When I entered the house. I heard the low murmur of conversation from the sitting room. I hurried down the corridor to it, and when everyone saw me standing there, he or she stopped talking. The Doctor, who was seated on the settee, put down the cup of tea he was drinking and rose quickly.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "Why are all these people here?"
He indicated we should continue down the corridor to his office, which we did. When we were inside, he closed the door,
"Some very bad news." he said. "Alberta lost control of her car this evening returning from that fund-raiser for MS. She went off the road at Crowley's Junction and down an embankment, where she struck a tree. She wasn't wearing her seat belt and that damn air bag did not activate. It's preliminary, but it looks pretty much as if she struck the windshield and died instantly."
I felt my stomach fold up inside me, my heart tightening like a fist, making it very hard to breathe.
"She's gone," he added, to be sure I understood the full meaning of what he was telling me,
"Gone?" I repeated, like someone trying to memorize what she had been told.
"I'm sorry," he said. For a moment it was as if he were a total stranger giving me the bad news. "These will be difficult days ahead. The funeral will be in three days. My secretary is contacting everyone whom we should contact."
"What should I do?" I asked him.
"There is nothing for you to do. Willow. Death is the most traumatic event in life because of its finality. I spend a good deal of my professional time trying to convince depressed and sick people that it is not the best alternative." He smiled, "I often use Shakespeare and quote from Hamlet. 'That
undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler has returned,' I try to get them to see they won't necessarily be better off.
"You have not been brought up in a religious home," he continued, "but I have to believe that she is in a better place. I won't ever tell any of my patients such a thing," he said, smiling again.
Then he put his arm around my shoulders, squeezed me to him, kissed my forehead, and left to return to his and my AM's friends, whom, he said, needed him to comfort them almost as much as he needed them to comfort him.
Without my Amou. I was left to find comfort in myself, for no matter what my true feelings were about Alberta, she and the Doctor were all the family I had. and Death had come into this house.
It made me think of Scott Lawrence and his belief that some people weren't supposed to have mothers and fathers. Death had done its duty.
For all I knew. it still lingered here somewhere, smiling through its icy teeth, enjoying- what it had accomplished.
What it had accomplished was to remind us all It was always there.
It was there waiting for us as well.
5
Setting Sail
.
What was most remarkable to me after
Alberta's death was how little our lives changed. If anything, the Doctor became even more involved in his clinic and with his patients. I was his little: amateur psychiatrist by now, and my analysis told me that, despite what he might say to others and how he might seem to be, he was suffering some Guilt,
How Alberta's death could have been caused in even the slightest way by him was a mystery that would take some time to unravel. I saw it in the darkness in his eyes whenever he was home, in the hours and hours he spent alone in his office gazing out the window, in the longer walks he took by himself on our grounds, and in the exhaustion he showed in his face whenever he returned from the clinic.
I wrote to Amou about him and spoke to her on the phone from time to time. All she would say was "take care of him." which was of course what she had told me in the airport the day she had left. I knew in my heart that she held some trust with him, that there were still secrets to unfold and surprises awaiting me in the days and years to come.
About three months after my AM's accident and death. Aunt Agnes's husband Uncle Darwood died. I didn't know him very well. They had visited us so rarely and we never visited them.
The Doctor and I went to the funeral. Afterward, he revealed that Uncle Darwood had been a bad closet alcoholic. He let slip that he thought Aunt Agnes was the reason, and then we talked about her and him for a while. It was a warm and interesting conversation for me because he did not often talk about his youth and his awn parents. He revealed that my AM thought his family was snobby because she came from an old Southern family that had lost most of its wealth. She always accused Aunt Agnes of speaking down to her.
The intensity of the undercurrent of tension and friction that ran under the foundation of our home and family always surprised me. Everyone believed I came from the most stable family possible because my father was a world-renowned psychiatrist who could cure psychological and emotional problems. Some of those problems were so deeply embedded in the roots of our world, however, it was naive to think anyone, even the Doctor, could stop the erosion of happiness and contentment. It was a lesson I was never to forget.
It seemed that there was so little lately to bring any pleasure and satisfaction into our house, but the Doctor was happy that I had been accepted to the University of North Carolina, I had already decided that I wanted to fallow in his footsteps to some extent and major in psychology, and he was not only familiar with their programs, but knew some of the teachers I would have.
One of the few prolonged periods of time that he and I were together was when he accompanied me to college. All during the trip he talked about how someone should work at orienting himself or herself to a new environment. His favorite expression was always "Focus. focus."
I thought he was the one doing most of the focusing on that trip. and I was quite pleasantly surprised at how much emotion he finally showed when we parted and he was leaving me at college. He saw me unpack some of my things and noted that I had brought my doll along, the doll he had given me a long time ago, the one a patient had made in his clinic.
