made?”

  “I’ll check on it. If you called, I’m sure we have it.”

  “I made it anonymously. And you never did anything about it. My husband’s not the only one who’s suffered there.”

  “All right, Mrs. Tolley. I’m having a hard time accepting what you’re telling me, but I’ll look into it personally. Okay?”

  “When? They won’t let me see him. I want to see him.”

  “I’ll call Pete today,” he said.

  Pete. As though he and Palmiento were old buddies.

  She got off the phone and sat curled up in one corner of the sofa, staring into space. It seemed impossible that they would have moved Joe so quickly after surgery. Maybe they’d only told her they’d moved him and he was still there. She called Colleen at the hospital and began telling her what had happened, but Colleen interrupted her.

  “I know,” she said. “They found out he was snooping into their experiments and they lobotomized him. I’m so, so sorry, Sarah.”

  Hearing the words from Colleen’s mouth made them horribly real.

  “Do you know where they took him?” she asked.

  “I looked at his chart,” Colleen said. “It doesn’t say.”

  “I can’t believe they moved him that quickly. Do you think he might still be there? Would you check, Colleen? Could you check any room where they might have put him for postsurgical care?”

  Colleen hesitated. “Gilbert called me into his office this morning,” she said. “He told me about you being fired and said I should…that I shouldn’t have any contact with you.”

  “Why?”

  “He said if I wanted to keep my job, I should avoid you.”

  “Colleen, please. Please look for Joe. No one needs to know what you’re doing.” That Colleen would put Gilbert’s demand ahead of their friendship stung her.

  “All right.” Colleen sounded reluctant. “I’ll check the other wards on my break.”

  The day was very long. Sarah took Janie for two walks in her stroller, and in between the walks, she held the little girl on her lap until Janie whimpered to be set free. She nearly forgot to feed her. Food was the last thing on her mind.

  Colleen called that evening to tell Sarah that she’d checked the hospital from top to bottom. Joe was not there.

  “I remembered that an ambulance was at the hospital yesterday afternoon,” Colleen said. “I didn’t make the connection at the time, but they were probably transporting him.”

  Or maybe Joe had died during the surgery, Sarah thought with horror. It happened. She’d never seen a patient die during a lobotomy, but she’d heard plenty of stories. Perhaps they had made certain that Joe died. That’s why they wouldn’t tell her where he had been taken.

  She was already up and sitting in the living room, planning her next move, when the phone rang early the following morning. It was Dr. Palmiento’s secretary, asking her to come to the hospital immediately for a meeting with him.

  She dressed quickly, dropped Janie off with Mrs. Gale and drove to Saint Margaret’s.

  Both Palmiento and Gilbert were in the director’s office. They stood as she entered, but she had no time for such niceties.

  “I demand to know where Joe is,” she said. “Or did you kill him during surgery?”

  “Sit down, please,” said Dr. P.

  “Just tell me—”

  “Sit down, dear,” he said, more firmly this time, and she took a seat. Why did she allow this man to have such power over her?

  Palmiento sat down again, hands folded on top of his desk. “I had a meeting with the president of the psychiatric board yesterday,” he said pleasantly, though his sharp eyes clashed with the tone of his voice. “We met on the golf course, so I had a good long time to explain the entire situation to him. I told him all about your husband’s psychiatric illness. And about your need to deny it.”

  “He did not have a psychiatric illness.” The words came out in a growl. She felt like a wild animal, ferocious and ready to defend her family.

  Gilbert sat in the chair next to hers. “This must be very difficult for you,” he said.

  His voice was so kind that, despite her fury, she was tempted to rest her head on his shoulder. But he was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

  “You must feel terribly betrayed by Mr. Tolley,” he said.

  “By Joe?”

  “Yes. To your face, he pretended everything was all right. To us, when you weren’t around, he told us how miserable he was in his life. He’d even considered suicide. The thought tormented him.”

