Gaits of Heaven

by Susan Conant

  So, since I’m not a psychotherapist, thank heaven, I have to preface the following by stating that since a transcript of Rita’s phone conversation with Peter York is nonexistent and therefore unavailable to me, I am reluctantly settling for the most accurate version of their exchange that I’m able to reconstruct.

  Fact: at about the time I was filching the disc from Wyeth’s computer, Peter York calls his supervisor, Rita, to consult with her about a patient of his who is in a crisis. The patient is, of course, Wyeth, who has called his therapist, Peter, from his cell phone to say that he almost killed his father and is now wandering the streets of Cambridge with nowhere to go.

  Rita calmly asks Peter what he said to Wyeth. Peter, it emerges, told Wyeth to go to his mother’s house. Peter expresses his concern about the boy’s potential for violence, both intentional and unintentional. Remarkably, or so it might seem, Rita’s response is more practical than psychological: assuring the boy’s physical safety comes first; Peter must maintain contact with Wyeth until the situation is stable. “He’ll probably go to his mother’s,” she says.

  She then asks what precipitated the crisis. After listening closely, she says, “Okay, the father makes a sudden unilateral change in the rules. Until tonight, the rule was that sooner or later, Wyeth got anything he wanted. Then all of a sudden, with no negotiation and no real warning, the father said no. And apparently meant it. There was obviously a need to modify the old rule, but with an adolescent, there has to be negotiation. The son needs to participate in the process and not just have this radical change sprung on him.”

  After again listening, Rita says, “Frank Farmer. Yes, I agree. They’re his speciality—these families with individual therapists and couples therapists, and everyone’s on meds, and everyone’s acting out, yes. When it comes to impossible families, he’s the court of last resort. He’s a legend. But Frank may not be willing to see these people.” She listens and then replies, “Okay, I could run it by him. He might do it for me. But in the meantime, see if the son is at the mother’s by now. And then you’re going to need to see the father and son together. If the rules are changing, the two of them need to work on how that happens.”

  CHAPTER 35

  When Steve, Leah, Caprice, and I returned home, Rita was in the yard, where she was talking on her cell phone and letting Willie, her Scottie, run around. Leah and Caprice went upstairs to watch a video. I felt like going to bed, snuggling up between Steve and a couple of dogs, and losing myself in a novel written before the invention of computers, psychotherapy, twelve-step programs, or cell phones. Pride and Prejudice. The Moonstone. Our Mutual Friend.

  As it was, our dogs needed their evening outing, and we had to listen for the phone. Furthermore, although Steve was always happy to let all five of our own dogs run together, neither of us wanted to take our dogs to the yard while Willie was there lest Willie display his excess of what’s called real terrier character. His feistiness always terrified Lady, and Lady’s terror aroused India’s protectiveness. Under my tutelage, Rowdy had become more than decent with other dogs, but not to the extent of calmly tolerating a noisy terrier challenge. As to Sammy, like sire, like son? I didn’t want to find out. Weirdly enough, Kimi, my alpha malamute feminist, reacted to Willie only by regarding him with an expression of utter disdain; in Kimi’s view, he was an upstart pipsqueak incapable of constituting a serious threat to her supremacy.

  So, I opened the door to the yard and stood at the top of the steps in the hope that Rita would hurry up. She met my gaze and gestured that she’d be off the phone in a second. “Well, crisis over for the moment,” she said into the phone. “We’ll talk about this at our next meeting. Look, before managed care and all the insurance problems, there were family systems therapists who would’ve met with everyone involved. Everyone. Parents, children, relatives, neighbors, friends, all the therapists, the household help. Even the dog trainer! The whole network. No one does that these days. Frank Farmer is probably the only therapist around who’d know how to do it, and even he doesn’t want to do it anymore. No one does. It’s not just the question of how you bill the insurance companies. It’s exhausting.” She listened. “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that individual psychotherapy is a complete waste of time with this boy, but I do agree, Peter. Now, does the father know that the boy is at his mother’s?” She nodded and, after a few concluding words, ended the conversation.

