IT WAS WEEKS BEFORE the sanatorium finally put Vanessa in a room with a therapist in a lab coat. Until then she saw only nurses who wasted Vanessa’s time combing through her medical history. They harassed her daily about going outside. Finally, she got on a doctor’s schedule—but only to discuss her aversion to the outdoors! Everyone spent time in the gardens, apparently, especially during sunny and fragrant May. Why didn’t she?
At first Homer Crawford seemed like a decent man with a friendly enough demeanor. He was slight and neat with Golden Retriever eyes. But Vanessa soon realized it was a ruse, a disguise to hide what he really was—a tyrannical tormenter. He wasn’t a Golden, he was a Doberman.
He didn’t even have a notebook on his lap! He didn’t sit behind a desk like a proper doctor. He sat in the plush wingback chair by the tall open window, while he directed her to a hardwood bench in a nearby corner by the wall. “You’re not going outside why?” Crawford said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
Did she have the nerve to tell this man? “I believe my husband is in love with another woman.” Vanessa was proud of herself for being forthright, but Crawford wasn’t the least impressed.
“Before you tell me your theories, I need to know some hard facts about you.”
“Like why I’m not outside?”
“Sure, let’s start with that.”
Vanessa didn’t want to start with that. They delved into her background instead, but Crawford wasn’t particularly interested in that either, other than to ask if she had been outside since childhood. He probed and probed until he goaded Vanessa into the Story of the Lost Hat. He sat befuddled.
“I don’t want to explain what I don’t want to explain,” Vanessa said.
“Explain what you want, then.”
“I have a real crisis in my house and you keep trying to pick apart something from ten years ago that doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Sounds like there’s been a crisis in your house for ten years.” Crawford appeared to be barely paying attention. His gaze was on the lawns below. “Has your marriage been sound before this latest . . .?”
“Absolutely,” Vanessa said. “We have a wonderful marriage.”
“Wonderful. I see. Then I’d say your suspicions are unfounded. Let’s get back to this lost hat. What is the hat a stand-in for?”
“No! I said no.”
“Suit yourself.” Crawford sat and stared out the window, absorbed in the activities below.
Vanessa shifted from side to side in the silence. “Is there anyone else I can talk to? A woman perhaps?”
“You want to talk to a woman, do you?” Crawford said. “I’m the psychiatrist in residence. We have a cardiologist, an infectious diseases specialist, and an ear and nose doctor. All men. The thirty nurses on staff take care of a hundred patients and don’t have an hour in their day to talk only to you. You’re welcome to try—with any one of them. But here’s the issue I have. You’re not at home. You’re in a sanatorium. This isn’t a pensione where you can spend your days fiddling with your hands like you’re doing now. Sick people come here to get better. And you know what happens after they get better? They go home. What you’re proposing—to use Austen Riggs as a permanent hotel—isn’t going to work for us, not even if your benefactor is our president. When Percival and I have our weekly review and I explain to him what you’re trying to do, he’ll be on the phone with your father posthaste, demanding you leave immediately.”
“Threats don’t work on me,” Vanessa said. “I just retreat further.”
“By all means retreat—back to Hampton. I have thirteen other patients I need to see today.”
Sometime later, Crawford introduced Vanessa to Shiba Miata, a nurse of indeterminate ethnic background. “Shiba said she’s willing to talk to you,” Crawford said. “She knows your history. Fill her in on the details if you wish. Good luck, Shiba. I’ll be on rounds.”
He left the two women alone. Vanessa hated to admit it, but Crawford was right. Vanessa was more wary of Shiba than she was of Crawford, even though Shiba let her sit in the comfy chair by the window.
“What else happened when you lost your hat?” Shiba said.
“I don’t want to talk about it!” Vanessa said. “Didn’t you hear me? I told you, my husband is in love with another woman.”
“Impossible,” said Shiba. “You are beautiful and elegant. You have a lovely smile, a genteel demeanor, graceful gestures. You came here well dressed, and the man who dropped you off was solicitous and caring toward you. He clearly wants you to be better, so whatever is ailing you, let’s get to it.”
“You’re looking at the problem from the outside,” Vanessa said. “You see only the visible, what you can observe with your myopic eye.”
Here is what ailed Vanessa:
After Isabelle shot the intruder and Finn leaped across the porch and into the house, the person he rushed to first was Isabelle, still violently expelling the shotgun shell from her smoking weapon. He stepped up to her as in a pas de deux, a dance for two. He didn’t speak to her, he merely came close and peered into her face. Only after that momentary lapse did Finn seek out Vanessa. Before that, no one else existed for him.
When Finn cast his brief gaze on Isabelle, he gazed upon her as the most familiar thing, not the least familiar thing.
