by Susan Conant
The vertical slats still screened the front door of Elaine Walsh's house from the street, and the lock hadn't been changed. Kevin Dennehy had refused to tell me anything about the contents of the files he'd found in Elaine's office, and when I'd asked him to get me a copy of Donna Zalewski's suicide note, he'd fiddled and diddled, as Johnny Most always said in his Celtics play-by-plays.
The police were economizing on Elaine's estate's fuel and cleaning bills. The house was cold and smelled like a refrigerator that hadn't been opened for weeks, and there was a lot of dust, some of it thick gray powder. On the third floor of the building, which was the second floor of Elaine's house, were her bedroom, the bed stripped of sheets and a down comforter tossed on the floor, a white-tiled bath, and the room I was looking for, a small, windowless study that someone other than Elaine would probably have used as a walk-in closet. In the study were a small bookshelf, a chair, a Panasonic printer on a stand, and a desk on which sat a modernistic-looking gooseneck lamp and a Zeos 286 computer.
The drawers of the desk had been emptied of everything except office junk, mainly pens and pencils; and the police must have taken any hard copy and diskettes Elaine had had, but they'd left the computer. If Elaine had realized how badly I needed a new computer and had foreseen how good I'd be to Kimi, she'd have bequeathed me the Zeos 286, so I felt justified in booting it up and scanning the contents of the hard drive. She'd used WordPerfect, but hadn't locked any of the document files. I retrieved quite a few. She evidently hadn't used the computer to store any notes she might have kept on her patients. Many files seemed to be chapters of a new book. Many were letters. Two were addressed to Joel Baker. The first was dated a couple of months earlier.
Dear Dr. Baker:
In the course of my treatment of a former client of yours, Ms. Donna Zalewski, serious questions have arisen about certain ethical matters related to your own conduct in the relationship between therapist and patient.
Please meet with me at the above address, my office, to discuss this very serious matter.
She gave him a date and time and didn't ask whether the appointment was convenient for him. The second was dated a couple of days before Elaine's death.
Dear Dr. Baker:
Your failure to respond satisfactorily to my previous communication, followed by the tragic death of Donna Zalewski, in combination with the need to prevent future occurrences of this type, leaves me no option other than to share the information that has come to my attention with the appropriate board of the Massachusetts Psychological Association.
As a matter of professional responsibility, I believe that no client should be left unprepared for revelations about a therapist. For the sake of your clients, then, and in the hope that you will undertake appropriate arrangements, I shall delay my communication to the board for ten days following this letter.
"I understand all about your professional ethics," I said to Rita. "I sympathize. Anyone would. If I went to a therapist, I wouldn't want her to go around talking about me to other people. I wouldn't want anyone to do that even after I died, even if I died a natural death. And I'm not asking you to go public, you know. I'm not Kevin Dennehy. And believe it or not, this isn't the kind of story Dog's Life usually publishes. Somehow I don't think they'd be interested."
Rita's left elbow was resting on my kitchen table, and she kept spreading her left hand open like a giant comb and running it through her hair. Her face was pale, and she kept biting her lips. Old nervous habits die hard even after as much therapy as Rita's had.
"I really don't know what to do," she said, picking up the copy of the first letter. I'd printed out both and brought them home. "Apparently, he didn't respond to this, or at least didn't meet with her. I find that hard to understand."
I picked up the copy of the second letter. "This says 'respond satisfactorily.' It sounds to me as if he did respond, but she didn't like what he said. Maybe he just called her and said he didn't do it. If he was innocent, isn't that what he'd have done? Why should he take orders from Elaine and show up when and where she wanted just because she summoned him? That first letter is practically a subpoena. If somebody sent me a letter like that, I'd call as soon as I read it and ask what the hell was going on. Wouldn't you?"
"Yes, but this is different. There really isn't an equivalent, for women. Women therapists simply don't take sexual advantage of male clients. It's one of those things women don't do. Like strangling. Did you know that? I learned it at a conference on gender difference. Men strangle men. Men strangle women. Women don't strangle anyone."