"You brought this." he said, holding it and turning it in his hands as if he wanted to inspect every single stitch.
"Yes."
He smiled at it.
"Whatever happened to the patient who made
that?" I asked. He looked up quickly. "Oh, she improved enough to go home eventually. She's never had to come back," he added.
"Maybe I should send that to her," I suggested. "Oh, no, no." he said. She wanted you to have it very much. She made it from a picture of you I had sent her after she left the clinic, actually."
"Yes." I said. nodding. "Besides, she probably doesn't want to be reminded she had to be in a clinic once."
"No," he said. "I don't imagine she does."
He put the doll down gently and then turned to me. "I guess it's time to go." he said.
"Okay," I said. I hugged him.
His eyes welled up with tears and all he could say was "Well, well, well,"
I kissed him and held tightly to him and assured him I would be fine.
"Of course you will." he said.
When he left. I watched him go off in a taxicab to the airport. I stood there for a moment, wondering why it was that we had lived in a house where emotions had to be kept under tight reins. What was it he feared so? I couldn't imagine the Doctor afraid of anything that much. I wondered to myself if I wasn't going into psychology hoping that I would learn enough to finally understand him.
And then I thought. perhaps I want to go into psychology not so much to learn about him as to learn about myself. So often and in so many ways, Alberta had drummed into my head that I showed signs of inheriting madness. It got so I questioned every action I took, every decision I made, every thought I had. Was it abnormal? Was it the symptom of something developing? Was my childhood pretending really just that-- pretending-- or was it the first sin of schizophrenia? And those fears I had, seeing something ominous in the shapes of shadows, in the silhouette of a tree at night, outlined against the inky sky, was all that the beginning of serious paranoia?
I never told my father, but deep inside. I believed that if I could see the symptoms before anyone else. I could cure them, or maybe hide them well enough to keep even someone like him from blowing. Looking at my doll now, turning it in my hands as my father had done. I felt like a criminal who had gone into forensic science just so she could cover up any clues she might leave behind. Was the likeness to me just a wonderful accident of fate. or did this doll with its dark eyes, its patchwork of a dress speak to my own patchwork of emotions and my awn dark fears?
Perhaps I didn't have the most altruistic reasons to go into psychology, but I couldn't see myself doing anything else. If I had inherited anything. I thought, it was the desire to prove.
"It was supposed to be hard work." he continued. "What an incredibly unexpected reaction to it all. Like your new friends, some of my closer friends thought I was bizarre. 'Psychiatry is a good place for vou. Claude,' they would say. 'Eventually, you can treat yourself and send yourself the bill.'"
We both laughed at the idea. and then he turned to me, his face as serious as it had ever been.
"If we don't love what we do," he told me. "then we don't love who we are, and the worst fate of all is not liking yourself. Willow, being trapped in a body and behind a face you despise. You hate the sound of your own voice. You even come to hate your awn shadow. How can you ever hope to make anyone else happy-- wife, children, friends-- if you can't make yourself happy?
"It seems like such a simple truth, but it remains buried beneath so many lies and delusions for most people. I know now that won't happen to you," he said assuredly.
I sensed he was going to tell me more. but Miles appeared to tell him he had a phone call from the clinic.
"They say it's an emergency," he added.
The crisis involved a patient who had attempted suicide, The Doctor had to rush back to the clinic. He was very upset about it, and told me afterward that he thought he had been making some significant progress with the patient, who was a young man my age. Although he didn't show it often, my doctor father did take his work very personally.
"If you are serious about going into this field. Willow," he warned. The prepared for more defeat than victory, more failure than success. There is no more complicated thing than the human mind and trying to determine why people do what they do, want what they want, and hate what they hate. Unlike a medical doctor, your patients more often than not are unwilling to let you discover what is the cause of their illness. They are either afraid or unable to do so. Imagine a doctor's patient preventing the doctor from la-towing he or she has a fever, and refusing to let the doctor take his or her temperature, and then you will have a little better idea of what awaits you in the world of psychiatry."
"I understand," I said. "and I am not
discouraged."
He smiled, "Good," he said. He closed and opened his eyes. "That's very good."
I returned to finish my college semester. Allan and I continued seeing each other. I didn't want to fall in love so fast. The Doctor's words staved with me. More than ever now, I was very determined to develop a career first. During the summer. Allan went to Europe to study. and I didn't see him again until the start of the new semester. I thought we would drift apart and he would probably find someone else, but to my surprise and delight at the time, that wasn't so.
It was the Doctor's idea that I do some volunteer work at his clinic that summer. I think I learned more about psychology in those ten weeks than I did or would in four years of formal schooling. One thing that happened was my appreciation and respect for him grew. His reputation in the world of psychology had only grown over the years, and he was off as a guest speaker more often than ever.