And that didn’t make any sense, because in recent months, Vanessa had observed Finn and Isabelle having almost zero connection. Their old banter was gone, their arguing, their joking. Obviously Vanessa didn’t know how they were with each other out in the fields, but during family meals they talked almost exclusively to others. Vanessa remembered one afternoon when Isabelle was by the stove, and Finn walked close behind her and didn’t say a word. Now that Vanessa thought about it, perhaps he passed too close behind her. Like he could brush against her if she moved. But he ignored her as if she weren’t even there, and she ignored him! She ladled out soup in a bowl for him and placed it on the counter, and he took it from the counter—not her hands. They never even glanced at each other.
He stopped speaking her name. Not just to call for her across the growing greenery, but even inside the house.
They didn’t sit next to each other anymore, not even outside by the fire, where Vanessa was not.
From the outside, if you were to observe Finn and Isabelle without knowing anything about them, you would think they were strangers.
But it wasn’t always that way. Vanessa was certain about that. Their previous nonstop repartee had been so irritating to her. She remembered the feeling it provoked within her, the churlishness. Now it was the absence of churlishness that was the glaring wrong.
Had they flirted, had they touched, or said inappropriate things, it would have been easier to deal with. This—it was like a slow deadly poison. By the time it killed you, you hardly knew you were dying.
And when you looked at the two of them from the outside, you could never tell.
Eventually, in broken passages, Vanessa managed to convey this to Shiba.
Like Crawford, Shiba was deeply unimpressed with Vanessa’s assessments. “I don’t know your husband,” she said, “and I don’t know the woman who lives with you. But I do know something about love. Love is the animating force in all life. It’s something you cannot hide. You would see it instantly between them, every time they looked at each other.”
“Exactly,” said Vanessa. “And they made sure they never looked at each other.” Except when she killed a man.
“You’re saying the absence of love is proof of love?” said Shiba. “That doesn’t seem right.”
“I’m telling you how it is. The external is not real.”
“Very good,” said Shiba. “But you’re speaking about yourself right now, correct? Earlier, I described you from the outside, and you just confessed to me that you are not what you appear to be. The external is not real. So who is the real Vanessa?”
After that, Vanessa sheepishly crawled back to Crawford, gladly sat on the hard bench while he lounged in comfort by his open window, and didn’t ask to speak to anyone else.
When she told Crawford again about her suspicions, he also shrugged. “It doesn’t seem likely. They live surrounded by nine other people. It doesn’t sound as if there’s a gap in their day for what you’re proposing. He sleeps at night with you, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And during the day they labor alongside your parents, his parents, your sister, and your children, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Every meal you have, you have together. And during those meals they don’t speak. Every evening you have, you have together. And during the radio hour they don’t speak. So when exactly does this breathless love affair take place? Only in their hearts? Only deep within themselves?”
Vanessa chewed her lip. In the winter months Isabelle had horse things to do for Mickey, and Finn drove her because she didn’t drive. The stables were in Virginia or Vermont, so they were gone a few days at a time. But often they took Mae and Junie with them and once even Earl and Walter! It seemed so harmless. And once a month, they went to Boston together—without the girls. Isabelle had things to do for Schumann and stayed with him while Finn visited Lucas and stayed with him. Finn drove home without her, and she returned later by train.
Why didn’t Vanessa want to disclose this little charade to the good doctor? Maybe because it made her seem like an idiot for not noticing and not even caring.
“Have you ever seen them acting inappropriately with one another?”
“Like how?” She was glad to veer off in another direction.
“Anything. Passing a private joke. Discussing things a man and woman who are not intimate should not discuss. Touching each other, perhaps.”
“No, never!” But Vanessa chewed her lip even worse than before. And there she’d been, thinking this was a good direction to veer off in!
They played in the snow when they were supposed to be shoveling. Sometimes they hosed each other with water. They fought like angry children when they tried to build a rail fence and the posts broke. Isabelle even shoved him. “I told you they weren’t strong enough, and you never listen!” Once she fell off a ladder. Maybe Finn caught her. Did she fall or jump? Vanessa couldn’t see past the raspberry bushes. Once he cut himself and she bandaged his arm. She did a very thorough job. Once they jumped from a high ledge in the barn into the hay below. They did it for hours with the kids. Vanessa rocked back and forth, wishing she could run over her memories with a concrete spreader.
There were other things, too. How united Finn and Isabelle were in trying to get Vanessa to function better, how often they cajoled her and appealed to her, how often they spoke to her as if they were well versed in their separate interactions with her. How relieved Vanessa had been to send Isabelle across Boston to bring Finn his dinner, so she herself wouldn’t have to do it. How after the bank closed, Finn and Isabelle ran the entire household, and how grateful Vanessa was that she herself didn’t have to do it. How often during that last year in Beacon Hill, Finn came late to bed, smelling of cigarettes and liquor and denying the liquor.
