The Thanatos Syndrome

II

1. MONDAY MORNING. Sitting on the front porch of my office waiting for a patient, sailingpaper P-51s, and watching the sparrows flock around the martin hotel.

I am not paranoid by nature, but I think someone is following me. Several times this week I’ve seen a Cox Cable van, sometimes following, sometimes ahead of me, sometimes parked and fixing a cable.

Ellen’s gone to Fresno alone. She seemed sober this morning, unhungover, cheerful, and in her right mind, full of practical plans. Van Dorn, she said, may join her later. How could he not? They have never lost a tournament. If not, at least he had promised to save her from the humiliating ordeal of the partnership desk, would fix her up with a worthy partner in the Mixed Pairs competition.

Worried about Ellen. Call home to try to reach Chandra.

Chandra answers, offhandedly, “Yeah?”

“Chandra, I want you to do me a favor. Would you?”

Chandra, alerted, voice suddenly serious: “I will.”

“Chandra, I am counting on you to help me with the kids while my wife is gone. Can I depend on you to be there after three when the kids get home from school?”

“You certainly can,” says Chandra in her new Indiana voice but not sounding put-on.

“Thank you.” I can count on her.

“But—”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. More said she made other arrangements.”

“What other arrangements?”

“I don’t know.”

Other arrangements. “Chandra, don’t worry about the other arrangements. I need you there when the children get home.”

“I’ll be here.”

A note in the mail and a recorded message on the machine, both from my cousin Lucy, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb.

The note, dashed off on a prescription pad: “Tom” (not Dear Cousin Tom, though we are cousins, certainly not cud’n): “I need to see you. Important. Bob C. and Van Dorn are up to something. It concerns you, dope. Call me. L.”

That’s her laconic style all right, maybe slightly overdone, what with her new doctoring manner. She’s completed her residency at Tulane and is back here as house physician at the local hospital.

I call. Can’t reach her at Pantherburn, where she lives, or at the hospital, but leave message: I’ll be at the hospital later to see Mickey LaFaye.

The sweet-gum leaves are speckled with fall but the morning sun is already hot. Sparrows flock. The martins are long gone for the Amazon. My nose has stopped running.

Taking stock.

Time was when the patients I saw suffered mainly from depression and anxiety: prosperous, attractive housewives terrified for no apparent reason; rich oilmen in a funk after striking it rich; in a funk after going broke; students, the best and the brightest, attempting suicide for reasons unknown to themselves; live-in couples turning on each other with termagant hatred.

I had some success with them. Though I admired and respected Dr. Freud more than Dr. Jung, I thought Dr. Jung was right in encouraging his patients to believe that their anxiety and depression might be trying to tell them something of value. They are not just symptoms. It helps enormously when a patient can make friends with her terror, plumb the depths of her depression. “There’s gold down there in the darkness,” said Dr. Jung. True, in the end Dr. Jung turned out to be something of a nut, the source of all manner of occult nonsense. Dr. Freud was not. He was a scientist, wrong at times, but a scientist nonetheless.

Two years in the clink have taught me a thing or two.

I don’t have to be in a demonic hurry as I used to be.

I don’t have to plumb the depths of “modern man” as I used to think I had to. Nor worry about “the human condition” and suchlike. My scale is smaller.

In prison I learned a certain detachment and cultivated a mild, low-grade curiosity. At one time I thought the world was going mad and that it was up to me to diagnose the madness and treat it. I became grandiose, even Faustian.

Prison does wonders for megalomania. Instead of striking pacts with the Devil to save the world — yes, I was nuts — I spent two years driving a tractor pulling a gang mower over sunny fairways and at night chatting with my fellow con men and watching reruns of Barnaby Jones.

Living a small life gave me leave to notice small things — like certain off-color spots in the St. Augustine grass which I correctly diagnosed as an early sign of chinch-bug infestation. Instead of saving the world, I saved the eighteen holes at Fort Pelham and felt surprisingly good about it.

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

The great American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, said that the most amazing thing about the universe is that apparently disconnected events are in fact not, that one can connect them. Amazing!

Here are a few disconnected facts, as untidy as these pesky English sparrows buzzing around the martin house.

Ellen.

Is she sick?

There is this:

Change in personality: from a thrifty albeit lusty, abstemious albeit merry, Presbyterian girl to a hard-drinking, free-style duplicate-bridge fanatic.

Her sexual behavior.

Her gift for bridge: Van Dorn says that after three rounds of play she can calculate the probabilities of distribution of cards in individual hands as accurately as a computer.

Her relationship with Van Dorn.

The Azazel convention.

Bob Comeaux and John Van Dorn. Lucy says they are “up to something.” The only evidence so far: Both are overly friendly toward me. Both want something. What? Bob wants me to work with him at Fedville. Why? Van Dorn wanted me to go to Fresno with Ellen. Why?

Three new patients (short case histories follow) who couldn’t be more different, yet there is a certain eerie similarity, certain signs and symptoms in common, such as

Change of personality. From the familiar anxieties, terrors, panics, phobias I used to treat to a curious flatness of tone. Their old symptoms are in a sense “cured,” but are they better? Worse?

Change in sexuality: Sexual feelings more openly, yet more casually, expressed. Less monogamous? More promiscuous? Or simply more honest, part and parcel of the sexual revolution? Plus certain clues to changes in sexual behavior in women: less missionary positioning, front to front, and more front to rear, six to nine, Donna backing into me. Also a hint of estrus-like behavior in Mickey LaFaye, who speaks of her “times,” not meaning her menses. Check menses in future histories.

Language behavior: Change from ordinary talk in more or less complete sentences—“I feel awful today,” “I am plain and simply terrified,” “The truth is, Doc, I can’t stand that woman”—to two-or three-word fragments—“Feel good,” “Come by me,” “Over here,” “Donna like Doc”—reminiscent of the early fragmentary telepathic sentences of a three-year-old, or perhaps the two-word chimp utterances described by primatologists—“Tickle Washoe,” “More bananas.”

Context loss: They respond to any learned stimulus like any other creature but not like an encultured creature, that is, any human in any culture. Example: Ask them out of the blue, Where is Schenectady? and if they know, they’ll tell you — without asking you why you want to know.

Idiot-savant response: They’re not idiots but they’re savants in the narrow sense of being able to recall any information they have ever received — unlike you and me, whose memory is subject to all manner of lapses, repressions, errors, but, rather, like a computer ordered to scan its memory banks. An ocular sign: eyes rolling up behind closed lids as if they were “seeing” a map when asked, Where is St. Louis?

Is this a syndrome? If so, what is its etiology? Exogenous? Bacterial? Viral? Chemical?

In a word, what’s going on here?

Can’t say. My series of patients is far too short. Three patients. I need fifty. I need blood chemistry, seven different kinds of brain scans, especially CORTscans.

Here comes a patient. Enrique Busch. I spy him a block away and hurry to get inside. Wouldn’t do for a shrink to be caught sitting on the porch zinging paper P-51s at a martin hotel. Ellen taught me that when she was my receptionist-nurse. Act like a respectable physician. Wish I had her back.

Inside, just time enough to call Lucy Lipscomb. Nothing doing. I leave a message at the hospital that I’ll see her around noon after I see more patients.

Here is Enrique.

CASE HISTORY # 1

Enrique Busch is an old, chronically enraged ex-Salvadoran. Although he was not a member of one of the fourteen families who owned that unfortunate little country, he married into one and had the good fortune to get out with most of his money and his family and remove to Feliciana, where he bought up thousands of acres of cutover pineland, which he converted to Kentucky bluegrass country with horse farms, handsome barns, hunter-jumper courses, and even a polo field.

His presenting complaint two years ago: insomnia. His real complaint: rage. Every night he lay stiff with rage. He spent the day abusing people. I have never seen such an angry man. There is nothing like an angry Hispanic. It was killing him, this rage, with hypertension, sleeplessness, pills, and booze. He hated Communists, Salvadoran liberals, Salvadoran moderates, Salvadoran Indians, nuns, priests, fundamentalists, Cubans, Mexicans (!), blacks. He hated Americans, even though he had gone to Texas A&M, chosen this country, and done well here. Why did he hate the U.S.? Because we were suckers, weren’t tough enough, were appeasing Communists, and sooner or later would find ourselves face to face with Soviet troops across the Rio Grande. And so on.

I couldn’t do much for him beyond helping him recognize his anger and to suggest less booze and barbiturates, and outlets for his energy less destructive than death squads. Take up a sport. Beat up something besides people. Beat up a golf ball. Shoot something besides people. He took my suggestion. The upshot: Too old for polo, he took up hunting and golf, joined the ROBs (Retired Old Bastards), a genial group of senior golfers at the country club. The golf, eighteen holes a day, tournaments at other clubs, helped. He competed ferociously and successfully, his blood pressure went down, he slept better, but in the end he blew it and either withdrew or got kicked out. Why? Because he never caught on to the trick of Louisiana civility, the knack of banter and horsing around, easing up, joshing and joking — in a word, the American social contract, in virtue of which ideology is mitigated by manners and humor if not friendship. He could not help himself. On the links he could hack up the fairway, hook and slice and curse with the best of them, but afterward in the clubhouse he could not suppress his Central American rage. One doesn’t do this. His fellow ROBs didn’t like Communists or liberals or blacks any more than he did. But one doesn’t launch tirades over bourbon in the locker room. One vents dislikes by jokes. But Enrique could never see the connection between anger and jokes (unlike Freud and the ROBs). He never caught on to the subtle but inviolable American freemasonry of civility. And so he got kicked out.

So here he is two years later. And how is he? Why, he’s as easygoing and fun-loving as Lee Trevino. Not only is he back in the ROBs, he’s just won the Sunbelt Seniors at Point Clear. Blood pressure: 120/80.

He even tells me a joke, not a very good joke. Here is the joke:

There was this old Southern planter who had bad heart trouble. So his doctor tells him, Colonel, you got to have a heart transplant. He says, Okay, Doc, go right ahead. But what the planter doesn’t know is that the only heart the doctor can find is the heart of a young black who’s been killed in a razor fight. So when the old planter wakes up, the doctor comes in and tells him, Colonel, I got bad news and good news. The bad news is that I had to give you a nigger’s heart. Good God, says the old planter, that’s terrible; maybe you better tell me the good news. So the doctor says, the good news is your deek is ten centimeters long.

“You get it, Doc?” says Enrique, laughing.

“Yes, I get it, Enrique,” I say. “But it should be ten inches, I think, not ten centimeters.”

“You right, Doc! Ten inches!” says Enrique, slapping his leg, laughing all the harder, not caring that he’s screwed up the joke.

So what has happened to Enrique? I don’t know.

Why is he here?

He needs something. And in fact I can help him. It’s about his daughter Carmela, a nice girl, a thoroughly American, Southern U.S. girl. It seems she has enrolled at the University of Mississippi as a freshman. She loves it. Her heart is set on being pledged by the Gammas, a sorority. All her friends are Gammas. If she does not make Gamma, her life will be ruined. There would be little doubt she would make it, but it seems there is a little hitch, says Enrique, and it is because her complexion is quite brunette like mine, and you know how it is in Mississippi, even though she is pure Castilian-German. Now here it is, the end of rush week, and she has not been pledged.

Enrique in fact looks like an Indian.

“That’s too bad, Enrique,” I say, still wondering why he’s here.

“Here’s the thing, Doc. I understand that the Gamma rush captain is a young kinswoman of yours, the granddaughter in fact of the distinguished lady from the Mississippi Delta who was the foundress of this very chapter of Gammas. Now here it is at the end of rush week—” He looks down at his diamond-studded Rolex watch as if minutes counted.

I look at him in astonishment. How does he know such things? I had forgotten myself, if I ever knew, that Jo Ann had gone to Ole Miss, let alone that she was rush captain of Gamma.

“Come inside, Enrique.” I remember all too well what it is to have an unhappy daughter.

It takes ten minutes. I call Aunt Birdie in Vicksburg and Jo Ann at Oxford. Two or three words about Carmela being a darling girl, member of an ancient aristocratic Castilian and Prussian family, indeed one of the first fourteen families of El Salvador, a prime prospect whom they can’t afford to lose to the Chi O’s, and so on.

I hang up. “She’ll get her invitation this afternoon,” I tell Enrique.

“Oh, my dear friend! Jesus!” cries Enrique, leaping to his feet. There are actually tears in his eyes. I’m afraid he’s going to embrace me, so I shake hands quickly. He shakes with both of his. “You name it, Doctor! Anything!”

“My pleasure, Enrique.” It is. Such matters can be serious. I can’t stand to see a child, any child who sets her heart on it, get blackballed by the sisters, who can in fact be as mean to one another as yard dogs.

But my interest in Enrique lies elsewhere. It is the change in him. Imagine a Central American who’s lost interest in politics! Who knows all about Ole Miss sororities!

On the way out I ask him casually where San Cristóbal is — San Cristóbal, the town in Chiapas, Mexico, where his family first settled. If I’d asked him two years ago, asked him anything about Mexico, he’d have got going on the Mexicans, whom he dislikes, but now he merely closes his eyes.

“Oh, I’d say it’s about three hundred miles northwest of Santa Anna.” Santa Anna is the place where he lived on his finca in El Salvador. He doesn’t even ask me why I wanted to know. He’ll tell me anything, give me anything.

I ask him if he will come in next week for a couple of tests — I tell him I want to see if he’s as healthy as he looks. What I really want is a CORTscan.

“My pleasure, Doc,” says Enrique, trying out his interlocking grip on an imaginary club, swinging as easily as Sam Snead.

CASE HISTORY #2

Here is Ella Murdoch Smith.

Her problem used to be failure and fright. “I can’t cope,” she once told me quietly. “It’s too much. What happens when people can’t cope? Is there a place to go, some government program for people who just can’t cope any longer?” she asked ironically but seriously. I told her I didn’t know of any such program. “But this is ridiculous,” she said. “Have you ever heard of a card game where you’re dealt a hand, a losing hand, and you’re stuck with it, can’t turn it in, can’t fold and draw a new card, and you’re stuck with it the rest of your life?” I admitted I had never heard of such a game. “You’re right,” she said. “There is no such game. I want to fold this hand.” I took her threat of suicide, of folding her hand for good, seriously.

