Orpheus and the Pearl & Nevermore

by Kim Paffenroth;David Dunwoody

  "No, not at all. I once thought to study literature, but there were even fewer women studying it than were in medicine, so I found myself gravitating towards that field."

  "Well, I never thought to study it at school. I hardly think my parents would have approved of such a course. School was something a nice young lady did in order to be interesting and attractive to a man, not to pursue beauty and knowledge for their own sakes. And then when I got married, I hardly had any time to read. It's one of the few advantages to being dead, having all this time to read."

  "Why didn't you have time before?"

  "Oh, I was always doing so much work around the house. Romwald is a most helpful and efficient man, but I liked to do as much as possible myself. I suppose it was a habit from when I grew up. My mother always made me do so much of the work around the house. I just became used to it and expected to do it when I had my own home."

  Catherine nodded impassively, not wanting to let on that Mrs. Wallston had already talked about both her parents. "So, you haven't had other servants besides Romwald? I thought perhaps Dr. Wallston had kept only him on after your... illness, but I assumed there were others in the house before."

  "No, only Romwald. He always did the heavier, manual work, as in repairing the buildings, shoveling snow, raking leaves. And, of course, the driving. But I did all the cooking and cleaning, and most all the gardening."

  "I see." It seemed a strange arrangement for an extremely wealthy woman, but now was not the time to investigate. "And what sorts of books have you read since... this year? I was reading Jane Eyre last night."

  "Oh yes, any novel I can. I know it's silly, but I hope you don't find it too funny that I read Mary Shelley's monster story as soon as I was cognizant again of my surroundings. I think poor Percy had tried to hide it, for it wasn't in its usual place where I'd put it on the shelf, as though he thought it might upset me. I suspect the poor man did it because he thinks the story might be taken to reflect badly on him, the man of reason and science and action, for I've noticed Faust and Macbeth were similarly hidden. Or who knows? Perhaps Romwald secretly has censored the books to protect both of us. He's not nearly as dull and uncomprehending as you might think at first. And lately I've also gone back and reread the Greek tragedians. I know they're difficult, and somehow so distant and removed from reality, but I found myself craving them. Does that make sense?"

  Catherine could see where it made a good deal of sense, but also she was quite embarrassed that a dead woman's reading list was so much more lively and sophisticated than her own. "Yes, it does. Would you like to read some books together? Are there any that you have two copies of, so we could read them at night, and discuss them in the afternoons?"

  Mrs. Wallston raised her eyebrows. "You want to read with me?"

  "Why not? You said it's what you like to do, and I like to do it too. And it'll give us something useful to talk about."

  "Yes, that would be nice. Thank you."

  "You're entirely welcome."

  "I didn't know talking to you would be enjoyable."

  "Mostly, it will be."

  "And when it's not?"

  "It will be useful then, too."

  "That's good. Sometimes unpleasant things can be useful."

  "Let's talk about which unpleasant things are useful, and which aren't."

  Catherine's first real job in the craft for which she had so long and so diligently trained had finally begun. And even if it were in such a wholly unexpected way, with such an unusual and difficult charge, it was nonetheless the most thrilling, satisfying thing she had felt since she was a child.

  The next several weeks continued the therapy begun that day. The hook of talking about literature rather than directly about family and personal matters was quite useful to Catherine. Though she never lost sight of the goal or the roles they must play in order for therapy to be successful, she found herself enjoying their conversations, even looking forward to them, as she looked forward to spending every evening reading the same books as Mrs. Wallston.

  As Catherine had expected, the progress was much slower than Dr. Wallston could have imagined, although the physical attacks ended after the first day. But Mrs. Wallston's deep depression and anger were not dissipated, even if the outright violence had been restrained. All Catherine could offer to Dr. Wallston by way of explanation was to note that Mrs. Wallston had a deep-seated conflict with her mother, but so did practically every female of the species, so far as anyone could tell. It hardly took any new theories of Freud to ferret that out. But what lay behind those issues, the particular implications and connections of her own unique situation---these were secrets that everyone's psyche spent decades learning to hide most effectively. It hardly helped matters that Catherine could not know whether or to what extent Mrs. Wallston's mental state was affected by her physical condition and the massive quantities and unknown qualities of all the chemicals to which she was daily subjected. So, as much as Catherine enjoyed her daily work, she could make no guarantees of success, or even progress.

