I HAIL A CAB ON 18TH STREET AND ASK THE DRIVER TO TAKE ME to the Medical and Dental Building on the Georgetown campus. The falling snow, which has started again, forces the traffic to move slower than usual on the E Street Expressway, obscuring my views of the Capitol Building, the museums and the memorials. The Potomac is a wide, black lagoon beyond the lights of the Kennedy Center.
After my combat experience, it was a foregone conclusion that trauma and PTSD would be my thing, and that at Georgetown I would receive a year of expert tuition at its renowned Department of Medicine, where van Buren was the Associate Professor.
His specialism is trauma and cellular level treatment at the micro- and nano-scales. A dozen years ago, when I arrived as an ex-military physician ten years older than the other students, a lot of it was beyond me. But I liked the fact that he thought way outside the box.
TVB was a giant in every way, with a cheerful, ruddy face, wavy white hair and blue eyes that twinkled beneath an earnest, inquisitive brow. He wore a trademark tweed jacket and red moleskin pants, and had a habit of sharing shots of Bulleit Bourbon with his pet students in his Old Curiosity Shop of a study on the top floor of his Georgetown home. Like the rest of the house, it was piled high with papers and periodicals, dog-eared textbooks, stuffed birds and antique maps, many of his parents’ native Holland, which they left hours before the Nazis invaded.
Ted had been born in Boston a couple of years later.
I’d always been drawn to a snapshot – in color, faded with age – that he kept on a shelf behind his desk. It had caught him at a moment when everything must have seemed possible. Ted, arms outstretched, is holding Jo up to the sky, while his wife Susan looks on. His expression, bursting with love, reminded me of the way Eric Abram had looked at Hope on our porch in South Tampa.
Hope had been planting aloes in the front yard with the sun in her hair when she spotted a frail and confused old man across the way. She’d asked if he was all right, and, hands trembling, he’d shown her a scribbled address and a black-and-white photograph.
The address – in our street – had belonged to Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot who’d dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The photograph was of Eric’s wife, Lola, whom he’d lost several weeks earlier, after nearly sixty years of marriage.
They’d met while he was in Reno, Nevada, on his way to a remote airfield near Wendover on the Utah border where he’d maintained the Enola Gay in the months leading up to the action that ended the war in the Pacific. They’d married pretty much on the spot.
When Tibbets got to hear about it, he summoned Eric to his office. Eric had told Lola nothing, but believed he was going to be court-martialed. Their mission was deep black before deep black was even invented.
Instead, Tibbets put him on an overnight train to Reno with a forty-eight-hour pass and an order to make the most of his honeymoon. It was an act of kindness he and Lola never forgot.
Hope had sat there holding Eric’s hand while she told me the story. I knew how she felt about the military, about Tibbets, the bomb and war in general, but right then the poignancy of this old man’s pilgrimage – his desire to find the house of the man who’d helped to change his life – was all she cared about. Eric felt her warmth, and so did I.
He started to tell us about the house he and Lola had owned on the beach, close to a point where the waters of Tampa Bay meet the Gulf. Much to his distress, he’d had to put it up for sale, so he could move north and be looked after by his daughter.
He reached into his pocket and showed me the sepia image of a radiant Lola under a bright sun.
‘Her hair was blonde and her eyes were this beautiful gray-green, but the guys on the base said I’d found me my very own Rita Hayworth.’
He took my hand as soon as Hope left to get more lemonade. ‘I came here to be reminded of what Lola and I had.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘And I found me another angel. But I guess you don’t need me to tell you that.’
Not long after, Hope and I cashed in everything we owned, and with some help from her mother, bought Eric’s house.
It wasn’t much more than a shack a few meters back from a secluded beach on the point of a causeway, but we loved it. And we told him it was still his to return to, anytime he wanted.
On the three occasions he did come to stay, he never stopped telling us how much he loved what we’d done to the place. How Hope still had Lola’s eyes. And how we needed to cherish every moment together, because in a blink it was over.
Hope and I walked the beach there, arm in arm, and swam in the ocean, for which she’d continued to have a longing ever since, as a child, she’d left her native California. And on long summer nights, we lay there in each other’s arms, usually beside a fire, and discussed the life we planned to build together.
But that was before the war. Before a lot of things I have spent the best part of the last fifteen years doing my utmost to forget.
I clamber out of the cab, pay the driver and negotiate a path through the piles of shoveled snow. As I cross the threshold of the Medical and Dental Building, I glance up at its classical columns and finely pointed brickwork. I see the glow of van Buren’s study from his third-floor window. One of the promises I made myself when I accepted the job of White House Medical Director was that I would see Ted every week. Not that he knows it, but Thompson gets two world-class shrinks for the price of one.
Ted is a polymath, but the mind is his real passion, and many an evening at the dinner table in the rambling brownstone at the eastern edge of the campus had been spent discussing the things that propelled his sizeable frame out of bed every day; none more so than his ceaseless exploration of the nature of consciousness – of what makes us ‘us’.
He is currently working on a funded experiment with a device he’s developed which uses ultrasound to manipulate tiny vibrations within the brain’s neuronal structures – vibrations he believes to be the origins of brain waves, about which so little is known a century-plus after their discovery. He believes that tuning these vibrations will lead to new treatments for a range of neurological, mental and cognitive disorders, including depression and anxiety, two of the core mood states underlying PTSD.
In typical style, he has rigged up a clinical trial at his home. Volunteers for treatment are invited to stay while he monitors the results. He has tried many times, and failed, to explain to me what the treatment involves – all I’m able to remember is that it’s required hefty investment from some big-shot venture capitalist and involves a computer developed by a tech start-up in Silicon Valley that crunches the almost infinitely complex data.
Susan is a professor of archaeology, and vanishes into the wilds for weeks, sometimes months at a time, leaving TVB in charge of their two dogs, three cats and a skunk they rescued from a pet store that was closing down on Wisconsin Avenue.
Jo is married to a surgeon and living abroad. The animals and students are their remaining family, in the environment you’d cherish if you were participating in a clinical trial or suffering any kind of depressive illness.
I know, because I was. And I still am.