Her husband had left her with two small children. She had to go to work. An educated woman, she had no particular skills and had a hard time holding down a job, taking care of the children, running the house. She became frightened.

I looked at her. That was three years ago. What was remarkable about her was that here she was, a handsome, formidable woman with heavy breasts, youngish but with hair gone prematurely iron-gray and done up in two heavy braids — and shaking like a leaf. She had been frightened for months.

Frightened of what? Failure? Not according to her. One might have thought she had enough ordinary troubles to frighten anybody. But she had her own theory. She read books on psychology. She misread Freud. Her theory was that she had a strong sexual drive, that it was not being satisfied, and that in consequence she became anxious. So anxious she couldn’t cope.

As the older Freud would have told you, it’s not that simple.

I think I helped her. I only saw her a few weeks. There was not enough time or money for a proper analysis. But we made some progress.

The young Freud might have partly agreed with her — of course, it was the other way around, she was agreeing with Freud. Suppressed or unfulfilled sexual needs translate into anxiety, etc. Now I don’t know how it was with the middle-class Viennese Hausfrauen Freud saw as patients. Maybe he was right about them. But he was not right about Ella. As a matter of fact, she satisfied her needs and drives, as she called them, had an affair with one of her bosses, a chicken farmer — and became more frightened than ever. She actually wrung her hands and cried, her face going red as a child’s between her heavy iron-gray braids.

I began to notice something about her. The only times she was not frightened were when she carried off some little performance, a gesture which seemed to her to be “right,” that is, sufficiently graceful, clever, savvy, warranted, that it pleased her and me. I never cease to be amazed at the number of patients who are at a loss or feel crazy because they don’t know what to do from one minute to the next, don’t think they do things right — I don’t mean right in the moral sense, but right in the way that people on TV or in books or movies always do things right. Even when such actor-people do wrong, go nuts, they do it in a proper, rounded-off way, like Jane Fonda having a breakdown on TV. “I can’t even have a successful nervous breakdown!” cried Ella, wringing her hands. She thought she had to go nuts in a poetic way, like Ophelia singing sad songs and jumping in the creek with flowers in her hair. How do I know what to do, Doctor? Why can’t you tell me? What I want to tell them is, this is not the Age of Enlightenment but the Age of Not Knowing What to Do.

One day she carried off a charming little gesture and I noticed that it pleased her very much. She showed up with copies of Feliciana Farewell, the yearbook of our high school — yes, she had discovered that we had attended the same high school here and the same university in North Carolina. She opened the two books to show me her picture and mine — yes, we had both been editor of the yearbook. She gave me the yearbooks. It pleased her. She stopped trembling.

We talked about failure. What is failure? Failure is what people do ninety-nine percent of the time. Even in the movies: ninety-nine outtakes for one print. But in the movies they don’t show the failures. What you see are the takes that work. So it looks as if every action, even going crazy, is carried off in a proper, rounded-off way. It looks as if real failure is unspeakable. TV has screwed up millions of people with their little rounded-off stories. Because that is not the way life is. Life is fits and starts, mostly fits. Life doesn’t have to stop with failure. Not only do you not have to jump in the creek, you can even take pleasure in the general recklessness of life, as I do, a doctor without patients sailing paper P-51s at a martin house. I am a failed but not unhappy doctor.

I took her hints of suicide—“I don’t have to play this hand,” etc. — seriously. We spoke of failure and she got better. I can’t claim a cure, but she got better. She showed some initiative, stopped wringing her hands, moved to Nags Head on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, got a job teaching school, put her children in the excellent public school system of North Carolina, and even began writing poetry. She sent me a postcard showing the beach and the dunes of Kitty Hawk. It read: “Did you ever walk on a beach in December in a gale. The winter beach is lovely.” Later she sent me a poem she wrote called “Spindrift,” about the spindrift of the waves being like the spindrift of the heart, etc.

Now, admittedly there is still some cause for alarm here: Ella setting too much store by walking on a winter beach and writing a poem about spindrift. There are at least a thousand women poets in America, mostly in California and New England, who walk on beaches and write poems about spindrift, spindrift of the waves, spindrift of the heart. Beware of women poets who write about spindrift. There is a certain peril in this enterprise. She could easily shoot herself down. The winter beach and the spindrift, relied on too much, could let you down. But at least I understood her and she me. We transmit on the same wavelength. She was functioning, living, not trembling, taking herself less seriously, had come to terms with failure. Her children were doing well in school, were happy, had not yet fallen prey to the miseries of adulthood.

Cure? No. What’s a cure in this day and age? Maybe a cure is knowing there is no cure. But I helped her and she me. She gave me a gift which I liked. I still have her two volumes of Feliciana Farewell on my shelf.

So here she is two years later.

She had called earlier, saying she needed my testimony in an industrial liability case, that it meant big bucks.

Big bucks? That didn’t sound like Ella.

I am waiting on the porch when she shows up. She arrives in a Nissan pickup with gun racks in the rear window. She’s wearing an elbow cast. The driver stays in the truck, a fellow in a yellow hardhat. I ask her if he’s going to wait for her.

She laughs. “Don’t worry about Mel. Let’s go inside.”

I follow her in. The change in her is startling. Her hair is cut short, dyed pinkish-blond, as crimped and stiff as steel wool. She’s wearing long shorts, the kind that pull up over the stomach, and she’s got a stomach, but the bottoms are rolled up high on her thigh. Her clear plastic shoes have openwork over the toes. Jellies, I think they’re called. About two dollars a pair from K-Mart. She looks like a Westwego bingo player.

It seems she has returned to Louisiana, gotten a job with Mitsy, the local nuclear utility at Grand Mer.

Now I’ve got nothing against Westwego types — they can be, often are, canny, shrewd, generous women, good folks. But there’s something about the way she plays the part — yes, that’s it, she’s playing it and not too well, somewhat absentmindedly.

But I’m fond of her. When she makes as if to give me a hug, I give her a hug. She’s bigger.

“How you doing, Doc?”

“I’m fine. I’m glad to see you.”

“I hear you been having trouble.”

“Yes. But I’m all right now. Do you have trouble?”

“Old Doc. You always been my bud.”

“Thanks, Ella.” It’s time she let go, but she hugs me tight, a jolly, nonsexual hug, like a good old Westwego girl.

“Dear old Doc. Tell me something.”

“All right.”

“You getting much, Doc?”

“What? Oh.” Well, so much for the spindrift of the heart. “What happened to your arm, Ella?” I ask, holding her off to take a look.

“You’re not going to believe this, Doc.”

Maybe I won’t, but it’s a relief to get her into a chair, aggrieved and telling me her troubles.

I am wondering about Mel out in the truck.

She goes into a long rigmarole about getting abused by her superior at Mitsy, a person named Fat Alice, who beat her up and broke her arm — and then getting fired. She wants to sue Mitsy for a million dollars and wants me to testify about her mental health.

“The real boss, who is also her boss, says he knows you,” she concludes.

“Who is that?”

“Mr. Beck. Albert J. Beck.”

“Bubba Beck? Yes, we went to high school together. Don’t you remember him? He was all-state quarterback.”

“Will you call him?”

“Yes. What is it you really want, Ella?”

“I want my old job back and I want him to tell Fat Alice to leave me alone.”

“All right.”

“Tell him also that thanks to Fat Alice I was also exposed to radioactive sodium and have been rendered sterile.”

“All right.”

I reach Bubba at home. Although I haven’t spoken to him for twenty years he doesn’t seem surprised.

“How you doing, Ace?” asks Bubba.

“I’m fine. I have a patient here with a problem. You might be able to help.”

“Let’s have it, Ace.”

I summarize Ella’s complaint.

Bubba speaks at some length.

“Thanks, Bubba. I’ll get back to you.”

I hang up and take a look at Ella. She’s got one leg crossed over the other, is frowning mightily at her thigh, squeezing it from the bottom to make the top, which is somewhat quilted, tight. She plucks something on her skin.

“Ella,” I say.

“Yes?” she says, looking up with mild interest.

“Why didn’t you tell me that Fat Alice is FA413-T, a rather low-grade robot which vacuums the floor and monitors the room air for particles?”

“So what?” cries Ella. “She still got me cornered and broke my arm and subjected me to radiation poisoning.”

“Ella, you were not even in the primary coolant unit. You worked in the secondary unit with non-radioactive sodium.”

“She still pushed me!”

“Ella, listen. You’ve got your job back if you want it. What is more, you’ve been promoted. You are now Fat Alice’s superior.” What Bubba told me was that Ella, whose job was hardly more demanding than Fat Alice’s — reading dials and noting molar concentrations of chemicals — could now periodically remove Alice’s software cassette and run it through the magnetic cleaner. “Do you want your job back?”

Ella claps her hands. “Wow,” she says, and starts around the desk. “You were always my bud.”

“Okay, hold it, Ella. I want to show you something.”

An idea occurs to me just in time, and I get a book and hold the book between me and Ella. “I want you to look at something.”

“Anything, Doc! Anything at all.”

The book is Feliciana Farewell, her gift of three years ago, the yearbook and our year. I open it to the group picture of our class, only twenty or so boys and girls standing in a tight little trapezoid, each with the fixed, self-obsessed expression of high school seniors. The world lies ahead, the expression says, and who am I?

It is by way of being a quick study, a little test, as crude and inconclusive as palpating an abdomen for liver cancer.

I’ve used it before. Most people, I daresay nearly all “normal” people, will seek out themselves in the photograph, usually covertly, but I can watch their eye movements. As a matter of fact, there is a laser device which can track and print out the eye movements until the eye settles on its prey. Which is me? How do I look? People are generally self-conscious, either shy or vain, like General Jeb Stuart, whose last words were “How do I look in the face?”

I wish I had my Mackworth head camera, which actually traces out eye movements. I need the records.

The point of the test, of course, is that self-consciousness implies that there is a self.

The book is open under my chin, facing her, her eyes on the book, my eyes on her eyes. They are looking at the picture, yes; focused? perhaps; interested? mildly. But there is no seeking herself out. A laser trace would show not a zigzag, cat chasing mouse of self, but a fond little moseying, cow-grazing. Maybe she’s looking for me.

“Okay, Ella,” I say, closing the book and putting it on the shelf. “You’ve got your job back and been promoted. You come back here next week after work.” I don’t have to ask her. I want a tracing, medical evidence.

“Oh boy.” She claps her hands. “Thanks, Doc. Wait till I tell Mel.”

“All right.”

CASE HISTORY #3

Here come Kev Kevin and Debbie Boudreaux, old friends, patients now, married couple: Kev, an ex-Jesuit; Debbie, an ex-Maryknoll nun.

They’ve had their troubles. I see them for marriage counseling. I don’t do much of that, but they are old friends.

The trouble is that Debbie, who had taken over her father’s Oldsmobile agency in New Orleans, was quite competent and happy as the young woman executive, named Woman of the Year by the C. of C., in fact, as happy as she had been as Sister Thérèse teaching at the Ortega Institute in Managua. But Kev was unhappy as personnel director of Boudreaux Olds, even though there had been every reason to expect that his experience as counselor at the Love Clinic at Fedville should stand him in good stead in dealing with salesmen and servicemen.

This dispute was acrimonious. They fought even more than non-ex-religious couples.

Here is a sample:

Debbie: The trouble with you is you’re still a closet Jesuit. Even though you’ve taken up transcendental meditation and teach it to the salespeople at your little ashram and play tapes of the Bhagwan and the Maharishi, supposedly to increase their selling potential, what you’re really running is a closet-Jesuit retreat. Next you’ll have them saying the rosary and making the stations of the cross. You don’t want to sell Oldsmobiles, you want to convert people. And the truth is, like the Bhagwan and most Orientals — and most Jesuits — you have contempt for women.

Kev: The trouble with you is you’ve turned into the worst kind of man-eating bitchy feminist. You’re known as the Bella Abzug of the LADA (Louisiana Automobile Dealers Association). You pretend you’re the belle of the ball at the C. of C., but deep down you hate men. And if you want to know the truth, that’s the reason you and all the other nuns quit, not because of politics or the Church, but because you don’t know who in the hell you are and you copped out, and so you take it out on men from the pope on down. You still hate their guts and you still don’t know who in the hell you are or what you are doing.

Debbie: Speak for yourself.

Kev: Doc, you wouldn’t believe what she’s into now.

“What?”

“Wicca.”

“Wicker?” I’m thinking, Good, she’s doing handcrafts.

“Witchcraft.”

Debbie: Don’t bad-mouth what you don’t understand. Wicca bears no relation to your stereotypical witchcraft, witches on brooms. It is extremely positive and loving, because it is the old nature religion, a nonsexist pre-Judeo-Christian belief. No guilt trips. It is nothing less than becoming one with nature and with yourself.

Kev: Plus a little hex here and there.

And so on.

To tell the truth, at the time I didn’t have much use for either of them, though they were my friends and my patients. I confess certain sardonic feelings toward both of them. There was Kev’s faddish Hinduism, his new voice, which has suddenly become hushed and melodious like the Maharishi’s, his casual but mysterious allusions to his siddhi. What’s a siddhi? I asked. A spiritual gift. Like what? Like levitation, no big deal, he said. Yes, during meditation he was often six inches off the floor. And there was Debbie’s new lingo, her everlasting talk about dialoguing, creativity, community, intersubjectivity, centeredness (her favorite word, centeredness). And her new word, empowerment.

What would happen, I wonder, if I asked them what they thought about God and sin?

I thought they did better, looked better, felt better as Father Kev and Sister Thérèse in the old days, as priest and nun, than as siddha Kev in his new soft Maharishi voice and a NOW Wicca Debbie in her stretch pants. If you set out to be a priest and a nun, then be a priest and a nun, instead of a fake Hindu or a big-assed lady Olds dealer who is into Wicca — this from me, who had not had two thoughts about God for years, let alone sin. Sin?

