Bad Love (6 page)

She wore a coarse, black, scallop-necked wool sweater over a pleated black skirt, stockings tinted to mimic a Caribbean tan, and black loafers. No jewelry. Her hair was straight, brown, and long, drawn back very tightly from a low, flat brow, and fastened above each ear with wide, black, wooden barrettes. A houndstooth jacket was draped over her lap. Near one shoe was a black leatherette attaché case.

As I sat down, she watched me, hands resting upon one another, spindly and white. The top one was sprinkled with some sort of eczematous rash. Her nails were cut short. One cuticle looked raw.

Bork stepped between us and spread his arms as if preparing to conduct a symphony.

“Dr. Delaware, Dr. Katarina de Bosch. Dr. de Bosch, Alex Delaware, our acting chief psychologist.”

I turned to her and smiled. She gave a nod so tiny I might have imagined it.

Bork backed away, rested a buttock on his desk, and cupped both his hands over one knee. The desk surface was twenty square feet of lacquered walnut shaped like a surfboard, topped with an antique padded leather blotter and a green marble inkwell. Centered on the blotter was a single rectangle of stiff blue paper. He picked it up and used it to rap his knuckles.

“Do you recall Dr. de Bosch’s writing to you suggesting a collaborative venture with your division, Alex?”

I nodded.

“And the disposition of that request?”

“I turned it down.”

“Might I ask why?”

“The staff’s been asking for things directly related to inpatient management, Henry.”

Looking pained, Bork shook his head, then handed the blue paper to me.

A program for the conference, still smelling of printer’s ink. Full schedule, speakers, and registration. My name was listed below Katarina de Bosch’s as co-chair. My picture below, lifted off the professional staff roster.

My face broiled. I took a deep breath. “Looks like a fait accompli, Henry.” I tried to hand him the brochure, but he put his hands back on his knees.

“Keep it for your records, Alex.” Standing, he sidled in front of the desk, taking tiny steps, like a man on a ledge. Finally, he managed to get behind the surfboard and sat down.

Katarina de Bosch was inspecting her knuckles.

I considered maintaining my dignity but decided against it. “Nice to know what I’m doing in November, Henry. Care to give me my schedule for the rest of the decade?”

A small, sniffing sound came from Katarina’s chair. Bork smiled at her, then turned to me, shifting his lips into neutral.

“An unfortunate misunderstanding, Alex — a snafu. “Something naturally always fouls up,’ right?”

He looked at Katarina again, got nothing in return, and lowered his eyes to the blotter.

I fanned the blue brochure.

“Snafu,” Bork repeated. “One of those interim decisions that had to be made during the transition between Dr. Greiloff’s and Dr. Franks’ sabbaticals and your stepping in. The board offers its regrets.”

“Then why bother with a letter of application?”

Katarina said, “Because I’m polite.”

“I didn’t know the board got involved in scheduling conferences, Henry.”

Bork smiled. “Everything, Alex, is the province of the board. But you’re right. It’s not typical for us to get directly involved in that type of thing. However . . .”

He paused, looked again at Katarina, who gave another tiny nod. Clearing his throat, he began fingering a cellophaned cigar — one of a trio of Davidoffs sharing pocket space with a white silk handkerchief.

“The fact that we
have
gotten involved should tell you something, Alex,” he said. His smile was gone.

“What’s that, Henry?”

“Dr. de Bosch
— both
Dr. de Bosches are held in extremely high esteem by . . . Western’s medical community.”

Are
. So the old man was still alive.

“I see,” I said.

“Yes, indeed.” The color had risen in his cheeks, and his usual glibness had given way to something tentative, shaky.

He removed the cigar from his pocket and held it between his index fingers.

From the corner of my eye I saw Katarina. Watching me.

Neither of them spoke; I felt as if the next line was mine and I’d flubbed it.

“High esteem,” said Bork finally, sounding more tense.

I wondered what was bugging him, then remembered a rumor of a few years ago. Doctors’ dining room gossip, the kind I tried to avoid.

A Bork problem child, the youngest of four daughters. A teenaged chronic truant with learning disorders and a tendency toward sexual experimentation, sent away, two or three summers ago, hush-hush, for some kind of live-in remediation. The family tight-lipped with humiliation.

