Ariel

Sixteen

In Dr. Reuben Gintzler’s office one sat on neither couch nor chair. The diminutive psychiatrist provided his patients with a tufted yellow chaise lounge, an uncomfortable piece of furniture on which one could not quite sit and not quite lie down. Roberta had occasionally entertained the thought that this was all according to the man’s master plan — he wanted to keep you off-balance. At other times she decided he was not so much calculating as he was oblivious to such matters.

She was on the chaise now, had been on it for half an hour. She’d been guarded at first, her monolog punctuated by long silences, but then her guard had slipped some and she’d let herself run off in several directions at once, talking about the state of her marriage and the death of her son, about Jeff and Ariel and the picture from the attic and the mysterious attack upon Caleb’s room. She found herself tugging at a conversational thread, drawing it out until it hit a snag, then switching abruptly to another and repeating the process.

She became silent now, her eyes lowered and half-lidded. There was no sound in the room but the ticking of Gintzler’s wall clock, a Regulator pendulum-type in an unvarnished oak case. Clocks like that had hung in schoolrooms when Roberta was a girl, and she wondered if they were there still. Perhaps they had all been rescued to tick out their lives in shrinks’ offices, letting neurotics know when their fifty minutes were up.

“Mrs. Jardell?”

She turned to look at Gintzler. He was poking at a pipe with a wire cleaner, running it through the stem and shank. He never smoked the pipes, only played with them incessantly.

“You are very scattered today,” he said. “Your thoughts run all over the place. Your son, your daughter, your husband, your lover. You came here as if you were at a crisis, and indeed you behave as though this were so, but instead you discuss a great many areas of concern without touching on any crisis. I wonder why.”

She shrugged, said nothing.

“I wonder what really bothers you, Mrs. Jardell.”

“All of the things I’ve been talking about.”

“Oh? I wonder if this is really so. You have mentioned so many unrealistic concerns. Ghosts which form in the corners of rooms. An old black woman who mutters occult secrets in dialect. A painting which seems to have some arcane significance. A mysterious spirit which haunts your gas range and extinguishes its burners. A flute which evidently is not to your liking musically. A curious force, no doubt a poltergeist, which rearranges articles in your dead son’s room. Stairs which creak, windowpanes which rattle. It would seem—”

“It would seem as though I’m crazy,” she said. “So I guess I’m in the right place.”

“It would seem as though you are using all of these phenomena to mask what is really bothering you.”

“And what would that be?”

“Can’t you tell me, Mrs. Jardell?”

And then she was talking about Ariel again, talking about Jeff’s attempt to learn more about her parentage, defending her desire to know Ariel’s ancestry. “Environment isn’t everything, is it?” she demanded. “Don’t genes count for anything? They determine what a person looks like. Why shouldn’t they have a lot to do with what’s on the inside?”

“This is a recent concern, Mrs. Jardell?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I have never heard you allude to it before.”

“No.”

“But now your natural son has died and you react by showing increased concern for your daughter. You mask this concern by saying it is for her character. You are afraid to worry about Ariel’s possibly dying because that is unthinkable. To think it might cause it to happen. We do not speak the word cancer because that might cause us to have it, and so it is with other unmentionable topics. So your mind rejects the notion that Ariel might die as your son died, and instead you worry that there is something wrong with her, just as perhaps you worry now that something was wrong with your son, that some genetic flaw you passed on to him led to his being taken from you. You are shaking your head. Are you so certain what I suggest is unsupported by the facts?"

“Yes.”

“There is guilt involved, you know. You betrayed your husband with another man. That guilt was always present, even though you have never permitted yourself to experience it, to deal with it. Perhaps there is a belief within you that your son was conceived in guilt, that his magical death was your punishment for adultery.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Perhaps it is illogical. What we believe is not always what we ought to believe. Perhaps you feel guilt over Caleb’s death—”

“No, I don’t!”

“You feel you should have been able to prevent it—”

“No.”

“You even feel you caused it.”

“I feel she caused it.”

“Yes, so you have said. But of course that makes no sense. I feel you have erected a whole superstructure to support this delusion in order to keep yourself from fearing for your daughter’s life. You—”

“Dammit, she’s not my daughter!”

The vehemence of her outburst surprised her. Around her the silence became heavy, oppressive. The clock ticked some more of her hour away. She lit a cigarette, dropped her lighter back into her purse. Calmly now, she said, “Did you ever happen to read a book called Helter-Skelter? About the Manson family?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Did you read it?”

“I am familiar with the book. I have neyer read it.”

