Snow White and Rose Red

4

“You’re the one who’s crazy,” my partner Frank said.

We were standing in what — by the end of May, or so we’d been promised by the contractor — would be one of the new corner offices at Summerville and Hope. The firm was expanding. We were doing good business, knock wood. We were making a lot of money.

“You can’t make money taking on lunatics as clients,” Frank said.

Carpenters were hammering on the wall behind him. The wall was open to the bright April sunshine. The carpenters were trying to “close up,” as the contractor had put it, before we had rain. No one expected rain in Calusa in April, but the contractor was a cautious man. His name was Percival Banks. Maybe anyone named Percival had to be cautious.

“What do those papers you’re waving in my face tell you, Matthew?”

I was not, in fact, waving anything in his face. Frank often tends to exaggerate. He is a transplanted New Yorker, and perhaps exaggeration is a trait peculiar to natives of that city.

There are people who say that Frank and I look alike. I cannot see any resemblance. I’m an even six feet tall and weigh 170 pounds. Frank’s a half-inch under six feet, and he weighs 160, which he watches like a hawk. We both have dark hair and brown eyes, but Frank’s face is rounder than mine. Frank says there are only two types of faces in the world: “pig faces” and “fox faces.” He classifies himself as a pig face and me as a fox face. There is nothing derogatory about either label; they are only intended to be descriptive. Frank first told me about his designation system several years ago. Ever since, I’ve been unable to look at anyone without automatically categorizing him or her as either pig or fox.

Frank also says there are only two kinds of names in the world: “Frère Jacques” names and “Eleanor Rigby” names, this despite the fact that neither his name nor mine fits into either category. Robert Redford is a Frère Jacques name: “Robert Redford, Robert Redford, dormez-vous, dormez-vous?” Jackie Onassis is an Eleanor Rigby name: “Jackie Onassis, died in a church and was buried along with her name...” I am constantly trying to think of Frère Jacques and Eleanor Rigby names. I sometimes go crazy trying to think of them.

Frank’s proclamations are often insidious. His exaggerations are merely annoying. The papers he said I was waving in his face were in fact resting on his desk alongside a pile of sawdust, a level, a set of blueprints rolled open and held down by a hammer and a screwdriver, and an empty beer can from which one of the carpenters had been drinking not five minutes earlier. I had obtained the papers from the records of the Probate Division of Calusa’s Circuit Court. The papers were a petition for appointment of guardian:

“If I’ve read this petition correctly—” Frank said.

“I’m sure you have.”

“—and if I’ve read the sheet of paper attached to it...”

The sheet of paper attached to it read:

“If I’ve read it correctly,” Frank repeated, “then Alice Whittaker is now the guardian of the person and property of young Sarah Whittaker, which means that the six hundred and fifty thousand bucks she got from God knows where—”

“She inherited it when her father died,” I said.

“Wherever she got it,” Frank said, “it is now controlled by Mama. So I ask you again, Matthew, where is this girl going to find the wherewithal to pay our admittedly exorbitant legal fees?”

“Once we get her out of that place—”

“If we get her out”

“—her mother will no longer be guardian of the property.”

“Yes, if we can get Miss Looney Tunes adjudged competent again.”

“Yes, if.”

“If,” Frank repeated.

“There must be an echo in this place,” I said.

“One thing anyone from Chicago should never attempt is humor,” Frank said dryly. “Especially when he’s on the verge of committing the firm to an expenditure of time that will result in the loss of a great deal of money.”

“I’m not on the verge, Frank. I’ve already committed—”

“Without first consulting me.”

“I knew you’d want to see justice done.”

“Bullshit,” Frank said.

“Anyway,” I said, “the case is ours.”

“Yours,” he said. “It’s bad enough I have to work with a lunatic, I don’t have to go looking for other lunatics in the bushes.”

“She’s not a lunatic,” I said.

“you’d better be ready to prove that to Judge Mason,” Frank said. “Who, as I understand it, signed both the commitment papers and the order appointing guardianship.”

“That has not escaped my keen eye,” I said.

Dr. Nathan Helsinger was in with a patient when I arrived at his office.

I should mention immediately that there are not very many psychiatrists in the city of Calusa. I’m sure we have our normal share of psychotics, but we have very many more than our normal share of senior citizens — what my partner, Frank, calls the white tide. This expression won’t make any sense to you unless you’ve heard of the red tide. The red tide is caused by the blooming — or population explosion — of a tiny one-celled plant that lives in the Gulf of Mexico. The plant is called Ptychodiscus brevis... or something. No one knows what causes a red tide bloom. When it comes, however, it kills the fish and stinks up the beaches. My partner Frank maintains that the white tide serves the same purpose. I myself have nothing against old people except that they cough a lot during performances at the Helen Gottlieb.

