Melancholy Baby

62

I settled into my chair across from Dr. Silverman. I had been seeing her long enough so that I now felt as if I was supposed to be there.

“I go back and forth to New York so much, I’m starting to feel like Amtrak,” I said.

Dr. Silverman nodded. She was carefully dressed and made-up, but very understated. I wondered what she looked like when she was going out to dinner. If she let it go, she’d look like something.

“We have the case about Lolly Drake almost solved,” I said.

“Almost?”

“We know what happened — we can’t quite prove everything yet.”

“But you expect to?” Dr. Silverman said.

She was equally interested in everything I said. But somehow she never let me ramble. She concentrated entirely on me for the fifty minutes I was there. She saw every movement, heard every intonation.

“It’s the old domino thing,” I said. “We have a whole bunch of freestanding hypotheses. We need one hard fact to tip the whole thing. One person to say ‘I did it.’ Or ‘She did it.’ Or ‘They did it.’ Or whatever. It’s like we have the fulcrum but we need a lever.”

Susan nodded.

“And Sarah?” she said.

“In a sense, we’ve solved her part. We know who her mother is, and we know that we will probably never know who her father is.”

“So that the questions she asked you to answer are answered or prove to be unanswerable.”

“Yes,” I said, “except, what the hell is she supposed to do now?”

Dr. Silverman tilted her head to the side a little.

“I mean, she’s twenty-one, and with my help she discovered that she’s alone.”

“And you feel responsible?”

“Not for finding out things. That’s what I do. But... on the drive back from New York, I gave her a small lecture on it. She was responsible for herself. She needs to stop smoking, stop the drugs, stop sleeping around, stop drinking too much.”

Dr. Silverman smiled.

“And was that effective?” she said.

“Of course not. She needs a shrink.”

“What you have done, which may be more effective, is to give her an image of competent adult womanhood, living alone.”

I smiled.

“And needing a shrink,” I said.

Dr. Silverman acknowledged what I said with a small single nod.

“Would you see her if she wanted to come?” I said.

“Have her call me,” Dr. Silverman said.

We were quiet. Dr. Silverman seemed perfectly comfortable with quiet.

After a while, I said, “I had a good talk with Richie the other day.”

“Really?” Dr. Silverman said. “What made it good?”

“He told me things about himself that he’d never told me when we were married.”

Dr. Silverman nodded. She was leaning forward a little in her chair, resting her chin on her fist.

“He also said he still loved me... more than his wife... and he told me it’s never over until it’s over.”

“Do you think that solves your problems?”

“I... I don’t... it made me feel thrilled and hopeful,” I said. “But I suppose it’s a little soon.”

She nodded very slightly, but I knew she thought it was a little soon, too.

“And there is the wife,” I said.

“And there is the wife,” Dr. Silverman said. “Do you think he’s changed?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think I have.”

“How so,” Dr. Silverman said.

“Well,” I said, “I had lunch again with my father.”

“Let’s talk about that,” she said.