That meeting was before I went to prison. Prison works wonders for vanity in general and for the secret sardonic derisiveness of doctors in particular. All doctors should spend two years in prison. They’d treat their patients better, as fellow flawed humans. In a word, prison restored my humanity if not my faith. I still don’t know what to make of God, don’t give Him, Her, It a second thought, but I make a good deal of people, give them considerable thought. Not because I’m more virtuous, but because I’m more curious. I listen to them carefully, amazed at the trouble they get into and how few quit. People are braver than one might expect.

This was three years ago.

Anyhow, after listening to this marital warfare for a few weeks, I had an idea which might help them. I made a semiserious suggestion. Yes, I confess it, my suggestion had its origins both in a wish to help them and in a certain derisiveness and a desire to be rid of them. Yet it worked! Why not, I asked them, why not put your talents to better use? After all, you’ve both had extensive experience in counseling. You both have superior — er — intersubjective and social skills (they used words like that, worse than shrinks). Why don’t you start your own counseling center, perhaps couples’ counseling. You could do it and you’d be helping yourselves while helping others. Was I being sarcastic? Not altogether. They’d been battling so long, they knew all the tactics of marital warfare. Ex-soldiers, after all, keep the peace better than politicians. Look at MacArthur in Japan, Eisenhower in Washington.

We laughed. And they did! And they got so involved in other couples’ fights, they stopped fighting each other. They started something called Beta House out in the country. I talked Enrique Busch into letting them have a great barn with stables at the time Enrique was quitting polo and taking up golf. I did it by lying, that is, by not telling Enrique who Debbie was, that is, an ex-Maryknoller from El Salvador, or telling Debbie who Enrique was, a member of the famous fourteen families — they would have wanted to shoot each other on the spot — but by telling Enrique that Debbie’s father had founded the White Citizens’ Council in Feliciana, which he had, and by telling Debbie that Enrique had deep feelings for the people of El Salvador, which he did.

So Beta House was founded in a barn, the stables converted to intimate bedrooms for estranged couples, the loft to an encounter room. Painted on the side of the barn was the logo they’d agreed upon, a yin-yang centered between two hearts, the yin-yang a concession to Kev’s Eastern leanings, the two hearts expressing Debbie’s notions about dialoguing and centeredness. Two hearts centered on a yin-yang.

So here they are three years later:

They’re pleased to see me and I them. There is no space of irony between us. I wish them well and they me. They’re as lovey now as they were fractious before. They sit side by side on my couch, holding hands and feeling each other up — which generally gives me a pain but doesn’t now because it’s an improvement over the mayhem.

“How does it go?” I ask them.

“Wow,” they say; both, I think. They look at each other and laugh. Then, putting on serious faces, they utter little noises of gratitude, not sentences, but exclamations: “Dear Doc,” “Our Doc,” “Oh boy, Almond Joy,” and suchlike. It seems I saved their marriage. It seems I get credit for the barn and Beta House, even though I only made a single, not quite serious suggestion, mainly to get rid of them. No more talk of Wicca.

“Very good,” I say presently. “I’m glad things are going so well. You both look fine. But what can I do for you? I can’t imagine that you need anything further from me.”

Secret looks between them, more laughter, again an instant sobering up, and they make their request.

Do you know what they want from me? A prescription for Alanone, the new Smith, Kline & French polyvalent vaccine which confers some immunity against both the lymphadenopathy virus of LAV–III and the glycoprotein D of Herpes II.

Without turning a hair and in the same smiling voice of our newfound friendship, I ask them why they need it. “I thought you were running a couples’ retreat.”

“Couples’ community,” they both correct me. Kev makes certain noises of demurral, but Debbie says quickly and as if she were reading it, “It is also an open community. We do not discourage creative relationships across stereotypical bonding. We find that open relationships, entered into maturely, enrich rather than impoverish the traditional one-on-one bonding.”

I do not say something derisive as I might have two years ago, but merely reflect a moment, sigh, and reach for my PDR, the physicians’ big red book — what do I know about creative relationships or pills and vaccines? — and write them a prescription for— How many do you want? “Three hundred,” says Kev; “Four hundred,” says Debbie. I make it four hundred. After all, better not to have than to have LAV-AIDS and Herpes II.

Somewhat abstracted, I forget to run the simplest test on them, a dominant-eye test or an out-of-context language test, like: Where is Ketchum, Idaho? (They’d know, because the Bhagwan had hung out there.) I have no doubt that either would have told me instantly and as merrily as a four-year-old, eyes rolled up to consult their interior brain maps. I’ll test them later.

Absently, I receive their hugs and thanking noises and watch from the windows as they depart in their old Econoline van with its flaming yin-yang logo centered between two dialoguing hearts.

2. WHAT TO MAKE OF these patients? What’s in common? Nothing? Something? Enough for a syndrome?

Here’s Mickey LaFaye, formerly anxious and agoraphobic, terrified of her own shadow, now a sleek, sleepy, horsewoman Duchess of Alba straddling under the sheets. Plus some peculiar business about a stallion and a stable boy. Plus Dr. Comeaux’s special interest in her.

Here’s Donna S—, formerly a fat girl, abused as a child, but a deep-down romantic, waiting for Galahad. Now she’s jolly, lithe, and forward, or rather backward, presenting rearward.

Here’s Enrique, once an enraged Salvadoran, now a happy golfer with no worries except his daughter making Gamma.

Here’s Ella Murdoch Smith, once failed and frightened, guilt-ridden, couldn’t cope, a solitary poet of the winter beach and spindrift. Now Rosy the Riveter, hardhat lady at Mitsy, with her boyfriend in a standard Louisiana pickup, getting beat up by a robot.

And Kev and Debbie, old friends, ex-Jesuit and ex-Maryknoller, a quarrelsome, political, ideological couple. Now content, happy as bugs in a rug; no, not happy so much as fat-witted and absorbed. Running some sort of encounter group out in the pines which sounds less like a couples’ retreat than a chimp colony.

Don’t forget Frank Macon, old hunting pal, once a complex old-style sardonic black man, as compact of friendship and ironies as Prince Hamlet, as faithful and abusive as a Russian peasant. Now as distant and ironed out as a bank teller: Have a nice day.

And Ellen.

What’s going on? What do they have in common? Are they better or worse? Well, better in the sense that they do not have the old symptoms, as we shrinks called them, the ancient anxiety, guilt, obsessions, rage repressed, sex suppressed. Happy is better than unhappy, right? But — But what? They’re somehow — diminished. Diminished how?

Well, in language, for one thing. They sound like Gardner’s chimps in Oklahoma: Mickey like — Donna want — Touch me — Ask them anything out of context as you would ask chimp Washoe or chimp Lana: Where’s stick? and they’ll tell you, get it, point it out. Then: Tickle me, hug me. Okay, Doc?

Then there’s the loss of something. What? A certain sort of self-awareness? the old ache of self? Ella doesn’t even bother to look at her own photograph, doesn’t care.

Bad or good?

For another thing, a certain curious disinterest. Example: Take the current news item: Soviets invited to occupy Baluchistan, their client state in southern Iran to restore order, reported advancing on Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf. What to do? Let them have it? Confront them? Ultimatum? Two years ago people would be huddled around the tube listening to Rather and Brokaw. My patients? My acquaintances? No arguments, no fright, no rage, no cursing the Communists, no blaming the networks, no interest. Enrique doesn’t mention liberals anymore. Debbie does not revile Jerry Falwell anymore.

There’s a sameness here, a flatness of affect. There was more excitement in prison, more argument, more clash of ideology. In Alabama we were polarized every which way, into pro-nukes and anti-nukes, liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, anti-Communists and anti-anti-Communists, born-again Christians, old-style relaxed Catholics, lapsed Catholics, Barbara Walters haters, Barbara Walters lovers.

Nothing like Alabama!

The warfare in that quonset hut at Fort Pelham!

We inmates, or rather detainees — assorted con men, politicians, ex-Presidential aides, white-collar crooks, impaired physicians pushing pills, mercy killers, EPA inspectors on the take from lumber and oil barons — criminals all, but on the whole engaging and nonmurderous. And next door, Hope Haven, a community of impaired priests, burned-out ministers and rabbis, none criminal, none detained, but all depressed, nutty, or alcoholic, generally all three, who had not run afoul of the law as we had but had just conked out, and so had great sympathy for us and made themselves available. One of them, my old pal and exparish priest, Rinaldo, Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, sojourned next door to me on the Alabama Gulf Coast for a year to recover from his solitary drinking. (I must call him. Has he gone nuts again?)

At Fort Pelham we had discussion groups, seminars, screaming political arguments over meals, fistfights. In prison, ideas are worth fighting for. One also gets paranoid. There is a tendency to suspect that So-and-so has it in for you, to read hostile meanings into the most casual glance.

I witnessed such a fight between an anti-Communist Italian Republican dentist from Birmingham who had patented a new anesthetic and more or less inadvertently killed half a dozen patients and an anti-anti-Communist Jewish lawyer from New York, my cellmate Ben Solomon, recently removed to New Orleans, where he had been convicted of laundering Mafia-teamster money for a black mayoral candidate.

This pair and I were sitting in the prison library one afternoon, the Birmingham dentist reading Stars and Bars, a new New Right magazine published at Fort Sumter, South Carolina; the New York lawyer reading The New York Review of Books. I was reading a new history of the Battle of the Somme, a battle which, with the concurrent Battle of Verdun, seemed to me to be events marking the beginning of a new age, an age not yet named. In the course of these two battles, two million young men were killed toward no discernible end. As Dr. Freud might have said, the age of thanatos had begun.

These two fellows had argued violently at table about racism in the South and the crypto-communism of Northern liberals. Now in the library I looked up from the Battle of the Somme and began to watch them. Both were gazing down at their magazines but neither was reading. Not a page was turned for twenty minutes. It was clear from his expression that Ben Solomon, the lawyer, was festering, nurturing some real or fancied slight, which was being rapidly magnified in his head to a mortal insult. I knew the signs. Perhaps he had lost the last argument and was thinking of what he might have said, a killing remark. But it was too late for talk. His fists clenched and unclenched on the table. The dentist, I perceived, was aware of the lawyer’s mounting rage. Then why didn’t they steer clear of each other? Why didn’t one just get up and leave? But no. They were bound, wedded, by hatred. They were like lovers. Finally the lawyer rose slowly and stood over the dentist, looking down at him, fists clenched at his sides. In a trembling voice he said, “Did you or did you not imply that as a supporter of Israel I was a secondclass and unpatriotic American?”

The dentist, surprised or not, did not look up from his Stars and Bars. “Only after that crack, addressed to others but intended for me, about rednecks, crackers, yahoos, and gritspitters. I only replied in kind.”

“You mentioned something about Yankee kikes.”

“Only after you used the expression ‘Southron fascist rednecks.’”

“Take it back,” said the lawyer, clenching and unclenching. Take it back! I am marveling. Like my five-year-old Tommy: Take it back. Well then, why not?

“Look, Doctor,” I said mildly, “if the word offends him—”

Both ignore me.

“You take it back,” said the dentist, rising.

“Look, Ben,” I say, rising, “why not take—”

“Who in the fuck asked you?” says Ben, not taking his eyes from the dentist.

Neither would take anything back. I am rising from the Battle of the Somme to say something like “Hold it, fellows.” Actually I’m fond of both of them.

“Tell him to take back ‘redneck,’” says the Italian (redneck!) dentist to me, without taking his eyes from the lawyer.

“Take back ‘redneck,’” I tell Ben. “Then he’ll—”

“Tell him to take back ‘Yankee kike.’”

“Okay. Take back—” I begin, relaying messages two feet. But before I can utter another word, they have actually hurled themselves at each other, and now they are actually rolling on the floor, grappling and punching, two middle-aged gents grunting and straining, their bald scalps turning scarlet. Neither can hurt the other, but they’re apt to have a stroke.

I am straddling them, trying to wedge them apart. Good God: a New York-New Orleans Democrat Jew fighting it out with a Birmingham Italian Confederate Republican.

“Cut it out, goddamn it!” I yell at them, straddling both. “You’re going to have a stroke!”

I did get in between and did stop the fight, easily, because both wanted an excuse to quit with their Jewish and Confederate honor intact. For my pains I got punched and elbowed, my glasses knocked across the room. “Somebody hit Doc!” one of them cries.

They both set about taking care of me, the lawyer fetching my glasses, the dentist staunching my bleeding lip. I go limp to give them something to do, carry me to the infirmary.

A discovery: A shrink accomplishes more these days by his fecklessness than by his lordliness in the great days of Freud.

What, then, to make of my patients?

Time was when I’d have tested their neurones with my lapsometer. But there’s more to it than neurones. There’s such a thing as the psyche, I discovered. I became a psyche-iatrist, as I’ve said, a doctor of the soul, an old-style Freudian analyst, plus a dose of Adler and Jung. I discovered that it is not sex that terrifies people. It is that they are stuck with themselves. It is not knowing who they are or what to do with themselves. They are frightened out of their wits that they are not doing what, according to experts, books, films, TV, they are supposed to be doing. They, the experts, know, don’t they?

Then I became somewhat simpleminded. I developed a private classification of people, a not exactly scientific taxonomy which I find useful in working with people. It fits or fitted nearly all the people I knew, patients, neurotic people, so-called normal people.

According to my private classification, people are either bluebirds or jaybirds. Most women, it turns out, are bluebirds. Most men, by no means all, are jaybirds.

Mickey LaFaye, for example, is, or was, clearly a bluebird. She dreamed of being happy as a child in Vermont, of waiting for a visitor, a certain someone, of finding the bluebird of happiness.

Enrique Busch was a jaybird if ever I saw one. He wanted to shoot everybody in El Salvador except the generals and the fourteen families.

It is a question of being or doing. Most of the women patients I saw were unhappy and wanted to be happy. They never doubted there was such a creature as the bluebird of happiness. Most men wanted to do this or that, take this or that, beat So-and-so out of a promotion, seduce Miss Smith, beat the Steelers, meet their quota, win the trip to Oahu, win an argument — just like a noisy jaybird. The trouble is, once you’ve set out to be a jaybird, there’s nothing more pitiful than an unsuccessful jaybird. In my experience, that is, with patients who are not actually crazy (and even with some who are), people generally make themselves miserable for one of two reasons: They have either failed to find the bluebird of happiness or they’re failed jaybirds.