  “That wasn’t Joe speaking. That was Frederick Hamilton. Complete fiction!”

  Gilbert gave her a rueful smile. “It wasn’t fiction,” he said. “They were Joe’s true feelings. His checking himself into the hospital as a supposed scheme was actually his cry for help, can you see that?”

  “No!” She started to stand, but Gilbert stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “Joe loved me,” she said. “He loved Janie, our little girl. He wouldn’t want to—”

  “We have documentation in his record of his deteriorating condition,” Dr. P. interrupted her. “I offered to show that material to Cliff, but he said it wasn’t necessary.”

  Sarah could imagine that conversation. She’s in denial, she’s crazy, she’s angry about being fired.

  “All right,” she said, raising her hands in surrender. “I give up. Just tell me where Joe is, and I’ll—”

  “Cliff agreed with me that, at this point in time, it would be better for you not to see him,” Dr. P. said. “You are far too fragile and—”

  “God damn it!” She stood up, too quickly for Gilbert to stop her this time. “I am not fragile. I am not crazy.”

  Gilbert reached a hand toward her. “Sit down again, Mrs. Tolley.” He looked at Dr. Palmiento and received a nod. “We have something very, very important to discuss with you.”

  The somber tone of his voice quieted her instantly, and she lowered herself back into her chair. The nausea from the day before toyed with her again, and she steeled herself against it. She would not get sick here.

  Gilbert rolled his chair in front of hers until he and Sarah sat face-to-face. “Dr. Palmiento and I have discussed this matter at great length, and we’ve decided it’s necessary to take you into our confidence. We are fully aware that you’ve been communicating with the board of psychiatry. We knew that even before yesterday.”

  “How did you—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that you tell no one—no one—anything you know about the techniques being used here at Saint Margaret’s. It’s a matter of national security, Mrs. Tolley.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Gilbert leaned forward in his seat, and she knew the concern in his eyes was genuine. “The Soviets and the Chinese are far ahead of the United States in the development of mind control techniques,” he said. “Some disturbing things have happened that you may not know about. For example, during the war in Korea, over seventy percent of the American prisoners of war being held in China signed petitions calling for an end to the American war effort, and some of them made false confessions. The frightening thing is, they stuck to those confessions even when they were finally safe at home. They were brainwashed, Sarah. Don’t you think that’s alarming? That other countries, that our enemies, can brainwash our men and we don’t have a clue how they’re doing it? It’s up to Dr. Palmiento and a handful of other…pioneers…to perfect mind control methods for our use. Our enemies have the upper hand. We have to get it back.”

  Sarah was overwhelmed, by both his words and his zeal. “But…what do you mean by mind control techniques, exactly?” she asked. “Psychic driving? The shock treatments? The isolation room?”

  “All of that is being researched,” Gilbert said. “Along with the use of certain drugs.”

 
“LSD.”

  “Yes, among others.” Gilbert sat back in his chair with a sigh. “I’m telling you a great deal, Sarah. Perhaps too much for your own good. But Dr. Palmiento and I felt you deserved to know.”

  “Who has authorized these…experiments?” she asked.

  “The United States government,” Gilbert said. “As a matter of fact, if you were to go to the FBI or the CIA with what you’ve witnessed here, you’d only be telling them something they already know—in fact, something they’re financing.”

  “Financing!”

  “Yes, but that fact must stay in this room, Sarah,” Gilbert said. “Only Dr. P. and myself, and now you, are aware of the source of our funding.”

  “It’s unconscionable, though,” Sarah said. “You’re experimenting on unwitting patients.”

  “Only those patients who are deemed expendable by virtue of their psychiatric condition are being taken to the highest levels of experimentation,” Gilbert said.

  “I still think it’s wrong,” Sarah said. “I think someone should blow the whistle on what’s going on here.”

  “And harm a carefully engineered program?” Dr. Palmiento finally spoke up. “A program sanctioned by the government and designed to develop methods to counter the Communist threat?”

