ASHER BLUM

After Eric left, Asher leaned against the door. His legs felt heavy with ancient memories, weak with regret, and barely able to carry him to Iris’s chair. He closed his eyes, and let the old pictures come.

He and Iris had been married and living on Azalea Court for three years when things fell apart. It was 1956. They were happy together, although he understood vaguely that he was more content than she was. He had his work—important work, work that mattered—and she wasn’t entirely satisfied with being a homemaker. But things would improve for her when the baby was born. She was nearing the end of the first trimester and glowed in a way she hadn’t since he extricated her from her Brooklyn life.

That morning he kissed her goodbye at the door and enjoyed the October colors as he walked to his office at the state hospital. He was in a good mood, anticipating the afternoon meeting with the hospital trustees at which he would present the excellent statistics for the past six months of electroshock therapy. Ruth Smith, his secretary, met him with a cup of tea and the morning newspaper, and he settled at his desk to begin the day.

“You have a visitor,” Ruth announced twenty minutes later. “No appointment, but she insists it’s critically important that she see you. Says her name is Harriet Sarnoff.”

Asher forgot to breathe. If it had been under his control his heart would have stopped beating as well. He tried to speak, but his lips were frozen. He nodded to Ruth who escorted Harriet into his office then left and closed the door. He pointed to the wooden chair facing his desk. Harriet did not sit. She paced the width of his office, back and forth three or four times without looking at him. Then she stood in front of his desk. She leaned both hands on the polished wooden edge and stared at him.

“Harriet.” His voice was shaky. He tried to steady it. “What do you want?”

“I want my life back. The life you stole from me.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t steal anything.”

Harriet reached into her purse and took out a folded paper. “It took some doing, getting a copy of the letter you wrote to the principal of my school.” She waved it in his face. “But now I have proof. Proof that you got me fired. With the information you sent him, the principal contacted the FBI, which led to me being called before the Senate committee.”

“Please,” he said. “Keep your voice down.”

Her voice rose in volume in response. “You are the reason I spent six months in prison. Because of you, I’ll never get another job as a teacher or a chemist!”

She was yelling now. Her face was red, her hair escaping its barrette. “You stole my best friend, and you stole my livelihood!”

Ruth opened the door a crack. “Everything okay in here, Dr. Blum?”

“Thank you, Ruth. It’s fine.” When the door was closed, he turned to Harriet. “Please calm down. We can work this out.”

“I will not be calm, and there’s nothing to work out.” Spittle sprayed from her mouth onto his desk. “I’m taking this to the local newspaper. I’m sure they’ll be interested in the activities of their respected psychiatrist, a man trusted with the mental health of so many suffering people.” She reached back and undid the barrette, letting her hair spring free, then shook her head hard, making the curls whip the air. He recognized the gesture from the few political meetings he attended with Harriet and Iris on campus, before he realized their danger.

He stared at her. She looked like a wild-woman—which was probably what she wanted—and for a moment he was frightened. He wasn’t that worried about the newspaper. After all, Harriet was a Communist so she got what she deserved, and the local paper would see it his way. But Iris? Iris would never forgive him. His wife would leave him, take their baby, and go back to Brooklyn with Harriet. He couldn’t let that happen. He studied Harriet’s face, deep scarlet now, her hair Medusa-like around her face.

“What do you think about that, Dr. Rat? How’d you like everyone in your town to know what you did to me?” She paused then and rubbed her wet cheeks. For a second or two the fury receded, and she looked profoundly sad. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in prison?”

He hadn’t noticed the tears before that moment, and he felt sorry for her. She wasn’t a bad person, not really. Not mentally ill either, just unhinged by her sorrow. Maybe he could persuade her to leave quietly and never return. “Harriet,” he began, but something in his tone seemed to enrage her further.

She grabbed the vase of artificial flowers on his desk, dumped the fake lilies of the valley on the floor, and lifted the vase over her head.

He stared at her. She wouldn’t physically attack him, would she? Reaching under his desk, he pushed the panic button.

Harriet slammed the vase on the edge of his desk. Better than my head, he thought, jerking back from the flying fragments of painted porcelain.

In less than a minute two white-coated attendants rushed into his office. Asher’s thoughts ricocheted between satisfaction that the emergency system worked the way it was supposed to and horror at the rapid cascade of events. Unstoppable and inevitable and escalating events.

“Restrain her,” he ordered, struggling to control his voice. “She attacked me. Give her Thorazine 100 mg IM stat.”

The attendants grabbed Harriet’s arms and pulled her away from Asher’s desk. One man covered her mouth with his large hand, cutting off her curses and threats. As they pushed Harriet toward the office door, she wriggled one arm free and socked the attendant, who was so surprised he released his grip on her mouth.

“You will regret this until the day you die,” Harriet said, her voice low and deadly calm. Then she was silenced, immobilized, and dragged out of the office.

Asher nudged her purse underneath his desk with his foot and slipped the copy of his letter into his top drawer.

Ruth watched the procession down the hall to the south wing and handed Asher a clipboard with the necessary forms. “I’m sorry, Dr. Blum,” she said. “I should have realized she was dangerous.”

“No way you could have known,” Asher said. “I believe she has a history of paranoia and violence, but she presented as a reasonable woman. Until she turned on me.” He took the clipboard. “We’d better admit her. I’ll take care of the paperwork.”

Ruth nodded. “I’ll get someone to clean up this mess.”

She closed the door, leaving him in silence. He brushed the pottery shards off his desk chair and collapsed onto it, then took a tissue from the decoupage box Iris made for his office. He wiped the speckles of Harriet’s spit off the polished desktop and turned his attention to the commitment paperwork.

Sixty-some years later, Asher could still picture the spit spots on his desk. Could remember being unable to draw a breath. What he did to Harriet was wrong. He knew that. He accepted it and had tried to minimize the pain his actions caused much as he could. He paid for Harriet’s upkeep at the hospital and personally managed her medications. He visited her every week on the women’s locked ward, although she never once acknowledged his presence. He sat by her bedside at the hospital after her stomach was pumped when she managed to stockpile her Thorazine tablets and take them all late one February night, almost succeeding in ending her life. He held her hand as she gained consciousness, even though she tried to bite his hand when she recognized him. After that, he increased her dose and switched to a liquid form.

When Harriet got pregnant two years into her time at the hospital, he tried unsuccessfully to find out if she had been raped or had consented, as if one could really consent on the drugs he’d prescribed for her. He arranged for good prenatal care and then for the little girl to be adopted. When Harriet succeeded in killing herself, he stood alone by the fresh mound of dirt at the burial ground. He recited the Hebrew prayer and whispered his apologies.

Of course, no one knew about any of this. Iris didn’t even know Harriet was at the hospital until she went snooping in his private papers. Or maybe Iris did know, in her bones, because she lost their first baby two weeks after he had Harriet committed to the state hospital.

The one thing that wasn’t in the files, the one thing he kept out of all the records and never told a soul, was about Harriet’s little girl. He monitored her progress, made sure that her adoptive parents were doing well by her, once even watched her on the elementary school playground. He lost track of the young woman when she went out west to college.

Some nights when he had trouble sleeping, Asher wondered about the child. Did she know anything about her birth mother? Would she try one day to contact her birth family? He thought of her as a niece or distant cousin and considered trying to meet her. She would be a couple of years older than Lexi.

But what good would meeting her do? What good would any of it do?

None of these things could ever atone for his actions against Harriet, against Iris. How could he try to explain, to beg Iris for forgiveness, if she wasn’t here to listen?