Chapter Ten

Two days after their visit to the hospital, Will was called in for an emergency—one of his admitted patients had experienced a severe psychotic episode—and was gone from the house by 7:00 a.m. The phone next to Flora’s bed rang at 8:00, fully waking her from a semi-doze that she’d fallen into after getting up to let Toto out the front door to piddle. Heavy rain just beyond the overhang had made the dog only tremble and stare at her through the screen door. She thought of poor Poppy, the image of snow on her snout thereby wearing the groove of that fruitless self-flagellating memory deeper still.

“Mrs. Rose, it’s Jenny. I am so sorry to bother you.” Unbelievably, as if Flora had conjured it with her recent memories, another perfect storm had occurred. It seems the simpleton substitute had a car on the fritz, had called Jenny in a panic to ask her for a ride, and the two of them, en route to the office, were victims of an injury-free but a morass of a fender bender just before the on-ramp to the thruway.

“I’m at a pay phone now, which was just lucky I could find one nearby!” Flora could hear whizzing traffic on the rainy road and pictured Jenny, in a formerly crisp and now wilted white blouse, on a dangerous speedway. “I know the doctor is at the hospital, but we have patients coming in this morning. There is no way that Tanya and I can get there in the next hour. Plus, I don’t even know if the car is okay.” The poor thing was hyperventilating. Flora wondered if she was shaken up from the accident or worried about the wrath of her boss.

“The important thing is that you and Tanya are safe.” Flora felt a pang of guilt as she realized she had not bothered to inquire about the substitute secretary’s name when Will had casually belittled her two days earlier. She assured Jenny that she would be at the office in thirty minutes.

When Flora arrived at the medical building parking lot, she was relieved not to see Will’s car. She wanted to feel purposeful and necessary in her task and to merit the clumsy rush to get here. Even in a hurried state, she had the wherewithal to locate her uniform, which she had not bothered to launder when she wore it for this same occasion three years ago. Only now, as she engineered herself out of the car while attempting to operate the huge umbrella to keep her legs and feet dry, did she acknowledge its tightness around her hips. But the thought quickly dissipated with the struggle at hand.

By the time she was inside the office, her shoes were spattered with bits of dirt, and her pantyhose were soaked. She would have liked to open the umbrella to leave it to dry, but there was no floor space other than the dead center of the waiting room in which to do so. So she closed and snapped it up, leaving it in the brass bucket outside the office door, hoping someone wouldn’t make off with it. Then she felt badly for mistrusting Will’s patients or any of the other passersby, especially as no one with any sense would have left their home this morning without their own umbrella. After flipping on all the lights, feeding the fish, and ensuring the tidiness of the waiting room, she went to sit behind the sliding glass window in Mrs. Eberly’s chair, took off her shoes, and waved her feet around a bit in a futile attempt to dry them. She looked at the appointment book and saw there was indeed a Lorraine Fiorello due at 9:00 a.m. and it was one minute before, according to the wall clock.

She paged through the book, looking at the names attached to past and future appointments. Not one of them looked familiar. No Dawn Farrington among them. She wished she knew how to turn the music on but she didn’t want to leave the desk in case Lorraine Fiorello appeared. Jenny had instructed her to explain the situation to Mrs. Fiorello, apologize, and reschedule. It made Flora nervous to have to deliver bad news. The patient would have battled the rain and traffic to get here only to find Flora who couldn’t help her at all. Already the woman was late so she would be arriving with her presenting problem, her diagnosis, and now an ill temper piled on top.

Flora busied herself by superficially leafing through Mrs. Eberly’s spiral-bound, dog-eared DSM-II as she waited. She was familiar with it from her days as a social worker, though at that time it was the first iteration of the book, and times had changed. Will talked about the controversies going on in his professional meetings about what should be changed in the next iteration as the hope was to make it more detailed but also to eliminate archaic diagnoses such as homosexuality, which was in the “sexual deviation” category. Flora looked in the personality disorders section for “Narcissistic personality structure,” a phrase Will often bandied about when spilling beans on his patients, but it was nowhere to be found.