Vanessa didn’t tell Crawford how they raced down to the river together, and went to town and the market and the ocean together. How Isabelle played the balalaika and sang in a foreign language and how he sat and listened as if he understood the words. Her heart hurt.
“Here’s my proof,” Vanessa said to the doctor. “A dozen people are celebrating New Year’s Eve. At midnight, we all hug and kiss one another. My God, I even hugged and air-kissed Finn’s brother, and I can’t stand that man!”
“Why?”
“Why did I kiss him or why can’t I stand him? No—he’s not the point of my story! Everyone kissed, yet neither Finn nor Isabelle came anywhere near each other.”
“Did you want them to?”
“They didn’t is the point.”
“How do you know,” said Crawford, “unless you were already watching them? They could have.”
“You think I’m imagining the whole thing?”
“I don’t know. Tell me about this Isabelle.”
Vanessa told him.
Crawford listened intently. It was the first time he turned his head away from the window.
“Do you think she’s attractive?”
Vanessa shrugged. “In my view, not really. She used to be a horse rider, so she’s trim and toned in the legs and hips, like a gymnast.”
“Or a rider.”
“Do men like that sort of thing?”
“They don’t not like it,” said Crawford.
“She does have an ample bosom, but she wears peasant dresses, how attractive is that?”
Crawford didn’t reply.
“She’s always perspiring and dusty from field work. It’s disagreeable to a man like my husband.” Or so Vanessa thought. “He has a strong distaste for dirt and germs.”
“What else?”
“She’s got a direct, open face. Unswerving eyes, well-formed lips. Her eyebrows are too thick. She doesn’t pluck them. She doesn’t do anything with her long hair either, all she does is brush it and leave it down. Or she braids it in two and looks like Heidi. She wears almost no makeup except when we have summer parties. She kind of dresses up then. Puts flowers in her hair—who does that? And she dances and sings and plays the balalaika and tells jokes like a jester. I didn’t think any of that would be particularly appealing to a serious professional like my husband.”
Crawford shrugged. “It’s not unappealing,” he said. “I’ve seen your husband when he comes to visit you. He is a handsome, hale and hearty man. I can’t speak for his taste in women.”
“His taste in women is me,” Vanessa said. “Refined, made up, neat, delicate, put together.”
“Except you are here, and he is there. With her.”
“By my choice, not theirs,” Vanessa said loftily.
Crawford was silent, as if figuring out what to say or how to say it. “During the months and years this was happening, and your husband and this woman lived and worked together side by side, what were you doing?”
“How is this about me?” she exclaimed, flustered and unhappy.
“Because this is your story,” said Crawford. “You are the center of your own narrative. If I were talking to your husband or to Isabelle, I suspect you would not be the focus of their story. I’ll ask you again—what are you, Vanessa Evans, doing in the middle of your days?”
“I’m in the house,” Vanessa said. “I’m in my bedroom.”
“What are you doing in your bedroom?”
“In the mornings, sleeping. Sometimes I clean at night, and I go to bed late. So I sleep late.”
“And then?”
“It takes me a while to get out of bed.”
“And then?”
“It takes me a while to get myself together, to get dressed, ready for the day.”
“And then?”
“I clean my room, or scrub the washbasin, or dust the wood blinds or the windowsills, or I wipe the floor where Finn has been. He tries to be careful but he always drags in dirt from outside. I wash the floor with rags, and then I wash the rags.”
“And then?”
“I make the bed, tidy my nightstand, dust my lamps, underneath the trays, the inside of the wardrobe and the dressers, wipe the mirror, do my makeup again. Normal things.”
“You put your makeup on twice. Why? Why even once?”
“Same reason I put it on here,” she said. “To look put together.”
“Yes, it’s important to look put together,” the doctor echoed. “By this time, I imagine it’s evening?”
“Yes. And the girls come in, and tell me what they’ve been doing, and then Isabelle comes in and tells me about dinner.”
“And then you go out and cook?”
“No,” Vanessa said. “I have a hard time cooking. Not because I don’t like it. But the act makes such a mess of my clean kitchen that it gives me tremendous anxiety.”
He studied her pensively. “I suspect there are many activities you probably find messy and distasteful.”
“Yes—such as cooking,” said Vanessa, averting her gaze. “So I remove myself from the process. I set the table, and after dinner I clear the table and wash the dishes and wipe the counters and make it spotless.”
“And then?”
“After dinner, they listen to a program, while I continue tidying up,” Vanessa said. “Or I wipe the floor under their feet, or I go clean the bathroom, because with so many muddy farm people washing before dinner, the bathroom is always a dire mess.”
Crawford was quiet. “You are dusting under your family’s feet while they’re relaxing at the end of their long day listening to Lone Ranger?”