My point is that the business of psychiatry, as it has evolved in America, has largely to do with neurotics as opposed to psychotics, and when a person reaches the age of eighty-two, he doesn’t much give a damn whether or not he is infantilely fixed on his mother’s breasts. Have you noticed that a lot of old people smoke? That is because they’re not afraid of cancer; death is on the horizon anyway. Similarly, an octogenarian doesn’t want to spend fifty minutes four days a week on a psychiatrist’s couch when he could be out fishing instead. Two things that are in short supply in Calusa are psychiatrists and orthodontists; old people don’t want either their teeth or their heads straightened out.

It is my partner Frank’s belief that all psychiatrists are nuts.

This is because he once used to play poker with a psychiatrist who was certainly certifiable. At a game one night, when Dr. Mann — for such was his name — failed to fill a diamond flush with a three-card draw, he threw the table into the air, scattering cards, poker chips, and potato chips all over the room. Frank told Dr. Mann he was behaving like a child. Dr. Mann answered, “Fuck you.” Frank thinks all psychiatrists should be sent to Knott’s Retreat.

I was here in Dr. Nathan Helsinger’s office to learn why he had felt Sarah Whittaker should be sent to Knott’s Retreat.

His patient came out of the inner office after I’d been waiting in the reception room for ten minutes.

“Raining out there?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “Nice and sunny.”

“Probably rain later on, though,” he said.

“No, the forecast is for clear skies,” I said.

“It’ll rain,” he said, and went to the coat rack, put on his rubbers, raincoat, and rain hat, and left without another word.

Dr. Helsinger appeared five minutes later.

He was a man of about sixty, I guessed, wearing a seersucker suit with a white shirt and a striped blue tie. Five feet nine inches tall, more or less, with pink cheeks, twinkling blue eyes, and a little round potbelly. He had a full white beard. If he’d been wearing a red hat, he could have been Santa Claus.

“Mr. Hope?” he said. “Sorry to have kept you waiting, I had a call to make. Come in, won’t you?”

We went into his office.

Framed documents on the walls told me he’d done his undergraduate work at Princeton, gone to medical school at Columbia, done his internship at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, served his assistant residency and residency in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital in New York, and been certified in psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, and that he was licensed to practice psychiatry in both New York State and Florida. The walls were painted white. Aside from the diplomas and such, there was nothing else on the walls. The room was furnished with a desk, a chair behind it and one in front of it, and a couch. A window was open to a cloistered little garden outside. A bright red cardinal sat chirping on one branch of a lavender jacaranda tree. It took wing as I sat in the chair on the patient’s side of the desk.

“So,” Helsinger said. “When I spoke to you on the phone, you said you were representing Sarah Whittaker.”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“You feel she’s competent, is that it? you’re seeking her release from Knott’s?”

“If the facts seem to warrant it,” I said. “At the moment I’m trying to learn—”

“you’ve talked to Miss Whittaker, I assume?”

“Yes, sir. Several times on the telephone and once—”

“Have you talked to her in person? Have you met her?”

“I was about to say... yes, sir, I went out to Knott’s and we talked for quite a long time.” I hesitated and then said, “She seemed all right to me.

“The man who just left this office seems all right, too,” Helsinger said. “Except that in his head It’s hurricane season all year round.” He sighed deeply. “Sarah Whittaker is not all right, Mr. Hope. She is a very sick young woman.”

“We spent two hours together. She seemed perfectly lucid, and organized, and... sane, Dr. Helsinger. Admittedly, I’m not—”

“No, you’re not,” Helsinger said at once. “Did she mention her father to you?”

“Only to say that she’d inherited a substantial amount of money from him.”

“Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to be exact.”

“Yes. That was the figure.” I hesitated again. “It’s also the figure mentioned in the guardianship papers.”

“Her mother has been appointed guardian of her person and property, yes,” Helsinger said.

“That’s a lot of money,” I said.

“Is it? What do you know about the Whittaker family, Mr. Hope?”

“Virtually nothing.”

“Then let me fill you in. Horace Whittaker came here from Stamford, Connecticut, when he was a young man. In Sarasota, Ringling was putting up villas and hotels for all his circus pals, and the town was beginning to boom. If it could happen in Sarasota, why not Calusa? Horace bought up all the land he could lay his hands on — it could be had for peanuts back then, the place was truly nothing but a small fishing village, bounded on the west by the Gulf of Mexico and on the east by Calusa Bay. He began selling off his real-estate holdings after the war — I refer to World War II, Mr. Hope, the only realistic war we’ve fought in the past forty years. Land Horace had bought for two hundred dollars an acre was then selling for two thousand. Gulf-front property today is worth five thousand dollars a running foot. The Whittaker family still owns choice gulf-front property it doesn’t yet choose to sell. Alice Whittaker inherited all of it when her husband died. The estate was valued at close to a billion dollars.”

