“Too bad you entered Saint Paul’s for help, Jordan.” He continued to shake his head. “If you and Mrs. Meredith had come to me in the first place you would have been all right.”
“Yeah,” I said noncommittally. “You may be right.”
“Did Saint Paul’s give you any tests of any kind? If so, we could obtain them and save the time of taking them over.”
“No, I didn’t get any tests—just blood tests.”
“Then let us begin with the Rorschach.” Dr. Fischbach opened his untidy top desk drawer, dug around in its depths and brought out a stack of cards about six inches by six inches and set them before me, Number One on top. “These are ink blots, Jordan, as you can see. We’ll go through the cards one by one and you tell me what they remind you of. Now, how about this one?” He shoved the first card across the desk and I studied it for a moment or so. It looked like nothing.
“It looks like an art student’s groping for an idea,” I suggested.
“Yes?” he encouraged me.
“It isn’t much of anything. Sometimes, Doctor, when an artist is stuck for an idea, he’ll doodle around with charcoal to see if he can come up with something. The meaningless lines and mass forms sometimes suggest an idea, and he can develop it into a picture. That’s what these ink blots look like to me.”
“How about right here?” He pointed with his pencil to one of the larger blots. “Does this look like a butterfly to you?”
“Not to me. No.”
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like some artist has been doodling around with black ink trying to get an idea.” How many times did he want me to tell him?
“You don’t see a butterfly?” He seemed to be disappointed.
“No butterfly.” I wanted to cooperate, but I couldn’t see any point in lying to the man. It was some kind of a trick he was trying to pull on me. I stared hard at the card again, trying to see something, some shape, but I couldn’t. None of the blots made a recognizable shape. I shook my head as he went on to the next card which also had four strangely shaped blots.
“Do these suggest anything?” he asked hopefully.
“Yeah,” I said. If he wanted to trick me I would play one on him. “I see a chicken in a sack with a man on its back; a bottle of rum and I’ll have some; a red-winged leek, and an oversized beak; a pail of water and a farmer’s daughter; a bottle of gin and a pound of tin; a false-faced friend and days without end; a big brown bear and he’s going everywhere; a big banjo and a—”
He jerked the cards from the desk and shoved them into the drawer. He looked at me seriously without any expression on his dark face and twisted the point of his beard with thumb and forefinger. My thin cotton robe was oppressively warm. I smiled, hoping it was ingratiating enough to please the doctor. Like all doctors, I knew, he didn’t have a sense of humor.
“I really want to cooperate with you, Doctor,” I said meekly, “but I actually can’t see anything in those ink blots. I’m an artist, or at least I used to be, and as an artist I can see anything I want to see in anything.”
“That’s quite all right, Jordan,” he said quietly. “There are other tests.” When he got to his feet I noticed he was slightly humpbacked and I had a strong desire to rub his hump for good luck. “Come on with me.” I followed him down the hall, Hank trailing us behind. We entered another small room that was furnished with a small folding table, typing paper and a battered, standard Underwood typewriter.
“Do you know how to typewrite, Jordan?” the doctor asked me.
“Some. I haven’t typed since I left high school though.”
“Sit down.”
I sat down at the folding table and the doctor left the room. Hank lit a cigarette for me and before I finished it the doctor was back with another stack of cards. These were about eight by ten inches. He put the stack on the table and picked up the first card to show it to me. “You’ll have fun with these.”
The first picture was a reproduction of an oil painting in black and white. It was a portrait of a young boy in white blouse and black knickers. His hair was long, with a Dutch bob, and he had a delicate, wistful face. He held a book in his hand. From the side of the portrait a large hand reached out from an unseen body and rested lightly on the boy’s shoulder. The background was an ordinary living room with ordinary, old-fashioned furniture. Table, chairs, potted plants and two vases full of flowers made the picture a bit cluttered.
“What I want you to do is this:” Dr. Fischbach explained, “Examine each picture carefully and then write a little story about it. Anything at all, but write a story. You’ve got plenty of paper and all the time in the world. After you finish with each one, put the story and picture together and start on the next one. Number the story at the top with the same number the picture has and they won’t get mixed up. Any questions?”
“No, but I’m not much of a story teller. I don’t hardly know the difference between syntax and grammar.”
“Don’t let that bother you. I’m not looking for polished prose, I merely want to read the stories. Get started now, and if you want to smoke, Hank’ll be right outside the door to give you a light. Right, Hank?”
“Yes, sir,” Hank replied with his customary smile.
They left the room and I examined the little print for a while and then put a piece of paper into the machine. It wasn’t fun, as Dr. Fischbach had suggested, but it passed the time away and I would rather have something to do, anything, rather than sit in the bleak cell they had assigned me. I wrote that the young boy was sitting for his portrait and during the long period of posing he got tired and fidgety. The hand resting on his shoulder was that of his father and it was merely comforting the boy and telling him the portrait would soon be over. In a few lines I finished the dull tale.
