“You live downtown,” he said. She glanced up at him. His glossy black hair gleamed in the overbright fluorescence.
“Yes,” she said.
“I bet you’re Irish,” he said.
“No,” she said.
“No? You look Irish. Which is a good thing.”
She gave a small smile, humoring him.
“My father was half-Irish, half-Italian. My ma, she’s a goddamn P.R.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You know that means Puerto Rican, right?”
“I know,” said Miranda.
He rose up from the seat with noticeable grace and leaned across the car with his hand extended. “I’m Nicky,” he said. She slowly took her hand from her coat pocket and took his hand. It was warm and he enclosed her fingers with a gentle pressure.
“Hi.”
He let go of her hand and sank back into his seat. “No name from you.” He grinned at her, a knowing grin. “That’s fine. You can be nameless for now,” he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his pillowy jacket. He tilted his head back against the scratched window, closed his eyes. “You know, Nameless,” he said, his voice low but still clearly audible over the rumble of the train. “I can still see you in that dress.” He fell silent for a long moment, then opened his eyes, catching Miranda staring at him, entranced. The train slid to a grinding halt at Union Square. Miranda stood abruptly, headed for the door. He was right behind her.
She turned to him. “You are not following me,” she said.
“Maybe this is my stop,” he said. He put his hand in the small of her back and nudged her through the open doors and onto the platform. Stepped off behind her. The train moved on, noisily abandoning them.
“This isn’t your stop,” said Miranda.
“Just let me walk you home.” He smiled, a lazy, practiced, lady-killing smile.
Why not?
THE TEENAGER WITH THE LARGE HOOP EARRINGS WOKE UP HOWLING when the first daylight was just beginning to filter into the Sat. “Mentiroso, mentiroso,” she screeched, over and over. Other women began to catcall and curse from their beds. The girl stood up, grabbed a metal water pitcher from a stand nearby, flung it against the window bars, producing a brain-rattling clang. The night CO came running from somewhere, tried to grab the girl’s arms. She turned and slashed at his face with long pale pink nails. She aimed for his eyes. He screamed. She howled in triumph and began ripping the bedclothes from her mattress. Another CO appeared, calling for help on his radio. In a minute there were four guards pinning the girl facedown to the floor, where she still screamed and struggled and bit any body part that came into tooth range. “MENTIROSO!” The guards finally got her cuffed and leg-chained. She lay panting on the linoleum. The COs dabbed at each other’s wounds with paper towels.
“I got HIV, you fucks,” said the girl, laughing.
“You better be lying, girl,” said one of the COs.
“Fuck you,” she roared. She kept screaming that, her voice growing hoarse, as they dragged her away.
The other Sat ladies were titillated by the scene. Scattered jeering. “Have fun at Marcy, baby,” one cried after her. “They got men there!”
“And a pool, too!” said another woman. “That’s the slickest nuthouse in the USA!” The general hilarity continued until one of the COs came back and shouted for everyone to shut up and stand for the 7 A.M. count.
After the count, with its endless radioing back and forth between the guards and the COs’ constant call of “No talking during count, ladies, no talking”—which never stopped the ladies from talking—the breakfast carts arrived. Miranda, tucking her blanket under the flimsy mattress, heard someone beside her saying, “Told you so.”
She turned as April wheeled a metal cart piled with little boxes of Special K cereal to a stop at the foot of her bed. “I told you you wouldn’t get out of here before me. You didn’t really think about leaving me alone with those bitchwomen on 109C?”
Miranda wrapped her arms around April’s narrow sturdy shoulders, her smell of lemony laundry soap. Another silent oath of thanks for what she hadn’t left behind. She released her, gestured at the cart. “You’re not kitchen crew.”
April shrugged, flashed her shy smile. “I bribed Cherie to call in sick. An entire case of Cup-a-Soup.” Then, eyes serious, amber flecked, so lovely: “I just had to see my sister. Lu said you were planning something but I told her, no way. You wouldn’t.”
Embers suddenly, heating her from inside out. Miranda lowered herself to her bed. Rubbed her face with her hands, trying to cool it. Gazed up at April again, noticing once more the elegant lines of her close-trimmed head, the intelligence of her eyes, the compact strength of her. What a shameful move it would have been, to desert this precious human, this small savior she relied on more than anyone she’d ever known, alone in this miserable place.