One of Bork’s many detractors had told the story with relish.

The de Bosch Institute and Corrective School . . .

Bork was watching me. The look on his face told me I shouldn’t push it any further.

“Of course,” I said.

It sounded hollow. Katarina de Bosch frowned.

But it made Bork smile again. “Yes,” he said. “So obviously, we’re eager for this conference to take place. Expeditiously. I hope you and Dr. de Bosch will enjoy working together.”

“Will I be working with both Drs. de Bosch?”

“My father isn’t well,” said Katarina, as if I should have known it. “He had a stroke last winter.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

She stood, smoothed her skirt with brief flogging movements, and picked up her attaché. In the chair she’d seemed tall — willowy — but upright she was only five two or three, maybe ninety-five bony pounds. Her legs were short and her feet pointed out. The skirt hung an inch below her knees.

“In fact, I need to get back to take care of him,” she said. “Walk me back to my car, Dr. Delaware, and I’ll give you details on the conference.”

Bork winced at her imperiousness, then looked at me with some of that same desperation.

Thinking of what he was going through with his daughter, I stood and said, “Sure.”

He put the cigar in his mouth. “Splendid,” he said. “Thank you, Alex.”

She said, “Henry,” without looking at him and stomped toward the door.

He rushed from behind his desk and managed to get to it soon enough to hold it open for her.

He was a politician and a hack — a skilled physician who’d lost interest in healing and had lost sight of the human factor. In the coming years he never acknowledged my empathy of that afternoon, never displayed any gratitude or particular graciousness to me. If anything, he became increasingly hostile and obstructive and I came to dislike him intensely. But I never regretted what I’d done.

The moment we were out the door, she said, “You’re a behaviorist, aren’t you?”

“Eclectic,” I said. “Whatever works. Including behavior therapy.”

She smirked and began walking very fast, swinging the attaché in a wide, dangerous arc through the crowded hospital corridor. Neither of us talked on the way to the glass doors that fronted the building. She moved her short legs furiously, intent upon maintaining a half-step advantage. When we reached the entrance, she stopped, gripped the attaché with both hands, and waited until I held one of the doors open, just as she’d done with Bork. I pictured her growing up with servants.

Her car was parked right in front, in the
NO STOPPING
ambulance zone — a brand-new Buick, big and heavy, black with a silver vinyl top, buffed shiny as a general’s boot. A hospital security guard was standing watch over it. When he saw her approaching he touched his hat.

Another door held open. I half expected to hear a bugle burst as she slid into the driver’s seat.

She started the car with a sharp twist, and I stood there, looking at her through a closed window.

She ignored me, gunned the engine, finally looked at me and raised an eyebrow, as if surprised I was still there.

The window lowered electrically. “Yes?”

“We were supposed to discuss details,” I said.

“The
details
,” she said, “are, I’ll do everything. Don’t worry about it, don’t complicate things, and it will all fall into place. All right?”

My throat got very tight.

She put the car into drive.

“Yes,
ma’am
,” I said, but before the second word was out she’d roared off.

I went back into the hospital, got coffee from a machine near the admittance desk, and took it up to my office, trying to forget about what had happened and determined to focus myself on the day’s challenges. Later, seated at my desk, charting the morning’s rounds, my hand slipped and some of the coffee spilled on the blue brochure.

I didn’t hear from her again until a week before the conference, when she sent a starchily phrased letter inquiring if I cared to deliver a paper. I called and declined and she sounded relieved.

“But it would be nice if you at least welcomed the attendees,” she said.

“Would it?”

“Yes.” She hung up.

I did show up on the first day to offer brief words of welcome and, unable to escape graciously, remained on stage for the entire morning, with the other co-chair — Harvey Rosenblatt, the psychiatrist from New York. Trying to feign interest as Katarina strode to the podium, wondering if I’d see another side of her, softened for public consumption.

Not that there was much of a public. Attendance was thin — maybe seventy or eighty therapists and graduate students in an auditorium that seated four hundred.

She introduced herself by name and title, then read a prepared speech in a strident monotone. She favored complex, meandering sentences that lost meaning by the second or third twist, and soon the audience was looking glazed. But she didn’t seem to care — didn’t seem to be talking to anyone but herself.