My working there brought us even closer. We spent more time together after work as well, going to restaurants, taking walks on our grounds, or simply relaxing and watching some televison. I could feel his effort to get to know me more and to slowly lower the barriers that had been kept up between us for so many years. One of the East things that happened was I stopped thinking of him as the Doctor, and, finally, as my father. After all, he was the only father I had known. Whoever had made my real mother pregnant did not know I existed, much less cared, and if there was one thing I had learned from Scott Lawrence and his family, it was that relationships, not blood, mattered the most.
When I prepared to leave for college this time. I did not expect it would be as emotional for either of us. We were planning to have dinner at my father's favorite restaurant. He had made all the arrangements, and I sensed it was going to be a special night for us. Two days before, however, he received a phone call from the coordinator of the American Psychiatry Association, who informed him their schedule for the upcoming national conference had been revised because the feature speaker, set to greet everyone, had suffered a heart attack. They wanted my father, and since he would have a national forum from which he could reveal and discuss some of his innovative techniques at his clinic, he had to accept. With the work he had to complete before leaving, his free time was constricted.
"Don't worry," I told him. "We'll see each other very soon anyway. Remember, you promised to visit me on campus this semester so I could show you off," I said, and he laughed.
He was gone the day before I left for school. Alone in the big house, except for Miles and the maid who came by to clean twice a week. I wandered slowly through the big estate home and thought about my youth here. my Amou, and my AM. I felt guilty calling her that now, but it just seemed to came naturally to me.
So much of this house still seemed off-limits to me or still carried unhappy memories. It was here in the family room that Alberta came upon me one afternoon. I was pretending to be a mother and I was mothering two small dolls. I suppose I was imitating her too well, for she stood behind me quietly, listened, and then pounced.
She told me I was sick in the head to think such terrible things at my age, and she warned me if she ever caught me doing it again, she would put glue in my mouth and make my tongue stick to the roof of it. It was a terrifying image. I tried not to cry until she left because she hated that. It only made her angrier.
Because of that and a few other occasions when she spied upon me. I took to whispering my pretend, even when I was outside and there was no chance of her overhearing any of it.
The Doctor had kept her things in the bedroom for a long time after she died, mostly because he just didn't have the time to get around to doing anything about it. I thought. but I also thought it was because removing her clothing, her cosmetics, her brushes and all would be like closing the lid on her coffin, and it was just something he was avoiding for as long as he could.
Now, her naked vanity desk remained, a cold reminder of what had once been. Of course. I recalled the infamous time she caught me in her makeup and revealed the great secret of my birth and status. I could see myself sitting there as a little girl, enjoying my pretend. and I could see her in the doorway, furious.
The Doctor's office would always remain sacrosanct to me. His personality was there, in its order and neatness. Alberta never liked coming in here, I thought. It actually was threatening to her. Maybe that was why I enjoyed being in there so much. In our house, this office was like a sanctuary. Evil, nastiness, anger, and pain were not permitted within its doors. Here there was only calmness, reason, logic, concern.
Amou's room was now occupied by Miles, because it was much nicer than the room he had had when she was living here. Still, just walking down that corridor and looking at the door brought back so many, many memories of her. I was so attached to her. I loved just watching her work, whether it was in the kitchen or doing her needlepoint. Her voice was forever embedded in my mind-- those melodies. Portuguese folk
songs, children's songs, and her laughter, melodic, full of love and life. It still echoed in this hallway. It would never be gone.
I wandered to the rear door and stepped out on the patio. The sun was setting. This would be the last twilight here for me for a while. Despite the difficult childhood I had experienced growing up here, it was still home. I knew no other, and at least I had a home, a place to call my own, or as Robert Frost once wrote. "A place where when you go there, they have to take you in."
Even if it was no more than that, it was something. I had this great faith that, in the days and weeks, months and years to come. the Doctor-- my father-- and I would grow into a true father and daughter, and this house, these grounds would warm up considerably for me. There would be a time when we would truly just have each other, and that would be enough for both of us for a while.
I would get married and have a family of my own. I was very determined about that, too, as determined as I was to have a career. It was as if I thought I could get revenge for how I had been treated. My, child will drown in my love, I thought, There would never be a doubt as to whom his or her mother was. It made me laugh to think of myself that way, but there was something inside me that called for and demanded that.
Can we be forgiven for giving too much love?
We certainly can't be for giving too little, I thought angrily. Then I imagined the Doctor beside me shaking his head.
"Anger isn't appropriate for a therapist. Willow," he would tell me. "Step back. analyze. You don't have to forgive, but you do have to understand."
I sighed and nodded.
All right, I thought. I'll try to do that__
But I might not be as strong as you.
The Doctor. My father. My friend,
Will you forgive me for that at least"'
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