“I see.”

“By comparison, Horace left his only daughter a mere six hundred and fifty thousand. Does that still seem like a lot of money to you?”

I said nothing.

“The oversight may have precipitated the elaborate delusional system Sarah had constructed,” Helsinger said. “It’s difficult to say. In any event, delusional perception is only one of the so-called first-rank symptoms of schizophrenia.”

I knew next to nothing about mental disorders. To me, a woman with “delusions” was someone who believed she was Queen Elizabeth or Catherine the Great. Sarah Whittaker believed she was Sarah Whittaker, and she further believed she was sane.

“What are the other symptoms?” I asked.

Helsinger looked at his watch.

“If you have the time,” I said.

“you’re asking me, in effect, aren’t you, to defend my diagnosis,” Helsinger said. “And the confirming diagnosis of Dr. Bonamico at Good Samaritan. And the corroboration of the entire medical staff at Knott’s, who unanimously agree that Sarah Whittaker is a paranoid schizophrenic.”

“If you have the time,” I said again, “I really would like to know the basis of your diagnosis.”

Helsinger sighed again. He did not look at his watch this time, but like a professor patiently lecturing to a dullard class in Psych 101, he began ticking off the symptoms of schizophrenia on the fingers of first one hand and then the other.

“One,” he said, “hearing your own thoughts aloud as you think them. Two, hearing hallucinatory voices discussing you or arguing about you. Three, hearing those same voices commenting on your actions. Four, believing that your body is being influenced or controlled by uncanny powers. Five, believing that your thoughts are similarly controlled. Six, believing that your thoughts are not your own — we psychiatrists call it ‘thought insertion.’ Seven, believing your thoughts are being broadcast to the outside world. Eight, believing that everything you do, feel, think, experience is being controlled by someone or something quite other than yourself. And lastly, the delusional perception I spoke of earlier.”

“Which manifests itself in what way?” I asked. I kept thinking that Sarah Whittaker had not behaved or sounded like anyone but the person I assumed she actually was.

“Let me quote C. S. Mellor. In commenting on Schneider’s work — That’s Kurt Schneider, who formulated the diagnostic criteria I just outlined for you — he said, ‘Schneider described the delusional perception as a two-stage phenomenon. The delusion arises from a perception which to the patient possesses all the properties of a normal perception, and which he acknowledges would be regarded as such by anyone else. This perception, however, has a private meaning for him, and the second state — which is the development of the delusion — follows almost immediately. The crystallization of an elaborate delusional system following upon the percept is often very sudden. The delusional perception is frequently preceded by a delusional atmosphere.’ Does that explain it, Mr. Hope?”

I did not feel particularly enlightened.

“And Sarah Whittaker was exhibiting all of these symptoms when you examined her?”

“Many of them,” Helsinger said. “It’s not necessary for all of the first-rank symptoms to be present in order to diagnose schizophrenia.” He looked at his watch again. “Enough of the symptoms were present, however.”

“And these symptoms included — what did you call it? — delusional perception?”

“Indeed.”

“Whom does Sarah believe herself to be?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“doesn’t a delusional system—”

“Oh, Napoleon, you mean,” Helsinger said, and smiled. “Yes, of course, That’s often the case. Sarah’s delusion, however, is more elaborate. You must understand, Mr. Hope, that a delusion is a belief — not a view, not an emotion, not a feeling, but a firm belief — that has absolutely no basis in reality but is nonetheless unshakably held despite factual evidence to the contrary.”

“And Sarah’s belief is what?”

“She believes — she knows with certainty — that she is being persecuted, deceived, spied upon, cheated, and even hypnotized by her mother and/or people in her mother’s employ.”

“You said a little while ago that the delusional system may have been triggered by the comparatively small inheritance—”

“Perhaps. But the delusional atmosphere must have been present long before her father died.”

I took a deep breath.

“Dr. Helsinger,” I said, “I saw no evidence that Sarah Whittaker is functioning under any sort of delusional system.”

“She told you she was sane, didn’t she?” Helsinger said. “She wants you to get her out of the hospital, doesn’t she? She’s being kept there against her will, isn’t she? Her mother had her committed wrongly, isn’t that her story?”

