by Lesley Kagen
On the drive to the doctor’s office, the widow Finley reminded once again, “Remember to call me Louise, and not Mom or Mother or Mommy. Like I keep tellin’ you and your sister, unless we want to end up in the poor house, I need another husband. No man wants to take on another man’s children. I gotta catch one, reel him in, then break the bad news about the two of you.” She instructed Tess to take the wheel of the old woody station wagon with the broken muffler, undid another button on the beige blouse she’d bought for the occasion, and checked her Aqua Net-sprayed hair in the rearview mirror. “So don’t act stupid or shocked when you meet the doctor. He’s not from around here. He’s an Indian.”
Tess had always admired Indians, and not knowing there was any other kind other than Tonto, she was sorely let down when Dr. Mukhar Rajagee—not a psychologist the way her mother thought he’d mentioned over drinks in the noisy bar, but a podiatrist—greeted them in his waiting room wearing Hush Puppies without beads, and smelling not like maize, but some other food that made her eyes water.
After the doctor inspected Tess’s little feet and gave her a pair of ill-fitting insoles, he said something about “karma” and “a past life,” but she thought he’d said something different because he had a foreign way of talking. She spent a lot of time that summer wondering exactly how many “caramels” she’d need to consume to get back her “passed life,” which, while not perfect, was a whole lot better than the one she had now.
And here she was almost nine years later to the day, showing up almost an hour early for the appointment with Dr. Glenn Ganges, a balding, fisherman-knit-sweater-wearing psychologist at the university’s counseling center. A man so extraordinarily ordinary-looking that she thought she’d have a hard time picking him out of a lineup unless he was smoking his pipe, which was one of those meerschaums.
Dr. Ganges asked about her childhood and proved to be a good listener, but she needed more than a shoulder to cry on. She needed him to diagnose and treat the unbearable feelings that she was experiencing ASAP!
“Am I crazy?” she asked him at the onset of the third session.
The shrink, who Tess had begun to envision as a sea captain, leaned back in his swivel chair with a confident, snaggle-toothed smile. “No, no, of course not,” he replied in his preternaturally calm voice. “You just need to relax.”
“I’m sorry.” She was sure she’d heard him wrong. “Did you say I just need to relax?”
When he nodded, her laugh had all the conviction of a sit-com soundtrack. “Could you please be a little more specific? I mean…what’s wrong with me? Does it have a name?”
Ganges preferred not diagnosing this early in the process, but his client’s desperation was compelling. He drew deeply on his carved white pipe and released a cloud of swarthy-smelling smoke—unbeknownst to Tess, he saw himself as a sea captain too. One who hunted down mental illness. With a vengeance—and asked her, “Are you familiar with the term shell-shocked?”
She bowed her head like she was considering his question, but what she was really doing was checking for his degree out of the tops of her eyes. She wanted to make sure he’d graduated from a school of psychology and not podiatry. (Momentarily reassured when she discovered his diploma, that soon changed when she realized it was hanging next to a painting of a red sailboat getting tossed about by storm waves without a safe harbor in sight.)
Tess asked, “Don’t only ex-soldiers get shell-shocked?” She’d seen plenty of John Wayne and Audie Murphy war movies during her growing-up years. And there was the caretaker at the cemetery, her friend, Mr. McGinty, who had a difficult time being around the living after he came back from bayoneting Nazis. “Like the crew-cut guys around campus who scream ‘incoming’ and dive to the ground when they hear a car backfire?” She didn’t admit that she jumped out of her skin around sudden loud noises as well, but Dr. Glenn somehow picked up on that. She could see it in his wise sea-faring eyes.
“The symptoms aren’t always combat-related,” he explained. “Any life-shattering event, such as physical or emotional abuse, or death of a significant loved one can trigger…,” he sounded like he was reading out of the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, “depression, panic attacks, paranoia, hypervigilance, phobias, and flashbacks.”
Being more than familiar with the list that he’d rattled off, Tess wasn’t alarmed, she was filled with a beautiful, horrible relief. If he knew what she had…what was that famous saying? “Half the battle of fixing a problem is identifying it?”