“He had children with most of those glassy-eyed little girlfriends of his. Charles Manson did. Of course it was always tricky to know just who fathered which child because all of those people did everything to everyone, they behaved like animals. But there were quite a few children born. And according to the book most of the children wound up being placed for adoption after the arrests were made and the Family broke up. The authorities just swept up the children and offered them for adoption.”

“And?”

Her eyes were intense. “Can you imagine? A man and woman decide to adopt a child and without having the slightest idea they take the daughter of two murderers into their home. Can you imagine that? Can you?”

“Mrs. Jardell...”

Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t seem to get hold of herself.

“Mrs. Jardell. You are not seriously suggesting that perhaps your Ariel was one of those children? Because the dates are wrong. And surely those children would have been placed with families in California, or at least in that part of the country. You can’t suspect—”

“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Don’t order a straitjacket just yet, all right? I know she’s not one of those kids. I was just giving an example of what could happen.”

“And what is it that you think could happen, Mrs. Jardell?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What could happen now? What is the threat?”

She tried to concentrate. “You think I’m afraid that Ariel might die.”

“Your son was born out of adultery and he died. Now you have resumed the affair. And now you expect punishment for it.”

She thought of telling him that the affair wasn’t going all that well, that she and Jeff seemed to be more bound up in compulsion than carried away with passion.

“Tell me about Ariel, Mrs. Jardell.”

“Tell you what? I’ve told you everything about her.”

“Tell me why you are afraid of her.”

“Because I think she’s dangerous.”

“To whom?”

“To me.”

“Do you really believe she killed your son?”

She closed her eyes, sighed heavily, opened them again. “No,” she said. “No, of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s impossible. Because she loved Caleb. She used to go into his room and play with him. She played that horrible flute for him. That might have driven him crazy but it couldn’t have harmed him, could it?”

He said nothing.

“No, of course not,” she said, answering her own question. “Then why is it so easy for me to see her as a murderess? What is there about her that makes me want to put her in that role?”

“Is it something in her?”

“Do you mean it’s something in myself?”

“Do you think that might be what I mean?”

“How do I know what you mean?”

Again he let the silence build around her. She felt very weak now, very tender and vulnerable. Was it all her inner problem, something that came from within her own mind? Was it her fault for worrying that everything was her fault? Was it ultimately that simple, and that ridiculous?

He said, “You see, Mrs. Jardell, it is not a simple matter of taking an aspirin for a headache. This is part of something that has been manifesting itself in various ways in your mind for as long as I have known you. From time to time you rush to me as if for emotional first aid, and always it is the same underlying problem. You cannot take an aspirin for it, you cannot put a bandaid on it. It is involved in your feeling for your own parents, rooted in some childhood experiences of your own we have barely gotten a hint of.”

“I barely remember my childhood, doctor.”

“And do you suppose that what you fail to remember no longer exists? We deal with things by forgetting them, but it does not work as well for us as we might like.” He seized a pipe, twisted it apart. “Of course you can go on this way. You can come to me once or twice a year, when your mind drives you here. I can chat with you for an hour, skimming the surface of your anxiety, and I can give you an occasional prescription for Valium.”

“Or?”

“But you know the answer, Mrs. Jardell.”

“Therapy.”

He nodded. “A regular program of regular appointments which you will keep and which will become part of your schedule. A program dealing not with the intermittent manifestations of your problem but with the problem itself, the problem that lies deep in you.”

“How long would it go on?”

“Two years. Perhaps longer.”

“And how often?”

“Twice a week. Once a week is possible, but twice is better.”

“Twice a week for two years.”

“Very likely.”

“But it might run longer.”

“That is possible, yes.”

Her eyes challenged him. “And what’ll it do for me? There are no money-back guarantees in this sort of thing, are there? You can’t sue a shrink for malpractice.”

He did not answer.

She lit a fresh cigarette, filled her lungs with smoke and thought involuntarily of her own mother. Her mother’s hands, grotesque with signs of age. Her mother’s body, wasted in the last stages of her disease.

She took another drag on her cigarette.

“I just don’t know,” she said.

“I suggest you think about this, Mrs. Jardell.”

“Oh, I’m sure I will.”

“It is true there are no guarantees. But I can give you a negative guarantee. This problem will not vanish of its own accord. There has been some deterioration since I last saw you. Your problem is getting worse, not better.”

“I’ve been under a strain.”

“Yes.”

She thought of Jeff. The two of them in his Buick, speeding west on a section of the Interstate. Just leaving everything behind.

But you couldn’t run away from things. They tagged along after you like old shoes tied to a honeymoon couple’s rear bumper—

“The time, Mrs. Jardell.”

His words brought her around. They never lost sight of the time, did they? They always knew when your hour was up.

She got to her feet.

“If I could have some Valium,” she said. He looked at her for a moment, then nodded and reached for the prescription pad.