"Dreams are a way for the subconscious mind to send messages to the
conscious, and in this case it's easy to see Freudian symbolic meanings
in these black gloves. The hands of the devil, reaching out to pull you
down from grace. Or the hands of your own doubt. Or they could be
symbols of temptations, of sins seeking your indulgence."
Brendan seemed grimly amused by the possibilities. "Especially sins of
the flesh. After all, the gloves do touch me all over." The curate
returned to the door and put his hand on the knob, but paused again.
"Listen, I'll tell you something odd. This dream ... I'm half-sure
it's not symbolic." Brendan let his gaze slide away from Stefan's, down
to the worn rug. "I think those gloved hands represent nothing more
than gloved hands. I think ... somewhere, someplace, at some time or
other, they were real."
"You mean you were once in a situation like the one in your dream?"
Still looking at the rug, the curate said, "I don't know. Perhaps in my
childhood. See, this might not have anything to do with my crisis of
faith. The two things might beprobably are-unconnected."
Stefan shook his head. "Two unusual and serious afflictions-a loss of
faith and a recurring nightmare-troubling you at the same time, and you
want me to think they've no relation? Too coincidental. There must be
some connection. But tell me, at what point in your childhood would
you've been menaced by this unseen, gloved figure?"
"Well, I had a couple of serious illnesses as a boy. Maybe during a
fever I was examined by a doctor who was a little rough or
scary-looking. And maybe the experience was so traumatic that I
repressed it, and now it's coming back to me in a dream."
"When doctors wear gloves for an examination, they use throwaway white
latex. Not black. And not heavy rubber or vinyl gloves."
The curate took a deep breath, blew it out. "Yeah, you're right. But I
just can't shake the feeling that the dream's not symbolic. It's crazy,
I suppose. But I'm sure those black gloves are real, as real as that
Morris chair, as real as those books on the shelf."
On the mantel, the clock struck the hour.
The soughing of the wind in the caves became a howl.
"Creepy," Stefan said, referring not to the wind or the hollow striking
of the clock. He crossed the room and clapped the curate on the
shoulder. "But I assure you, you're wrong. The dream is symbolic, and
it is related to your crisis of faith.
The black hands of doubt'. it's your subconscious warning you that
you're in for a real battle. But it's a battle in which you're not
alone. You've got me beside you."
"Thank you, Father."
"And God. He's beside you as well."
Father Cronin nodded, but there was no conviction in his face or in the
defeated hunching of his shoulders.
"Now go pack your suitcases," Father Wycazik said.
"I'm leaving you short-handed when I go."
"I've got Father Gerrano and the sisters at the school. Now, off with
you." When his curate had gone, Stefan returned to his desk.
Black gloves. It was only a dream, not particularly frightening in its
essence, yet Father Cronin's voice had been so haunted when he spoke of
it that Stefan was still affected by the image of shiny black
rubber-clad fingers reaching out of a blur and prodding, poking....
Black gloves.
Father Wycazik had a hunch that this was going to be one of the most
difficult salvage jobs upon which he had ever embarked.
Outside, snow fell.
It was Thursday, December 5.
4.
Boston, Massachusetts
On Friday, four days after the catastrophic fugue that followed the
aortal graft on Viola Fletcher, Ginger Weiss was still a patient at
Memorial Hospital, where she had been admitted after George Hannaby led
her out of the snowy alleyway in which she had regained consciousness.
For three days, they had put her through exhaustive tests. An EEG study,
cranial X rays, sonograms, pneumoventriculography, a lumbar puncture, an
angiogram, and more, repeating the several procedures (though
fortunately not the lumbar puncture) for cross-checked results. With
the sophisticated tools and processes of modern medicine, they searched
her brain tissue for neoplasms, cystic masses, abscesses, clots,
aneurysms, and benign gummatous lumps. For a while they concentrated on
the possibility of malignancies of the perineural nerves. They checked
for chronic intracranial pressure. They analyzed the fluid from the
spinal tap in search of abnormal protein, cerebral bleeding, a low sugar
count that would indicate bacterial infection, or signs of a fungus
infection. Because they were physicians who always gave their best to a
patient, but especially because Ginger was one of their own colleagues,
her doctors were diligent, determined, thoughtful, thorough, and firmly
committed to pinpointing the cause of her problem.