  “Wyeth is at Johanna’s?” I asked.

  “You know—”

  “You said ‘even the dog trainer.’ We’ve just come from Ted Green’s. As you apparently know, Wyeth threw his computer and monitor and printer out the window when Ted had Dolfo in the yard. They got hit. Ted probably has a broken ankle or foot. Steve went to check out Dolfo. Wyeth had taken off. When we left, just now, George McBane had taken Ted to the emergency room, and Barbara Leibowitz was staying at Ted’s in case Wyeth came back. George and Barbara live next door. You know them. They’re psychiatrists. I need to call her. She offered to let everyone know what was going on.”

  While I was updating Barbara and then telling Steve, Caprice, and Leah that Wyeth was at his mother’s, Rita took Willie to her apartment. Then she came back down and joined Steve and the dogs and me in the yard. She greeted me by saying, “These boundary violations make me very uncomfortable.”

  “Rita, Barbara needed to know that Wyeth was safe. So did the rest of us. And if you think that Caprice’s presence here is a boundary violation, you’re wrong. What are we supposed to do? Throw her out? Besides, you’re the one who said ‘dog trainer.’”

  “It was only a figure of speech.”

  “Dog trainer isn’t a figure of speech. You meant me, and you meant it in a disparaging way, as if my efforts to help Dolfo didn’t really count. He is a member of that crazy family, and I have to say that getting everyone together sounds like a wonderful idea. Like one of those…What do you call them? Confrontations? Interventions? To persuade people to go into drug treatment centers. That kind of thing.”

  “That’s not what I was talking about. The idea isn’t to confront any one person. It’s to treat the entire system instead of identifying any one person as the locus of pathology.”

  “In this case,” Steve said, “you could flip a coin about which one to choose. Rita, you want a drink?”

  Rita was concerned that the crisis might not actually be over, so she wanted to stay sober, and Steve and I were thirsty, so all of us ended up drinking lemonade.

  “I think that you should organize one of these systems interventions,” I told Rita.

  “Not me! I don’t even know how. The only person who could do it is a guy named Frank Farmer. He specializes in these complicated families. Why I am talking to you about this? I’m not!”

  “He specializes in basenjis,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If it’s the same Frank Farmer. Sixty or so? With a mane of white hair? Good-looking. Very athletic.”

  “Frank’s a client of mine,” Steve said. “He’s a psychologist. Nice dogs. One of them went Best of Breed at Westminster a couple of years ago.”

  “Dogs!” Rita exclaimed. “I should’ve known.”

  I wasn’t surprised at all. Anything but. “Of course you should’ve known. As the hymn says, All nature sings, and round me rings, the music of the spheres. It’s obvious that the universe is sending us a message, namely, that Frank was meant to intercede.”

  “I told Peter I’d speak to him, but I don’t think he’ll do it.”

  “Frank owes me,” I said. “I’m the one who sent him to the handler who showed that dog for him at Westminster. Frank is grateful to me. Besides, we go way back. He knew my mother.”

  “Every dog owner over the age of forty knew your mother,” Rita grumbled.

  “Those who did thought very highly of her. She has posthumous clout. But go ahead and talk to Frank on your own. Then if he says no, tell him I said to ask.”

  CHAPTER 36

 
At seven o’clock on Tuesday morning in the house next to Ted Green’s, Barbara Leibowitz and George McBane are having breakfast. Although they are sitting at the same kitchen table and listening to the same National Public Radio program, they are not exactly eating together. Indeed, it might be said that they are eating apart or that George is having breakfast with Barbara; and she with the half-Westie and entirely adorable Portia and with Dolfo. In deference to Barbara’s desire that he lower his cholesterol level, George is sprinkling granola on a bowl of low-fat Total yogurt. Barbara is indulging in an Iggy’s croissant, on which she is spreading sweet butter. The well-trained, civilized Portia, loose in the kitchen, is munching on the contents of a white ceramic dish that bears her name in ornate blue letters. Since Barbara wisely views Dolfo as precivilized, he is in a nearby wire crate. He does not envy Portia her personalized dish but is happy to make do with a stainless steel bowl. The dogs are eating together in the sense that they are having the same meal, a mixture of Eukanuba, safflower oil, grated carrot, diced chicken breast that Barbara cooked herself, a small quantity of filtered water, and two powdered supplements, Nupro and Missing Link. Although the dogs are silent right now and are attending exclusively to their food, each would be willing to woof pleasantly at the other, whereas Barbara is not speaking to George.

