I HELD THE HANDRAIL TO STEADY MYSELF AS I WALKED DOWN THE COURTHOUSE steps. I’d had no idea what a brutal confrontation the hearing would be. John had gone through all my papers, making copies of the pen-and-ink note cards I’d made for sale, and had presented a carefully thought-through case for my ability to make a living without the need for alimony. All those years he’d never let me get a job, pay the bills, or handle the money. He didn’t even tell me how much money we had. Now he was trying to convince the judge that I was competent to walk out of our twenty-three-year marriage and live as if I’d always been an independent woman, that he could walk away from the marriage with no sense of responsibility at all.
What a fool I’ve been, I thought. What a naïve, thoughtless fool.
My lawyer said he’d never been involved in such a long divorce hearing. The divorce was finally granted for reasons of cruel and abusive treatment. I was to receive $125 a week for alimony, $50 a week for child support, health insurance for Chris and me, and half of whatever the house brought when it was sold, which had to be done within the year.
My lawyer and I shook hands. Then I got into my car and headed to Northampton for an appointment with Dr. Turcotte. But first I stopped at Carburs on Route 9 for a sandwich. I was late for the lunch crowd, and except for a few people at the bar and a couple in a far corner of the dining room, the restaurant was empty.
I sat down at a table near the door. The waiter came and took my order for a tuna fish sandwich. I lit a cigarette. Through the smoke I noticed a ceiling fan revolving slowly and thought of an old black-and-white movie and the feeling of heat and humidity. What was that movie with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman? I couldn’t even remember his famous line as he watched her board a plane to fly away from him forever.
Forever.
I took another drag from my cigarette.
Casablanca. That was the movie’s title.
The waiter set the plate on the table in front of me. He must have been around John Elder’s age. “Anything else, miss?”
I wondered if his parents were divorced. “No, thank you. This will be fine.”
I unfolded my napkin and spread it on my lap, took a bite from my sandwich, and chewed thoughtfully as the ceiling fan revolved its broad blades slowly. What was that Bogart line? What did it matter? Two hours ago I’d been an unhappily married woman. Now I was a divorced woman. I practiced saying the words in my head—a divorced woman.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waiter asked politely, hesitantly, as if afraid he was intruding on my thoughts. His cheeks were slightly red, and he averted his eyes from mine.
“No,” I assured him. Then I realized that my sandwich lay uneaten on my plate.
I lit another cigarette and sat, looking at the fan blades in their slow rotation.
I was a divorced woman without any idea of how to play the part. It was as if I’d spent my entire life reading someone else’s lines. I’d learned quite well how to play the unhappy wife. Mother had taught me that from the beginning. But the divorced woman? The independent woman?
Then I remembered Bogart’s line: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
And Bergman’s “I wish I didn’t love you so much.”
I remembered twenty-three years of cutting John’s hair and how well I knew the way it grew, how my fingers felt as they ran through it, the snap of the scissors, hair falling at my feet. The angry divorce scene dissolved in my mind, and—just as some people say happens to you before you die—image after image of my life with him came flooding through my mind. Not the nightmarish confrontations, the mental torment, or the violence, but the good things about John and me and the children. The first snow we saw in Philadelphia when he woke me in the middle of the night and together we went out to the backyard in our pajamas and robes and lifted our faces to the sting and tickle of the first snowflakes we’d ever seen. John Elder flying his kite at Valley Forge while John and I sat on the grass, talking. The three of us in a boat on the Schuylkill River. Camping in the Poconos, roasting unhusked corn in the coals, and camping along the Oregon coast, with postcard sunsets and the surf pounding. Year-old Chris sitting on John’s lap, eating an ear of corn from our garden in Hadley, Massachusetts.
I remembered the day John came home carrying a brand-new Olympia electric typewriter for me and how nervous I was, wondering if I could possibly ever write anything to deserve such an expensive machine.