At two o'clock Friday afternoon, George Hannaby came to her room with
the results of the final battery of tests and with the reports of
consultants who had given one last round of opinions. The fact that he
had come himself, rather than let the oncologist or the brain specialist
(who were in charge of her case) bring the news, most likely meant that
it was bad, and for once Ginger was sorry to see him.
She was sitting in bed, dressed in blue pajamas that Rita Hannaby,
George's wife, had been kind enough to fetch (along with a suitcase.
full of other necessities) from the Beacon Hill apartment. She was
reading a paperback mystery, pretending to be confident that her
seizures were the result of some easily corrected malady, but she was
scared.
But what George had to tell her was so bad that she could no longer hold
fast to her composure. In a way, it was worse than anything for which
she had prepared herself.
They had found nothing.
No disease. No injury. No congenital defect. Nothing.
As George solemnly outlined the final results and made it clear that her
wild flights, performed in a fugue, were without a discernible
pathological cause, she finally lost control of her emotions for the
first time since she had broken into tears in the alleyway. She wept,
not noisily, not copiously, but quietly and with enormous anguish.
A physical ailment might have been correctable. And once cured, it
would not have prevented her from returning to a career as a surgeon.
But the test results and the opinions of the specialists all conveyed
the same unbearable message: Her problem was entirely in her mind, a
psychological illness beyond the reach of surgery, antibiotics, or
controlling drugs. When a patient suffered repeated incidents of fugue
for which no physiological cause could be found, the only hope of ending
the seizures was psychotherapy, though the finest psychiatrists could
not boast of a high cure rate with patients thus afflicted. Indeed, a
fugue was often an indication of incipient schizophrenia. Her chances of
managing her condition and living a normal life were
small; her chances
of institutionalization were dismayingly high.
Within reach of her lifelong dream, within months of beginning her own
surgical practice, her life had been shattered as thoroughly as a
crystal goblet struck by a bullet. Even if her condition was not that
extreme, even if psychotherapy gave her a chance to control her strange
outbursts, she'd never be able to obtain a license to practice medicine.
George plucked several Kleenex from the box on the nightstand and gave
them to her. He poured a glass of water. He got a Valium and made her
take it, though at first she resisted. He held her hand, which seemed
like that of a very small girl when clasped in his large mitt. He spoke
softly, reassuringly.
Gradually he calmed her.
When she could speak, she said, "But George, damn it, I wasn't raised in
a psychologically destructive atmosphere. Our home was happy, at peace.
And I certainly got more than my share of love and affection. I wasn't
physically, mentally, or emotionally abused." She angrily snatched the
box of tissues from the nightstand, tore Kleenex from it. "Why me?
How could I, coming from my background, develop a psychosis? How? With
my fantastic mother, my special papa, my damned-if-it-wasn't-happy
childhood, how could I wind up seriously mentally disturbed? It isn't
fair. It isn't right. it isn't even believable."
He sat on the edge of her bed, and he was so tall that he still loomed
over her. "First of all, Doctor, the consulting specialists tell me
there's a whole school of thought that says many mental illnesses are
the result of subtle chemical changes in the body, in the brain tissue,
changes we're not yet advanced enough to detect or understand. So this
doesn't have to mean that you're screwed up by your childhood. I don't
think you've got to reevaluate your whole life because of this. Second,
I'm not-I repeat. not-at all convinced that your condition is anything
as serious as debilitating psychosis."
"Oh, George, please don't coddle-"
"Coddle a patient? Me?" he said, as if no one had ever suggested
anything half as astonishing to him. "I'm not just trying to lift your
spirits. I mean what I say. Sure, we didn't find a physical cause for
this, but that doesn't mean there isn't a physical problem involved. You
might have a condition that's not yet sufficiently advanced to be
detectable. In a couple of weeks, or a month, or as soon as there's any
worsening of the problem, any indication of deterioration, we'll run
more tests; we'll take another look, and I'd bet everything I own that
we'll eventually put our finger on the problem."
She allowed herself to hope. Discarding a wadded mass of tissues, she
fumbled for the Kleenex box. "You really think it could be like that? A
brain tumor or an abscess so small it doesn't show up yet?"
"Sure. I find that a hell of a lot easier to believe than that you're
psychologically disturbed. You'? You're one of the steadiest people
I've ever known. And I can't accept that you could be psychotic or even
psychoneurotic and not exhibit unusual behavior between these fugues. I
mean, serious mental illness isn't expressed in neatly contained little
bursts. It relops over into the patient's entire life."