“No!” Vanessa exclaimed. “Sometimes it’s Fibber McGee and Molly.”
“Let’s say it’s true about your husband and this Isabelle,” Crawford said. “Why are you here?”
“What do you mean why? It’s not obvious?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“I needed to remove myself from that incredibly stressful situation. Is that really hard to understand?”
Crawford stared at Vanessa for so long she became uncomfortable. “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing your whole life?” he said at last. “Removing yourself utterly from any situation that made you the least bit uneasy? Even something as anodyne and virtuous as cooking for your family. You couldn’t participate in it. Field work? Not for you. Educating your own children? Sounds like your mother-in-law is performing that task.”
“She is an actual teacher! It’s the role she was born to play.”
“There’s always a reason, isn’t there, why someone else does what you don’t want to do. Tending to your father? Your mother has that in hand. Where are you, Vanessa Evans, while another woman lives your life and takes care of your husband?”
Vanessa got up and left.
“I see where you are,” the doctor called after her. “Missing.”
It was a long time before she appeared again in Crawford’s office.
She sat quietly at first, mulling her words.
“I came to Austen Riggs,” she said, “because when I realized he was in love with her, I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Of course,” Crawford said. “You did the only thing you ever do. Bolt and run. But why didn’t you first ask your husband if it was true?”
“Why would I?”
“If you didn’t want to know, why are you talking to me about it? For rhetorical exercise?”
“I’m talking to you about it because I thought you could help me.”
“Help you do what?”
Vanessa didn’t reply.
“Why didn’t you stay and fight?”
“How could I?” whispered Vanessa, her voice breaking. “I didn’t ask him because I couldn’t bear to have him look into my face and lie.” She raised her hand to stop Crawford from speaking again. “I didn’t ask him,” she said in a collapsing, deadened voice, “because I couldn’t bear to have him look into my face and tell me the truth.” She burst into tears.
Crawford sat and waited for her to stop crying. He didn’t even offer her a napkin, she had to get her own!
“You’re afraid of the truth,” he said.
“Who wouldn’t be!”
“Why are you afraid?”
“Because then what?” whispered Vanessa.
“Finally,” Crawford said with great emphasis. “After many months, we are finally getting somewhere.” He folded his hands. “You haven’t asked my opinion but I’m going to give it to you anyway. What you’ve described to me cannot continue.”
“I agree!”
“What you are doing cannot continue.”
“What? No—it’s not me! It’s them!”
“No, Vanessa. I know you feel as if you had no choice but to come here, but while you’re here, what do you think is happening there? Now that they don’t have you to worry about, do you think they’re growing less intimate, falling less in love, becoming less committed to each other?”
“I don’t think about it,” half a Vanessa said in half a voice.
“Your marriage is going to end,” Crawford said. “And then what will you do? Sounds like the farm life can’t succeed without Isabelle. In the scenario you’ve painted for me, she is the indispensable one. You have been sidelined. Not only is life going on without you, but it’s going on swimmingly. How does that make you feel? If you go back and give your husband an ultimatum—it’s either her or me, darling—what kind of response do you think you’ll get?”
“You don’t think I know this?” Vanessa exclaimed. “That’s why I didn’t ask him.”
“What do you plan to do about it after you leave here?”
“You’re the doctor. I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“I’m a doctor, not a magician,” Crawford said. “You have been a non-existent wife. You have not helped him, not even in the smallest way, to carry the burden that was placed on him.”
“What about the burden on me?” Vanessa said, insulted.
“While your husband seeks a way to feed his family, your parents, his parents, and your sister, what are you burdened by? The country is facing challenging times. The pressures on him are enormous. And what have you done? I would be more surprised if you told me he was still faithful to you, frankly.”
“How dare you!”
“I’ll tell you how you can begin another life,” Crawford went on, ignoring her outburst, her outraged glare, her frazzled hands. “First, acknowledge your own failures.”
“You sound like Finn, not like my doctor,” she said.
“You mean your husband has discussed this with you?”
“Many times. We do communicate, you know. We are married.”
“You’ve communicated with your husband about all the ways in which you refuse to participate in the marriage?” Crawford stared at her coolly. “Vanessa, let him go. You clearly don’t love him. Leave him be.”
“What are you talking about?” she cried. “Of course I love him.”
“Not one thing you’ve told me comes from the mouth of a wife who loves her husband. I’ve heard a lot about what he did wrong. He doesn’t understand, he doesn’t care, he works too hard, he drinks illegally, he brought you to the farm, he keeps asking you to go outside. That’s what I’m hearing. Anger. Contempt. Disrespect. Resentment. Not even between the lines do I hear love.”
“The love is there. It’s just covered with those other things.”
“Not covered. Buried. As in dead.”
“That’s not true!”
