Ghost Country
Page 6
One night, in a particularly heated discussion of Hagar’s House, Sylvia preached (raved, Rafe Lowrie muttered) about the church’s duty to the widow and orphan. Which brought Mrs. Ephers to her feet in turn: Are these widows? she demanded. They’re like the woman in the Gospel of John, who had five so-called husbands, but was never married to any of them.
A ripple of laughter went through Lowrie’s faction. Pastor Emerson got up to propose a compromise before Sylvia or any of her furious supporters could respond. He could ill afford to alienate Sylvia Lenore—her hundred-thousand-dollar annual pledge was an important part of the church’s budget. Besides, in his heart, which he tried to keep hidden from the fifteen-hundred-plus members of the congregation, the pastor found Sylvia and her friends easier to work with than Rafe Lowrie. He didn’t always agree with her, but Sylvia didn’t phone him at two in the morning to harangue him when they differed. As Rafe had. Many times.
Keep Hagar’s House open, the pastor urged: The congregation had put far too much into starting it to shut it so soon. Give the shelter a full year, but let someone try to bring the Gospel to the homeless.
After another half hour of dickering, the entire parish council agreed to the proposal and the pastor breathed more easily. Sylvia knew that the longer she could keep the shelter running, the harder it would be to close it down, while Rafe was ecstatic at the opportunity to show Emerson-the right way to run a Bible study meeting.
Rafe’s supporters also relaxed: If the women were praying regularly, and reading the Bible, they might find God—after all, He had demanded that Joshua spare Rahab the harlot, who was able to recognize a divine emissary. So, too, might the women in Hagar’s House someday come to Jesus. Might even save the church from some danger, although that was added with a snicker.
“And you know,” Mara said to Harriet, still next to her on the piano bench. “He makes Cynthia come along sometimes to hand out the Bibles and make coffee and shit. You know how hard he whipped her that time she came over to watch the hew Madonna video with me?”
“But Grandfather had told you that you weren’t to buy it: you know his feelings on that kind of pointless eroticism.”
“So he had to tell Rafe. I’ll never forgive him for that. I tried getting her to go to the emergency room, but Cynthia was afraid of what a doctor might say. Rafe’s turning her into a little Stepford wife. He’s joined that horrible bunch of hypocrites called Family Matters, you know, where men get together and learn to be men again, praying God to smite all the evil feminists in their midst and pick out Christian spouses for their children. Mrs. Lowrie left after he broke her arm all those years ago, but Cynthia’s been terrorized into thinking she’ll go to hell if she disobeys him.”
Cynthia Lowrie and Mara Stonds had begun an improbable friendship when they met in Sunday school at the age of nine. Cynthia’s mother had just run away with a computer repairman; Mara had no mother at all. Even in a world filled with divorce most girls had a mother. Mara and Cynthia were the only two in their whole Sunday school class who didn’t.
Mara told Cynthia her grandfather had locked Mara’s mother in the psychiatry wing at the hospital, even though nothing was wrong with her, and that he whipped Mara when she tried to smuggle a key to her mother. Cynthia’s whippings made a big impression on Mara, which is why she added that particular detail to the story. Grandfather never actually beat her, although Mrs. Ephers, furious with having such a liar on her hands, smacked her across the face and washed her mouth with soap.
They made Mara apologize to Rafe for the story: I’m sorry, she said. My grandmother was kidnaped by the Russians after World War Two because Grandfather is a spy for the CIA. My mother died when she tried to go to Russia to rescue my grandmother. They were both shot by a firing squad.
No punishment could cure Mara of her storytelling, as Harriet labeled Mara’s dramatic tales. Lies, Mephers said, and don’t try to dress them up as something prettier.
Rafe and Dr. Stonds didn’t agree on much, but they were united in wanting Cynthia and Mara to find other friends. Dr. Stonds hated the friendship because he thought Cynthia dragged Mara down: she ought to have friends who were ambitious for education and professional acclaim. After graduating from high school, Cynthia became a transcriber in the word processing center at a big insurance company. She was only going to work until Rafe found a good Christian mate for her.
