I was so upset I didn’t know what to do, so I did what was previously forbidden. I stood up and I walked to where he was sitting, like crossing an ocean of time for me, and I extended my hand. “Your apology is accepted, Dr. Myers,” I said.
He stood up and we were eye to eye. He took my hand and shook it firmly. As far as I could remember the only other time we shook hands was the day I left Payne Whitney fifty years before.
I knew he still wasn’t satisfied. He would never forgive himself.
He died six years later, in January 2009, from lung cancer, and it was only then that I found out anything about him, by reading his obituary in the New York Times. I sat at the kitchen counter and cried reading it. It turned out that the first day I met him at the hospital he looked so young because he was only thirty years old, just twice my age at the time. He grew up in Westchester, New York, graduated from the University of Arkansas, Phi Beta Kappa, and went to medical school at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. His surgical residency was interrupted by the Korean War, where he became commander of the Fifteenth Medical Battalion, and he saved the lives of hundreds of men, supervising and operating on wounded soldiers in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital under fire. After the war he decided to do a second residency in psychiatry, which brought him to Payne Whitney. In his later years he became clinical professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical College, a supervising analyst at Columbia University’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and the author of five books. At Payne Whitney he was a senior resident, the fair-haired boy of the hospital. It was fate that randomly assigned me to him toward the end of his psychiatric residency, shortly before he started a successful private practice, in which I was one of his first patients.
Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned about him by reading his obituary was that he was Jewish. All those hours I spent trying to explain my life to him from a Jewish point of view, and he never let on. I wonder to this day why he led me to believe he wasn’t Jewish. I can hear him asking me, “And what would it mean to you if I was Jewish?”
A week after that last session with him, I received a bill for $300. Some things never change.
About the Author
Steven Gaines is the author of Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons; The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan; and Simply Halston, the biography of fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick. He is the co-author of The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles, among other books. Gaines is a co-founder of the Hamptons International Film Festival and lives in a small hamlet on the East End of Long Island.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 2016 by Steven Gaines
Cover design by Jonathan Lippincott
978-1-5040-3947-5
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