“What about your family, Miranda? Didn’t you think of your mother?” Her voice scolding, heartrending.
“April. I don’t know what I was thinking. You know, I just . . . you know, fifty-two years.”
“So what. You gotta bloom where you are planted, my girl.”
This was the ladies’ favorite motto and was even painted mural-size on the wall in the gym. Miranda nodded. “I’m working on it.”
“Speaking of that, they set up a new girl in Watkins’s old room. Nessa. We’ve been walking together, a bit.” She smiled shyly. “Yeah, Nessa. She’s smart. Squared away.”
Miranda grinned. “I see.” She felt inordinately pleased.
April shook her head, bashful. “Na, that’s not it. She’s just a good person.” She handed her two boxes of Special K. “Lu sent you the bottom one. Don’t know what’s in it, but leave it to open till breakfast rounds are over. I could get into real shit for that.”
“Thanks.” Miranda clasped her hand over April’s as she took the boxes and gave her a squeeze.
April gave a firm squeeze in return. “Can’t wait till you’re back on the unit.”
“You really think they’ll send me to 109 again?” Miranda said.
April smiled back over her shoulder as she started pushing the cart. “Beryl is dying to get at you again.”
When all the food carts had been trundled out of the Sat and quiet had at last returned, Jessop reading the newspaper at her station, and most of the women playing poker in a far corner, Miranda pulled off a strip of tape from the second cereal box. She fished out a tissue-wrapped packet and unrolled it to find a miniature bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream and a pristine Revlon lipstick, a rich deep red called Luminesque. Also, a square of paper, tightly folded. Miranda opened it to find a note in Lu’s strange block print, which maintained a few fragments of Cyrillic. BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME MIMI, it read.
9
Be Aware of the Possible Effects of One’s Own Mental Health on One’s Professional Judgment
(Principle A)
I’ve always been an impassioned advocate of the unconventional solution. Creative problem solving, in all its forms. I’ve urged my clients: Think outside the usual parameters. Break down old patterns and vicious cycles. Ditch the habitual. Take a risk.
The risk of failure cannot be avoided if the possibility of success is to have any meaning. Hasenheide, my old mentor at NYU, said it, and in the wake of M’s attempt to off herself, I meant to live it.
Step 1: reestablish contact with M. This was tricky. Psych Sat was Corinne Masterson’s domain, and she grew very testy if she found other shrinks skulking around in there, messing with her observation cases. Still, I managed to get into the cottage late on the third day after M was bused back from the hospital. I’d tended to her in the hospital, of course, the night of the banquet, and again all the next day. She was bleared out, under heavy sedation; I don’t think she was aware.
And now that she’d returned, I wasn’t sure how she’d receive me. My pulse must have topped 200 as I walked past the guard desk at the Psych Sat entrance, mumbling something about Dr.
Masterson out at a meeting. In fact, I knew Corinne was playing hooky from work that afternoon to catch a Broadway matinee.
I scanned the room, weighty dark-stained beams across the ceiling, cross-paned windows and neat rows of beds along both walls. A dusty, timeworn light fell from the old white-glass pendants high above. Omit the uniformed inmates and guards, and you might have been in a dorm at a shabby but genteel women’s college. I glimpsed M propped on her bed, reading a book about Eleanor Roosevelt. “Good read?” I said. She lowered the book. I felt as if a ball-peen hammer had been raised in my chest and was tapping inside the base of my throat. The other women were staring with curious hostility. I was definitely not Corinne Masterson.
Her gaze flicked, toward me, then away. “She’s my new role model. A do-gooder.”
“Yes, a strong woman. From what I know. A strong first lady.”
Just then, a woman across the dormitory started calling out, “Where’s Dr. Corinne, I need my Dr. Corinne.”
A CO hurried up behind me. “Doc, do you mind dealing with Lena over there first, she’s throwing a fit of some kind.”
“Sure, of course, be right there.” The guard headed for the yowling Lena. I turned back to M, kept my voice low: “Please come see me when you can.”