It is not for me to say whether one should try to be happy — though it always struck me as an odd pursuit, like trying to be blue-eyed — or whether one should try to beat all the other jaybirds on the block. But it is my observation that neither pursuit succeeds very well. I only know that people who set their hearts on either usually end up seeing me or somebody like me, or having heart attacks, or climbing into a bottle.

Take a woman — and some men — who think thus: If only I could be with that person, or away from this person, or be in another job, or be free, or be in the South of France or on the Outer Banks, or be an artist or God knows what — then I’ll be happy. Such a person is a bluebird in my book.

Or consider this person: What am I going to do with my nogood son, who is driving me crazy — what I want to do is knock him in the head. Or, what is the best way to take on that son of a bitch who is my boss or to get even with that other son of a bitch who slighted me? Wasn’t it President Kennedy who said, Don’t get mad, get even? — now, there was a royal jaybird for you. Or, I’ve got to have that woman — how do I get her without getting caught? Or, I think I can make a hundred thousand almost legally, and so on. Jaybirds all. B. F. Skinner, the jaybird of psychologists, put it this way: The object of life is to gratify yourself without getting arrested. Not exactly the noblest sentiment expressed in two thousand years of Western civilization, but it has a certain elementary validity. True jaybird wisdom.

But what has happened to all the bluebirds and jaybirds I knew so well?

They’ve all turned into chickens.

Here I am out of the clink and back in the normal law-abiding world, the Russians are coming, the war, if there’s a war, is going to make the Somme look like Agincourt, and here are all these people tranquillized, stoned out on something, grinning and patting one another, presenting rearward. What happened to the bluebird of happiness or the jaybird ruckus? These folks act more like Rhode Island Reds scratching in the barnyard or those sparrows befouling the martin house.

Are they better or worse?

I think it’s a syndrome, but I am not sure. I aim to find out.

First call Cousin Lucy. She’s an M.D., Vassar smart and Southern shrewd, a sane person, perhaps the only one around. And she knows me.

Maybe she can tell me who’s crazy and who’s not.

She calls me between Ella Murdoch Smith and Kev ’n’ Debbie.

She’s at the hospital, in the doctors’ lounge, taking a break. Can she see me?

Sure, I’ll be there around twelve, to see Mickey LaFaye.

Good. She’s got an impaction in the same room. An intern screwed up and she’s got to do it. Do I have a few minutes now? she asks.

Sure. Kev ’n’ Debbie haven’t arrived. They wouldn’t mind waiting anyhow. But what’s this all about?

Can’t tell me now. Later.

Well then, I have something to tell her. Okay? Okay. I can hear the crinkle of the plastic of the chair in the doctors’ lounge as she settles back. There’s a click and a long, hissing exhalation. She’s still smoking.

We’re in luck. She doesn’t get called for twenty minutes. There’s time to tell her about my “syndrome.” I don’t get into case histories but summarize the symptoms and signs, the odd language behavior and sexual behavior. There are some things you don’t forget, like riding a bicycle or teaching interns. I don’t mention Ellen.

It takes fifteen minutes.

When I finish, there’s a long silence.

“Well?” I say at last.

She clears her throat and makes a small spitting noise. I can see her touch the tip of her tongue for a grain of tobacco, spit it out.

“What I need to know,” I tell her, “is whether the two years away have warped my perspective, whether it is me, not they, who has become strange — in a word, whether I’m seeing things.”

“Yes,” she says in a changed voice.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, you’ve changed. Yes, the cases are real. You’re not seeing things.”

“What do you think?”

“About you or them?”

“Them.”

“I might have an idea. And about you too.”

“I’ll look for you at the hospital around noon,” I tell her. Kev and Debbie are at the door. “Don’t worry. I’ll find you.”

3. SECOND CONSULTATION WITH Mickey LaFaye.

There is a slight unpleasantness about doing a psychiatric consultation in a small general hospital. Here a psychiatrist is ranked somewhere between a clergyman and an undertaker. One is tolerated. One sees the patient only if the patient has nothing else to do.

In your office you are in control. You control where you sit, where the patient sits or lies, who speaks, what is said. You even control the silences. Here it is the patient who controls while you stand about on one foot, then the other; here it is Mickey lying at her ease among the pastel Kleenexes and Whitman Sampiers, chin at rest in her full, sumptuous throat, her tawny eyes watching me incuriously while I stand just clear of her bed as wary as a preacher.

It is hardly an ideal setting for an interview, but I know what I want and do not intend to waste time.

It is a double room in the medical wing. Mickey LaFaye is in the bed next to the window. I stand at her bed but not touching it, facing the window. Behind me, not six feet away, is the curtained-off bed of the second patient. Lucy is attending the patient. I recognized her legs under the curtain, the same strong calves and laced-up oxfords I remember from when she was interning in pathology and I used to see her standing on tiptoe, calves bunched, to get at the cadaver.

Lucy is doing some procedure, no doubt clearing an impaction. The old woman is making querulous sounds of protest. She is not cooperating. Lucy’s murmur is soothing, but there is in it a note of rising impatience.

Directly opposite me, not thirty feet away, through the window, across a completely enclosed quadrangle of grass, beyond another window, stands Bob Comeaux in the glass box of the nurses’ station. I caught his eye. He is dressed in his riding clothes, turtleneck sweater, suede jacket. His office is not here at the hospital or close by but at the federal complex on the river. Dressed as he is, he is probably dropping by after his morning ride and before going to work. It is clear that he is doing just that, dropping by an ordinary small general hospital in his riding clothes, as much as to say that his real work as neurologist is elsewhere.

Standing next to him is Sue Brown, the floor nurse, a pleasant woman and an excellent nurse, who was glad to see me and made me welcome. She cheerfully entered the test I ordered in Mickey’s chart, which is no doubt the chart Bob Comeaux is holding.

“How do you feel, Mickey?”

“Oh, fine! Fine!” Her legs move under the covers. Again she somehow gives the effect of straddling.

“What are your plans when you leave here?”

“Vermont!” she says in the same mild exclamatory voice.

“You’re going back to your grandmother’s farm?”

“Yes!”

“Why are you going?”

“Cool! Too hot here! Vandals and police and all!”

“Where are the vandals?”

“Out at the ranch!”

“There has been some trouble out there?”

“Oh yes! Terrible!”

“I see. Who’s going to look after the ranch while you’re gone?”

“Dr. Comeaux!”

“Does going back to Vermont remind you of your dream?”

“Dream?” It is not so much a question as the puzzled repetition of the word.

“You remember. The dream you used to have about the cellar, the smell of winter apples, the expectation of something important about to happen which would tell you the secret of your life.”

“Apples? Oh yes. In the hamper next to the chimney.”

“That’s right. What are you going to do after you get to Vermont?” I am curious to know how she will answer a question which requires making a plan and telling of the plan in sentences.

“So much better there! Not to worry. Dr. Comeaux—”

“Dr. Comeaux says you’ll feel much better there?” Almost despite myself, I find myself repeating and filling out her utterances as one would with a child.

She nods emphatically. “Right. Power of attorney!”

“I see. Now, Mickey, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. I’m going to do two quick little tests right now. All you have to do is follow along with me. Then I’m going to take you down to the PETscan room and they’re going to do another test. All you have to do is sit in a chair and they’ll put a funny cap on your head and let you listen to music and words — like a radio headset, okay?”

She nods eagerly. Now you’re talking! This is what she’s good at. Taking directions, cooperating — not like that bad old woman in the next bed! — playing the game.

“I’m going to crank you up straight. Now.”

I sit on the bed, leaning almost athwart her, and, taking her face in both hands, turn her directly toward me. I cover her left eye.

What do you see?”

“You.”

“Am I moving?”

“No.”

“Now.” With a forefinger I depress the fundus, the eyeball, of the open eye through the eyelid. “Am I moving now?”

“Yes.”

I take my hand away. “Now, with both eyes open, look back and forth as fast as you can.”

She does it, then looks at me hopefully, to see if she has done well.

“That’s fine. What happened?”

“What—”

“Did I move?”

“Yes! You — everything — the room—”

“That’s fine, Mickey.”

She looks pleased.

It is not fine. What is amazing is that with a normal eye and a normal brain, no matter how violent the movement of the eyes, the room — and I — will be perceived by you as what they are, stationary.

“Okay, Mickey. Now let’s do this. I’m going to roll the bed table right up here, give you pencil and paper, okay? Now, what I want you to do is make X’s and O’s like this.” I show her and she makes some X’s and O’s and looks up for approval.

“That’s fine, Mickey. Now here’s what I want you to do. Make an X and an O, then two X’s and O’s, then three X’s and three O’s and so on. Do you understand?”

She nods eagerly and starts making X’s and O’s. She makes an X and an O, two X’s and an O, then a series of X’s with an occasional O.

“That’s fine, Mickey. Now I want you to come along with me and we’ll—”

Before I get any further, she has obediently folded back the covers and swung her legs out without, I notice, taking the universal woman’s precaution of minding her gown, which rides up her not thin thighs.

“Just a moment, Mickey. I’ll get you a wheelchair.”

I become aware of a silence behind me, a silence, I realize, which has gone on for some time.

I turn. Lucy Lipscomb has come out of her curtained-off bed-room. I thought at first it was to give me a hand.

“Hello, Tom.” She smiles, then hesitates, mouth open, as if she wanted to tell me something.

“Lucy.”

“Could I have a word with you?” She is not smiling. “Wait a minute.” She peels off her gloves and goes into the bathroom.

I haven’t seen her for a year or so. She’s better-looking. Perhaps it’s the gleaming white coat, so starched that it rustles with every movement, against her dark skin. Perhaps she’s lost weight. Perhaps it’s the way her haircut doesn’t look butch anymore. She used to cut it herself, I thought. It was as rough-cut as a farmer’s — she is a farmer as well as a doctor. But instead of looking like a Buster Brown, it looks French, straight dark bangs come down her forehead at angles. No butch she. There is a reflex hammer and an ophthalmoscope in her breast pocket.

“Sorry about the ward conditions, Tom.”

“It didn’t matter.”

“I noticed that. It seems you have an audience, or rather an onlooker.” She speaks in an easy but guarded voice, looking over my shoulder.

“Who? Oh.” I turn around. Across the tiny quadrangle, still holding the steel chart in both hands, Bob Comeaux is looking straight at me.

“Yeah. He’s waiting to see me when I finish.”

“Hm. So it seems. Could I also?”

“Also what?”

“Have a word with you.”

“Sure.”

Mickey is thrashing impatiently. Lucy is spoiling her game.

I’m out the door and down the hall, looking for a wheelchair for Mickey.

“Doctor!” A sharp peremptory un-Southern man’s voice. “Just hold it right there.”

It’s Bob Comeaux, with Sue Brown holding a chart. He’s angry, I see at once, so angry that he’s past prudence, to the point of showing his anger toward another doctor in the presence of a nurse — which for a doctor is angry indeed. He’s lost his temper. His nostrils flare and have actually whitened where they join the lip. Sue Brown gives me a frightened smile.

Bob Comeaux is not smiling. His eyes are up in his eyebrows, mouth tight like a chief of surgery on grand rounds.

“Doctor, would you mind stepping over here?” We walk back, past the open door of the room, presumably to get a little away from Sue Brown. We don’t want a nurse to see doctors fight. But Sue Brown has vanished into thin air. For a split second I am aware of Lucy through the doorway, standing still, her brown eyes rounded.

Bob Comeaux and I find ourselves standing side by side, backed against the wall, hands in pockets, looking down at our toes in a studious exercise of control, of not facing each other, not confronting, not yelling, not fistfighting. We could be a couple of horsy docs discussing the hunter-jumper show. I notice that his field boots are muddy. He’s wearing short spurs. I remember wondering at that very moment if his coming to the hospital in riding clothes is simply a matter of convenience or whether it is more than that.

“Doctor, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” asks Bob Comeaux pleasantly, smiling — white around the mouth with rage — down at his boots.

“I was doing the consultation on Mickey you asked for.”

“I saw what you were doing.”

“You did?”

“You ran a Tauber test, then some Luria X’s and O’s. I saw you.”

“So?”

“What the fuck for?”

“I—”

“And you were about to wheel her out.”

“Yes.”

“Where were you taking her?”

“Down to get a PETscan. That’s the best I can do in this hospital. You must have seen the order on the chart.”

“I sure as hell did. But to what end, for Christ’s sake?”—smiling, taking a deep breath, examining each muddy boot carefully. He’s getting it back, his lost temper. “Oh, I know you, old buddy!”—now smiling brilliantly, even nudging me. He has recovered himself and can wipe the smile and come close with a comradely seriousness. “God knows, I understand your intellectual curiosity, Tom — such is the stuff of great discoveries — but I’m just an ordinary clinician and must think first of my patient.”

“I think she’s got a cortical deficit, probably prefrontal.”

“Very interesting. Okay, okay. Let’s skip the metaphysics. You get into the prefrontal, you get into metaphysics. In any case it’s academic when it comes to managing her. That’s not why I asked you in on this.”

“Why did you ask me in, Bob?”

“I thought for one thing to do you a fucking favor. Believe it or not, I thought we were friends, and as a friend I wanted you back on your feet as a working physician — entirely apart from my role as one of your probationers. As such, I don’t mind telling you it was I who got the Board of Medical Examiners to move you from a Class Three to a Class Two offense.”

“What is that?”

“It means, Doctor, that your license is not revoked or suspended but that you are on probation. Do you think that happened by accident? We are hoping to get it down to Class One, reprimand. Tom, we want you doctoring here and not greens-keeping in Alabama. A good idea for all concerned, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Now as far as LaFaye is concerned, my point is that she is neurological and not psychiatric, which puts her on my turf, right? So all we need to commit her to my program over at NIMH is your co-signature as consultant.”

“I see.”

Things have eased between us. Hands in slant pockets, he’s pushing himself off the wall by nodding his head. His spurs clink against the terrazzo. We’ve fallen into our standard medical comradeship, having gone to the same medical school, years apart. We did not know each other there but we remember the old Columbia joke which has almost become a password, a greeting, between us:

“Just keep in mind, Tom, the two most overrated things in the world.”

“I will.”