Each picture I tackled was progressively impressionistic and it did become fun after all, once I got interested. The last three reproductions were in color, in a surrealistic vein, and they bordered on the uncanny and weird. However, I made up stories on them all, pecking them out on the old machine, even though some of the stories were quite senseless. When I finished, I racked stories and cards together and called Hank. He was down at the end of the hall talking to a nurse. He dropped the cards and stories off at the doctor’s office and we started back to my cell. I stopped him.
“Just a second, Hank,” I said. “Didn’t you say something about a roof?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got a roof,” and he pointed toward a set of stairs leading up, right next to the elevator.
“After being cooped up so long,” I said, “I’d like to get some fresh air. Do you suppose the doc would let me go up on the roof for a smoke before I go back to that little tomb? That is, if you go along.”
“I’ll ask him.” Hank left me in the hall and entered the little office. He was smiling when he came out a moment later. “Come on,” he said, taking my arm. We climbed the short flight of stairs and Hank unlocked the door to the roof.
The roof was black tar-paper, but near the little building that housed the elevator machinery and short stairwell to the sixth floor, there were about twenty feet of duckboards scattered around and a small green bench. It was late in the afternoon and a little chilly that high above the ground, but we sat and smoked on the bench for about an hour. Hank didn’t mind sitting up there with me, because, as he said, if he was sitting around he wasn’t working. He was an interesting man to talk to.
“How come you stay with this line of work, Hank?” I asked him.
“I drifted into it and I haven’t drifted out. But it isn’t as bad as it looks. There are a lot of compensations.” He winked. “As a hot-shot male nurse, I rank somewhere between a doctor and an interne. I have to take orders from internes, but my pay check is about ten times as big as theirs, almost as big as some of the resident doctors. So the nurses, the lovely frustrated nurses, come flocking around, and I mean the female nurses. An interne doesn’t make the dough to take them out
and the doctors are married, or else they’re too careful to get mixed up with fellow workers, you know, so I do all right. I get my own room right here, my meals, laundry and my money too. Funny thing about these nurses. They all look good in clean white uniforms and nice white shoes, but they look like hell when they dress up to go out. I’ve never known one yet who knew how to wear clothes on a date. They seem to be self-conscious about it too. But when the clothes come off, they’re women, and that’s the main thing with me. Did you see that nurse I was talking to in the hall?”
“I caught a glimpse of her.”
“She’ll be in my room tonight at eleven. So you see, Harry, taking care of nuts like you has its compensations.” He slapped me on the knee. “Come on, let’s go.” He laughed happily and I followed him down the stairs.
For supper that night I ate hamburger patties and boiled potatoes, lime jello and coffee. The mental work of thinking up stories had tired me and I fell asleep easily. As Hank said, having the door unlocked was almost like not being locked in.
The next morning I had another session with Dr. Fischbach. It was an easy one and didn’t last very long. He gave me a written intelligence test. The questions were all fairly simple; questions like: “Who wrote Faust?”, “How do you find the circumference of a circle?”, “Who was the thirty-second president?”, and so on. In the early afternoon I was given a brainwave test. It was rather painful, but interesting. After I was stretched out on a low operating table, fifty or more needles were stuck into my scalp, each needle attached with a wire to a machine. A man pushed gadgets on the machine and it made flip-flop sounds. It didn’t hurt me and I didn’t feel any electric shocks, but it was a little painful when the needles were inserted under the skin of my scalp. All of this procedure seemed like a great waste of time and I hated the ascetic loneliness of my wooden cell. Sleeping on the mattress without any springs made my back ache.
The next few boring days were all taken up with more tests.
X-Rays were taken of my chest, head and back.
Urine and feces specimens were taken.
More blood from my arm and from the end of my forefinger.
My eyes, ears, nose and throat were examined.
My teeth were checked.
At last I began my series of interviews with Dr. Fischbach and these were the most painful experiences of all.
SEVENTEEN
Flashback
DOCTOR Leo Fischbach sat humped behind his desk twirling the point of his beard with thumb and forefinger. I often wondered if his beard was perfumed. It seemed to be the only link or concession between the rest of the world and his personality. If he had a personality. His large brown eyes, fixed and staring, were two dark mirrors that seemed to hold my image without interest, without curiosity, or at most, with an impersonal interest, the way one is interested in a dead, dry starfish, found on the beach. I was tense in my chair as I chain-smoked my free cigarettes and the longer I looked at Dr. Fischbach, the more I hated him. My efforts at total recollection, and he was never satisfied with less, had exhausted me. I began to speak again, my voice harsh and grating to my ears.
“The war, if anything, Doctor, was only another incident in my life. A nice long incident, but all the same, just another. I don’t think it affected me at all. I was painting before I was drafted and that’s all I did after I got in.”
“Tell me about this, er, incident.”
“Well, after I was drafted I was assigned to Fort Benning, Georgia. And after basic training I was pulled out of the group to paint murals in the mess-halls there. I was quite happy about this and I was given a free hand. Not literally, but for the army it was a good deal. Naturally, I knew the type of pictures they wanted and that’s what I gave them. If I’d attempted a few non-objective pictures I’d have been handed a rifle in a hurry. So I painted army scenes. Stuff like paratroopers dropping out of the sky, a thin line of infantrymen in the field, guns, tank columns and so on.”