I remembered our trips to Hyde Park, Tanglewood, the Bay of Fundy, Old Sturbridge Village, and up the dramatic coastline of Maine. There were the plays we saw in Williamstown. And, when John and I were very young, the trip to New York, where we saw Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. Tears streamed down John’s cheeks as he watched. Image after image flowed through me until I thought I might get caught up in the flow and go on forever seeing images of John and me and the children until my heart broke open and I sat paralyzed with grief.
I fumbled in my purse for money to leave in the tray with my bill. Then I crushed my cigarette in the ashtray, fought the panic rising in my chest, and went to my car to continue on my way to Dr. Turcotte’s, not as part of a couple but as a woman alone.
Driving, I thought of Suzanne. Since the night in the motel with Paula, I had accepted the idea of sex between two women with none of my old guilt, or the feeling that something was wrong with me. The more I was with Suzanne, the more clearly I understood that sex simply had to do with love. And beyond my immeasurable love for my sons, I was consciously learning more about love than I’d ever known.
Suzanne was an orthodox Christian who went to the Congregational church on Sundays and tried to live according to the principles of her church, and the Bible as she understood it. She was also married. Her own father had left her mother when Suzanne was a young girl. As an adult, Suzanne believed that a happy, fulfilled life lay in having a husband and children.
I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, had gone through periods of agnosticism, followed by searching in the Presbyterian, Unitarian, and Catholic churches for spiritual sustenance. After my psychotic experience in 1971, I came to believe everything came from and was a part of God. I felt the ground under my feet as holy, just as the housefly buzzing annoyingly at my ear was holy. My spiritual growth continued to widen and deepen, with troughs of doubt and confusion followed by periods of reaffirmation of a faith that didn’t fit into any formal belief system or church.
Unlike Suzanne, I had finally gotten a divorce. As an adolescent, I’d felt torn by the way my parents tormented each other. I’d wished with all my heart that they would divorce and go in search of their own separate happiness. Wisely or unwisely, having reached the end of my endurance, after twenty-three years of marriage, I had taken the step I’d wished my parents had taken when I was young.
I was also getting more and more involved with a married woman who was weighted down by guilt and filled with longing and confusion. Suzanne’s inconsistency and the varying limits she put on our expressions of our love only served to intensify my longing. Looking back, I can see that, more than anything else, it was the longing that gave life to the relationship for me, the longing that gave me reason to live another day, despite my grief and depression.
During all the years of going to Dr. Turcotte I’d sat in the waiting room for ages while he talked with John. Now it was I alone who went in to talk with the doctor. John told me that Turcotte blamed him for the breakup of our marriage and wanted nothing more to do with him. It was I who kept my relationship with Dr. Turcotte.
He told me that he was my brother, my God-brother; that his would be the shoulder I could lean on when my burdens grew too heavy for me to bear alone—that I would never be alone. I looked across the cluttered table at him, his clear blue eyes always looking just a bit past me.
I looked down at the stacks of old magazines, half-burnt candles, books, boxes of Kleenex, and dirty ashtrays.
Dr. Turcotte was my brother? Why didn’t I feel any brotherly love in his voice? It was as if he’d thought things through and decided that he should say those words. Maybe, feeling confusion about his relationship with me now that John was no longer there, he’d opened his Bible for an answer. Maybe his index finger had landed on the word brother. Whatever brought him to tell me that he was my brother, I felt sad at the absence of feeling behind the words. I wanted a brother. I needed a brother. Mercer didn’t have the emotional strength to relate to me, and Bubba and I had rarely spoken in years. But was Rodolph Turcotte my brother? I wanted to believe he really was. As I left his office that day he embraced me, but the gesture felt empty, and distrust began to work its way up into my consciousness.
My relationship with Dr. Turcotte gradually changed. Some of the changes were good. I had the opportunity to begin to know him better, and to discuss his beliefs more thoroughly. Often I just enjoyed his company, which was everything from compassionate and wise to outrageous, funny, and blundering. There were disturbing changes, too, although I fought, often successfully, to deny them. As my denial grew stronger, so did my depression.