  After several such weeks of enjoyable but inconclusive therapy, Catherine thought it was time to bring the conversation back to Mrs. Wallston's mother more explicitly than she had attempted before. Catherine was standing, as she often did in their sessions, rather than sitting, for it put them both more at ease, somehow seeming less static or formal.

  "You mentioned that you did much housework when you were young. You must have had servants. Why did you have to do so much?"

  Mrs. Wallston was sitting on the couch, as usual. She never lay on it, partly for the physical reason that with her system so stimulated, she was restless and had to move around constantly, thereby making lying down the more stressful and uncomfortable posture. She had also admitted, without revealing anything at all surprising, that lying down reminded her far too much of being dead again, so she avoided it. As she sometimes did, she had let her hair down after lunch, since it was just the two of them, and pins and the tightening of her scalp often annoyed her hyper-sensitized nerves. Sitting there on the dark blue sofa -- her skin as always so appallingly white, accentuated by cascading folds of a dress of the same hue, and her blonde hair catching the sunlight and framing her face like the corona of an eclipse -- the contrast was both unnerving and captivating, somewhat like seeing a cameo that moved and spoke.

  Or, Catherine had the queerest imagining, like a large, perfect pearl set on a navy blue cushion. Yes, she thought, with the sunlight spilling into the room and over her, Mrs. Wallston today has more of the pearl's iridescence than a corpse's pallor.

  Catherine couldn't quite recall the parable about the pearl, or even if there were more than one, as she could remember the Lord saying both that pearls were not to be cast before swine, but also that a pearl was of great price. As a scientist she could also not help but remember that a pearl was, in the end, little more than a giant tumor. A product of pain and nervous excitement at the most basic, animal level. Catherine thought of all these as she considered her fragile and horribly beautiful charge.

  Mrs. Wallston took a deep breath, so as to say something, not because she needed to breathe. "Oh my, no, we didn't have servants. I used to think it was because mother was just being so particular in everything, just to spite me. And then I thought perhaps she was just being stingy, for she made my father do a lot of work around the house that a man of his stature might have expected servants to do."

  Catherine nodded. "You say you used to think of those explanations. What explanation did you decide on later?"

  "I remembered back to when I was very little. I remembered that then, there were servants, quite a few of them. A nanny, a cook, two different maids. And all of them such pretty, lively young women. All so very different... a bosomy English woman, a beautiful Irish girl, dark haired Italians, even several Negresses. Each one so different, but so charming. Several of them loved to play with me. And they all always smelled so nice... never perfume, of course, but earthy and rich and fecun
d, each in her own way. I loved having them near me. It was such an overwhelmingly feminine house, I don't know how my father could stand it." Mrs. Wallston wasn't really capable of laughing anymore, as it involved too much of a conscious inhaling and exhaling for it to sound like normal laughter, but she did manage a nervous sort of chuckle, almost like a cough.

  "But then they were gone? Did you ever know why?"

  Mrs. Wallston paused for quite a while. She frowned. She fidgeted. Catherine waited. To comfort her in her distress at this point would be premature and she would again cover up whatever it was. "They all laughed so much, too. It was quite a gay, frolicsome place. But mother never laughed. Never. I always thought her so severe and so particular and wondered why. But father laughed. He had a big, booming laugh when he was with me and we were playing. Sometimes I'd hear him behind a door, laughing with one of the servants, and it was more of a snicker. And they'd laugh then, too, but theirs weren't loud laughs, either, but more like little giggles or coos. I'd hear them behind doors and wonder. I even wondered when I actually saw him with one of them, his hands on her, lifting her skirt up, kissing her neck. I'd never seen him kiss mother that way, because one simply doesn't do that in front of others, does one?