“Did this type of thing satisfy you? Did you feel you were sacrificing your artistic principles by painting this way?”
“Not particularly. If I thought of it at all I knew I had a damned good deal. I was painting while other soldiers were drilling, running obstacle courses and getting shot at somewhere or other. I missed all that, you see. As a special duty man I was excused from everything except painting.”
“You didn’t paint murals for the duration of the war, did you?”
“Not at Fort Benning, no. After a year I was transferred to Camp Gordon—that’s in Georgia too, at Augusta.”
“What did you do there?”
“I painted murals in mess-halls.”
“Didn’t you have any desire for promotion?”
“No. None at all. But they promoted me anyway. I was made a T/5. Same pay as corporal but no rank or responsibilities.”
“How was your reaction to the army? Did you like it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you dislike it then?”
“I don’t know. I was in the army. Everybody was in the army.”
“How were you treated?”
“In the army everybody is the same. Nobody bothered me, because I was on special duty. Many times the officers would come around and inspect the murals I was working on. They were well pleased, very happy about them. Knowing nothing at all about art was to their advantage. On two different occasions I was given letters of commendation for my murals. Of course, they didn’t mean anything. Officers like to give letters like that; they believe it is good for morale. Maybe it is, I don’t know.”
“What did you do in your off-duty time in Georgia?”
Again I had to think back. What had I done? All I could remember was a blur of days, distant and hazy days. Pine trees, sand and cobalt skies. And on pay-days, gin and a girl. The rest of the month—days on a scaffolding in a hot wooden building, painting, doing the best I could with regular house paint, finishing up at the end of the day, tired but satisfied, grateful there was no sergeant to make me change what I had done. A shower, a trip to the first movie, bed by nine. Was there nothing else?
“Well, I slept a lot. It was hot in Georgia and I slept. I worked and then I hit the sack.”
“When did you get discharged?”
“November, 1945. And then instead of returning to Chicago I decided to come out to California and finish art school out here.”
“Why?”
“I must have forgotten to tell you about it. I had a wife and child in Chicago.”
“Yes, you did.” He made a note on his pad. He made his notes in a bastard mixture of loose German script and Speed-writing. “This is the first time you’ve mentioned a wife and child.”
“It must have slipped my mind. It was some girl I married while I was attending the Chicago Art Institute. She has a child, a boy, that’s right, a boy. She named him John, after her father. John Jordan is his name. I’ve never seen him.”
“Why didn’t you return to your wife and child? Didn’t you want to see your son? Sometimes a son is considered a great event in a man’s life.”
“Is that right? I considered it an unnecessary expense. I came to California because it was the practical thing to do. If I’d gone to Chicago I wouldn’t have been able to continue with my painting. It would have been necessary for me to go to work and support Leonie and the child. And I didn’t want to do it.”
“Didn’t you feel any responsibility for your wife? Or to the child?”
“Of course I did. That’s why I didn’t go back. I didn’t want to live up to the responsibility. It was more important to paint instead. An artist paints and a husband works.”
“Where’s your family now?”
“I imagine they’re still in Chicago. After I left the army I didn’t write to her any more.”
“Do you have any curiosity about how they’re faring?”
“Not particularly.”
Curiosity. That was an ill-chosen word for him to use. I could remember
my wife well. She was a strong, intelligent, capable young woman. She thought she was a sculptor, but she had as much feeling for form as a steel worker. She didn’t like Epstein and her middle-western mind couldn’t grasp his purported intentions. If a statue wasn’t pretty she didn’t like it. But she was good on the pointing-apparatus and a fair copyist. Her drawings were rough but solid, workmanlike. She would get by, anywhere. And my son was only an accident anyway. I certainly didn’t want a child, and she hadn’t either. But she had one and as long as he was with his mother, as he should be, he was eating. I had no doubt about that, and no curiosity.
“And then you entered the L.A. Art Center,” Dr. Fischbach prodded.
“That’s right. I attended the Center for almost a year, under the G.I. Bill.”
“Did you obtain a degree?”
“Just an A.A. Things didn’t go so well for me after the war. I had difficulty returning to my non-objective style and I was unable to finish any picture I started. I still can’t understand it. I could visualize, to a certain extent, what my picture would look like on canvas, but I couldn’t achieve it. I began and tossed aside painting after painting. The rest of my academic work was way above the average. It was easy to paint academically and I could draw as well as anybody, but that wasn’t my purpose in painting.”
“So you quit.”
“You might say I quit. But actually, I was offered a teaching job at a private school. I weighed things over in my mind and decided to accept it. I thought I’d have more free time to paint and a place to work as an art teacher. The Center was only a place to paint and as a teacher I’d get more money than the G.I. Bill paid.”
“What school did you teach at?”
Pick-Up Page 15