"No one strangled Elaine," I said.
"I can't imagine Joel strangling anyone," Rita said. "Or hurting someone. He's always seemed like such a calm, stable person. He makes such good contact with people. Even the most borderline people tend to feel safe with him. I have a hard time believing any of this, especially about Joel. I have always had the highest regard for him. Sheila was one thing, but this is so . . . Obviously, Donna made this accusation to Elaine, and Elaine passed it along to Ben. Then Ben told Sheila, and Sheila told me and God knows who else. So it wasn't just Sheila fantasizing . . ."
"Maybe it's not true. Could Donna Zalewski have made it up? Or imagined it?"
Rita looked down at Kimi, who was, for once, asleep, curled up under the table.
"Okay," I said. "You can't talk about Donna Zalewski. But don't you feel some responsibility about her? This is going to sound mean, but you are the one who sent her to Joel Baker. Maybe your professional responsibility is to do something now, not just to keep totally quiet about whatever she told you."
"Maybe," Rita said.
"Well, think about it." Then I pulled something on Rita that I learned from her. "Maybe you're not ready yet," I said, "but in the meantime, just talk to me a little about someone like her. Not about Donna Zalewski. Just about that kind of person. Okay? For instance, it seems to me that there are some women who could not be seduced by a therapist no matter what. Like Elaine Walsh, for example. Or, I don't know, maybe she's a bad example. Anyway, there are some women like that. And then there are others, I bet, who could be."
"There have been cases of women being told it was part of the therapy, that it was necessary for their benefit."
"Okay. And, obviously, not everybody is going to believe something like that. You're not. I'm not."
"And sometimes, the countertransference becomes so powerful that the therapist is overwhelmed. He isn't a sociopath. He doesn't mean to be exploitative. Sometimes, apparently, these people genuinely believe that they're in love with the women. In a way, of course, they are. But it doesn't justify it. It doesn't even begin to justify it."
"What's countertransference?"
"It's, um, it's a little complicated."
"So are the American Kennel Club obedience regulations."
"That's a rather different order of complexity." She coughed. "It has to do with the therapist's response to the client. What the therapist projects. How the therapist distorts the relationship."
"That doesn't make any sense," I objected. "Why would anybody go to a therapist who was going to do that? I mean, the point is sanity, right?"
"Sometimes the main point is another human being," Rita said. "And every human being has a past, a history. And anyone who's got a history has something to transfer to the new relationship. Anyway, it may be inevitable. But acting on it isn't."
"But look. Suppose the guy, the therapist, starts telling one of his woman patients—"
Rita interrupted. "Clients."
"Clients. So suppose he starts telling her that he's madly in love with her. I mean, if that happened, a lot of women would realize that there was something wrong with the therapist. If you saw a therapist who started telling you he was crazy about you, what would you do?"
"Go to a consultant. Instantly," she said, and added, "Another therapist. Somebody outside the situation, to put some perspective on what was going on and what to do about it."
"Even if y
ou didn't know to do that, if you were someone who didn't know much about therapy, you'd still know something was really off, that that wasn't how therapy was supposed to be. And the reverse must be true. That there are women who wouldn't get it. Either they just didn't know much about therapy and didn't realize how taboo it is, or else they fell in love, too, or got caught up in believing it was for their own good."
"Yes."
"So was Donna Zalewski the kind of person who'd know? Who'd get it? Would she have told somebody to go to hell and walked out? Or was she vulnerable?"
"I'd have thought she'd have come back to me," Rita said.
"She didn't. But was she vulnerable?"