She had not thought about that before. As she considered his point, she
felt a little better, though not wildly hopeful and certainly not happy.
On the one hand, it seemed weird to be hoping for a brain tumor, but a
tumor could be excised, perhaps without gross damage to cerebral
tissues. Madness, however, responded to no scalpel.
"The next few weeks or months are probably going to be the most
difficult of your life," he said. "The waiting."
"I suppose I'm restricted from hospital work for the duration."
"Yes. But depending on how you come along, I don't see why you can't
help me out at the office."
"And what if I .-. . threw one of these fits?"
"I'd be there to keep you from hurting yourself until it passed."
"But what would your patients think? Wouldn't exactly help your
practice any, would it? To have an assistant who suddenly turns into a
meshuggene and runs shrieking through the office?"
He smiled. "Let me worry about what my patients think. Anyway, that's
for the future. Right now, at least for a week or two, you've got to
take it easy. No work at all. Relax.
Rest. These last few days have been emotionally and physically
exhausting."
"I've been in bed. Exhausting? Don't knock a teapot."
He blinked, confused. "Don't what?"
"Oh," she said, surprised to have heard those four words pop out of her,
lit's something my father used to say. It's a Yiddish expression. Hok
nit kain tehynik: don't knock a teapot. It means, don't talk nonsense.
But don't ask me why it means that. It's just something I used to hear
all the time when I was a kid."
"Well, I'm not knocking a teapot," he said. "You may have been in bed
all week, but it's been an exhausting experience nonetheless, and you
need to take it easy for a while. I want you to move in with Rita and me
for the next few weeks."
"What? Oh, I couldn't impose on you-"
"It's no imposition. We have a live-in maid, so you won't even have to
make your bed in the morning. From the guestroom window, you'll have a
nice view of the bay. Living around water is calming. In fact, it's
quite literally what the doctor ordered."
"No. Really. Thank you, but I couldn't."
He frowned. "You don't understand. I'm not just your boss but your
doctor, and I'm telling you this is what you're going to do."
"I'll be perfectly fine at the apartment-"
"No," he said firmly. "Think about it. Suppose one of these seizures
struck while you were making dinner. Suppose you knocked over a pot on
the stove. It could start a fire, and you might not even be aware of it
until you came out of the fugue, by which time the whole apartment could
be ablaze and you could be trapped ' That's only one way you might hurt
yourself. I can think of a hundred. So I have to insist that . . .
for a while you must not live alone. If you don't want to stay with me
and Rita, do you have relatives who'd take you in for a while?"
"Not in Boston. In New York, I've got aunts, uncles .
But Ginger could not stay with any of her relatives. They would be
happy to have her, of course-especially Aunt Francine or Aunt Rachel.
However, she did not want them to see her in her current condition, and
the thought of pitching a fit in front of them was intolerable. She
could almost see Francine and Rachel huddling over a kitchen table,
speaking in low voices, clucking their tongues: "Where did Jacob and
Anna go wrong? Did they push her too hard? Anna always pushed her too
hard. And after Anna died, Jacob relied on the girl too much. She had
to take over the house at twelve It was too much for her. Too much
pressure too young."
Ginger would receive considerable compassion, understanding, and love
from them, but at the risk of sullying the memory of her paren
ts, a
memory she was determined to honor, always.
To George, who still sat upon the edge of the bed and awaited her
response with an obvious concern that touched her deeply, she said,
"I'll take the guest room with the view of the bay."
"Splendid!"
"Though I think it's a horrible imposition. And I warn you, if I really
like it there, you might never get rid of me. You'll know you're in
trouble if you come home some day, and I've hired people to repaint the
walls and hang new drapes."
He grinned. "At the first mention of painters or draperies, we'll throw
your butt out in the street." He kissed her lightly on the cheek, got up
from the edge of the bed, and walked to the door. "I'm going to start
the release procedures now, so you should be out of here in two hours.
I'll call Rita and have her come pick you up. I'm sure you can beat
this thing, Ginger, but you've got to keep thinking positive."
When he left the room and his footsteps faded down the hall, she stopped
struggling to maintain her smile, and it collapsed instantly. She
leaned back against her pillows and stared morosely at the age-yellowed
acoustic tile on the ceiling.
After a while she got out of bed and went into the adjoining bathroom,
where she approached the sink with trepidation. After a brief
hesitation, she turned on the water and watched it whirling around and
around and into the drain. On Monday, at the surgical scrub sink, after
Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers Page 14