Driving home from a meeting of the Massachusetts chapter of the Society of Religion and Mental Health one afternoon, I began to talk to him excitedly about a new insight I’d had about the creative process. He gripped the steering wheel with ferocity. “I wouldn’t know about the creative process. I’m too damned busy treating mentally ill people.”
I was shocked by his anger, and by a bitterness I’d not heard in his voice before. I was surprised that he didn’t realize that his teachings in relation to mental health contained many of the basic principles of the creative process as I’d grown to know them. By encouraging me to accept my depression rather than fight it, he had allowed me to bring some of my best writing out of that darkness. I told him that I’d never come out of a depression without bringing a gift back with me. His encouraging me as well as his other patients to keep talking no matter the content was an important thing I applied to writing. I discovered that if the stream of writing ran on long enough, sooner or later I’d discover gold in the flow.
I’d become friends with more of Dr. Turcotte’s patients, as well as with Jim Clark and two of the doctor’s five daughters, June and Amy. All were involved in writing to one degree or another. Both sisters painted, and Jim was a serious photographer. After the Shutesbury house was sold on October 1, 1980, Chris and I moved to an apartment on Dickinson Street in Amherst. June, Amy, Jim, and several patients met in our apartment on Sunday evenings for a potluck supper and conversation. Several members of the group also participated in my Thursday-evening writing workshop. One group member was Helen Jackson, a young woman whom I had worked with on her writing and who’d come to stay with me while on vacation. Shortly after she arrived, I realized she was deeply troubled. She’d heard Dr. Turcotte give a talk in Amherst and wanted to see him as a patient, which she did. Because she didn’t feel up to going back to college, she became a permanent member of my household and of the group. Our home was always filled with creative people coming and going—sitting at the dining table writing, making collages on the kitchen table, Jim developing film in the basement, people spending the night sleeping on the couch or on the shag rug.
One Sunday evening during dinner, Dr. Turcotte called from Philadelphia, where he’d gone with Father Gray. “You’re trying to take my practice away from me!” he yelled.
“What?” I exclaimed, unable to believe what I’d just heard.
“You’re trying to take my practice away from me with those meetings of yours,” he repeated.
“I’m not trying to take your practice away from you. I teach people about the creative process. I’m not a psychiatrist.”
It was true that everyone in the group was becoming more open and emotionally expressive as they were growing more creative, but I saw no one pulling away from him. However, my relationship with Dr. Turcotte continued to change.
Chris was visibly nervous when he and Jim came into the kitchen where I was sitting at the table writing. I closed my notebook and lit a cigarette. Still standing, Chris explained that Jim had something to tell me. “I have to go to town. I’ll be back soon,” Chris said, hurrying from the room.
Jim sat down on a kitchen chair.
I can’t remember a word he said to me, but I remember his message with searing clarity—he and Chris were having a sexual relationship. Dr. Turcotte had already told me this, but to hear it in Jim’s words made the fact painfully real. This man whom I had known and talked with for years in Dr. Turcotte’s office, discussing my troubled marriage, his troubled childhood with abusive parents, and, hour after hour, the life and ideas of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Georg Groddeck; this man who had supported me when I was in Northampton State Hospital and—years later—had said he would stay with me night and day to keep the doctor from committing me to the Brattleboro Retreat; this man who had attended my Sunday-night potluck dinners and Thursday-night writing workshops, and who developed his film in a darkroom he’d created in my basement, was having a sexual relationship with my fifteen-year-old son.
When Dr. Turcotte told me about the relationship, he had warned me that I would risk losing Chris altogether if I opposed it. And he told me that Chris had been sexually active long before his relationship with John.
I remembered how—two years before that night—Chris had threatened to become a male prostitute in Springfield if I wouldn’t do something he wanted me to do. I had no idea that he even knew what the word prostitute meant. We settled whatever conflict we were engaged in, but that he had known enough to make that threat concerned me.