For his part, Rafe tried to end the friendship because he thought Mara taught Cynthia to disobey him. Dr. Stonds let Mara talk back to him in a way that he, Rafe, would never tolerate. He’d made it clear that in his own home Mara was to treat him with the same respect Cynthia did. Now that she’d been thrown out of college, he hoped Cynthia could see what a slippery slope her friend was on. Cynthia would murmur, Yes, Daddy, No, I’m not seeing her these days, Daddy, not adding that they talked almost every day on the phone while Cynthia was at work.
“You know, now Rafe’s got his undies in a bundle because the Lenore Family Foundation is bringing in a psychiatrist to counsel the homeless.” Mara played chopsticks with her right hand. “It’s only once a week, on Fridays, but apparently the resident they picked is a Jew. Rafe has been screeching about how a Christian church ought to be able to find a good Christian to work there. And they’re letting men as well as women come to see the doctor, so the possibility exists that homeless people might have carnal relations. I mean, they’re barely supposed to eat, they ought not be allowed to be together as men and women.”
She hit a discordant seventh to emphasize her anger. “You know the asshole held up the start of the psych clinic for three weeks so Sylvia Lenore could see if any Christian psychiatrists or social workers in the parish felt called to minister to the homeless? I guess Gilbert McLlvanie and Connie Trumaine needed CPR to recover from the shock of donating a day a week to pro bono work.”
Harriet laughed, but shook her head. “Beebie, you take everything too hard. I know why you worry so much about homeless women, but sometimes I think Grandfather is right, that you’re identifying too much with them.”
Mara’s face scrunched into lines of angry hurt. “Beebie” was Harriet’s pet name for her, rarely used, and it always made Mara feel too hurt by the sense of love gone missing from her life. She loved Harriet. She hated Harriet. She saw the feelings running through her veins like two different-colored streams of blood that never mixed; she never could tell which one dominated.
Mara turned back to the piano. Harriet left the room, a momentary impulse to hug her sister replaced by a more typical irritation with her. Grandfather was right: Mara just never made any effort.
7
Open-air Clinic
Haven’t written in several weeks. Been run ragged between work with street people for Lenore Foundation and regular hosp duties. Disappointed that work with Hagar’s House doesn’t include more time with Boten. He met with me before I started there, remembered me from my interview when I applied for residency, which was pleasing, but told me bluntly there wasn’t going to be much scope for general therapy work. He will meet with me once a month to discuss patients and progress—if any—but no budget for him to play more active role. It’s ail on my shoulders.
So I’ve been going every Friday to a room in a converted coal cellar at the Orleans St. Church where men and women, mostly women, from different shelters come in and talk to me. More men without shelter than women, but women more willing—more eager—to see doctor, have someone to talk to, try to get help. No cost containment committee to limit sessions to fifteen minutes. On the other hand, after first week—where only two people showed up in five hours—numbers have been growing and I have to limit sessions based on my own stamina.
Another negative is the hostility of some of the church staff. Shelter and counseling room have a separate entrance, on Hill Street, but you can’t just walk in: church is like a fortress, with pseudo-Gothic buildings behind eight-foot-high castiron fence. Intimidates me, no doubt worse for the mentally ill.
“Running a shelter in a church like Orleans Street involves a series of compromises, Dr. Tammuz,” Patsy Wanachs told him, keeping one hand on her phone so he’d realize how busy she was. “A lot of our client base has serious problems with drugs and alcohol, as you surely realize. And we’re a stone’s throw from one of the city’s most dangerous housing projects. Perhaps our security system keeps away some people who badly need help—but it also keeps out drug dealers and pimps.”
She picked up the receiver as a sign of dismissal. One of the volunteers followed him to the hall.
“This isn’t really the hostile place you’re taking it for,” she told Hector. “Women feel a sense of safety here, and that’s important on the street. And we’re one of the few places in the city where women can shower, and get a hot breakfast.”