By 9:30 there was no sign of Mrs. Fiorello or anyone else. No message light blinking on the phone. To distract herself from thinking the worst about everyone who wasn’t here, she decided to hunt for the music source. She put her foot in one of her shoes, but it was horribly wet and cold, so she walked on her toes around the room, trying to look with new eyes at every surface thinking there must be some kind of stereo contraption that she hadn’t noticed previously because it was just a dull-looking object. But the only things on surfaces were other dull objects: files, bookkeeping ledgers, books, coffee and tea implements and bouillon jars, a few empty vases, and one, precariously situated on top of two books on Jenny’s desk, that held relatively fresh red tulips. When she completed the visual circuit, she landed on Will’s office door. Would it be in there? Suddenly it seemed obvious that it must be. She didn’t expect the door to be unlocked, and it wasn’t. She was sure that was some kind of ethical practice point as well, even though the supposedly confidential files were all on or near the secretary’s desk. Retracing the only possible path in that single-lane space, she opened the drawer under Mrs. Eberly’s desk to reveal a jumble of office supplies. In the right-hand corner in the small compartment next to another small compartment spilling over with paperclips, was a ring of keys. Flora tried them in succession in Will’s office door and had luck, like Goldilocks, on the third one, and suddenly she was in the spacious room that was the antithesis of the outer office.

The walls were paneled oak, two of them lined floor to ceiling with books and journals, some in German which Will could read with near fluency. The carpet was the same institutional gray-green but significantly more green than gray and no square inch was interrupted by plastic protective mats. From one of the two green, upholstered armchairs that faced Will’s massive desk, a patient could focus on Will, his diplomas on the wall behind him—from the University of London and Columbia University, but far enough to be distractingly indecipherable if one’s vision were less than perfect—or one of the more salient objects on the desk, including an Italian marble paperweight in the shape of a flat-bottomed egg, a brass pen holder sprouting a single Montblanc pen, a small clock turned in a neutral position so as to be visible to both patient and doctor, or a box of tissues. The air smelled pleasingly of lemon oil.

The chair behind Will’s desk was one Flora had chosen for him after discovering the designer on a trip to Copenhagen. She took pleasure now in sitting in its elegant and sturdy embrace, admiring her own taste as she ran her hand over the soft black leather. Facing out towards the room at the two armchairs and the Miro reproduction on the opposite wall, she tried to imagine herself as the doctor and what it must feel like to have so much authority over a person’s wellbeing. The game was short-lived because she knew something of what that was like, and it didn’t suit her. A glimpse of her teenage self doing the same thing in her father’s law office when he was out at lunch one day, and she was reminded of the mix of titillation and fear. To have and use power was a potential that could point in too many directions, and now she recalled an incident where this truth was made pointedly clear to her. Will was called as an expert witness in a case where a twenty-nine-year-old man had beaten to death a seventy-six-year-old woman with his bare hands. It was 1951. He had visited the defendant at the Hammond County jail a few times, which Flora knew he did from time to time but let herself think he was off to one of the several hospitals where he was on staff. He was actually safer from a violent patient in a jail than in a hospital, but she didn’t let herself think about that either.

“Do they allow visitors in the courtroom during the trial?” Flora asked, the night he told her about the trial, as he was gargling loudly in the bathroom. He only mentioned it because she had been complaining about the cost of new draperies for the living room and he said that his fee for the testimony would cover it handily. He had been a witness on numerous trials and she only found out when he came home from them or she saw his name in an article about the trial the next day. She waited for him to spit and emerge from the bathroom.

“You’d like to observe?” Shirtless, in his boxers and socks, he put his hands on his hips and began his deep knee bends.

“Yes.” She stopped short of making a case for herself. Her patients, all women, were often mired in circumstances similar to—and were sometimes married to or abused or abandoned by—the men that Will was called upon to explain. She had gone to family court with patients over the years, but had never seen a trial other than in the movies.

Without a pause in his raising and lowering, Will readily agreed that it seemed like an acceptable idea and “professionally advantageous” for her, and so she arranged her work schedule for the Wednesday in question and, dressed in the charcoal gray suit that she had worn to her mother’s funeral the previous winter, she walked into the courthouse with manufactured self-possession and sat in the second-to-last row of a surprisingly small and unglamorous courtroom that disappointingly lacked a jury box and a jury.