“Sexual intercourse and—”

“Johns Hopkins University.”

Bob Comeaux likes this because he knows I interned at Hopkins.

The anger is gone, the threat withdrawn. Or did I imagine the threat? The threat: That if I don’t behave I could find myself back in the pine barrens of Alabama, driving the big John Deere.

Bob Comeaux has always been skittish with me. The anger over Mickey LaFaye is something new and puzzling. The skittishness is old. It comes from something in his past which he is almost, but not absolutely, certain that I don’t know, can’t know. There is no reason why I should know, but the tiny possibility makes him skittish. Sometimes I catch him appraising me, wondering. It is a very small thing that I might know and it needn’t worry him, but it does. In fact I do know it, this curious little thing, and by the merest chance. It came from my reading the P & S Alumni News two years ago. You know a physician is not doing well when he has nothing better to do during office hours than read the alumni news. One’s eye skims down the listed names for someone familiar in “Necrology”—who died? — in reunions, newsy notes from alumni, honors. What my eye caught was not a name but a town, this town, in “Alumni Notes,” and opposite the name of the physician, a Dr. Robert D’Angelo Como, and the breezy note: “Bob doing yeoman work in the brain pharmacology of radioactive ions at NIH’s Feliciana Qualitarian Life Center — an appropriate name for a Qualitarian satellite, reports Bob, who describes himself as a converted Johnny Reb with his own hound dawgs, hosses, and ham hocks.” Hm. The familiar mixture here of professional seriousness and the always slightly deplorable tone of medical bonhomie. But Como? Not Comeaux? That’s what worries Bob. I can imagine what happened. It was his twenty-fifth class reunion and the secretary got his name not from his letter but from his class roster — yes, there he is on the reunion list, Dr. Robert D’Angelo Como. A small matter certainly, especially in Louisiana, where name changes were commonplace to accommodate whatever nation prevailed. German Zweig and Weiss often became La Branche and Le Blanc. Le Blanc and Weiss have been known to become White. No one cares. I know a man named Harry Threefoot whose family changed their name from Dreyfus. From French-Jewish to Choctaw. Why? Who knows? And in Louisiana who cares? Harry laughed about it. No, the little pique of interest comes from another small scrap of memory. A couple of years ago Mickey LaFaye, not then a horsewoman, lying on my couch, was going on in her old derisive tone about her husband, Durel, and his exclusive Feliciana Hunt Club, the old-line names and the old money it took to get in, the snobbery of it, the silliness and cruelty of fox hunting and so on, then less derisively about an attractive doctor she’d met at the Hunt Club, Dr. Robert Comeaux, newly arrived at Fedville but not one of your D.C. bureaucrats, no, he was old-line Delaware Huguenot stock. Voted into the club on the first ballot. Something occurred to me. Two years ago. My eyes went up to my bookshelves. My father subscribed to a yearly tome, the U.S. Medical Directory. I took down the most recent, ten years old. There he was: Dr. Robert D’Angelo Como, b. Long Island City, N.Y., C.C.N.Y., Columbia University’s College of Physicians & Surgeons …

A small thing, but puzzling. Why would anybody want to change Como to Comeaux nowadays? Why would anyone prefer to be thought Huguenot and not Italian? I’ve known plenty of both, and frankly—

A small thing, but enough to make him skittish with me. But he’s very much at his ease now, clicking his spurs against the terrazzo and pushing off the wall by ducking his dark head just graying at the temples, neither Sicilian nor Huguenot now but very much the English gent in his muddy field boots. He smiles his new, brilliant smile.

“Bob, what’s this about a fire and vandalism out at Mickey’s ranch? Did something happen out there? Something about a groom?”

“Oh boy.” Bob’s face goes grave, showing white around the eyes inside the tan. With his deep tan and flashing white smile suddenly going grave, Bob is as handsome as a young George Hamilton. “Oh boy, it was more than that. The fire was the least of it. Tom, Mickey took it into her head one day last week to remove her husband’s.45 automatic from the closet shelf, drive out to the ranch, and begin shooting her thoroughbreds, beginning with the least valuable, fortunately — you know, she’s got over two million in horseflesh out there — until she was stopped and disarmed by a groom. Those horses weren’t burned. She shot them. Then she deceived the groom by pretending contrition, talked him out of the gun, headed back to the house. Tom, I’m afraid she intended harm to herself or her children or both.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me.”

“How did she tell you? In her present state I can’t see her telling a story, relating an event.”

“You noticed that.” Bob Comeaux gives me a keen-eyed look. “You would. You’re quite right. You get it out of her by questioning her like a child. But she’ll tell you!”

“What’s this about some sort of sexual business between her and the groom? Did the groom attack her?”

Bob looks grave. “I fear not, Tom.” He stands quite close, facing me, head down, talking so low that not even Sue Brown, who’s back, now six feet away, can hear. “She was coming on to him, Tom.”

“That’s the groom’s story?”

“Yes, and I didn’t believe it at first. But she told me herself, quite openly.”

We fall silent, pondering. Now Bob is back against the wall, speaking in our old offhand style.

“Tom, you asked me earlier, with your typical Freudian skepticism, just how did I propose to modify her behavior and what sort of behavior I wanted from her.” Actually I didn’t ask him any such question. “Well, you’ve seen for yourself. Wouldn’t you say that such behavior needs modifying — entirely apart from whatever is going on in her subconscious mind, as I believe you call it.”

“Yes.”

“You know, Doctor, you and I might just be the ones to achieve a meeting of minds over the old mind-body problem, that ancient senseless quarrel. What do you think?”

“Our minds might.”

“Ha ha. Never quit, do you?” By way of leave-taking he gives me a warm, horse-smelling, shoulder jostle. “Oh, Tom—”

“Yes?”

“I know I can count on you to help me see to it that Mrs. LaFaye gets the best care we can give her.”

“You can.”

“Thanks, hoss. What say to the Ein und Zwanzig and a flick?” That’s old P&S talk for let’s go to Twenty-One to eat and then to the movies at Radio City.

“Thanks, but I got a junior dog.” I got a date with a student nurse.

“Oh shit. Tom?”

“Yes?”

“I almost forgot. This is not a favor. This is something I’m sure you’d want to do because it involves an old friend of yours.”

“Who’s that?”

“I spoke to you about Father Smith and Father Placide over at St. Michael’s?”

“Yes?”

“Well, it seems the good fathers have a problem. Father Placide called me a couple of weeks ago. Incidentally, he’s a hell of a nice guy — we served on a couple of committees together. He’s got a little problem and frankly I think you’re in a better position to handle it than I.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem is Father Smith. It has to do with his behavior. Ha ha, I’m sorry, Tom, but I’m quoting Father Placide. Frankly, Tom, I’m a little out of my element here. I believe you’ve known Father Smith for some time, that you knew him well in, ah, Alabama.”

“Yes. What’s wrong with him?”

“I’m not clear on that — something about him flipping out, not coming down from a fire tower. Anyhow, I’d appreciate it if you would talk to Placide. I’d take it as a personal favor.”

“All right.”

He looks at his watch, a curved gold wafer. “Could you drop by there this afternoon?”

“Well—”

“Tom, just hear what Father Placide has to say. Then I want you to take a look at Father Smith and give me a DX. Okay?”

“All right,” I say, looking around for Lucy.

“Great,” says Bob, giving me a strong pronated handshake and a long level-eyed look. “You know something, hoss. If the creek don’t rise, I think we’re going to make it. Right?”

“Right,” I say, wishing he’d let go of my hand and wondering what he wants from Father Placide.

4. LUCY CATCHES ME IN the parking lot. She’s got two sandwiches and two Cokes. We sit in her old pickup, a true farm vehicle spattered to the windows with cream-colored mud. The truck bed is loaded with a tractor tire and a cutter blade from a combine.

My two-toned Caprice, even older, is alongside. Beyond, in the far corner of the lot, a Cox Cable van is parked facing out. Later I remember wondering what a cable van was doing here. The hospital has a dish antenna.

“You look underfed. Eat,” says Lucy, eating. She still wears her white coat.

But I don’t eat. I sit hands on knees. The hot October sun pours through the windshield. The vinyl seat is torn. Stuffing extrudes through the tear.

Lucy lights up one of her Picayunes, plucks a grain of tobacco from the tip of her tongue, pointing her tongue. I remember her doing this before.

“You and Bob seem to have patched things up,” says Lucy, watching me. She is sitting in the corner, half facing me, white coat open, bare knee folded on the seat. A splendid knee.

“What? Yes.” A déjà vu has overtaken me. It began when she unlocked her door, got in, and I, waiting at the other door, watched her lean almost horizontally, holding the wheel with her left hand and with two fingers of her right, palm up, lift the latch. She’s done this before for me, hasn’t she?

It is the smell of hot Chevy metal and the molecules of seat stuffing rising in my nostrils and the rustling of her starched coat. I’ve been here before.

“You were testing her for a cortical deficit, weren’t you?”

“Yes. I’m glad you were there.”

“I made it my business to be there. Did you find it?”

“What? Oh, the deficit. Yes, I think so.”

“I wanted to tell you why Bob Comeaux was so angry.”

Lucy is telling me something about Comeaux and his interest in Mickey LaFaye and her ranch. It is difficult to listen.

The déjà vu has to do with sitting in a car with a girl, woman, with her swiveled around, bare knee cocked on the seat, with the smell of hot Chevy metal. We’ll sit there for a while, then we’ll—

She touches my arm. I give a start. She is leaning toward me. “Are you all right?”

“Sure. Why?”

“You’ve been sitting there for five minutes, not saying a word.”

“I’m all right.”

“My God.” She has made a sharp cluck in her teeth, pulling back the corner of her mouth like a country woman, leaned over, and taken hold of the lapel of my jacket. “Did they give you that suit when you got out of jail?” With a curious rough gesture, like a housewife fingering goods, she rubs the seersucker between thumb and forefinger, gives it a yank and a brush back. “You’re very pale. I’d like to have a look.”

“A look?”

“With this.” She’s taken her ophthalmoscope from her breast pocket. “I’ve gotten very good with eyegrounds. I can tell more about you with one quick look than with a complete physical.”

“I believe you. All right.”

“Not here. Too much sun. In my office.”

Her office in the hospital has a small desk, two chairs, and an examining table. I sit on the table, knees apart. With me sitting and her standing we’re of a height. I make as if to get my knees out of her way, but she’s already between them. She examines my eyegrounds. The lance of the brilliant blue-white light seems to probe my brain. When she changes from my right eye to my left, we are face to face. Her coat rustles. I feel the radiation of heat from her cheek and once the touch of down. She doesn’t wear perfume. Her breath is sweet. She smells like a farm girl, not a doctor.

“All right,” she says, with a slight blush, I think, and backs away. “Your arteries look good. No narrowing, no plaques, no pigment, no hypertension, I would suppose.”

“Did you think I’d had a stroke?”

“You were absolutely motionless.”

I look at her. I don’t think I’d ever taken a good look at her before. I used to think of her as a convent-school type, St. Mary’s-of-the-Woods, good-looking in a hearty Midwestern way, good legs, black bobbed hair, handsome squarish face with a bruised ripe freckled effect under the eyes — the sort who might become a nun or marry a Notre Dame boy, and live in Evanston. But of course she’s not. She’s none of these. She’s old local Episcopal gentry. She went not to St. Mary’s in Indiana but to St. Elizabeth’s in Virginia.

A lot happened to her. She married, not a Notre Dame boy, but Buddy Dupre, Ed’s brother, a pleasant Tulane DKE, not merely pleasant but charming, the sort of Southern charmer who drinks too much. He had that sweetness and funniness which alcoholic Southern men often have, as if they cannot bear for the world not to be as charming as they are. He farmed a little at Pantherburn, Lucy’s family’s place, charmed everybody, got elected to the state legislature, began to spend most of his time at the Capitol Motel in Baton Rouge, did not so much separate from Lucy as drift pleasantly away, got investigated by the house ethics committee for taking a bribe from a waste-disposal contractor, got exonerated by the legislature ethics committee, which has never found a legislator unethical, drifted farther, to New Orleans, where he divorced Lucy and married the contractor’s daughter, leaving Lucy high and dry at Pantherburn, but intact, herself intact, and Pantherburn and its two thousand acres intact. She farmed it herself, planted and harvested soybeans in the not so rich loess loam, with only day labor. Then out of the blue and in her late twenties she went to medical school. She still farms Pantherburn, not with the two hundred slaves who used to pick the indigo or cut the sugar cane, or the one hundred sharecroppers who used to pick the cotton, but with two tractor drivers and two John Deeres and a leased combine for harvesting the soybeans.

I take a good look at her. She’s sitting at her desk, clicking thumbnail to tooth, not looking at me. She is somehow both stronger-looking and more feminine. There’s this odd dash of gamin French about her face, bruised cheek, and almost black boy’s hair. She reminds me of Southern women in old novels: “a splendid vivacious girl, not beautiful, but full of teasing, high spirits.”

It is as if she had only just now decided to become a woman, but not entirely seriously. Having failed at marriage, she has succeeded in farming and doctoring and has discovered that succeeding at anything is a trick, a lark. She’s enjoying herself. She is also exhilarated by my failure and disgrace. Now she can “take care” of me with her brisk tugs and brushings. We are kin; I am old enough to be her father, yet she’s more like a mother, might any moment spit on her thumb and smooth my eyebrows. She feels safe and can give herself leave with me.

She cocks her head. “Are you coming out to Pantherburn this afternoon?”

“If you want me to.”

“Do you remember coming out to Pantherburn years ago and examining my uncle? and committing him to Mandeville? when he was hiding out in the woods or the attic and wouldn’t talk to anyone?”

“Yes. How is he?”

“He’s all right. I remember how you talked to him and got him to talk. I remember how you listened to him. You looked as if you knew everything there was to know about him.”

“As it turned out I didn’t, did I?”

She cocks her head. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think you got yourself in trouble on purpose.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I think you wanted out of here, even if it meant going to prison. It wasn’t bad, was it?”

“I’m glad to be out. I’ve got to go now.”

“I know. To Father Placide about your old friend Father Smith.”

“You seem to know what’s going on around here.”

“And you seem not to.”