“Listen to me,” said Crawford, a little louder, as if Vanessa was having trouble hearing him. “It doesn’t exist. Let him be. Let him make a better life with someone else.”
“You’re insane,” said a horrified Vanessa. “I’m the one who should be treating you for nervous maladies. I didn’t come here to let him go, you fool. Do you even have a degree? I came here to get him back.”
“You’re here because you ran away, the same reason you hid in your bunker on the farm. It’s why you mindlessly dust your drawers and don’t go outside with your children.”
“I went outside with my children—and look what happened!”
Crawford couldn’t hide his astonishment. “You blame your children for losing your baby?”
“It was so slippery out, and we have such steep hills! Take us to the park, take us to the park, they said. I relented, I tried to be a good mother. I took them, and I lost my favorite hat! Had I not gone out with them, I’d still have it, and I’d still have my child, and we wouldn’t have this to deal with.”
“It’s the children’s fault you slipped on a curb?”
“It happened because I went looking for my hat and couldn’t find it. And Finn was out drinking with Lucas! He wasn’t home where he was supposed to be, to help me, to go with me! I was all alone, and I slipped.” She put her face into her hands. “And when Lucas finally brought him home, he was so toasted, he didn’t even know what was happening to me.” She couldn’t speak about it anymore. She left. It was a long time before she returned.
“If our governess hadn’t taken the day off because her husband was sick, I wouldn’t have had to go to the park in the first place,” said Vanessa after she sat down on her hard bench.
“You wouldn’t have had to go to the park with your children,” Crawford repeated.
“Yes.”
“Vanessa, I’m unclear—is it the governess’s fault for taking a day off, or the children’s fault for wanting to play, or your husband’s fault for having a drink, or this Lucas person’s fault? Is any of it your fault?”
“It’s my fault for trying to be a good mother, for trying to be a good wife.”
“Is that why you’ve stopped trying to be either?”
“I haven’t stop—”
“Enough.” He regrouped. “Did you consider the possibility that perhaps the baby wasn’t meant to be?” Crawford said. “Millions of mothers have walked in the snow, taken their children to the park, slipped off curbs, lost hats even—and they didn’t lose their babies. I know there is grief. I know that what happened is unfair. But instead of blaming your entire family and the great outdoors, and this Lucas character, couldn’t you—solely for comfort—entertain the possibility that maybe the child wasn’t meant to survive? Maybe there was some abnormality that would have made life difficult for him? Why didn’t you try to have another one? Nothing like the birth of a healthy child to make you forget your anguish.”
“I couldn’t risk it,” said Vanessa. “What if I miscarried again? A scalded cat doesn’t jump on a hot stove again.”
“Yes, but it won’t jump on a cold stove either,” returned Crawford. “You’d rather live inside your anger and pain than try for another baby your husband desperately wanted?”
“Why should he get to have what he wants?”
“Yes, spoken like a woman in love.”
“I didn’t get to have what I wanted.”
“And what is that, Vanessa?”
“A living baby,” she barely mouthed, struggling up and staggering from Crawford’s office.
She had come to the sanatorium hoping that she could get better, and maybe she could offer herself to Finn and her girls as the woman she was always meant to be, instead of the woman she had become, nothing but an irrational fraction divided again and again. But this was going so poorly.
When she and Crawford met again, she was quiet. “The next time you provoke me, I may not come back at all,” she said, trying to be funny.
“And who would that be a punishment for?” said Crawford.
They sat. He stared out the window.
“I think you’re right,” she said.
“I’m right about so many things. What specifically?”
“It could be my imagination,” she said. “I’m in a room alone with my thoughts all day. Some of them are bound to be irrational.”
“Which part is either imagination or irrational?”
“The part about Isabelle and my husband,” said Vanessa. “I get too worked up about things. I’ve blown the whole thing out of proportion.”
Crawford nodded.
“You agree?” She was excited.
“Only that you are using another one of your tricks to stop yourself from dealing with your terrible situation, to stop yourself from fixing yourself and your life. If it’s all someone else’s fault, if it’s all in your head, you don’t have to do anything.”
“Okay, yes, maybe—but also,” said Vanessa, “then I can go back home and pretend like nothing’s happened.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Everything else is too unbearable,” Vanessa said, looking at her hands with shame. “I have nowhere else to go. And we as a family have nowhere else to go. Your way, my entire world explodes. My way, everything stays the same.”
“You’d rather live a life in which your husband continues an intimate relationship with another woman in your house?”
“Nothing else seems possible,” Vanessa said.
“No other solution presents itself to you?”
“Like what, some kind of pill? Electric shock treatment? A lobotomy?”
“There is no pill that will make you love your husband,” Crawford said. “No treatment that will make you stop being angry at others for your own failings. No lobotomy is going to help you cope with your anxiety.”