  "For a while, she'd make him dismiss just the one he'd been familiar with, but after a while, she made them all go away, once and for all. And it was father's turn to be less frolicsome and more severe. Not that mother's mood really improved. No, we were just all very dull and quiet and severe, the three of us together, after that. Oh, and we did a lot of housework. And I mean a lot of housework. So, no, we didn't have any servants." She attempted a very sarcastic and extremely ugly half-smile that didn't get all the way to a smirk, but stayed stuck at a snarl. "Does that answer your question?"

  Catherine's next question was as predictable as it was necessary. "How did that make you feel?"

  There was little pause this time. "Angry. So very, very angry. Angry at mother for making us all so miserable. And I didn't understand why she did it, of course, and later when I did, I was angry at all those women who had been so nice to me, because they weren't nice, were they? They were nasty and vicious and they ruined our lives. But do you know what? I still wanted to hold on to how they'd been nice to me, so I tried to remember just the way they smelled, because I felt that was something between us as women, all the smells we'd experienced in the kitchen and the field and the garden, all the smells that stuck to us and made us who we were, the bark and grass and lavender and leeks and nutmeg." She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose this time and smiled. Then her eyes snapped back open and she frowned again. "But I didn't want to remember their laughs, because now I could see how they'd tricked and hurt us with their nasty little tittering, being happy when they were making mother and me so sad."

  Mrs. Wallston stood and walked slowly over to Catherine, enjoying the drama and control that came with revealing something that would be considered shocking and shameful, but which Mrs. Wallston knew was also powerful and captivating.

  "And their necks, where I'd seen father slavering like a beast, I really couldn't stomach remembering those lovely, soft necks. Have you ever really looked at another woman's neck, doctor?" She dragged the cold fingers of her right hand along Catherine's neck for effect. It was worse than being touched by a snake, for there wasn't the solid, rubbery mass of scales backed by powerful muscle---reassuring and alive in its own way---but rather the eerie tickling of the softest skin and the scratch of sharp nails.

  Every part of the caress was evacuated of all animal vitality and filled instead with the cold pain of the poor woman's intellect and memory. "A woman can be too fat or too skinny, eyes too small or too close together, nose too long or too flat or crooked, lips too thin or too thick, hips too big or legs too short. But her neck always seems to have an exquisite, unearthly beauty, as though it were carved by the greatest artist of all, which I suppose it was." She came around and leaned in very close to the right side of Catherine's neck. "I remembered all those necks, so variously lovely, and I hated them." She over-aspirated her words, expelling them with a pent-up passion, but the breath that seeped over and gripped Catherine's neck was as cold and dry as the exhalation of a tomb. "I hated them and I wanted to rip them open, with a knife, or even with my teeth. With my teeth, doctor."

  Never mind the horrible and violent words, the sensation of the dead breath on Catherine's neck was even more confused and overwhelming than the cold touch. Catherine remained outwardly impassive, but she knew with a seldom-achieved clarity and certainty that, whatever else she might ever do or experience in her life, this would be the most exquisitely repulsive and erotic moment she would ever endure, rapturous and oppressive in equal and intense measure. She also realized how right Dr. Wallston had been, that the mock-divine knowledge he had uncovered did not make the real divine obsolete, but only made one realize how the primal forces of life could at any moment utterly overwhelm the paltry reason and science of man. "Are you quite sure you're not afraid of me, doctor?" Victoria rasped in Catherine's ear, her teeth all but grazing her earlobe.