“Maybe you’d better tell me.”

“About Bob Comeaux? He wants Mrs. LaFaye’s place, her horses and probably her money, and will even take Mrs. LaFaye to get them.”

“You told me that. What does he want from Father Placide?”

She explains patiently. “It’s no secret. Bob Comeaux wants to buy old St. Margaret’s — you know, where Father Smith’s hospice is, or was. He wants it for a private nursing home, a real moneymaker, you know. Actually that building would be a marvelous investment. Imagine a hundred nuns living out there! And it just so happens the hospice has folded up and Father Smith has too, he’s not at all well. The bishop would like to get rid of it, he needs the money. Placide would like to get rid of it so Father Smith can come back and help him with the parish. You’re supposed to talk Father Smith out of the fire tower and into coming back to St. Michael’s. Then the bishop can sell the place to Bob Comeaux and everybody will be happy. Do you understand?”

“No.” I am thinking about the déjà vu. I think I know what it was about. It was about cars, women, girls, youth, the past, the old U.S.A., about remembering what it was like to be sitting in a car with a girl swiveled around to face you, her bare knee cocked up on the vinyl, with four wheels under you, free to go anywhere, to the Gulf Coast, to Wyoming. It, the déjà vu, came from the smell of hot Chevy metal and vinyl and seat stuffing tingling in the nostrils and radiating up into the hippocampus of the old brain and into the sights and sounds of the new cortex, which gathers into itself a forgotten world, bits and pieces of cortical memory like old snapshots scattered through an abandoned house.

I rise. She takes hold of my lapel again. “You come on out to Pantherburn later. I have something to show you. I know you can come. Your wife’s gone.”

I laugh. “I’m not surprised. You know everything else.”

“You don’t have much luck with women, do you?”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Only that you could use somebody right now to look after you.”

“And you’re going to look after me.”

“Somebody had better.”

“Why is that?”

“You’re a mess. Look at you. You may be smart, but you’re a mess.”

“That’s true.”

“Eat your BLT. I put it and the Coke in your car.”

“All right.”

“Eat.”

She grabs my lapel again, both lapels. We are almost face to face.

“You’re coming out to Pantherburn later?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“What?”

“How many cases have you got of this — ah — syndrome?”

“Oh, a dozen, I guess.”

“Could you bring the case histories with you?”

“I know the case histories.”

“Okay. Then bring their social security numbers.”

“What for?”

“Trust me.”

“All right.”

5. I FIND FATHER PLACIDE in the rectory of St. Michael’s. Mrs. Saia, the housekeeper, lets me in. It is his living quarters, but the living room looks like an untidy business office. There are desks, file cabinets, typewriters, a photocopier, a computer, stacks of bulletins and collection envelopes, and a coin-counting machine.

A man dressed in a business suit, probably a deacon, is seated at a desk in the hall sorting out different-colored cards. He greets me amiably. I try to remember his name.

St. Michael himself is still there, a three-foot bronze archangel brandishing a loose sword, bent at the tip, which I used to fiddle with while attending meetings of the St. Vincent de Paul Society years ago. The sword got lost. They must have found it. I seem to remember that—

Father Placide is nowhere to be seen. The next room, connected by an arched doorway, is a kind of parlor furnished with old-fashioned mohair sofas. Half a dozen women are sitting there. It is some kind of meeting, perhaps the altar society, perhaps the Blue Army, perhaps the Legion of Mary. I recognize three of them: Mrs. Saia, a plump, cheerful, middle-aged woman with perfect dark satiny skin; Mrs. Ernestine Kelly, wife of councilman Jack Kelly, an old fisherman friend of mine and sometime barmate at the Little Napoleon, a very pretty grayhaired woman with a solemn, even sad, expression, whom one thinks of as pious in the old sense, who still observes the old Catholic devotions, still makes First Fridays, sends vials of Lourdes water to sick friends, and from time to time mails me a holy card with a saint’s picture and always the same note: Praying for you and your intentions, on which occasions I always wonder what she is praying for, my doing time in Alabama? mine and Jack’s drinking? my loss of faith? Ellen’s neglect of me for duplicate bridge? And Jan Greene, a youngish, intense blade of a brunette, ex-New Orleanian, wife of a gynecologist colleague and an old-style Catholic who wants to rescue the Church from its messing in politics and revolution, from nutty nuns and ex-nuns, from antipapal priests and malignant heterodox Dutch theologians, and so revive the best of the old Church, that is, orthodox theology, without its pious excesses, meaning Ernestine’s holy pictures and First Fridays.

The women see me and give me guarded greetings, with half nods, smiling. They can’t decide how disgraced I am, so charitably give me the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps Father Placide is at the meeting, but no, here he comes breezing in behind me. He greets me cordially, paying no attention to the meeting.

Father is a thin, young, pale, harassed priest. Except for his black dickey with clerical collar attached, which he wears over a T-shirt, he looks like an overworked intern. His face has a greenish pallor and the speckling of a stubble, the look of a man who has forgotten to shave. There is a rash where the collar irritates his neck.

Though I hardly know him, he greets me as warmly as if I were a faithful parishioner, but it may be that he is too harried to remember. He takes the easy confidential tone of one professional consulting another: Look, Dr. More, we have a little problem here—

We are sitting side by side at a broad table holding the coin counter and covered by papers and cloth coin bags. He speaks easily, alternately rubbing and widening his eyes like a surgeon who has finished a six-hour operation and has flopped in a chair to discuss the case.

The women in the parlor resume their meeting.

The case is Father Smith. He, Father Placide, has his troubles. The main trouble is that the pastor, Monsignor Schleifkopf, has departed, returned to the Midwest, some say to join the conservative schismatics in Cicero, some say to join the liberal Dutch schismatics in South Bend. St. Michael’s Church here is still Roman Catholic; that is, it still recognizes the authority of the pope as the lawful successor to St. Peter. Young Father Placide was left with the burden of running the parish until a replacement could be found. This would not have been a problem since the other assistant, Father Smith, though not a young man, was a vigorous one. And he seemed well when he came back from Alabama, no longer a boozer. Between the two of them they could and did take up the slack. Father Smith ran the hospice out by the fire tower and the little mission “under the hill” and helped out at St. Michael’s with Masses, meetings, confessions, CYO, and such. Now, it seems, Father Smith has conked out, leaving Placide holding the bag.

“Doctor,” says the priest, his hollow white eyes not quite focused, “I can’t do it all. We’ve been promised a pastor this month. We were promised a pastor last month and the month before. It would be very helpful if Father Smith would help out here. I understand y’all are old friends, so I was wondering if you might see him, talk to him, give him — ah — whatever therapy he might need, tell him I need him. The deacons here, they’re fine, they’re doing a tremendous job, but they can’t do Masses, confessions, funerals, weddings, and suchlike. Doc, I’m going to tell you something, listen: I’ll serve the good Lord and His people as long as I can, but, Doc, I’m going to tell you, they ’bout to run this little priest into the ground.”

“What’s wrong with Father Smith? Has he started drinking?”

“No.” Father Placide gives a great shrug, holds it, looks right and left. “Who knows? He says he’d like nothing better than to help out but he can’t.”

“Why can’t he?”

“I’ll tell you the truth. I don’t know.”

“Is he sick?”

“Not that I know of. Not in the usual sense. Maybe in your sense.” He taps his temple. “That’s why I need you to talk to him.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m not quite sure. Father Smith is a remarkable man, a gifted priest, as you well know. He’s always been a role model for me. In fact, he’s gotten me past some bad moments. But—” Again he shrugs and falls silent.

“I don’t think I understand what the problem is,” I say, wondering whether we’re supposed to be out of earshot of the women and whether they’re waiting for Father Placide. But he speaks in an ordinary voice and pays no attention to the women or to the deacon in the hall.

“Look, Doctor, you’re an old friend of Father Smith’s, right?”

“Right.”

“You know that for years he has lived out in the woods at the hospice near the fire tower and that he has never given up his part-time job as fire watcher for the forestry service.”

“Yes.”

“Not that I don’t sympathize with him. I mean, how would you like to live here? Ainh?” He opens his hands to the cluttered office and the oval print of the Sacred Heart with a dried-up palm frond stuck behind it.

“Not much.”

“Look, Doc,” says the priest, rubbing both eyes with the heels of his hands. “Look, I’m not the best and the brightest. I finished in the bottom third of my seminary class. I don’t know whether Father Smith is a nut or a genius, or whether he has some special religious calling. It’s out of my league, but I can tell you this, Doc, I need help. Me, I’m not going to be much help to the Lord if they have to peel me off the wall and carry me off, ainh Doc?”

Father Placide talks in an easy colloquial style, hardly distinguishable from any other U.S. priest or minister, except that now and then one hears a trace of his French Cajun origins. It is when he shrugs and cocks a merry eye, hollow but nonetheless merry, and says ainh? ainh? His three is just noticeably t’ree.

“I understand, Father. What do you want me to do?”

“I ask you, my friend, to speak to Father Smith, persuade him to come down and help me out. For just a few weeks.”

“Come down?”

“From the fire tower.”

“In a manner of speaking, you mean.”

“Not in a manner of speaking, cher. He won’t come down.”

“Won’t come down from what?”

“From the fire tower.”

“Literally?”

“Literally. He has a man bring up his groceries and empty his camp toilet.”

“How long has he been up there?”

“Three weeks. Since the hospice was closed.”

“Why was the hospice closed?”

A shrug. “The government. You know, they cut Medicare for hospices but not for Qualitarian centers.”

“Then is he staying up there as a kind of protest?”

A big French shrug, eyes going left, then right. “Who knows? Maybe, but it’s more than that.”

“How do you mean?”

“He told me that he had — ah — discovered a mathematical proof of what God’s will is, that is, what we must do in these dangerous times.”

“I see.”

“Now, he may be right. It’s out of my league. Me, I’m a very ordinary guy and have to baptize babies and run the school and suchlike. I’d like to preach the good news of the Lord, but it seems like I don’t have the time. Ask him if he can take off a little time from saving the world to help one po’ li’l priest.”

“All right, Father.”

“One more little thing—” He is shuffling papers on the table.

“Yes?”

“I’m supposed to be organizing an ecumenical meeting here—” He sighs. One more thing to do. “I got to find five of our laymen who are willing to — Would you be interested?”

“No, thanks.”

“Okeydoke,” says the priest absently, unoffended, shuffling more papers. Is he looking for something else I can do? I get up.

The doorbell rings. Mrs. Saia starts out from the meeting. Father Placide jumps up. “I’ll get it, Sarah! Hold the fort.” I think he is avoiding the meeting.

While Father Placide is gone, I am wondering how best to get out of here. The front door is blocked by the deacon, who likes to talk. I find myself remembering that during the race riots here years ago I once escaped through the ducts of the air-conditioning system. Now I remember. I used St. Michael’s sword to unscrew the Phillips screws of the intake grille of the air-conditioner — to escape during the riots.

One of the ladies is saying, “—and I heard that he wouldn’t even come down when he had a heart attack and wouldn’t let anybody come up to treat him except Dr. Gottlieb. And the only reason he let him come up was that he, Father Smith, had converted to the Jewish religion.”

“Oh no,” says Mrs. Saia sharply. “He’s peculiar, but he wouldn’t do that. I know him well — after all, he lived here. Peculiar, yes. Why, you wouldn’t believe—”

Ernestine Kelly breaks in with her low-pitched but querulous voice. I can see her sweet, sad face. “I don’t know about that, but I can tell you this on good authority because I know the people it happened to. Both desperate cases. One had a tumor of the womb which was diagnosed as malignant. The other, a close friend of mine, had a son working for Texaco who fell off a rig during a hurricane. After three days the Coast Guard gave up on him. Both of these people had the same impulse the same night, the exact same time, to get up and go for help from Father Smith. They did. Of course they couldn’t get up the tower, so they both wrote their intentions on notes and pinned the notes to the steps of the tower. The very next day the first person’s tumor had gone down — the doctors could not find a trace of it — and the other person’s son was found clinging to a board — for three days and three nights.”

Jan Greene snorts. “For God’s sake. Like Jonah. I mean, really. Has it ever occurred to anybody that he might be up there for a much simpler, more obvious reason?” Her voice is impatient, even ill-tempered. I can see her lean forward in her chair, eyes flashing, face thrusting like a blade.

Silence, then Ernestine Kelly’s injured voice: “Are you suggesting miracles cannot occur?”

“I am not. But why not look for simpler explanations?”

“Hmph. Such as.”

“Such as the tumor was a fibroid and went down spontaneously — they often do. The boy’s life was preserved because he hung on to the raft or whatever. And Father Smith could be staying up there for the oldest reason in the world.”

The other women wait. Finally someone says, “What’s that?”

“He could be doing vicarious penance for the awful state of the world. It is, after all, good Catholic practice,” says Jan sarcastically. “The Carmelites and the Desert Fathers have been doing it for centuries. This really slays me. Here we are on the very brink of World War Three, on the brink of destruction, and nobody gives it a second thought. Well, maybe somebody is. After all, how do you think the siege of Poitiers was lifted? How do you think Lucca was saved from the Black Plague in the fourteenth century?”

Hm. Poitiers? Lucca? Nobody knows how they were saved. The Desert Fathers. The other ladies are floored. But not for long. “I still say—” tolls Ernestine, her voice a soft little bell.

Father Placide is back. “Sorry, Doc. Another dharma bum. Trying to get out to California. Looking for a handout. One more thing, Doc—”

“Look, Father,” I say, lowering my voice, “I think those ladies are waiting for you to run the meeting. Hadn’t you better—”

Father Placide laughs. “You kidding, cher?” For once he does lean close and almost whisper. “Me run that gang? I don’t tell them. They tell me.”

“Well—” I stand up. “I have to see Father Smith.”

“Good luck, ma fren,” says Father Placide, shaking hands, hollow-eyed but merry. “Tell Simon to phone home.” He laughs. Tired as he is, he doesn’t seem to bear a grudge.

“I will.”

Dan — yes, that’s his name — looks up from his index cards as I pass and addresses not me, it seems, but there’s no one else in the hall.