While many of his responses to the attorneys’ questions were rote—“Dementia Praecox Paranoiac Type is a mental sickness, a type of insanity characterized by attempts, purely involuntary, to withdraw from reality, by distorted thinking and frequently by sensory hallucinations”—it was clear that he had been through this process before and was not remotely anxious or suffering from performance anxiety. His gravitas and authoritative demeanor equaled that of the attorneys. At other times, Will went on too long, lapsing into professor mode, wanting to add more than simple facts, and the judge had to ask him to rephrase something in layman’s terms or cut him off with a toneless “That’s enough.” It was plain to see that Will could have been a lawyer like her father though, as far as Flora knew, Frank had dealt with uninteresting subjects like wills and contracts. Will and her father had nevertheless found much to talk about in the few short years they had known one another, before Frank had a heart attack and died in his office at age seventy.

She sensed that the other observers in the courtroom were transfixed by his delivery as she had been in her college classroom a dozen years earlier. And now she was his wife. She felt awkward and self-conscious in her pride. She could not even make a guess as to whom the other people were sitting in on this trial, just as they would have no idea who she was, planted in her seat with her impassive face and oddly erect posture.

She tried to work out the weight, not just in the horrific case at hand, but in general, of Will’s part in these critical decisions about how other people would spend the rest of their lives. She knew, because she had been there when friends had asked him about such thrilling aspects of his work, leaning forward with hands clasped and shoulders raised, ready for a good story, that Will felt that offering neutral facts and expert opinion was no mercenary endeavor, accepting payment from neither defense nor prosecution, but a moral duty, an act of service and ultimately compassion. Flora did agree that it would probably be better for a criminal, who had undoubtedly suffered immensely in life thus far as a victim of his insanity, to be captive in a psychiatric ward where he would be given the level of care appropriate to his needs, as opposed to a prison where he could not defend himself nor be accountable for his actions. But either was a kind of death sentence. There had been rousing debates about this around various dinner tables, and Will always maintained the higher ground, never conceding to anyone’s arguments. If one dared to raise the specter of the death penalty, as did happen occasionally, Flora braced herself for some fist banging and female flinching, as Will’s tirade against the barbaric and immoral practice was ignited. In spite of his arrogance, on these matters she was always in accord, and she found it satisfying to hear him defend his stance and vicariously assert her own. But to wield that responsibility was far beyond anything she wished to participate in. She had a hard enough go of playing a role in the lives of her own patients who were merely poor and unfortunate, an irritant even then in that early stage of her career.

She opened the shallow center drawer of Will’s desk. Therein lay a stack of index cards, secured with a rubber band, displaying Will’s indecipherable scrawls, several prescription pads at varying levels of depletion, numerous defunct Cross pens, several unused number two pencils, a tin of breath mints, and a photo of Flora.

She recognized the photo as one of Will’s favorites, taken at the Pan Am lounge in Kennedy Airport as they were en route home from Moscow over five years ago. She was dressed in a flattering wrap dress that she no longer owned and probably wouldn’t look like that on her now anyway, she told herself, registering again the new nagging pull of her uniform across her backside. She picked it up to inspect indulgently, revealing another photo beneath it. Was it Abby? She removed her glasses to see and quickly realized that it was not her daughter. It was a dark-haired woman wearing a burgundy leather coat with a fur collar. Will had his arm around her waist and was in the process of kissing the woman’s cheek. She could not make out the dark background to see where it was taken, and there was no date anywhere and no annotation on the reverse. Will looked to be somewhere between the age he was in the photo with Flora and the age he was now. She put the photo back, replaced the one of herself on top of it, and closed the drawer, smoothly and silently, leaving a small jumble of unidentified feelings in the drawer with the other scattered and indiscriminate objects. She returned to Mrs. Eberly’s desk with its unattractive and functional office chair, saw the empty waiting room, confirmed no blinking light on the phone, and jammed her feet into her wet shoes.

She had forgotten to look for the stereo.