“So…you can…um…cure this, right?” she asked.
Ganges didn’t say he could, or he couldn’t; he passed her a box of Kleenex, settled back into his swivel chair, and said, “Why don’t you tell me more about your relationship with your father and sister today?”
Not wanting to appear uncooperative, she dabbed at her tears, curled her legs up beneath her, and proceeded to tell the note-taking doctor how on a lovely August afternoon a few weeks short of her tenth birthday, her father, Edward “Eddie” Finley, borrowed a motorboat from a pal at Lonnigan’s where he worked tending bar. Tess’s younger-by-a-year sister, Robin Jean, who’d been nicknamed Birdie due to her low birth weight, large eyes, and tiny-boned frame, had made it clear early on that she didn’t care for fishing, so she wasn’t out on Lake Michigan with them that day. (Non-swimmer Tess was terrified of deep water, so she shouldn’t have been bobbing around in that boat that afternoon either, but she adored her daddy and would do anything to spend time with him.)
Father and daughter whiled away the hours in the record-setting summer heat talking, fishing, and laughing that fateful afternoon. When “Good-time Eddie,” who was known far and wide for his funny bone, stood to reach for a worm out of the tin can to thread Tess’s hook, he comically pretended to lose his balance, but then due to the heat of the day and the consumption of more than a few bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, he grew dizzy and lost his balance. On his way down, he conked his head against the outboard motor and tumbled over the side of the boat named The High Life.
Her daddy loved practical jokes of all kinds, but he absolutely adored the ones that scared you before they made you laugh. Like, when he jumped out of the girls’ bedroom closet, or when he put a hunk of raw meat under their bed on Halloween. That’s why after he fell into the lake, Tess swallowed back the water from his splash and wasn’t worried at all. Her daddy was an excellent swimmer who took his jokes very, very seriously, so she was ready for him to stay underwater longer than Houdini before he popped back up. She was doubled over in laughter while she waited for him to resurface with a sputtering, “Gotcha!”
Her mother, Louise, called the police when they didn’t show up by suppertime. The sun had already set by the time the lake patrol showed up to comb the waters for the missing girl and her father. They found and rescued Tess, and began their search for Eddie early the following morning, but a few days later, they gave up any hope of resurrecting him.
With a pencil poised over his pad, Dr. Ganges interrupted Tess’s story to ask, “You do realize that you couldn’t have saved your father, correct?”
She remained flat faced.
“Was there a memorial service for him?”
She nodded.
“Did you and your sister attend?”
“No.”
The psychologist scribbled like mad on his yellow pad. “Were you later given the opportunity to tell him goodbye?”
Tess gave him an eerie smile. “Every day.”
Thanks to the Veterans Administration, which had supplied a cheap coffin and a simple stone free of charge, her daddy was buried in the backyard of the Finley sisters’ Keefe Avenue house. Mind you, her father’s actual bones were not interred; they’re still lying undiscovered at the bottom of Lake Michigan not far from a freighter that sank in 1822. And I don’t mean the Finley sisters’ actual backyard, but the grounds of Holy Cross Cemetery that butted up against their property.
Louise
’s adamant refusal to allow Tess and Birdie to commemorate their daddy’s passing was somewhat a sign of the times, but also a harbinger of the punitive anger she felt toward her husband for leaving her with two small girls to raise and less than a hundred dollars in the bank.
Not attending the pretend funeral Mass and the burial wasn’t quite as vital to Tess for she had borne witness to her father slipping into his watery grave. She knew her daddy was gone forever, but Birdie? Not being in the boat that afternoon nor having the opportunity to play a part in the normal end of life rigmarole—hearing folks praise Eddie Blessing from the altar lectern, grieving for him into their hankies, and meeting up at the cemetery to throw pink carnations on the coffin that held only memories—left the already delicate girl at odds, to say the least.