“Why make it complicated?” he says, not quite to me and not quite as a question. “It’s just a cop-out. There is such a thing. He quit, period. Who wouldn’t like to quit and take to the woods? But somebody has to do the scut work. Some people—” he says vaguely, and goes back to spinning his Rolodex.

“Right,” I say as vaguely as I close the door.

6. THE FIRE-TOWER ROAD winds through a longleaf-pine forest to a gentle knoll perhaps fifty feet above the surrounding countryside. Beyond, fronting a meadow, stretches a spacious low building with a small central steeple, which looks stuck on, and far-flung brick wings. The building looks deserted. The meadow is overgrown. Half a dozen Holstein cows graze, all facing away from the bright afternoon sun.

There is a single metal utility shed straddled by the legs of the tower, fitted with two aluminum windows. A chimney pipe of bluish metal sticks through the roof.

Not a soul is in sight. I roll down the Caprice window and listen. There is no sound, not even cicadas. No breeze stirs the pines, which glitter in the sunlight like steel knitting needles.

Getting out, I walk backward, the better to see the tower. It is an old but sturdy structure of braced steel, perhaps a hundred feet tall. The cubicle perched on top looks like a dollhouse. One window is propped open. Shading my eyes against the sun, I yell. My voice is muffled. The air is dense and yellow as butter.

A bare hand and arm appear at the window. It is not a clear gesture. It could be a greeting or summons or nothing. I will take it that he is waving me up. I climb a dozen steep flights of green wooden steps smelling of paint. Presently the crowns of the longleafs are beside me, then below me. The heavy shook sheaves of needles, each clasping a secret yellow stamen, seem to secrete a dense vapor in which the sunlight refracts.

Thumbtacked to a post at the foot of the tower are three cards, two ordinary business cards and an old-fashioned holy picture of the Sacred Heart, each with the scribbled note: “Thanks for favors granted.” On the metal upright of the tower I notice several penciled crosses, like the plus signs a child would make.

The stairs run smack into the floor of the tiny house. The trapdoor is open. Father Smith gives me a hand.

I haven’t seen him in months. We were both in Alabama, he almost next door on the Gulf Coast at a place named Hope Haven for impaired priests, mostly drunks. I used to attend his Mass, not for religious reasons, but to get away from Fort Pelham, the golf course, the tin-roofed rec hall, the political arguments, and the eternal stereo-V.

He has aged. He still looks like an old Ricardo Montalban with a handsome seamed face as tanned as cordovan leather, hair like Brillo, and the same hairy futbol wrists. His chest is a barrel suspended by tendons in his neck. Emphysema. As he pulls me up past him, his breath has an old-man’s-nose smell. But he is freshly shaven and wears a clean polo shirt, unpressed chinos, and old-fashioned sneakers.

He is different. It comes to me that the difference is that he is unsmiling and puzzled. He inclines his head to the tiny room. The gesture is not clear. It could mean make yourself at home.

Home is exactly (I find out) six feet square. He is more than six feet tall. I see a bedroll against the wall. I reckon he sleeps on the floor catercornered.

The room is furnished with a high table in the center, two chairs like barstools, in one corner a chemical toilet, and nothing more. Mounted on the table is a bronze disk azimuth, larger than a dinner plate, fitted with two sighting posts and divided into 360 degrees. The four sides of the cubicle are glass above the wainscot except for a wall space covered by a map. Hanging from the map are strings weighted by fish sinkers. Next to the map is a wall telephone.

Outside, the gently rolling terrain stretches away, covered by pines as far as the eye can see. In the slanting afternoon sun the crowns of the pines are bluish and rough as the pile of a shag rug. The countryside seems strangely silent and unpopulated except toward the south, where the condos and high-rises on the lakefront stick up like a broken picket fence.

“It’s good to see you, Father.” I offer my hand, but he does not seem to notice. Perhaps he regarded his pulling me up through the trapdoor as a handshake. Then I see that something is wrong with him. He is standing indecisively, fists in his pockets, brows knitted in a preoccupied expression. He does not look crazy but excessively sane, like a busy man of the world, with a thousand things on his mind, waiting for an elevator. Then suddenly he snaps his fingers softly as if he had just remembered something, seems on the very point of mentioning it, and as suddenly falls silent.

We stand so for a while. I wait for him to tell me to sit. But he’s in a brown study, frowning, hands deep in pockets, making and unmaking fists. So, why not, I invite him to have a seat. He does.

We sit on the high stools opposite each other, the azimuth between us.

“Allow me to state my business, Father. Two pieces of business. Father Placide wanted to know how you were and wanted me to inquire whether you might help him out. Dr. Comeaux wanted to know whether you have decided to recommend his purchase of the buildings and property of St. Margaret’s.”

Again he gives every sign of understanding, seems on the point of replying, but again falls silent and gazes down at the azimuth with terrific concentration, as if he were studying a chess board.

“Father,” I say presently, “I know you must be upset about the hospice closing.”

Nodding agreeably, but then frowning, studying the table.

“I know how you feel about the Qualitarian program taking over, the pedeuthanasia, the gereuthanasia, but—”

“No no,” he says suddenly, but not raising his eyes. “No no.”

“No no what?”

“It wasn’t that.”

“Wasn’t what?”

“They have their reasons. Not bad reasons, are they? They make considerable sense, wouldn’t you agree? They’re not bad fellows. They make some sense,” he says, nodding and repeating himself several times in the careless musing voice of a bridge player studying his hand. “Well, don’t they?” he asks, almost slyly, cocking his head and almost meeting my eyes.

“It could be argued,” I say, studying him. “Then are you going to approve the sale to Dr. Comeaux?”

“Hm.” Now he’s drumming his fingers and tucking in his upper lip as if he had almost decided on his next play. “But here’s the question,” he says in a different, livelier voice — and then hangs fire.

“Yes?”

“Tom,” he says, nodding, almost himself now, but concentrating terrifically on each word, “what would you say was wrong with a person who is otherwise in good health but who has difficulties going about his daily duties, that is — say — when he is supposed to go to a meeting, a parish-council meeting, a school-board meeting, visit the nursing home, say Mass — his feet seem to be in glue. He can hardly set one foot in front of the other, can hardly pick up the telephone, can hardly collect his thoughts, has to struggle to answer the simplest question. What would you say was wrong with such a person?”

“I’d say he was depressed.”

“Hm. Yes. Depressed.”

I wait for him to go on, but he doesn’t.

“Were you, are you, able to say Mass?”

“Mass,” he repeats, frowning mightily. “Yes,” he says at last in his musing voice. “Oh yes.”

“Could you preach?”

“Preach.” Again the cocked head, the sly near-smile. “No no.”

“No? Why not?”

“Why not? A good question. Because — it doesn’t signify.”

“What doesn’t signify?”

“The words.”

“The words of the sermon, of the Mass, don’t signify?”

“That’s well put, Tom,” he says, not ironically. “But the action does.”

“Why don’t the words signify?”

“Let me ask you a question as a scientist and a student of human nature,” he says, almost in his old priest-friend-colleague voice.

“Sure.”

“Do you think it is possible that words could be deprived of their meaning?”

“Deprived of their meaning. What words?”

“Name it! Any words. Tom, U.S.A., God, Simon, prayer, sin, heaven, world.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.”

“Here’s the question,” he says in a brisk rehearsed voice. Again, for some reason, he reminds me of a caller calling in to a radio talk show. He almost raises his eyes. “If it is a fact that words are deprived of their meaning, does it not follow that there is a depriver?”

“A depriver. I’m afraid—”

“What other explanation is there?” he asks in a rush, as if he already knew what I would say.

I always answer patients honestly. “One explanation, if I understand you correctly, is that a person can stop believing in the things the words signify.”

“Ah ha,” he says at once, smiling as if I had taken the bait. “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”

“What’s the point?”

“Don’t you see?” he asks in a stronger voice, eyes still lowered, but hitching closer over the azimuth.

“Not quite.”

“It is not a question of belief or unbelief. Even if such things were all proved, if the existence of God, heaven, hell, sin were all proved as certainly as the distance to the sun is proved, it would make no difference, would it?”

“To whom?”

“To people! To unbelievers and to so-called believers.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because the words no longer signify.”

“Why is that?”

“Because the words have been deprived of their meaning.”

“By a depriver.”

“Right. Once, everyone admits, such signs signified. Now they do not.”

“How do you mean, once such signs signified?”

Again he smiles. Again it seems I have fallen into his trap. He rises, stands to one side, hands in pockets making fists. “I’ll show you. Do you see that?” He nods to the horizon.

I look. There is nothing but the shaggy sea of bluish pines. My nose has started running. The air is yellow with pollen.

“Right there.” He nods, hands still in pockets.

I look again. There is a straight wisp of smoke in the middle distance, as insignificant-looking as a pile of leaves burning in a gutter.

“Yes.”

“As a matter of fact, would you help me report it? My hands are a bit unsteady.”

Perhaps that is why he keeps his hands in his pockets, to hide a tremor.

“Sure. What do I do?”

“Line up the sights on the smoke.”

I rotate the azimuth and sight along the upright posts to the wisp of smoke. “I make it eighty-two degrees.”

“Very good. Wouldn’t you agree that there is no question, about what the smoke is a sign of?”

“Yes, I would.”

“What is it a sign of?”

“Fire.”

“Right!”—triumphantly. “Now would you hang up the reading?”

I turn to the wall map, which is encircled by pins like the Wheel of Fortune. I pick up a weighted string and hang it over pin number 82.

“Very good!” says the priest. He’s looking over my shoulder. “Now what do we have here?”

“We have the direction of—”

“Right! We have one coordinate, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s not enough to locate the fire, is it?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“What else do we need?”

“We need another coordinate.”

“All right! And how do you suppose we get it?”

All at once I know what he reminds me of. He’s the patient priest-teacher teaching the dumb section at Holy Cross Prep.

I am willing to play dumb. “I don’t know. I don’t see how we can get a triangulation fix from here.”

“And you’re right! So we need a little help, don’t we? So—” He picks up the wall phone and dials a number. “Emmy,” he says in a different voice, “give me a reading on that brush job in 5–9. Okay, Blondie, I read. How goes it in Waldheim? All right. That’s a fiver-niner. You call it in. Over.”

He speaks easily, good-humoredly. No, he’s not a priest-teacher. He’s a ham operator, one of those fellows who are shy up close but chummy-technical with a stranger in Bangkok.

He turns to me. “Her reading is 2-9-2. She’s in the Waldheim tower.” He shows me a pin. “Here. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

I pick up the string and the Waldheim sinker and hang it over pin 292. The weighted strings intersect at a crossroad on the map. The priest, I can see, is pleased by the elegance of the tight intersected strings. So am I.

The priest is pushing one fist into the other hand, hard, taking turns. I realize he is doing isometric exercises. Now he is pulling against interlocked fingers.

“We know what the smoke is a sign of. We have located the sign,” he says between pushes and pulls. “Now we are going to act accordingly. That’s a sign for you. Unlike word signs.”

“Right.” I look at my watch. I’m afraid he’s going to get going on the Germans. “It’s good to see you, Father, but I have an appointment. Do you wish me to tell Father Placide or Dr. Comeaux anything?”

“Sure,” says the priest, who is back in his place across the azimuth. “Now here is the question.” There’s a lively light in his eye. He’s out to catch me again. He has the super-sane chipperness of the true nut.

“Can you name one word sign which has not been evacuated of meaning, that is, deprived?”

“I don’t think I can. As a matter of fact, I’m afraid that—” Again I look at my watch.

Two things have become clear to me in the last few seconds.

One thing is that Father Smith has gone batty, but batty in a way I recognize. He belongs to that category of nut who can do his job competently enough, quite well in fact, but given one minute of free time latches on to an obsession like a tongue seeking a sore tooth. He called in the forest fire like a pro, but now he’s back at me with a mad chipper light in his eye.

The second thing is that I promised Father Placide to make an “evaluation” of Father Smith’s mental condition. Can he do priestly work?

No, three things.

The third thing is that all at once I want badly to get out of here and see Lucy Lipscomb.

“Can you name the one word sign,” Father Smith asks me, leaning close over the azimuth, “that has not been evacuated of meaning, that is, deprived by a depriver?”

“I’m not sure what the question means. Later perhaps—”

“Will you allow me to demonstrate,” says the priest triumphantly, as if he had already demonstrated.

“Of course,” I say with fake psychiatric cordiality.

“The signs out there”—he nods to the shaggy forest—“refer to something, don’t they?”

“Right.”

“The smoke was a sign of fire.”

“That is correct.”

“There is no doubt about the existence of the fire.”

“True.”

“Words are signs, aren’t they?”

“You could say so.”

“But unlike the signs out there, words have been evacuated, haven’t they?”

“Evacuated?”

“They don’t signify anymore.”

“How do you mean?” From long practice I can keep my voice attentive without paying close attention. I wonder if Lucy—

“What if I were to turn the tables on you, ha ha, and play the psychoanalyst?”

“Very good,” I say gloomily.

“You psychoanalysts encourage your patients to practice free association with words, true?”

“Yes.” Actually it’s not true.

“Let me turn the tables on you and give you a couple of word signs and you give me your free associations.”

“Fine.”

“Clouds.”

“Sky, fleecy, puffy, floating, white—”

“Okay. Irish.”

“Bogs, Notre Dame, Pat O’Brien, begorra—”

“Okay. Blacks.”

“Blacks?”

“Negroes.”

“Blacks, Africa, niggers, minority, civil rights—”

“Okay. Jew.”

“Israel, Bible, Max, Sam, Julius, Hebrew, Hebe, Ben—”

“Right! You see!” He is smiling and nodding and making fists in his pockets. I realize that he is doing isometrics in his pockets.

“See what?”

“Jews!”

“What about Jews?” I say after a moment.

“Precisely!”

“Precisely what?”

“What do you mean?”

“What about Jews?”

“What do you think about Jews?” he asks, cocking an eye.

“Nothing much one way or the other.”

“May I continue my demonstration, Doctor?”

“For one minute.” I look at my watch, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“May I ask who Max, Sam, Julius, and Ben are?”

“Max Gottlieb is my closest friend and personal physician. Sam Aaronson was my roommate in medical school. Julius Freund was my training analyst at Hopkins. Ben Solomon was my fellow detainee and cellmate at Fort Pelham, Alabama.”