Suppose you can put up with a lot for safety, food and shower. Including prayer meetings or Bible study, whatever they call it.
Sessions led on Wednesday night by a forty-something commodities trader who’s found Jesus and wants to bring him to the homeless women at Hagar’s House. Rafe Lowrie. Raspy voiced, but smooth, well-dressed, no light of fanaticism in his eyes, maybe motivated by need to be in charge of everyone’s life. He came along my second Friday to interrogate me about my methods and goals. Told me he doesn’t want me undoing the good he’s achieving with Hagar women through heightening their spiritual awareness.
Thinking of some of the visions my patients are seeing, I suggested to Lowrie that tamping down their spiritual awareness might be a good thing. He became very huffy, said he had warned the parish council that bringing a Jew in to work with the homeless not a good idea at all. Jesus cast out devils; if the Holy Spirit was really at work in the Orleans St Ch the parish ought to be able to pray these people well, I said, anything that could cure schizophrenia was fine with me, whether prayer or Prolixin, or both together. He stared at me for a several minutes without speaking—probably thought he was looking like Clint Eastwood staring down Lee Van Cleef, but looked more like a man who’s found a cockroach in his soup. Then in Eastwood style turned on his heel and slowly stomped off.
So at the hospital I have Hanaper telling me I’m like a witch doctor because I prefer therapy to drugs, and here at the shelter I have this born-again Lowrie telling me I’m a heathen—worse, a Jew—who believes in medicine instead of prayer.
Starting to have dreams in which I’m shaving, and my face comes loose. Sometimes behind the skin I’m a monster—a savage concoction of bone and blood. Sometimes I’m a woman. Always the question of—who am I really?
As Dr. Boten warned Hector, most people who came to the Orleans Street clinic were in state of acute crisis. What he wasn’t expecting was the rough good humor with which many met life’s most trying conditions. He found himself looking forward to the visits of a number of regulars, including two women who always seemed to travel together. Jacqui and Nanette didn’t want separate sessions of therapy, just Hector’s empathic ear. They told him bloodcurdling tales of life on the street: that most women who were out there any length of time were raped, sometimes by homeless men, even by cops, but just as often by white businessmen on their way home to suburbs, wife, and family.
Jacqui is black, Nanette white. Apparently on the streets racial differences stop mattering as much as they do aboveground. Last week, J & N told me they have a third friend, woman named Madeleine Carter, who has always had mental health problems, but now they’re seriously worried about her. Took some doing to get the story out of them—they were afraid I would either laugh or tell them to take the tale to Jesus.
They say Madeleine thinks the Virgin Mary appeared to her on a wall on Underground Wacker. She won’t leave wall now, even in the foulest weather. The three women used to sleep at Hagar’s House, or sometimes, when they had enough money, rent an apartment together, but now Madeleine won’t leave the street at all. J & N found a big crate that a generator came in around the corner from Madeleine’s vision; when their money is short the two of them sometimes sleep there with her, and they fixed it up with blankets so Madeleine could get some shelter.
J & N tried to persuade Madeleine to come to me, but she won’t leave her post at Virgin’s side. So—they want me to go to her. After a lot of arguing with them—I’m stretched too thin to visit people on the streets, I say—This isn’t just anyone, Doctor, she’s our friend. Imagine dozens of their friends scattered around town, they prodding me into visiting all of them, but there’s something about the friendship between J & N that moves me, so I agree to go, on Monday afternoon after finishing up at the hospital.
The woman at the wall was reading a Bible. When Hector arrived with her friends, Madeleine marked the place and put the book away in a plastic bag.
Before Hector could work his way into an interview Jacqui said, “This here is Dr. Tammuz, Madeleine. He’s come to talk to you about your wall.”
Madeleine turned and touched a crack in the concrete. Hector looked at it intently, but could see no Rorschach that looked like a face. The concrete was split by a line that looked like a flattened sine curve; by tilting his head to one side he supposed he could make out the shape of a woman’s breasts, or a child’s rendition of a bird in flight, but no face.