  “Barbara, they’re rodents, for God’s sake,” says George. “They’re rats with furry tails. Try thinking of it that way. We had rats. I poisoned them. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to upset you. I know how softhearted you are. The only thing I’m guilty of is pest control.”

  CHAPTER 37

  On Tuesday morning, Caprice astonished me by getting up early with the rest of us and leaving to meet with a physics teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School to discuss tutoring. It soon emerged that the teacher was a client of Steve’s and that Steve had been the matchmaker. As a romantic matchmaker for human beings, Steve was all but useless; he failed to share my interest in fixing people up, and whenever I suggested that So-and-so and So-and-so might make a good couple, he’d shrug his shoulders and offer no opinion on the matter. Need I add that he refused to read Jane Austen? He did, however, have a good eye for a dog and a particular talent for prophesying the outcomes of particular breedings. For instance, when he’d learned about the Emma-Rowdy breeding that had produced Sammy, he’d known right away that he’d want a puppy. So, I assumed that he’d regarded Caprice as in physics season, so to speak, and had applied his talented eye to identifying a suitable mate.

  Once the animals and I had the house to ourselves, I did my usual morning chores and then settled down at the kitchen table with my notebook computer and the disc I’d lifted from Ted Green’s yard. My guilt about the pilfering took the form of a conviction that the disc was going to contaminate my notebook with a virus that would wipe out my hard drive and e-mail itself to all my friends, who’d blame me for the epidemic, and rightly so! What do thieves deserve? The worry about a virus was justified, but since I used the notebook only for writing and never for e-mail, even the worst infection couldn’t have spread itself to my Internet contacts. Still, my guilt-driven fears led me to go online with the notebook and update the virus definitions before slipping the CD into the drive and scanning it for infection. It was clean.

  All my guesses about its contents were wrong. I expected music, a movie, or maybe pirated software or games. My hope, of course, was that in preparing to transfer files to the new computer he’d been demanding, Wyeth had backed up his documents on the disc and that somewhere in his files there’d be something—anything—about Eumie’s murder. The notion now seems nuts. Wyeth was about as likely to keep an intimate diary as he was to pen sonnets or to execute delicate watercolor paintings of flowers. Still, there was an off chance that he’d taken an English course that had required him to keep a journal and that he’d continued the habit of making entries. In fact, the files on the disc weren’t Wyeth’s at all; rather, they were what I quickly recognized as a therapist’s notes about patients. I opened and quickly closed several files after reading only the first few sentences. To my shame, I then read one brief file in its entirety.

  Youngman, Quinn. Initial interview. Psychiatrist, psychopharm. Pt. grew up in small town in Montana, conservative family, sent to college to become minister. Attended U. of Mont., superstraight Young Republican, no sex, drugs, alcohol. Took science course, encountered evolution & scientific method. Result: internal revolution. Switched to chem, biology, physics. Excelled. Applied to med schools in East. Went to Cornell, where he rewrote his past, now seen by self as embarrassing and absurd. Recast self to peers as having been radical outsider among political conservatives and religious fundamentalists at home. Now complains of sense of fakery and emptiness, with false presentation of self that in own opinion impedes ability to form genuine relationships.