Now he was having a sexual relationship with Jim.
As I sat once again attempting to accept the fact, Chris burst into the kitchen with enthusiasm.
“I’ve bought you a gift, Jim,” he said, and handed Jim a gift-wrapped box.
Did Jim open his gift? Did Chris say anything to me? Did I say anything to him?
I do remember that his feeling of relief was palpable. I remember him touching Jim’s shoulder.
The rest of my time with them that evening is a blur, though I have a vague memory of them leaving the apartment together.
Life continued as always in the Dickinson Street apartment—the potluck dinners and writing workshops, the Turcotte girls and Helen and her friends coming and going, Jim developing film in the basement, and Chris sitting upstairs writing poetry or writing in his journal, while I too wrote. But somehow, nothing was the same after that night.
After Dr. Turcotte returned from Philadelphia, nothing more was said about the accusing call he’d made. He invited me to go out to dinner with him one night, and I accepted. He often invited patients to join him for lunch or dinner. Usually the patients were either interested in or involved with one or another of the doctor’s projects, or they were in distress or in need of extra attention. Often he invited patients to accompany him because he needed someone to listen to and support him.
Over dinner that night he began to tell me a story about him being a lonely high school boy who was grateful for the attention of one of his teachers. The details of the story are gone now. What I remember is the image of him sitting across the table from me in a rattan wing chair. Whatever Dr. Turcotte’s teacher had said or done seemed to me to be such a small thing that it magnified his great emotional need. As he talked, his eyes filled with tears that spilled over and streamed down his face in a torrent of grief and gratitude.
“I don’t know,” he said, pulling his handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiping his eyes. “I’ve never talked about these things. For some reason, you’re so easy to talk to.” He blew his nose and continued to cry.
In addition to compassion for him, I felt puzzlement and surprise as well. This doctor to whom I’d been going for so many years had not lived according to his own theories. He had never talked with anyone about these painful things in his childhood and youth. All those years his old unacknowledged pain had gnawed into his perceptions until they were like slices of Swiss cheese, each hole creating a blind spot in his vision. Surely we all have many blind spots, but that someone with such power over confused, distraught people was so unconscious of the lack in his own perceptions about himself frightened me. Now I saw Dr. Turcotte, whom I’d thought the most perceptive and creative therapist I’d ever known, as also the hurt child holding a heart full of unacknowledged grief and unfulfilled emotional need.
Had he been one of my students, I would have suggested that he write the story he’d just told me. I would have told him this, believing that finding a form for his pain would make it a story rather than a series of disconnected sentences spilled out through his tears; writing the story would be a second step toward his healing, just as his awkward and emotional telling me over dinner had been the first.
He finally stopped crying. He wiped his eyes, blew his nose again, put his handkerchief back into his pocket, picked up a piece of meat loaf with his fork, and lifted it to his mouth. I sat stunned at the realization that my therapist had explored his own childhood and youth less than many of the young people in my writing workshops had explored theirs. The realization made me feel less secure with him, but he was still my therapist, and I wasn’t ready to let that relationship go. I wasn’t confident enough to claim myself as person rather than patient.
I began to take more short trips with Dr. Turcotte to different Catholic churches, and visits with priests, meetings of the Society for Religion and Mental Health, and short excursions to unknown destinations. Sometimes he’d follow his heart from one town to another. I thought of Saint Francis, who, I’d read, often tossed a coin to tell him which direction to follow when he reached crossroads in his travels.
Once the doctor pulled the car over to a large pond and sat for a long time, looking. On the pond floated more ducks than I’d ever seen gathered in one place. “What an example of the abundance of God’s creations,” he said with wonder. Then he started the car and pulled out onto the highway again.
Trip by trip, bit by bit, I began to piece together the story of his life, at least some of the highlights and major shaping events, or at least those things he felt moved or willing to tell me about. Dr. Turcotte told me that he’d never been able to please his father and how much that had hurt him. He said little about his mother except that she had actively engaged in life until her death.