Their mother’s family, the Fitzgeralds, had never played a part in the sisters’ lives. Louise had an older brother named Virgil who’d run off when he was sixteen to join the Navy and was never heard from again. Her father died in the second World War, and her mother, a bitter woman whose name was Faye, passed a few years ago of complications from a bladder infection, so during the weeks following their father’s demise, the sisters had only their beloved Gammy and Boppa. Tess and Birdie wanted more than anything to spend time with their grandparents in their stone house in the country, but due to a combination of their mother’s contentious relationship with her husband’s family, and the grief that had taken a toll on the elderly couple, their comfort was not forthcoming, not for a while anyway. Eddie, their youngest, was the second child they’d lost. They had another son who lived in the area, but “The Professor,” was quite a bit older, and didn’t appear to want much to do with his family.
So the Finley girls—or the “Finley Ghouls,” as they were known in the neighborhood on account of their unusual hobby, which essentially was death—were left to their own devices. After they cleaned the house as directed by their mother, they’d sit on the back porch of the Keefe Avenue house that was just yards away from the black iron fence that ringed the cemetery. They’d while away the hours of the hot August days playing Cat’s Cradle or Candy Land on the wooden steps, but never Go Fish! because that was just too sad.
Tessie would always work their conversations back to their father’s death. She had to, for something alarming had developed. Birdie was refusing to believe that their daddy was gone forever, which was so weird on top of all her other problems. She would drift off in the middle of chats, had a hard time grasping reading or time-telling, and barely understood what was happening in the movies at the Tosa Theatre. Tess grew so worried about her that she’d had to come up with another of her never-ending lists to help her deal with the situation:
TO-DO LIST
Talk Mom into letting Birdie and me go to Daddy’s pretend funeral.
Convince Birdie that Daddy is really dead so Mom doesn’t send her to the county insane asylum.
If #1 and #2 don’t work out, find Daddy’s pretend grave in the cemetery when Mom isn’t around so Birdie can say goodbye to him once and for all because seeing really is believing.
Decide if I should confess to the cops about murdering Daddy.
Feeling like a broken forty-five, Tess told her sister once again on one of those Candy Land-playing, back-porch afternoons, “Daddy’s dead.”
“No, he’s not.”
“Yeah, he really is.”
“Is not.”
“Okay,” Tess said, “if you don’t believe that Daddy is at the bottom of the lake then where is he?”
“Boca Raton.”
Tess stopped on her hop over to the Candy Cane Forest. “Boca…what?”
“Boca Raton,” Birdie said like her sister was deaf and dumb. “It’s a city.”
“Oh, yeah? Where is Boca Raton a city?”
“Florida.”
Tess, who always got A’s in geography said, “Where’d you hear that? School?”
Birdie said, “Nope,” and gave her a wisenheimer smile because she rarely knew something that Tess didn’t. “I heard about it at the drug store. There’s a picture postcard taped on the side of the cash register and the man on the front of it is Daddy! He’s holdin’ up a huge silver fish with a pointy nose and wearing a blue shirt. Mr. Dalinsky told me it says, “Greetings from Boca Raton! Wish you were here!”
Tess thought, Oh, boy.
Birdie drew another card because she didn’t like the one she’d gotten. “They looked really hard for three days and they didn’t find Daddy in the lake,” she said very full of herself.
“Yeah, but just because they didn’t find him,” Tess said, “that doesn’t mean that he isn’t down there.”
“Doesn’t mean that he is, either.”
“But that doesn’t make sense, Bird. If Daddy is still alive, after he fell outta the boat, why didn’t he just get back in? And why didn’t he just come home?”
“He wanted to,” Birdie said wistfully. “But he couldn’t because he got am…am…am—”
“His arms got amputated?”
Birdie flapped hers up and down. She did that sometimes when she got frustrated. “He didn’t get back in the boat because he got am…am…amnesia.”
Tess thought, Double, oh, boy.
Even though the pine box that had been sunk in the cemetery was empty, Tess felt sure if Birdie could only see the grave and her daddy’s tombstone it would help her accept his death. It might even stop her from yelling out in her sleep and wetting the bed, which is why Tess swore to herself then and there that she’d start looking for her father’s pretend grave in the cemetery the following day.