A tight grimace flashed across her face. She fixed her eyes on Eleanor Roosevelt. “I don’t need any more counseling, I think,” she said, just above a whisper.
“Just once,” I said, then turned and walked away. When I had pacified Lena and worked my way back across the room, I found her gone. I asked the CO where she’d disappeared to. “Toilet, doc,” he said. “Said she needed to access the can.”
AFTER I HAD BOLTED FROM THE HILTON BANQUET HALL, I HEARD later, my father stepped up to the mike and delivered an acceptance speech hailed as one of the greats in APA history: brilliant, gracious, witty. I read it recently in an old copy of the association’s annual that found its way to me. The speech was all those things and more.
Accomplished parents loom over your life, am I right? As you trudge your path, you remain constantly aware of the one they forged, tracking alongside yours. But at some point, you sense that they have somehow traversed more lush, more rewarding landscapes, scaled grander mountains and attained more majestic vistas, while you have been foggily dawdling and looping around in the flats. Maybe you gain satisfaction imagining them at the heights, even as you suspect, you know, really, that you will never stand alongside them. You linger this way, marking the years, sometimes pausing your daily rounds to glance up, to contemplate their position, maybe to steep for a moment in your longing for them, until, gradually, eventually, they fade from view.
Jerry Stidwell pulled Dad aside afterward and asked if I was looking for a therapist. “He seemed . . . a bit rattled, that’s all.” Stidwell confided that his daughter was a performance artist: she could be seen that very night on a downtown stage in a scatological exercise she titled “Feces/Fetus.” He sighed and said, “I guess it is really true what they say, Erskine. The cobbler’s kids have no shoes.” He thumped Dad on the back. “Tell him I’ve got a slot opening Tuesday evenings, and I’d love to fit him in.”
After hearing Corinne’s news, a frantic drive up to Hudson Valley Med Center to bid M good-bye. And when I got there, I found her alive. I sat by her sleeping form for a long night, as the skinny-limbed CO dozed in a chair nearby. At dawn, I stepped out to the parking lot for a breath of air. Leaned against my car and stared up at her third-floor window through a glaze of relief and gratitude. Said a brief prayer of thanks to God. And to be forthright: at that time I was not a religious man. I think that on that balmy dawn I may have become one. I sensed a benign presence in that suburban lot, with its security lights clicking off and its righteous chorus of wakening birds.
Later in the morning I met Charlie Polkinghorne in the hospital hallway: whenever a suicide was attempted, it created a major paperwork headache for old Charlie. He was waiting for a vending machine to spit out a cup of hazelnut. “I don’t know what to say about this one,” I said as I walked up. “I swear to you that I did a thorough assessment here, and I didn’t detect any suicidal ideation.”
“They throw us curveballs, my friend,” said Charlie sympathetically. “And sometimes we whiff.”
“She scored a 2 on the Hopkins Scale, really solid. Just some anxiety. She seemed an excellent candidate for Elavil.”
I was unshaven, my hair wild. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, Frank. We have deep faith in you.” He picked up his coffee and sipped it. “This little lady will be scurrying around the yard in no time.”
He followed me into M’s room. I bent over her bed for just a moment—she was still pretty zonked but I thought that maybe, just maybe, she smiled at me through the mist. I straightened up, laid my hand on her wrist. “Pulse strong, skin tone nicely roseate,” I said to Charlie. “I think she’ll pull out of this with a new lease on life. I’ll look forward to seeing her in my office again.”
Charlie nodded, solemnly surveying this sleeping beauty. “Good man, Frank. Good man.”
ALL THE WAY HOME, BETWEEN UTTERING OATHS OF THANKS FOR M’S life, I tried to think about how I would face my father after my vanishing act. He had left worried voice-mail messages. I decided to return to the apartment, shower and shave, pick up some black-and-white cookies at Zabar’s as a two-tone gesture of good faith, then treat him to dinner.
I exited the elevator to find Truffle curled atop the hallway fire extinguisher, glaring at me with accusatory eyes. The door to the apartment stood wide open. “Hello?” I called into the living room, tentatively. No answer. No sign of life, but the television set was gone, its cable dangling limply from the entertainment center. “Christ,” I muttered. Clearly, some local crackheads had ripped off the tube and fled. And in their haste, they had dropped the remote, which lay in the center of the throw rug. I kicked it under the couch and walked back toward my bedroom.