He told me about the first patient assigned to him when he was still in medical school. She sat in a chair on the ward, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring off into space, saying nothing. Her hair was unwashed, and her dresses were someone’s ill-fitting castoffs. Her eyes were vacant, her body skin and bones. “I sat in a chair facing her,” he said. “I tried every way I could think of to get a response out of her, but nothing worked. So I just sat there and she sat there. I returned the next day, and the day after that. Day after day we sat there together that way. One day I looked at her, that woman stripped of personality, and it was like she was naked. That woman had nothing, absolutely nothing left but cigarettes. Then I saw her. I really saw her. And I thought: I’m looking into the face of God made visible. It was a holy moment.” There was tenderness in his voice. “I was humbled by the experience,” he said. “It changed my way of looking at patients from that day on.”
He went on with his studies until he graduated and became a board-certified psychiatrist. He told me that he was certain that the first patient he had after graduating from medical school was determined to kill him once she got out of the hospital, and how afraid he’d been, both of the patient and the patient’s brother.
There was the story of a patient who was a priest, who, Dr. Turcotte claimed, was determined to set fire to the rectory. The doctor could convince no one of this possibility but shared his thoughts about the priest with everyone in the diocese, trying to convince them of what he saw as imminent danger. The priest finally packed his things and left the diocese altogether.
The stories came in bits and pieces, but after hearing various fragments, I began to see that two themes emerged: that of patients out to kill Dr. Turcotte and other patients who were going to set fires, possibly killing themselves and others. While I wished no one harm, I did wish that something visible would happen to prove the doctor’s beliefs—a fire started, but extinguished before damage was done, a written death threat to the doctor that could be traced to the patient he claimed was threatening him. I wanted to visibly see that he was right about his patients, that he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t a paranoid manic-depressive who survived by projecting onto certain patients, while putting other patients in the position of supporting him and his delusions. He’d saved my life, and I still wanted to believe in him.
Dr. Turcotte fell in love with a patient, a young divorced woman with several children. He talked about her to anyone who would listen. He claimed that falling in love with her made him feel more in love with his wife, Claire, and with Ethel, whom he considered his “second wife.”
Claire must have been well aware of his long relationship with Ethel. He made no secret of his belief that men often needed more than one wife. Ethel worked part-time for him, and had become increasingly devoted to him and his teachings, both psychiatrically and theologically. Their emotional bond grew stronger. He told me of their struggling with what to do about their feelings for each other, their praying and reading the Bible. He said that a scripture convinced them to consider themselves husband and wife. According to him, they repeated vows to each other and made love. Ethel became his second wife. I suppose he wanted the patient as yet another of his wives.
I never knew Claire’s or Ethel’s response to this. Claire probably went on with her life as she’d learned to do years before. She was a loyal Catholic who would never divorce her husband no matter his behavior. If she was grief-stricken, brokenhearted, jealous, or angry, she was as silent about her emotional state as her husband was loud and public about his.
Patients’ problems paled in comparison with the doctor’s needs. Many therapy sessions turned into opportunities for him to talk incessantly about his new love. “My heart,” he announced repeatedly, “is bursting with love.” After his proclamation of love to her, the young woman—I’ll call her Sally—stopped going to him. Dr. Turcotte went to her brother, begging him to persuade her to return to therapy. She refused. He called her, wrote notes to her, phoned her. He told her how much she needed him. He drove back and forth in front of her house.
Then he called me one evening and told me he needed to get out of town for a few days. Would I drive him? I threw some clothes into a suitcase and picked him up at his office. He was visibly shaken. Sally was going to have him killed. He was certain of it. She and her family had hired a Mafia hit man to execute him. She was also going to set fire to her house and kill the children along with herself.
His two great fears had been brought together in one person. He frightened me. So many of the things he’d said about people had seemed insightful and true, but this was too much.
Yet I went with him.