"There are people whose boundaries about everything are very diffuse." Rita had both elbows on the table. She folded her hands and rested her chin on them. "For people like that, relationships are never clearly defined. You can see it in every aspect of their lives. No one is separate from everyone else. Sometimes you find families where the kids can all go into the parents' bedroom unannounced whenever they feel like it. There's no lock on the bathroom door. And in a similar way, in terms of individuals, the doors and the locks, the walls, the boundaries, aren't there, either. You see, I've always thought that was one of Joel's strengths as a therapist, the ability to keep the boundaries very clear, which is one thing that makes people feel safe."
"This may sound stupid to you, but in a way, that's what Elaine didn't do with Kimi."
"This is serious," Rita said.
"It's true. There was no boundary between who was the owner and who was the dog. The first time I was there, she put a pitcher of milk on the table and just stood there and watched Kimi drink it. And that kind of thing makes a dog very nervous. They want to know who's who and what the rules are. They want to know where they belong in the pack and what they can and can't do. That's when they're happy. Otherwise, it's a crazy world for them, and they spend all their time trying to bring some order into it."
"I didn't refer her to Elaine Walsh," Rita said. "There are a lot worse clinicians than Elaine, but she had a tendency to let theory override her judgment."
"Like the marriage-is-slavery theory. So the Mosses' marriage didn't exist. The boundary didn't exist. The limits didn't. But that made it as if Sheila Moss didn't exist. Or as if her feelings didn't, or didn't count. I'm not sure which. But look. Elaine was obviously furious about Joel Baker. That taboo was one rule she recognized. She was going to turn him in."
"His life would have been ruined. And there wasn't really anything he could have done about it."
"Say he didn't do it?"
"And just how was he supposed to prove that? It would have been strictly Donna's word against his. That's a way in which therapists are very vulnerable."
"And Donna Zalewski?"
"If everything is diffuse, the boundary between what's real and what isn't can get very vague, too."
"She was very vulnerable."
"In a way, so was Elaine. She was vulnerable to believing it."
A while later, when Rita stood up and got ready to leave, Kimi clambered out from under the table, shook herself off, and stuck her big, black, wet nose directly in the crotch of Rita's navy wool pants.
"No!" I said firmly, and dragged her away. The worst thing about that habit is that public correction embarrasses the sniffed person even more than the dog already has. The best way to eradicate any unwelcome behavior isn't negative, anyway, but positive: Teach the dog what he is supposed to do. Lie down. Sit. Give his paw. Whatever. Once Kimi mastered heeling, sitting, and staying, she'd stop embarrassing herself, me, and other people. I'd get her there. In the meantime, I apologized.
But Rita has a dog, too. She smiled and shook her head. "I'm having awful cramps. Dogs can always tell."
"Yes," I said. "But they don't have to announce it to everyone else."
"Boundaries," Rita said.
12
There are two notable institutions of higher learning in my neighborhood. The first is the Cambridge Dog Training Club. The second is a certain person-training club principally famous for the big bang produced by dropping its name.
In Cambridge, though, the high concentration of alumni and alumnae muffles the bang to what would sound like a thud if you didn't know better, but everyone does know better because there's always a Harvard graduate around to spell out the significance of everything to the rest of us. One of the lessons Harvard teaches the undergraduates is to question every assumption since Christ's. It's a lesson the graduates remember. For instance, the alumni don't assume that everyone knows they're alumni, and, despite their numbers, they don't assume that everyone in Cambridge went to Harvard any more than the owner of a purebred dog from great lines and a famous kennel assumes that your dog of the same breed is of equal rank. If you admit that you went someplace with a name that doesn't drop quite so loudly, the typical alumnus slowly lowers his eyes, silently expresses pity for you, and stops assuming that you know what he knows and have read what he's read. In fact, he may start assuming that you know nothing and can't read.
But I'm used to it. Dog people ask what kennel your dog came from, too, and sometimes they're more than simply curious. In truth, what dog snobs share with Ivy snobs is a mistrust of their own judgment. Some dog people need to ask where the dog came from because they don't trust themselves to recognize a good dog when they see one. The Ivy snobs don't trust themselves to recognize a smart person. Have I digressed?