Then, a rustling. Coming from the bathroom. Heart thumping, I ducked across the hall into my room, glanced around me for a weapon, seizing on a reading lamp. I unplugged it and held it aloft. “I’m armed,” I called out, backing toward the phone by the bed. “I’m calling the cops.”
I picked up the receiver and dialed 911. The rustling in the bath became louder. I could hear the shower curtain being pushed aside, hear someone stepping from the tub. Then a huge crash—a twenty-seven-inch Hitachi exploding against ceramic tile.
“911 operator. What’s your location?”
“Three sixty-six West Eighty-Fourth. There’s an intruder—.”
The bathroom door flew open, smacking into the wall. A tall hunched figure, long hair, the remains of my television heaped around his feet. “Don’t, bro, please don’t,” he whimpered. “I’m holding.”
“Operator, never mind.” I hung up the phone. I dropped the lamp, sat down on the bed, and exhaled, trying to catch my breath. Clyde peered unhappily from beneath the brim of his faded Yankees cap and fiddled with the laces of his begrimed hoodie. “You got a broom?” he ventured. “I’ll sweep up.”
“This has got to be a new low.”
“I was only gonna pawn it. I would’ve bought it back for you soon as I could. I swear.”
I sighed. Kicked aside glass, opened my arms to him. Skeletal, my baby brother felt. Like holding a bundle of sticks. But his hair, brushing my cheek, carried memories. Our mother’s hair, Colleen’s hair, the same fine waves, feather-light against your skin.
And then I realized that his unlawful entry could be a very good thing. I released my embrace. “You get back in that shower. Scrub yourself up. I’ll handle the mess.” I hurried to the closet, pulling out a blue oxford shirt and a pair of khakis for him.
“Frank, man, I’m sorry—” I turned to see him kicking aside splinters of wood-grain plastic with a shamefaced frown. I strode over and plucked the cap off his head, then turned him and gave him a firm shove.
“Get to it,” I said. “Your
dear old dad is waiting.”
A SULTRY JULY NIGHT, THE STREETS WERE HALF EMPTY, WE LUNDQUISTS rocketed freely around the city in the white stretch limo. Dinner on the East Side, gelato in the Village, a spin around the Battery so Dad could tip his hat to Lady Liberty. Occasionally Clyde popped his head through the open sunroof, shouted out into the night, giving a joyful double thumbs-up to dumbstruck passersby as the limo sped past. Dad tossed his arm around Clyde’s shoulders as he flopped back down into the white-leather sanctum. “The boy’s still a cutup, all right.”
Me, on the other hand, he regarded with pensive sympathy. When we stopped in Chinatown for a midnight snack, he prodded me with questions about my divorce. Clyde vacuumed up pot stickers. “What was the real problem with Winnie and you?” he asked delicately. “Communication problems? Lack of sexual closeness? Of course, she was away a lot. Could be an avoidance tactic, could just be her job. Hard to say.”
I squirmed in my seat. “Dad, really, it just wasn’t meant to be.”
“You don’t have a problem with me, I hope—identity problem, anger?”
“No.”
“It’s just—your running out last night.”
“I am . . . I’m under stress at work. A patient of mine has proven . . . problematic, and it’s become”—I struggled to find the words—“a bit of an obsession. I want to handle the case correctly. Maybe I’m overwrought.”
He nodded sagely and spat out the shell of a salt-and-pepper shrimp. “That’s just how you tested at six years old, Son. Very strong superego. Extraordinarily conscientious. A stringent follower of the rules.”
I smiled weakly. “Another accurate Lundquist result. Unmatched predictive accuracy.”
“Unmatched,” he said, nodding. He turned to Clyde. “And then there’s this boy. I do worry.” My brother raised a chopstick in acknowledgment. “That bakery job, how’s it going, Son? You see a future there?”
I gestured surreptitiously to Clyde, trying to get him to tug his shirt cuffs down. In his degustatory frenzy, he’d pushed them up above his elbows, and his track marks were showing. He shrank back into the sleeves. “Oh, sure, pie is always in style, Dad.”
The Captives Page 11