“Very interesting.”

“How’s that?”

“Don’t you see?”

“No.”

“Unlike the other test words, what you associated with the word Jew was Jews, Jews you have known. Isn’t that interesting?”

“Yes,” I say, pursing my mouth in a show of interest.

“What you associated with the word sign Irish were certain connotations, stereotypical Irish stuff in your head. Same for Negro. If I had said Spanish, you’d have said something like guitar, castanets, bullfights, and such. I have done the test on dozens. Thus, these word signs have been evacuated, deprived of meaning something real. Real persons. Not so with Jews.”

“So?”

He’s feeling so much better that he’s doing foot exercises, balancing on the ball of one foot, then the other. Now, to my astonishment, he is doing a bit of shadowboxing, weaving and throwing a few punches.

“That’s the only sign of God which has not been evacuated by an evacuator,” he says, moving his shoulders. “What sign is that?”

“Jews.”

“Jews?”

“You got it, Doc.” He sits, gives the azimuth a spin like a croupier who has raked in all the chips.

“Got what?”

“You see the point.”

“What’s the point?”

He leans close, eyes alight, “The Jews — cannot — be — subsumed.”

“Can’t be what?”

“Subsumed.”

“I see.”

“Since the Jews were the original chosen people of God, a tribe of people who are still here, they are a sign of God’s presence which cannot be evacuated. Try to find a hole in that proof!”

I try — that is, I act as if I am trying.

“You can’t find a hole, can you?” he says triumphantly.

“But, Father, the Jews I know are not religious. They either do not believe in God or, like me, they don’t attach any significance beyond—”

“Precisely!”

“Precisely?”

“Precisely. Probatur conclusion as St. Thomas would say.” He seems to have finished.

“Right,” I say, reaching for the rung of the trapdoor. I think I know what to tell Father Placide.

“Hold it!” He waves an arm out to the wide world. “Name one other thing out there which cannot be subsumed.”

“I can’t.”

“Pine tree?”

“How do you mean, pine tree?”

“That pine tree can be subsumed under the classes of trees called conifers, right?”

“Right.”

“Try to subsume Jews under the classes of mankind, Caucasians, Semites, whatever. Go ahead, try it.”

“Excuse me, Father, but I really—”

“Do your friends still consider themselves Jews?”

“Yes.”

“You see. It does not matter whether they believe. Believe or not, they are still Jews. And what are Jews if not the actual people originally chosen by God?”

“Excuse me, Father, but is it not also part of Christian belief that the Jews did not accept Jesus as the Messiah and that therefore—”

“Makes no difference!” exclaims the priest, throwing a punch as if this were the very objection he had been waiting for.

“It doesn’t?”

“Read St. Paul! It is clear that their inability to accept Jesus was not only foreordained but altogether reasonable and is not to be held against them. Salvation comes from the Jews, as holy scripture tells us. They remain the beloved, originally chosen people of God.”

“Right. Now I—”

“It is also psychologically provable.”

“It is?”

“Jews are naturally skeptical, hardheaded, and, after all, what Jesus was proposing to them was a tall order.”

“Yes. Well—” He’s standing on the trapdoor and I can’t lift it until he gets off.

“What do you think Peres would say if Begin claimed to be the Messiah?”

I have to laugh.

“No no.” The priest hunches forward, almost clearing the trapdoor. “You’re missing the point.”

“I am?”

“How many times in your work have you encountered someone who claims to be Napoleon, the Messiah, Hitler, the Devil?”

“Often.”

“How often have you encountered a Jewish patient who claimed to be the Messiah or Napoleon?”

“Not often.”

“You see?”

“Yes.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I don’t?”

“You still don’t see the bottom line psychologically speaking?” My nose has started running seriously. He is standing on the trapdoor and my nose is dripping.

“One, a Jew will not believe another Jew making such a preposterous claim, right? But — But—!” Now he has come to the bottom line sure enough. For he has stopped doing isometrics and throwing punches and has instead placed both hands on the azimuth and lined me up in the sights. He speaks in a low intense voice, pausing between each word. “Is it not the case, Doctor, that if a Jew speaks to a Gentile, speaks with authority, with sobriety, as a friend—the Gentile — will — believe — him! Think about it!” He has leaned over so close I can see the white fiber, the arcus senilis, around his pupil.

I give every appearance of thinking about it.

“Even an anti-Semite! Did you ever notice that an anti-Semite who despises Jews actually believes them deep down — that’s why he hates them! — and isn’t that the reason he despises them?”

I eye him curiously. “May I ask you something, Father?”

“Fire away.”

“Do you still regard yourself as a Catholic priest?”

For the first time he seems surprised. He stops his isometrics, cocks his head. “How do you mean, Tom?”

“Why are you?”

“Why am I what? Oh. You mean why am I a Catholic — Tom, may I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Do you remember what a sacrament is?”

I smile. “A sensible sign instituted by Christ to produce grace. I can still rattle it off.”

The priest laughs. “Those sisters did a job on us, didn’t they?”

“Yes. Maybe too good.”

“What? Oh. Yes, yes. Do you remember the scriptural example they always gave?”

“Sure. Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you will not have life in you.”

“Same one!” says the priest, again laughing, then falls to musing. “Life,” he murmurs absently and under his breath. “Life. But that’s the trouble, the words—”

“What’s that?” I ask the priest, wondering if he’s still talking to me.

“Oh,” he says, giving a start. “I’m sorry. To answer your question—” He frowns mightily.

What question?

“Are you forgetting about the ancient Romans?”

The ancient Romans. My nose is running badly. I have to go.

“Aren’t you forgetting that the ancient Romans, who were, after all, not stupid people and were right about most things though not very creative, were also right about us.”

“I suppose I had forgotten.”

“The historians say they mistook us for a Jewish sect, didn’t they?”

“Sure.”

“Was it a mistake?”

Now he’s clear of the trapdoor. I give the rung a yank.

“The Jews as a word sign cannot be assimilated under a class, category, or theory. No subsuming Jews! Not even by the Romans.”

“Right.” I yank again. What’s wrong with this damn thing?

“No subsuming Jews, Tom!”

“Okay, I won’t.”

“This offends people, even the most talented people, people of the loftiest sentiments, the highest scientific achievements, and the purest humanitarian ideals.”

“Right.”

“You have to turn it,” he says, noticing my efforts to open the trapdoor.

“Thank you.” No, that doesn’t work either.

“The Holocaust was a consequence of the sign which could not be evacuated.”

“Right.”

“Who remembers the Ukrainians?”

“True.”

“Let me tell you something, Tom. People have the wrong idea about the Holocaust. The Holocaust, as people see it, is a myth.”

Oh my. My heart sinks. On top of everything else, is he one of those? I try harder to open the damn door.

While he is talking, he has taken hold of my arm.

I remove his hand. “Goodbye, Father.”

“What’s the matter, Tom?”

“Are you telling me that the Nazis did not kill six million Jews?”

“No.”

“They did kill six million Jews.”

“Yes.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“What I’m trying to tell you is that the origins of the Holocaust are a myth—”

“Never mind. I’m leaving.”

“Very well. What are you going to tell Father Placide and Dr. Comeaux?”

“I am going to tell Father Placide that you are too disturbed to be of any use to him at St. Michael’s. I am going to tell Dr. Comeaux that you are also too disturbed to operate the hospice and that I hope you will sell it to him. Now will you let me out of here?”

“I appreciate your frankness,” says the priest, nodding vigorously, hands making and unmaking fists in his pockets. “Shall I be frank with you?”

“Sure, if you’ll open this damn door.”

“I will. But please allow me to tell you something about yourself for your own good.”

“Please do.”

“You are an able psychiatrist, on the whole a decent, generous, humanitarian person in the abstract sense of the word. You know what is going to happen to you?”

“What?”

“You are a member of the first generation of doctors in the history of medicine to turn their backs on the oath of Hippocrates and kill millions of old useless people, unborn children, born malformed children, for the good of mankind — and to do so without a single murmur from one of you. Not a single letter of protest in the august New England Journal of Medicine. And do you know what you’re going to end up doing? You a graduate of Harvard and a reader of The New York Times and a member of the Ford Foundation’s Program for the Third World? Do you know what is going to happen to you?”

“No,” I say, relieved to be on a footing of simple hostility, “—even though I did not graduate from Harvard, do not read The New York Times, and do not belong to the Ford Foundation.”

The priest aims the azimuth at me, but then appears to lose his train of thought. Again his preoccupied frown comes back.

“What is going to happen to me, Father?” I ask before he gets away altogether.

“Oh,” he says absently, appearing to be thinking of something else, “you’re going to end up killing Jews.”

“Okay,” I say. Somehow I knew he was going to say this.

Somehow also he knows that we’ve finished with each other. He reaches for the trapdoor, turns the rung. “Give my love to Ellen and the kids.”

“Sure.”

At the very moment of his touching the rung, there is a tapping on the door from below. The door lifts against his hand.

“That’s Milton,” says Father Smith in his workaday ham-operator voice and lifts the door.

A head of close-cropped iron-gray hair pops up through the opening and a man springs into the room.

To my astonishment the priest pays no attention to the new arrival, even though the three of us are now as close as three men in a small elevator. He takes my arm again.

“Yes, Father?”

“Even if you were a combination of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Charles Kuralt rolled into one — no, especially if you were those guys—”

“As a matter of fact, I happen to know Charlie Kuralt, and there is not a sweeter guy, a more tenderhearted person—”

“Right,” says the priest ironically, still paying not the slightest attention to the stranger, and then, with his sly expression, asks, “Do you know where tenderness always leads?”

“No, where?” I ask, watching the stranger with curiosity.

“To the gas chamber.”

“I see.”

“Tenderness is the first disguise of the murderer.”

“Right.”

The stranger has sprung up through the opening with no assistance, even though he’s carrying a plastic pail of water in one hand and an A&P shopping bag in the other. Evidently he’s used to doing this.

“Well—” I say, stepping down. We needn’t shake hands.

“Here’s the final word,” says the priest, taking hold of my arm.

“Good,” I say.

Now we three are standing facing in the same direction, the stranger evidently waiting for me to leave, not even having room to set down pail and shopping bag.

“If you are a lover of Mankind in the abstract like Walt Whitman, who wished the best for Mankind, you will probably do no harm and might even write good poetry and give pleasure, right?

“Right.”

“If you are a theorist of Mankind like Rousseau or Skinner, who believes he understands man’s brain and in the solitariness of his study or laboratory writes books on the subject, you are also probably harmless and might even contribute to human knowledge, right?”

“Right.”

“But if you put the two together, a lover of Mankind and a theorist of Mankind, what you’ve got now is Robespierre or Stalin or Hitler and the Terror, and millions dead for the good of Mankind. Right?”

“Right,” I say indifferently.

Now the stranger places the pail in a corner and lines up items from the bag on the table next to the azimuth: two bars of soap, a pack of small Hefty bags, a double roll of Charmin toilet paper, three large boxes of Sunkist raisins, half a dozen cans of food, including, I notice, Vienna sausage and Bartlett pears.

The priest introduces me. “Dr. Thomas More, this is Milton Guidry, my indispensable friend and assistant. He keeps me in business, brings me the essentials, removes wastes, serves Mass. Unlike me, he is able to live a normal life down there in the world. He used to run the hospice almost single-handedly, plus milk the cows. He still milks the cows. Now he works as a janitor at the A&P. Between his small salary there and my small salary from the forestry service and selling the milk, we make out very well, don’t we, Milton?”

The newcomer nods cheerfully and stands almost at attention, as if waiting for an order. Milton Guidry is a very thin but wiry man of an uncertain age. He could be a young-looking middle-aged man or a gray-haired young man. His face is unlined. His neat flat-top crewcut, squared at the temples, frames his octagonal rimless glasses, which flash in the sun. The bare spot at the top of his head could be the result of a beginning of balding or a too-close haircut. He wears a striped, long-sleeved shirt and a bow tie — he could have bought both at the A&P — neatly pressed jeans, and pull-on canvas shoes. He is of a type once found in many rectories who are pleased to hang around and help the priest. In another time, I suppose, he would be called a sacristan. He listens intently while the priest gives him instructions. It does not seem to strike him as in the least unusual that Father Smith is perched atop a hundred-foot tower in the middle of nowhere and giving him complicated instructions about getting cruets, hosts, and wine. This, Milton’s attentive attitude seems to say, is what Father does.

“Do you say Mass here?” I ask the priest. We stand at close quarters, our eyes squinted against the sun now blazing in the west.

“Oh yes. Every morning at six. And Milton has not been late yet, have you, Milton?”

Milton nods seriously, hands at his sides. “It is easy,” Milton explains to me, “because I have an alarm clock and I live in the shed below.” He points to the floor. “I set the alarm for five-thirty.”

“I see.”

“I used to set my alarm for five-forty-five, but I felt rushed. I like to give myself time.”

“I see.” I really have to get out of here.

“Milton has to work mornings next week,” says the priest, eyeing me. “Would you like to assist?”

“No thanks.”

The priest seems not to mind. In the best of humors now, he holds the trapdoor open for me and again sends his love to Ellen and the children.

“Tom,” he says, holding the door in one hand and shaking my hand with the other, “take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

“Let me say this, Tom,” he says in a low voice, not letting go of my hand, pulling me close.

“What?”

“I think you’re on to something extremely important. I know more than you think.”

I look at him. The white fiber around his pupils seems to be spinning.

“I have great confidence in you, Tom. I shall pray for you.”

“Thanks.” I am working my hand free.

“Did I ever tell you that I had spent a year in Germany before the war in the household of an eminent psychiatrist whose son was a colonel in the Schutzstaffel?”

“Yes, you did. Goodbye, Father.”

“Last night I dreamed of lying in bed in Tübingen and listening to church bells. German church bells make a high-pitched, silvery sound.”

“Goodbye, Father.”

“Goodbye, Tom.” He lets go. Both he and Milton stand clear. They are smiling and nodding cheerfully. “There are dangers down there, Tom, you may not be aware of. Be careful.”

“I will,” I say, stepping down, wanting only to be on my way.