“Yes, but—”

“That’s all part of her delusional system. Persecution, deception—”

“Unless she really is being persecuted and deceived.”

“Yes, but where’s the basis in reality for such a belief?”

“You find no such basis, is that correct?”

“None whatsoever.”

“When were you first called into this, Doctor?”

“On September twenty-seventh last year. After Sarah tried to kill herself ”

“By allegedly slashing her wrists with a razor blade.”

“Allegedly? She did, in fact, slash her left wrist.”

“You saw the results of this suicide attempt?”

“I did.”

“Her left wrist was cut?”

“It was.”

“She was bleeding when you examined her?”

“No, her mother had put an adhesive bandage on the wound. It was only a superficial cut.”

“Did you remove the bandage to look at the cut?”

“I did.”

“And saw the cut?”

“Saw it, yes.”

“Did you see the razor blade as well?”

“No, I did not.”

“Do you know what happened to that razor blade?”

“I have no idea.”

“Was it given to the police?”

“Why would it have been?”

“Dr. Helsinger, when I was visiting Sarah, I saw no scars on either of her wrists. I looked for them, and there were no—”

“As I told you, she managed to cut herself only superficially.”

“Mrs. Whittaker called you first, is that correct? Her daughter was bleeding, but she didn’t call a general practitioner, she called a psychiatrist instead.”

“A Band-Aid took care of the cut. I’ve told you several times now that it was merely superficial. Her daughter had just attempted suicide, Mr. Hope, and suicide is not the act of a so-called normal human being. It seemed obvious to Mrs. Whittaker that a psychiatrist was needed. In the same situation, wouldn’t you have called a psychiatrist?”

“You said a delusional atmosphere had undoubtedly existed before her father—”

“I said it must have existed.”

“That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption based on the usual development of delusional patterns. The physicians treating her at Knott’s would be able to tell you more about the origins of her disease.”

“But when you examined her—”

“Yes?”

“Did you then conclude that this delusional atmosphere had existed?”

“I considered it a definite possibility. In terms of my personal experience with such cases.”

“Had you ever examined Sarah before then?”

“No.”

“No one had called you to say that Sarah was hallucinating or hearing voices or in any way exhibiting symptoms of delusional perception?”

“No.”

“Had you ever treated or consulted with any other member of the family?”

“No.”

“Then Mrs. Whittaker just picked you out of the phone book, did she?”

“I’ve been a friend of the family for a good many years now,” Helsinger said. “Mr. Hope, you will forgive me, but I’m expecting my next patient in ten minutes, and there are still some calls I have to return.”

“Just a few more questions, Dr. Helsinger, if you can spare me the time.”

He looked at his watch again.

“Well,” he said, and sighed.

“When you examined Sarah for the first time — was she hearing voices?”

“She was manifestly exhibiting many if not all of the first-rank symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, yes.”

“Which was what convinced you that it was necessary to sign a certificate for emergency admission under the Baker Act.”

“The need for admission to a mental facility seemed indicated, yes.”

“On the basis of the one and only time you saw Sarah Whittaker in a professional capacity?”

“Mr. Hope,” Helsinger said wearily, “I am a trained psychiatrist. I do not have to be run over by a locomotive to recognize schizophrenia when I encounter it.”

“you’d encountered it often before, is that true? Before that evening?”

“On innumerable occasions.”

“You mentioned earlier that you’d known Sarah before that evening, known the family, and, I believe you said, were — and are — a longtime friend of the family?”

“That’s true.”

“On any occasion — when you saw Sarah socially — did she seem mentally disturbed to you?”

“No, she did not.”

“Then the first clue you had to her illness was on the evening you saw her for the first time professionally. The evening of September twenty-seventh last year.”

“Yes.”

“And you were sufficiently alarmed that evening to sign a certificate for emergency admission and to deliver it personally to the Public Safety Building.”

“I was not ‘alarmed,’ Mr. Hope. I had examined a young woman who was manifesting many of the first-rank symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia — a woman, moreover, who had just attempted suicide. It was incumbent upon me to seek emergency admission. Now, Mr. Hope, I think you’ll recognize — as a fellow professional — that I’ve given you more than enough of my time, and that I’ve sat through your inquisition with more courtesy and patience than I might have were I in a court of law, under oath. I do have some calls to make, so if you’ll forgive me...”

“Of course,” I said. “Thank you for your time, Doctor.”

I rose and started for the door.

When my hand was on the knob, Helsinger said, “Mr. Hope?”

I turned.

“Yes?”

“Leave this alone,” he said gently. “Sarah is really an extremely sick person. Believe me,” he said. “Please believe me.”