I was still wondering what kind of person Donna Zalewski had been, but my first guess about where she'd gone to college turned out to be right, and after some tedious time spent with the Harvard Alumni Directory, I placed two calls to Adams House and managed to get the name of her roommate, whose phone number I got from another look at the Harvard stud book. And what did I tell you? The ex-roommate lived in a graduate-student kennel on Wendell Street, which is a ten-minute walk from Harvard Yard. Cambridge is a great whelping box filled with litter after litter of full-grown, unweaned dogs. A sensible bitch would nip and growl at these people until they learned to feed themselves.
I told the former roommate, Sarah Goldberg, that I now owned Donna Zalewski's malamute, was having some problems with the dog, and thought it might help if I understood a little bit about both Donna and Kimi. I knew the story was farfetched, but as soon I mentioned the dog, Sarah seemed almost oddly willing to talk to me. She set up a time for us to meet and invited me to Wendell Street.
I've seen less crowded and better furnished whelping boxes than the railroad apartment that Sarah Goldberg shared with four or five other graduate students. The furniture must have come from Morgan Memorial and the Bargain Spot, but there was lots of it, overstuffed armchairs upholstered in scratchy blue-green and stained a pale mud color, sagging bookshelves with chipped paint, rickety wooden chairs, gouged tables, and, underneath, carpet remnants pieced together. But it wasn't depressing. It was like a happy, underfunded child-care center, a child-care center for semi-grown-ups. That's what graduate students are, of course: adult children. Adult children of academics.
Sarah was a tall, thin woman in her mid-twenties with long blond hair fastened in a ponytail at the base of her neck. She had a plain, bony, stark face and wore clothes that she must have picked up when she bought the furniture. The second we walked in, she made a heartfelt fuss over Kimi. I liked her right away. Kimi did, too, but then malamutes like almost anyone, especially anyone who'll play with them and pay attention to them.
Sarah finally looked at me. "God, she's wonderful. I want a dog so badly, but it's not fair to keep one here. We're gone all the time, and we're all broke. That's half the reason I can hardly wait to finish my dissertation."
"What kind of dog are you going to get?" I asked when we seated ourselves in the kitchen. We faced each other across a table. Maybe the benches we sat on were small church pews, or maybe the ensemble was a booth salvaged from a defunct restaurant.
"Oh, one of these. A malamute." She looked intelligent
, too. "I've always loved malamutes. When I was growing up, some people down the block had one that was practically half mine. His name was Nicky. I used to walk him for them, fool around with him. He was my bosom companion. We grew up together."
"That's so strange," I said. "That you and Donna both . . ."
"Did Donna tell you . . . ?"
"I never met Donna." I shook my head. "I didn't know her at all."
"Then how . . . ?"
"The breeder she got Kimi from. She told the breeder about how she'd grown up with a malamute. That was one reason she wanted one."
Sarah pursed her lips and tilted her head a little as if she were hearing something familiar. "You didn't know Donna," she said.
"No."
"She did things like that sometimes."
I must have looked puzzled.
"She had a way of co-opting other people's experience. Sometimes it seemed fairly benign. Other times she'd give you the feeling that she was stealing your life."
"She didn't . . . ?"
Sarah sounded gentle. "She didn't grow up with a malamute down the block. I did." She shrugged. Then she suddenly smiled. "You must be wondering which of us borrowed the other's neighborhood dog."
I laughed. Nervously. "I'm just a little thrown." I made noises to attract Kimi's attention and get her to come to me, but she kept staring up at Sarah.
"I guess the easiest way to explain it is that Donna was a person who felt empty," Sarah said. "And when she was feeling particularly empty, she filled herself up. She took bits and pieces of other people's experience. She swallowed parts of people's lives like tranquilizers. Or antidepressants. In a way, it was flattering when she chose one's own life. But sometimes it was hard to look at it that way. Donna didn't have a lot of friends."