Reminiscing about her father’s glory days.

Such as they were.

Anticipating the symposium, I’d taken the time to review Andres de Bosch’s collected writings, and I hadn’t raised my opinion of him.

His prose style was clear, but his theories about child rearing — the good love/bad love spectrum of maternal involvement that his daughter had used to title the conference — seemed nothing more than extensions and recombinations of other people’s work. A little Anna Freud here, a little Melanie Klein there, tossed with croutons of Winnicott, Jung, Harry Stack Sullivan, Bruno Bettelheim.

He leavened the obvious with clinical anecdotes about the children he’d treated at his school, managed to work both his Vienna pilgrimage and his war experiences into his summaries, name dropping and adopting the overly casual manner of one truly self-impressed.

Emperor’s new clothes, and the audience at the conference didn’t show any great excitement. But from the rapt look on Faithful Daughter’s face, she thought it was cashmere.

By the second day, attendance was down by half and even the speakers on the dais — three L.A.-based analysts — looked unhappy to be there. I might have felt sorry for Katarina, but she seemed unaware of it all, continuing to flash slides of her father — dark-haired and goateed in healthier days — working at a big, carved desk surrounded by talismans and books, drawing in crayon with a young patient, writing in the brandied light of a Tiffany lamp.

Then another batch: posing with his arm around
her —
even as a teenager, she’d looked old, and they could have been lovers — followed by shots of a blanket-swaddled old man sunk low in an electric wheelchair, positioned atop a high, brown bluff. Behind him the ocean was beautiful and blue, mocking his senescence.

A sad variation upon the home-movie trap. The few remaining attendees looked away in embarrassment.

Harvey Rosenblatt seemed especially pained; I saw him shade his eyes and study some scribbled notes that he’d already read from.

A tall, shambling, gray-bearded fellow in his forties, he struck up a conversation with me as we waited for the afternoon session to begin. His warmth seemed more than just therapeutic veneer. Unusually forthcoming for an analyst, he talked easily about his practice in mid-Manhattan, his twenty-year marriage to a psychologist, and the joys and challenges of raising three children. The youngest was a fifteen-year-old boy whom he’d brought with him.

“He’s back at the hotel,” he said, “watching movies on pay-TV — probably the dirty ones, right? I promised to get back in an hour and take him out to Disneyland — do you have any idea how late they’re open?”

“During the winter, I think only till six or so.”

“Oh.” He frowned. “Guess we’ll have to do that tomorrow; hopefully, Josh can deal with it.”

“Does he like arcade games?” I said.

“Does a duck quack?”

“Why don’t you try the Santa Monica pier. It’s open late.”

“Okay — that sounds good, thanks. Do they have good hot dogs by any chance?”

“I know they have hot dogs, but I can’t vouch for them being gourmet.”

He smiled. “Josh is a hot dog connoisseur, Alex.” He puffed his cheeks and smoothed his beard. “Too bad about Disneyland. I hate to disappoint him.”

“Challenges of parenthood, huh?” I said.

He smiled. “He’s a sweet kid. I brought him with me hoping to turn it into a semi-vacation for both of us. I try to do that with each of them when they’re old enough. It’s hard to reconcile working with other people’s kids when you can’t find time for your own — you have any?”

I shook my head.

“It’s an education, believe me. Worth more than ten years of school.”

“Do you treat only children?” I said.

“Half and half. Actually, I find myself doing less and less child work as time goes on.”

“Why’s that?”

“To be honest, kid work’s just too nonverbal for me. Three hours in a row of play therapy makes my eyes cross — narcissistic, I know, but I figure I’m not doing them much good if I’m fading away. My wife, on the other hand, doesn’t mind. She’s a real artist with it. Great mom, too.”

We walked to the cafeteria, had coffee and donuts, and chatted for a while about other places he could take his son. As we headed back to the auditorium, I asked him about his connection to the de Bosches.

“Andres was my teacher,” he said, “in England. I did a fellowship eleven years ago at Southwick Hospital — near Manchester. Child psychiatry and pediatric neurology. I’d toyed with the idea of working for the government and I wanted to see how the Brits ran their system.”