“So what are we talking about then?” She said it as if she wanted a lobotomy, preferred it to this.
“If I asked you what you want, what would you tell me?”
“What I want from what?”
“From this day forward. From the moment you leave here. When you return home. What do you want, Vanessa?”
“I want things to go back to the way they were,” Vanessa said weakly. “Before she came into our lives. We were managing. We were happy, more or less. We had a house, servants, money. Everything ran smoothly.”
“Except you couldn’t go outside, and you didn’t want to be touched by your husband.”
“Only because I was afraid of having a child!”
“And that life is something you’d want again?”
“Yes, it was wonderful.”
“If Finn was here with you, and I asked him the same question, what would he say?”
“I can’t speak for him.”
“Of course you can. You can give an opinion, can’t you? What do you think he would say? Would he tell me it was wonderful? Would he tell me he would like that life back?” Crawford paused. “Or would he say that despite the endless toil, the unceasing labor, the absence of financial security, the lack of material comforts, he would still take his present life over any other life he’s ever had?”
It took Vanessa a very long time to reply. “That is what I’m most afraid of,” she said.
“You keep telling me all the things I’ve done wrong,” Vanessa said to Crawford.
“I’m not. I’m like a recording. I repeat to you what you say to me.”
“But you’re not telling me how to fix it.”
“I can’t fix it.”
“So what good are you?”
“Only you can fix it.”
“How?”
“Ask yourself what you want,” Crawford said. “Ask yourself what you can’t live without. I don’t think you’ve suffered enough. Until you answer those questions, you can’t know what to work toward. Roosevelt wanted to be president and not even a potentially life-ending illness would stop him. First and foremost, you need to know your order of desire.”
“I don’t want to go outside,” she said.
“First and foremost?” said Crawford. “Because if you can’t go outside, you cannot be a wife and mother. It’s one thing or the other thing. Are you a paralytic or are you the President of the United States? That’s the choice you must make, Vanessa.”
“It’s all well and good for us to sit and speculate on the president’s choices,” Vanessa said. “But I can’t live on my own, and I don’t want to be forced to do what I don’t want to do.”
“Okay, this is progress,” Crawford exclaimed dryly. “You’re admitting that you’re resigned to living out your days in a wheelchair, an invalid by choice whom other healthy people—including your husband and his sensual, charismatic, inexhaustible woman—must care for. And that this lamentable existence is enough for you. Better that than a future in which you rediscover your purpose. This is an important breakthrough you’ve made about yourself, Vanessa. I hope you’re proud.”
“Do you have any idea how infuriating you are?” she said, standing and turning toward the door. “How mind-bogglingly vexatious?”
“No, but do tell. I have a half-hour before my next patient.”
Weeks and weeks of crying and eating in her room, while outside was sunny and bright and the yellow-bellied tanagers chirped and fairytales were read to visiting children.
Or was it months and months?
Or was it years?
Who wrote that fairytales did not tell children that dragons existed? Children already knew that dragons existed. Fairytales told children that dragons could be killed.
“Vanessa, from my window, I saw you out on the patio yesterday,” Crawford said. “Were my eyes deceiving me?”
“I wish they were deceiving you,” she said. “It was dreadful. As soon as I dared set one foot on the concrete, something flew into my eye. I had to be sedated.”
“Shiba told me it was fluff from a dandelion.”
“It was a bumblebee,” Vanessa said. “It was huge like a bumblebee.”
“Vanessa, did you tell your husband when he came to visit you that you’ve been going outside?”
“I didn’t need to. We sat outside and had our tea.”
“Was he impressed? Were your daughters impressed? They’re lovely young ladies, by the way. They look like their mother.”
“Are you being forward with me, Dr. Crawford?” said Vanessa.
“I’m being observant.”
“They were moderately impressed, I suppose, by my single step into the fresh air,” Vanessa said. “And thank you.”
“All great things begin with a single step. How is everything at home?”
“Good. We have a tractor. It was a gift for Isabelle from a horse breeder.”
“That is some gift,” Crawford said. “What does Isabelle do for this man?”
“Like I pay attention. Evaluates his horses, I think.” Vanessa shrugged. “One of her horses won the Kentucky Derby.”
Crawford whooped. “That’s an extraordinary achievement!”
“I suppose. We also bought a combine. The girls love all that, but the farming talk is debilitating for me.”
“It’s important for mothers to pay attention to the interests of their children,” Crawford said. “What else? How is your sister’s new husband?”
“I don’t know. Bertie is a fisherman. When he comes, I have nothing to say to him. Neither does Eleanor. I think she only married him to have an extra pair of hands in the fields.”
“Extra hands are important. Most of your family came last month?”
“Yes. Everyone but Isabelle.”
“Yes.” Crawford was quiet. “She never comes.”
