4

In college, Richard Parrish was possessed of a seriousness that repelled certain women and attracted others as though it were an aphrodisiac. He was a handsome young man. An unhealthy delicacy had melted away, and a sense of purpose gave him a capable, masculine air.

Richard Parrish slept with seven girls during college. He found that he fancied a certain blonde type and he was particularly susceptible to high cheekbones and an imperious air. But these brief liaisons made no lasting impression and, indeed, the girls seemed glad to end the relationships, finding a chilly lack of intimacy in Richard.

“You just don’t open up,” one girl told him, and Richard thought about that and said, “That’s true.”

“Why should I?” he could have added. He had his diary, and there he could say anything he pleased.

After his marriage—which, in his diary, he referred to as the “Vivian incident”—his mother made him go to an expensive psychiatrist, Dr. James Ellis, a solemn Freudian whose offices exuded an air of masculine power. Dr. Ellis was a grey-haired man with a round face and shaggy eyebrows that must have been worth a fortune in his profession. He dressed in dark suits and spoke in a voice only fractionally louder than a church whisper.

Ellis was cool, Richard thought. An ice man.

“Maybe I’ll become a shrink myself,” he told the psychiatrist.

Dr. Ellis, lulled perhaps by the oakwood shadows of the room and the polite murmur of the air conditioning, had missed this remark, for later in these sessions when Richard said that he would be leaving for Duke University in three weeks, Dr. Ellis had raised his substantial eyebrows and said, “Three weeks? We are far from through here, I think.”

Richard nonetheless left Dr. Ellis’s care to go to college. While he had found nothing healing in the sessions with Ellis, he had discovered a goal. He was going to be a psychiatrist. He was going to be above the dirty, ugly clamor of people, the pettiness and the stink. He was going to sit in a cool, dark room and keep his own counsel, a man of power, a shaman—ice cool.

Richard had an ample allowance and was able to live in an apartment off campus (an apartment furnished much more opulently than the wretched apartment of his Vivian exile). He was a good student, and he had the kind of compulsive mentality that makes for successful scholars and bureaucrats. In graduate school, teachers began to remark on his tenacity, his ability to grind massive amounts of research into something possessing a logical shape. There was more than mere endurance going on here, and his teachers began to think of him as brilliant, certainly a student to enlist in their own pet projects.

In his final year at Duke, Richard’s stepfather died. Richard was awakened at three in the morning by a wild, incoherent phone call from his mother. She had been drinking—something she almost never did—and it was only after she finally hung up, with a wail, that he was able to piece together what she had been saying. Poor Paul had died of a heart attack, sliding down behind his desk unobtrusively, at the lunch hour, so that he was not discovered until late in the afternoon. But that event had taken place three days ago, and that was not what had prompted his mother’s late-night phone call. What had shaken her decorous grief into tears was a meeting with the Baynard lawyers during which she learned that Paul had been a salaried employee, that old man Baynard still owned the company, and that all the evidences of ample wealth were, for the most part, on loan. Grace was reeling under the blow of this black news when she called her son. Richard, lying in bed, caught his mother’s fear and remembered the nightmare apartment of his days with Vivian.

As it turned out, the financial picture wasn’t quite that bleak. There was a trust fund, insurance, stocks. The mansion had to go, along with servants, but Mrs. Parrish-Baynard was able to live quite well. Richard, however, felt the purse strings tighten, and the fear of poverty and humiliation didn’t leave him. He wrote in his diary: “Without money it is all bullshit.” He was pleased at the obviousness of this observation, and aware that it wasn’t obvious to many of his fellow students, who didn’t understand that so many clients of mental health programs had only one disease: poverty.

Parrish interned at a large general hospital in upstate New York and then returned to the south for a residency at Romner Psychiatric Institute in Newburg, North Carolina. When his residency was over, he was asked to join the hospital staff. He accepted.

At the Institute, he labored to be liked, and he succeeded. He talked to everyone, and made himself available to everyone.

Richard was not naturally charming. He was, he realized, not even particularly likeable. It amused him to try to appear otherwise. And there were those of his colleagues who found Dr. Richard Parrish a bit too solicitous, too lavish in his praise. He had no real warmth, they suspected, and, in conference, he was capable of saying things that suggested an underlying indifference to the fate of patients. He was, his colleagues admitted, an astute observer of human behavior, but he often seemed to be observing it from somewhere beyond Andromeda.

Most people were impressed with young Dr. Parrish, however. He was a tall, strikingly handsome man who spoke slowly and with care, and he was possessed of an earnestness of manner that resembled deepest concern.

Several of the nurses were in love with him. Diane Larson found him attractive, but Saul, her wayward rock guitarist, was her world and, in any event, she didn’t quite approve of the ribald jokes and unabashed lust of the nurses. Maybe she was stodgy, a puritan throwback, but nurses, acting like giggly cheerleaders, sighing over doctors, seemed woefully out of line, even in jest. Diane wanted to get on with the business of helping people who were desperately in need of help.

She wanted to help Anna, and Richard Parrish was a man who listened. “I’m really worried about a friend of mine,” she told him. “She never had much of a life. Ran away from home when she was a kid.

“Then this guy she was living with died of an overdose, and she got into this religious thing. I mean, it’s not just tripping on mysticism with Anna. It’s not like Hank or Gretchen, these other folks where I live. It’s like people when they do speed, words racing, you know. And her whole manner … not exactly crazy, but not exactly rational either. I’ve seen schizophrenics, and it’s sort of like that. David, her new boyfriend, he says she’s fine, but I know he doesn’t really think that.”

Dr. Parrish, sitting across from her at a table in the hospital cafeteria, nodded his head. “I’d like to talk to her,” he said.

“I’ll try to get her to come in,” Diane said. “I don’t know. Anna can be difficult.”

They left it at that. Richard had forgotten Anna—indeed, had forgotten Diane—when Diane called him at home and asked if he would admit Anna to the hospital.

He had just come back from dinner with Jane Solomon. The evening had been a success. He was slowly winning her skittish, high-born heart.

Always accommodating, Richard had assured Diane that he would take care of the matter immediately, and he had called the ward and spoken to the night ward clerk.

The next day, Dr. Richard Parrish had the first of many interviews with Anna Shockley.