She stopped, blew her nose, and told Dr. Ganges, “What’s the point of going all over this again?” Sharing the stories that ran through her mind on a continual loop didn’t feel healing, it was like picking at a scab. “Couldn’t you just give me a drug to make me better? Something to erase the memories, or help me,” she made air quotes, “relax?”
“I could refer you to a prescribing physician, but drugs will only mask your symptoms,” he said, because he couldn’t very well tell a woman in her state that there was no real known cure for what she had other than exposing it to the light of day and learning how to manage it. “The best way to get to the bottom of your problems is by talking about them. We’ll need to dive deep.”
She could feel his genuine concern and appreciated it, but his diving deep suggestion reminded her of the old television program Sea Hunt—a very touchy subject indeed—and she never returned to Dr. Ganges’s office.
So, other than comparing notes with her younger and even-more-mixed-up sister, Tess rose every morning hoping for divine intervention even though she didn’t believe in that sort of thing by that time. Imagine her surprise when not one, but two miracles were eventually sent her way. William Blessing. And Dr. Charles Drake.
Shortly after she met and fell madly in love with Will when he showed up for lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, he told her she was hilarious, but everybody had always told her that. “You’re a funny kid, Tessie,” her father used to say.
“And all those voices and impressions you can do…you should be a comedian!” Will had said. “Like one of those girls on Saturday Night Live. Like Glenda!”
“Gilda,” she corrected.
“Right!”
The idea of being funny for money clicked with Tess, and after researching the subject, she found that one of the best formal training grounds in the country was The Second City in nearby Chicago. The two-hour, twice-weekly round-trip to the improvisation and stand-up classes was horribly challenging given her fear of travel, but she thrived on the laughter and the thought of how proud her father would be. Socially awkward, she also felt more at ease around the other comedians, who tended toward instability as well. One of the other stand-ups did a bit about her Woody Allen look-alike shrink. She called him, “A real mensch.” Tess didn’t know what a mensch was, but she liked the sound of it, so she got his name and made an appointment hoping t
hat he might do her more good than the university psychologist had.
Turned out Dr. Charles Drake was indeed a good man who could be counted on. An added bonus was the fact that his office was on the ground floor of a building located on Chicago’s Miracle Mile. (I arranged that.) Besides coming up with a more modern name for what was troubling Tess—post-traumatic stress disorder—Dr. Drake proved to be much more useful than Dr. Ganges in others ways as well. He didn’t look like he wanted to harpoon her for one thing.
The mild-mannered, middle-aged psychiatrist explained to Tess during one of their many sessions, “If too many traumas happen too close together, the mind can’t process them. Feeling under siege, it shifts into high gear to protect a person against further damaging experiences. It appears that your father’s death, your mother’s indifference, and your tumultuous childhood has become more than you can integrate.”
Dr. Drake also assured her early on that she would not spend the rest of her life in a padded room eating ice cream with her fingers. And that the probability of the scenario she feared the most more than likely would never happen. “Yes, that could happen,” the good doctor stated, but the chance was slim that a tubercular-looking man would hitch up his oily jeans, gob on the floor of a nearby Mobil station’s bathroom, rub his overly moisturized hands together whilst muttering to himself, “There she is, that redhead, Tess Blessing. I’ll wait until she goes in to the mini-mart to buy a Three Musketeers bar, then I’ll grab the Coke can out of her car and slip in some of this curare I carry with me at all times. She’ll never know what hit her.”
Over the years that she saw him, Dr. Drake didn’t only help Tess examine her struggles through brilliant analysis, he taught her what an important role her sense of humor played in transcending her pain, different relaxation techniques, how to recognize when she was in danger of being overtaken by PTSD rage, and they’d worked together to reduce her phobias from fourteen to eleven. They parted ways only when the both of them agreed that her panics, flashbacks, depressions, and other symptoms had quieted down to dull roars.