Vanessa was quiet. “I suppose that’s how you know what I fear is true. If it wasn’t true, she’d be here.”
“Yes.” Crawford sighed. “Did you and your husband have a few minutes alone?”
“Of course not. We never do. His design, not mine. He comes once a month, brings gifts, stays the afternoon, but there’s always someone by his side. The girls always—”
“You’re happy to see your daughters, no?”
“Of course. But he brings my sister, whom I’m less happy to see, and Eleanor drags her son with her, and now her new husband, too. Finn often brings my parents. My father looks a little frail.” Vanessa shuddered. “He’s lost weight. His hands tremble. I don’t know.”
“What would you say to Finn if he came alone?”
Vanessa stammered.
“Why don’t you ask him to come by himself next time and we can work on what you can say to him.”
“You’re just making things worse, Crawford, with your damn words. Where did you get your degree, the School of Ruin Everything?”
“You’re upset with your husband for not coming by himself, yet the thought of being alone with him is an unimaginable terror?”
“Somewhere in there I know you’re trying to catch me in something.”
“Yes, in your maddening inconsistency.” Crawford looked out the window and smoked.
“I see you didn’t ask Finn to come alone. Who was that with him?”
“His father.”
“The retired judge?”
“Yes. He scares me. But apparently Finn and Earl drove down to Connecticut some months back and sweet-talked the CEO of a submarine company into donating one of their decommissioned boats to charity.”
“A submarine to charity?”
Vanessa chuckled. “No, Crawford,” she said. “They make ferry boats and other ships. But that’s pretty good, right? As good as the Kentucky Derby?” She smiled. “They talked the CEO into repurposing an old unused ship into a merchant vessel.”
“Always good to repurpose old unused things. For what charity?”
“My husband helps people who bring in refugees from Ukraine every few months.”
“What an unending disaster that part of the world is,” Crawford said.
“Tell me about it. That’s the main dinner talk at my table.”
“But a great act of charity on the part of the boat company. And your husband is involved in this because of Isabelle?”
“Yes,” Vanessa said. “To help her husband and sons get to America.”
“Isabelle has a husband and sons? Why have you not mentioned them?”
“They’re missing,” Vanessa said. “But every boat that comes in, she prays they’re on it.”
Crawford began to say something.
“You asked me a while back what I hope for, do you remember?” said Vanessa. “I guess in the half of an imperfect life that’s still left for me to live, I’m hoping that Finn’s herculean efforts on her behalf will not be in vain, and that her family will find their way to America and be reunited with her, and then they can go off and live their own imperfect life, and my husband will return to me.”
“That sounds almost like a plan, or a dream,” said Crawford. “In which case, we’re going to have to work harder, Vanessa, to give Finn something real to come back to.”
“Do I have too many problems to be a good wife?” she asked Crawford, when her progress seemed too insignificant to warrant a change in her marital circumstances.
“No,” Crawford said. “You’re doing well.”
“Seems sort of pathetic. Outside for thirty minutes. It’s hardly a triumph. It’s hardly the sacking of Troy.”
“Are you Troy or Greece in your analogy?” asked Crawford.
“Jury’s still out on that,” she said.
“Because it took Greece over ten years to achieve victory.”
“Yes, yes, I know, Troy wasn’t sacked in a day,” Vanessa said, and Crawford laughed.
“We’ve been working on two areas,” he said. “One you can heal by relatively simple therapies just as you’ve been doing. Going outside, for example. Since you’ve separated the loss of your child from being outdoors, you have been slowly regaining your sense of the world by venturing out onto our gorgeous lawns. Carry on, and success will be yours. Just remember, if you are outside thirty minutes on Monday, you must sit by yourself at least forty minutes on Tuesday. If you took forty steps on Wednesday, you must take fifty steps on Thursday. Every day push yourself a little farther, a little harder. And when you feel uncomfortable—”
“Stop immediately!”
Crawford smiled. “When you feel stressed or anxious, push yourself another minute or two into that anxiety. Then stop if you want, but don’t let the stress control you. Learn how to walk through it. Remind yourself you are a strong, attractive, capable woman.”
“Yes, a strong, attractive, capable woman who doesn’t like to get dirty or endure mess, and are you being forward with me again, Crawford?”
“Merely observant,” he said. “So what if you get dirty? That’s what soap is for. So what if the kitchen is a mess? That’s what a sponge is for.”
“What about the other problem? Not so easy, that one.”
He sat by the window and breathed in the air. “Your second habit is admittedly more difficult because you’ve trained yourself to give in to it instead of to overcome it. It’s a nasty lifetime pattern to break.”
“And that is?”
“Coping by way of distraction,” Crawford said. “It started with the lemons and continued right into your husband’s love affair. A direct line from lemons to Ukrainian lovers.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No, Vanessa,” Crawford said. “Unfortunately our time is growing short. It took us a while to get here. You were one tough nut. However, you’ve had some major steps forward. I’ve given you the tools. The rest is up to you.”