  “Rowdy,” I said to my most trusted confidante, “I have done a bad, bad thing. I have learned things I have no right to know.” Therapists are taught to be nonjudgmental. If a patient is on the verge of murdering someone, the therapist is obliged to warn the intended victim. But in most instances, no matter how despicable, rotten, disgusting, irritating, boring, or unlikable the patient, the poor therapist is supposed to listen and help rather than to judge. Such idealism! I ask you, just how capable is even the most highly trained and self-disciplined professional of squelching inevitable human feelings? It’s possible, I suppose, that Psychotherapy 101 includes a unit on keeping a poker face, and I’m sure that skilled, experienced therapists manage to keep their judgments from leaking into their behavior with patients, but imagine the effort! In contrast, consider dogs, all dogs, any dog, Rowdy, for instance, dog of dogs, primus inter pares, he of the deepest dark eyes, the most heartily wagging of heavily furred white tails, he of the heavy bone, the massive muscle, and the oldest of souls, he who knew all my sins, judged not, and effortlessly loved me with all his heart. “What,” I asked him, “am I supposed to do now? These notes weren’t made by Ted Green or Eumie Brainard-Green. That’s not where Wyeth got these files. Quinn Youngman is Ted’s psychopharmacologist, and he was Eumie’s. He isn’t Ted’s patient, and he wasn’t hers. Those break-ins up the street? That’s where this disc came from. Quinn Youngman and all these other people whose records are on this disc are patients of one of those therapists. So, take a wild guess about who broke into those offices. Absolutely. Wyeth Green.”

  I got down on the floor and wrapped my arms around Rowdy’s neck. In his profoundly nonjudgmental opinion, I hadn’t done anything wrong. Consequently, I can’t actually say that he sympathized with my moral dilemma. He did, however, respond to my hug by lying down and presenting his belly in the hope that I’d rub it, as I did. The interchange isn’t, I hope, typical of therapist-patient interaction unless, of course, one or the other is a dog. But being a dog, Rowdy was extremely helpful. “Yes,” I said. “About Quinn, what I do is nothing. The information isn’t mine and therefore isn’t mine to pass along. Wyeth? What I don’t do about Wyeth is turn him over to the police. Or I don’t rush into doing that, anyway. Maybe what I do is talk to Rita. Because, you know what? Once in a while, human therapists do have their uses.”

  CHAPTER 38

  That same Tuesday afternoon at about four o’clock, I got another pleading call from Ted Green. His previous pleas had been merely alarmist. This time, his ordinarily pleasant, calm voice sounded weak and thick. He said that his ankle was in a cast and that he wasn’t supposed to put weight on it. His new housekeeper hadn’t shown up. At his insistence, Barbara had returned Dolfo. He’d managed to get down the back steps to take Dolfo out, but the exuberant dog had jumped on him and knocked him to the ground. He’d had to crawl back upstairs to the house. It seemed to me that he hadn’t been thinking straight: the yard was fenced, and if he was unable to manage stairs, he should just have let Dolfo out and then in. Ted went on. He was out of dog food, the milk was sour, he’d had to cancel all his patients, and he was on so much p
ain medication that he belonged in bed. Barbara and George weren’t home. He didn’t know what to do. Oy vey iz mir! The cry was merited. He really needed help.

  Caprice was there when I took the call. “What’s true is that Ted has no real friends,” she said when I’d hung up. “He has people he sucks up to, people he wants to impress, that kind of thing. There were people who cared about my mother, but they were her friends, not Ted’s. They know what a poseur he is. He called you because he knew you’d feel sorry for him.”

  Mindful of Kevin’s warning, I said, “Look, I’m not crazy about the idea of going there alone, but he sounds terrible. I do feel sorry for him. But…Caprice, bad things happen in that house. I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “They probably won’t happen to you,” she said.

  “I’ll just take over milk and dog food. I’ll drop it off. I won’t stay. Or maybe Barbara and George are home by now. They’d help. I’m sure Barbara would take Dolfo.”

  “She tried to talk them out of buying him,” Caprice said. “She said there was no such thing as a golden Aussie huskapoo and that if they wanted a mixed-breed dog, they should go to a shelter.”

  “She was right. But at least there’s nothing wrong with his temperament, why, I can’t imagine. According to everything I know about dogs, it’s a miracle that he isn’t biting people. Anyway, let me try Barbara and George. If they aren’t there and if I really think that safety is an issue, I’ll get Steve to keep Dolfo at the clinic. I can’t have him here, not with our five.”