  “Joe was just a casualty in all of this, wasn’t he,” she asked. “He knew too much. You needed to shut him up.”

  “Not true at all,” Dr. Palmiento said. “Joe was unwell.”

  She knew she would never get him to admit to anything else, and he was the well-respected, award-winning genius of the psychiatric community. She was the fragile, unstable, deluded wife.

  “Here’s the main reason we wanted you to know and understand what we’re doing here,” Gilbert said. “We need you, Sarah. We want to keep you on as a member of our team. We know you’ll need some time to cope with what happened to your husband, but you’re a skilled nurse, truly the finest nurse on ward three, and you’d be a valuable asset to us. Surely you can see the importance of the research we’re doing.”

  Sarah stood up. “I don’t want anything to do with your so-called research or with either of you or Saint Margaret’s,” she said. “You’ve destroyed my husband, you’ve harmed my patients, and now you want me to join forces with you? Never!”

  “You’re not thinking clearly,” Gilbert said, with real sympathy in his voice. “That’s certainly understandable. Please consider what we’ve said. About this being a matter of national—”

  “I don’t believe you!” she said. “This is a free country. We don’t destroy our own people in the name of national security. I don’t believe for an instant that the government sanctions what you two are doing. And you can bet that when I leave here, I’m going straight to…to someone in authority with what you’ve told me.” She started toward the door.

  “Just one minute, Mrs. Tolley.” Dr. Palmiento stopped her with the threat in his voice. He rose slowly to his feet, his eyes pinning her to the wall.

  Sarah closed her own eyes to shut out his impaling glare. She’d been right about him in their first meeting. He was crazy as a loon. “What?” she asked.

  “You have a young daughter, don’t you?” His voice was merely inquisitive, but the menace was clear. “Do you want her to suffer the same fate as your husband? Or worse, perhaps?”

  Sarah gasped. “That’s an empty threat,” she said, but her voice was shaking.

  “I don’t make empty threats,” Palmiento said. “I see a problem and I solve it. Your husband Joseph Tolley was a problem, and I took care of it. Rather quickly, too, wouldn’t you say?”

  Gilbert moved to stand between them. “I don’t think we need to resort to threats,” he said, obviously trying to placate them both, and for the first time Sarah realized that the young psychology student might not be completely supportive of his mentor’s methods.

  “I think we do,” Dr. P. said. “If Mrs. Tolley understood how grave the consequences would be if she revealed anything about our work, that would be fine. We could let her go. But she doesn’t seem to comprehend the gravity of the situation. So, I say to you, Mrs. Tolley—keep your mouth shut about what you know and no harm will come to you or your child. Speak up, and there are people far more powerful and zealous about this cause than I am who will be sure you never speak again. Understand?”

  Sarah said nothing. Her knees were about to give out.

  Dr. Palmiento walked toward her. “Do you understand?” He repeated. “Swear to us that nothing you know about Saint Margaret’s will ever leave this room.”

  She turned her head from his gaze. “I swear it,” she said, backing away from him. Then she fled from the office, fled from Saint Margaret’s, hoping she would never have to set foot in that house of horrors again.

  31

  THERE WAS A LONG VOICEMAIL FROM BECKY REED, THE publicist for Ray’s book, waiting for Laura when she arrived home from Sarah’s. Laura leaned against the kitchen counter, listening.

  “Sorry to call on the weekend,” Becky said on the tape, “but this can’t wait. We have tentative dates scheduled for two local talk shows, as well as—hold on to your hat—Oprah. That’s a major coup, I’m sure you know. That particular show won’t air until November, when For Shame is released, but it will be taped the end of next month. So we need to know right away if you’re willing to do it—and we certainly hope you are.” Becky left her home number with a request to call her “right away.”