A faint reddish liquid oozed from the crack, rust from the rebars behind it. Madeleine dipped her fingers in it and sucked them. Hector tried not to let his disgust show in his face.
“Her blood,” Madeleine explained to Hector. “The Mother of God weeps tears of blood. I was looking for the place in the Bible where it says it but I can’t find it. All I can see is the place where Jezebel was murdered and her blood splashed on the wall. But I know this isn’t Jezebel, this isn’t the blood of a whore, I can tell by the taste.”
She looked fiercely at Hector, as if expecting him to argue the point with her. Instead he asked her how long she had known the Virgin was present in the wall.
“Since She spoke to me one night when I was walking by. Some man had been doing his business on me and I came by here and She spoke to me out of this crack. She tells me I’m Her daughter, I’m as pure as She is, and She’s crying because the rest of the world isn’t pure enough, they won’t listen to Her, but I listen to Her. I loved my own little girl, I wouldn’t never leave her but they made me go. The Holy Mother says She loves me just that much as I love my own little girl.”
“That’s right, honey,” Jacqui said. “You need the Virgin Mary to look after you, but you need to eat, too. You tell her, Doctor.”
Persuaded her to go around the corner to their generator box to perform a cursory exam. M very frightened of men, understandable, if they’ve been “doing their business” on her, so Jacqui and Nanette promise to stand right outside, talk to her while I examine. Underneath the layers of coats and socks M a wraith, skin transparent from weeks out of the sun. Seems to be a case of acute schizophrenia, probably intensified by vitamin deficiencies, oh, not to mention lack of sleep, fear of rape, etc.
Ought to be hospitalized, but would mean a trip over to County, and she won’t leave her “face.” Under prodding from her friends agreed to an injection of Prolixin. Worry about ethics of dispensing medication in such a setting, how can she give an informed consent?
The next week Jacqui and Nanette came to Hector, ecstatic: the shot he’d given Madeleine had changed her dramatically, She was eating now, and would leave the wall sometimes to get some sunlight in the world overhead. She’d even spent the night at Hagar’s House a few times. She was still guarding her “face” on the wall, but not drinking rusty water from the crack as much as she’d done before.
Jacqui and Nanette bought him a potted daisy at Woolworth’s to show their gratitude. They also started spreading the word on the st
reet that Hector was a miracle worker, a sympathetic man who would listen to their troubles, and give them the kind of drugs that could really help. The two women started bringing patients in to see him. Hector tried telling Jacqui that she shouldn’t force anyone to come against their will.
Jacqui shook her head. “You’re thinking of poor Ashley, Doctor. You don’t know her life. She ran to the streets to get away from her mother’s boyfriends, that was when she was thirteen, and she ran straight into the arms of a pimp who started working her over for his own gain. She’s like a lot of people out here, thinks she’s worthless, she wouldn’t ever come see you on her own. Me and Nanette have to see she gets help, otherwise she’ll be dead in six months. And even though she doesn’t say anything to you, those pills you give her really help.”
Ashley won’t let me give her an injection, and won’t take pills when she’s on her own, so J brings her in every week and watches her swallow a handful of Haldol.
Funny how my eye for street people changed by working with them. Tough lives. In shelter have to follow strict set of rules, yet handle it all without losing dignity.
Am trying to learn from them how to put up with Hanaper’s petty rules without losing my own dignity. Hanaper vastly entertained after looking over clinic sheets for last three months to see Mrs, Herstein, the compulsive hoarder, has been coming in every week. Daughter still with her. One of these nuclear families created by fission, turning into black hole that sucks in all joy, light.
“Ah, your black eyes, Dr. Tammuz, I knew Mrs. Herstein would find them Irresistible. Cultivate her—she may be one of these demented women who keeps a fortune stuffed under the bedclothes. Where she apparently would like to reside with you.”
The dark man in America, even if not from Africa, always has great sexual prowess. Foolish grandfather—thought by fleeing the Aryan nation could leave behind the greasy Jew of perverse sexuality.