“I don’t see any tools,” said Vanessa, “and I certainly don’t know how to use them.”
“The lemons have ruined you,” Crawford said. “You distracted yourself from them at an early age by planting flowers or organizing your wardrobe.”
“Yes, Crawford, I’m the one who told you this.”
“The next time you faced a new anxiety—like your sister’s jealousy or your mother’s unrealistic expectations of you—you again coped the only way you knew how, by busying yourself with mindless physical tasks. No matter how small the problem, you turned away from it. You sponged or dusted or scrubbed or mopped. And then you added another impediment by inserting excuses into the busyness. You stopped saying, I’m distracting myself with cleaning because I know Finn is keeping something from me and I’m afraid to ask what it is, and started saying, I’m cleaning because the house or the nursery or the kitchen is a dire mess and I must deal with this new problem at once to the exclusion of all else.”
“Crawford, sometimes things are messy,” Vanessa said. “Closets really are dusty and windows are disgusting.”
“A lot less often than you think,” Crawford said. “And even when the windows are clean, the other, much more serious problems persist.”
“Yes, but the windows are clean,” said Vanessa. She was teasing.
“Your defense mechanism against anxiety is infinitely regressive,” said Crawford. “You became so proficient with the compulsion that you lost your ability to deal with any situation. And losing a child is an enormous ordeal. If you turned away from the lemons, think about how far you ran from the grief. And in 1929 when your family endured another genuine crisis, you had no ability to meet it or to support your husband through it other than to hide inside your rags and your sponges.”
“Someone had to wash the towels,” Vanessa muttered, less jovially.
“You created for yourself and in yourself an untenable make-believe world in which all reality was blocked and all that was left was a chaos of your own invention. You kept saying if only the books got alphabetized, if only the children didn’t lose their mittens, if only the immigrant woman stopped placing jars on shelves and cans in cupboards, everything would be all right again.”
“In my defense, Crawford, the books have never gotten alphabetized.”
Crawford drummed on the window ledge. “How are you going to confront the very real crisis inside your marriage?”
“I guess I’ll have to scrub harder.”
“When you find yourself reaching for a rag or a duster instead of confronting Finn, when you feel yourself unable to leave your room, say to yourself: I know the floor is not dusty. I know his clothes on the floor is not why I’m upset. I need to talk to him, and I’m afraid.”
“Sometimes his clothes are on the floor. Both things can be true.”
“Vanessa.”
“Oh, fine. But I’ve had a lot to be afraid of,” she said. “The loss of my father’s bank. His heart attack. Adder’s abandonment of my sister. Our sudden calamitous poverty. Our moving to an awful remote place in the middle of nowhere. My husband’s love for another woman.”
“Every one of the things you listed except the last one has already happened and been dealt with by people other than you. You were nowhere to be found. You left your husband adrift and alone. He is responsible for his actions, but if you cast the one you say you love into a storm, you can’t blame only him for finding a life raft. Some of that, you must own.”
“I’m confused—do I clean or not?”
“You don’t clean first. You clean last. You don’t clean for coping. You clean for reward. This is your chance to do something about the thing you can still do something about, Vanessa. You want to save your marriage? Talk to Finn and then dust. Stop postponing the confrontation. Stalling only adds to your burdens. Say instead, I will mop as a gift to myself—for facing the most difficult thing. Because to face a hard thing deserves applause, deserves reward. First you speak to him, and then you scrub, knowing you have faced him. Sponge to your heart’s content knowing you have earned it.”
“Sounds like another trick of the mind.” But she leaned back on her bench feeling more hopeful. “Live first, then run from living? Are you sure changing the order of operations will help?”
“Has your way made your life livable?” Crawford said. “For years, you’ve been dusting the corners while your marriage fell apart. Now try dusting your marriage while your corners fall apart. I fully expect that by the time you finish with the marriage and the fields and the cooking and the children, you will have so little energy for scraping wax off candles that you will listen to Jack Benny, laugh a few times, and be out like a light.”
As Vanessa was about to leave, she turned around. Crawford was still by the window, looking longingly at the green sloping lawns and the lengthening shadows.
“Are you all right, Homer?” she said, seeing him suddenly. His hair had thinned. He had lost weight, had trouble taking a deep breath.
He turned to her and smiled. “I’m fine,” he said. “Thank you for asking. By the way, did you ever find out if you were allergic to lemons?”
“I did,” said Vanessa. “And I’m not.”
He laughed.
She laughed too.
“You are a lovely woman, Vanessa,” he said.
“Okay, you’re definitely being forward now.”
“Maybe,” Homer Crawford said. “But also a little bit observant.”