  Still preoccupied by what she’d learned from Sarah that afternoon, Laura could barely concentrate on the message. The walls of the kitchen were closing in on her. The last thing she felt like doing was boning up on Ray’s work with the homeless.

  She called Stuart in Connecticut and told him about the message.

  “Oprah!” Stuart said. “That’s fantastic.”

  “The taping date is in late September,” she said. “It’s too soon. I—”

  “It’s more than a month away.” Stuart paused. “How come you don’t sound more excited about this, Laura? This is everything that Ray wanted.”

  “I’d rather not do it,” she said bluntly. “Maybe you could do it.”

  Stuart was quiet. “It wouldn’t have nearly the same impact coming from me as from his wife,” he said finally. “And you’re already a household name, practically, with your comets and all. What the hell’s the problem?” He didn’t usually swear, and she knew he was not pleased with her.

  “I don’t know, Stu. I’m just wiped out by my life right now.” She looked out the window toward the lake. Some of the leaves were already beginning to color, and it was only the end of August. “Emma still won’t talk, and she’s crawling under furniture again.” It had only happened that once, and she felt guilty taking advantage of the behavior to support her own need. “I’m trying to coordinate a relationship between her and her birth father, and—”

  “You are?” Stuart asked. “So soon?”

  “It’s been eight months, Stu.” She explained how Dylan came to be involved in their lives.

  “Still seems awfully soon,” Stuart said. “Are you sure that’s the best thing for Emma?”

  No, she wasn’t sure, but that was the choice she’d made and she was too tired to defend it. “He’s a nice guy,” she said, “and her therapist seems to think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “You sound really upset, Laurie.”

  “I just came from visiting Sarah. You know, the woman my father asked me to look after? And she told me some things that are…disturbing.”

  “What sort of things?”

  She sighed. “I really don’t want to go into it now.”

  “Maybe it would help to talk about them with some—”

  “I’m too tired, Stuart.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Laurie, why are you doing this to yourself? Why do you still visit her when it upsets you? What’s the point? It sounds like it’s not doing you any good, and with everything else you have going on—”


  “But it does her good. At least, I think it does,” she said. “She loves to get out for a walk. And besides, I like her, Stu. I would miss her if I didn’t—”

  “You’re too wiped out to promote your husband’s book, but you have time to—”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” she said quickly.

  “Don’t you at least think you owe him that much?”

  Her guilt over Ray’s death hit once again with full force.

  “All right, I’ll do it,” she said. “I’m just nervous about it. I’m nervous about knowing what to say. How to explain his death. How to—”

  “Look,” Stuart said, “how about I come down to Virginia sometime soon? I have a sales trip down that way the second week of September. You and I can sit down and plan what you should say.”

  “That would help,” she said. “Thanks.”

  She got off the phone feeling weak, badgered and ashamed. What was wrong with her that she had no interest in being her husband’s champion?

  The following afternoon, Dylan came over to go swimming with her and Emma. Emma had loved swimming the year before, but the one time Laura had taken her to the lakeside beach this summer, she wouldn’t even set foot in the water. She would only agree to go now if Cory could come along.

  Laura herself had a moment of anxiety that morning as she pulled her two bathing suits from the bottom drawer of her dresser. One was at least ten years old, and the elastic in the legs was nearly nonexistent. The other suit was new—well, three years old at the very most—but it was a one-piece, black, old-lady sort of suit. She wore clothes for service, not for style, but that morning she wished she’d remembered these two flabby old suits and gotten a new one with a little more flair.

  She threw the oldest suit in the trash and put on the black suit, studying her reflection in the mirror. She’d lost a lot of weight since Ray’s death. Her legs were thin, and her breasts looked as though they’d shrunk. She had a vague tan, but it stopped at the middle of her thighs and a few inches below her shoulders. A year ago she wouldn’t have noticed, and it irritated her that now, simply because Dylan would be with them, she felt self-conscious about her looks. She pulled a pair of shorts over the suit for the walk to the beach.