  Indeed, Catherine was quite sure she was afraid. But, as consumed with the voluptuousness of self-pity and hate as Mrs. Wallston was at that moment, and as seductive and sensuous as her witness to her own wretchedness was, Catherine was still, at some level, in control. It was finally neither eroticism nor repugnance that filled her heart, but love and compassion for another person, especially a patient she had sworn to protect and heal. She took hold of Victoria's shoulders and turned her, with all the grace and care one would a sleeping child, and gently embraced her from behind, with her right arm across the front of the dead woman's shoulders, and her cold back pressed lightly against Catherine's warm chest and beating heart. It was as erotic as Mrs. Wallston's lewd and vicious touch had just been, but also loving and maternal. And the words she whispered---with her lips actually touching the cold, dead flesh of the other woman's ear---were loving, even as they were stern. "I'm not afraid, because we both know that I'm not the real object of your rage, and neither are those women. If you could tell me I'm wrong, only then might I be afraid. So tell me what you really feel."

  Catherine could feel her patient's body relax slightly, then felt the cold body shake three times, noiselessly, and she held her tighter. They hung in that embrace for what seemed a very long time, before Mrs. Wallston extricated herself and took a few steps away, turning to face her doctor again. "It's funny, really, the things you miss when you're dead. I never knew until just now how painful it would be not to have tears anymore. Isn't that funny? I should have cried more when I could, but anger was so much easier." She bowed her head slightly, then lifted it. "But now, doctor, I'm afraid I don't know how to proceed. You have lifted a heavy burden from me, but it was also in a way my raison d'être. What would you have me do now?"

  "Now you must heal. Now you must allow yourself to be angry at the right object."

  Mrs. Wallston was capable of a smirk, and one that looked much less bestial and threatening than her expressions had up until then. "My father? He's very old and lives in Providence. I hardly think I'm in any condition to travel, and I think the sight of his angry, dead daughter come to accuse him of all his sexual misdeeds might do him in once and for all. You'd give me more guilt than satisfaction or healing, doctor."

  "There are ultimate causes for most everything we feel, and often those causes are far beyond our reach, but there are also proximate causes." Catherine could smirk too, and she felt more genial than she had in weeks. "I don't believe any travel will be necessary."

  Catherine took her patient to Dr. Wallston's study. Mrs. Wallston knocked and opened the door herself, and he was understandably surprised to see them both. Both of them looked to Catherine for some guidance or orchestration of the event, but in reality, it really wasn't a situation for which she had trained. "Dr. Wallston," she began. "I believe we have made real progress and can now address the fundamental conflict
s with which you both have been struggling."

  "Splendid. Capital. When do we begin?" He stood and looked back and forth between the two of them, without a clue what was to come. Catherine had supposed he wouldn't guess what was going on, but it did make the whole thing even more awkward.

  "Dr. Wallston, as I'm sure you know, much of psychoanalysis involves very delicate and unpleasant aspects of sexuality."

  "Yes, I had read about it. Deep-seated complexes from childhood."

  "No, not all of them, even if they are related to childhood dynamics and trauma."

  "Not deep-seated? Well what, then?"

  "Impulses related to present relationships. Issues of trust. And intimacy. And betrayal."

  "Oh." Dr. Wallston now fidgeted. He looked sideways at his wife. "I haven't, Victoria, not once, not since early last year, before you were sick."

  She looked out the window and spoke very softly. "But you did, Percy. And often."

  "How long did you know?"

  "I've always known, Percy. I can't say for certain I knew the first time, but I'm quite sure that I knew within days of the event that I had lost you. It is one of the endearing things about you, that you lack a certain deceitfulness and stealth. On the other hand, those qualities might have made our situation easier. I really don't know."

  Now he turned to face her, and stepped toward her, though she remained aloof, staring out the window. "Lost me? You never lost me, Victoria, you never could. I lost my way from you. I knew I was being a beast... a horrible, lecherous beast who didn't deserve you. But I never, ever thought that you knew and that it was hurting you."

  "If you did, that would be true, horrible malice, wouldn't it? As it was, it was just apathy. That, or contempt, that you thought me so absurdly stupid and unobservant. I'm not sure which is worse."