Doctor's Wife (20 page)

    “Is that why you decided to do this? Because you
want to have a good time?”

    “No. It happened to me.”

    “But it won’t last,” Dr. Deane said. “You know that,
don’t you?”

    “That’s not the point.”

    “It
is
the point,” Dr. Deane said. “Now,
look, don’t be cross, but Kevin could be right. This decision of
yours could be a sign of mental illness.”

    “Like Ned? Oh, for goodness’ sake, Owen!”

    “All right, but the fact is,
his
trouble
started with a love affair.”

    “Look, there’s no comparison.”

    “Then let me say something else. Ned had a nervous
breakdown. But he’s not the only one. It’s quite possible that we
have a weakness of that sort in our family.”

    “Who had one? Who else?” Suddenly she was
frightened.

    “Kitty.”

    “Kitty?”

    “It was just after you were born. She became
suicidal, it seems. Anyway, she spent three months in Purtysburn
Asylum.”

    “But isn’t that something women have sometimes after
a baby, a suicidal thing?”

    “Postpartum depression. Yes. But I don’t think it
was that in her case.”

    She leaned forward and closed her eyes. The traffic
noise seemed unnaturally loud. “Is that why you came?” she said.
“To frighten me?”

    “I came to help you, if I can. I’m worried about
you.”

    “So you think I might be going through some sort of
mental breakdown?”

    “You may be doing what analysts call ‘acting out.’
“

    “You don’t think it’s possible that I just fell in
love?”

    “Yes, of course,” Dr. Deane said. “But that doesn’t
necessarily mean that you’re all right. Look, who is this chap?
Could I meet him?”

    “No.”

    “Why not? Are you ashamed of him?”

    “He’s an American. He’s ten years younger than I am.
We’ve only known each other two weeks and we’re living together. He
wants to look after me. He wants me to come to America with him and
marry him. Or not marry him. It’s up to me. That’s all. I’m sure
this will just confirm your damn diagnosis.”

    “I didn’t make any diagnosis.”

    “Well, anyway, that’s the situation. I
am
like the man who went out to get cigarettes and didn’t come back.
Forget about me. Oh, yes. Sell my shares, will you? I’ll write you
a letter soon and let you know where to send the money. Will you do
that?”

    “I’ll sell them as soon as I get your letter. All
right?”

    “Thanks. Now, I want you to go home, Owen. There’s
nothing you can do here. You think I may be mad. I know I’m not. So
let’s say goodbye. Nicely.”

    “Oh, come on. Let’s at least have dinner
together.”

    “I’m sorry. I have a date.”

    “Well, could I join you?”

    “No.”

    And then, ashamed, she reached across the table and
took his hand. She squeezed it. “I’m sorry, Owen.” But at that
moment she saw, fifty yards away, Tom Lowry, standing at the Métro
entrance, watching them. How dare he spy on her. She had told him
to wait for her in the flat. But, angry as she was, at the same
time she felt an excitement at seeing him. She let go of her
brother’s hand and said, “All right, if you’re not going till
tomorrow, I’ll have breakfast with you. I’ll come around to your
hotel about eight.”

    “Good. Sheila, I have to phone Kevin tonight. What
will I say to him?”

    “Tell him it’s no use.”

    Dr. Deane bowed his head. “What about Peg, is she
around?”

    “Yes. Why?”

    “Maybe she’ll have dinner with me. You don’t mind my
getting in touch with her, do you?”

    “She’s your friend, too,” Mrs. Redden said. She
found Ivo’s phone number and wrote it down for him, handing him the
scrap of paper as she stood up. “All right. What’s your hotel
again?”

    “The Angleterre.”

    She bent down and kissed him on the cheek. “See you
in the morning,” she said, and went quickly out into the street,
mingling with the passersby. She walked to the curb, waited with
the crowd, then, as the light went green, hurried across the square
to reach the midway traffic island, where, as the second traffic
light went green, she went on to the safety of the pavement on the
far side of the square. Then turned and saw that Tom, who had
followed her, was stranded on the traffic island by a red light. He
glanced at the oncoming automobiles and sprinted out inches ahead
of the traffic. She felt her heart jump in fear, until he reached
the safety of the pavement. When he ran up to join her, she held
him to her. “You might have been killed!”

    And then, holding him, remembered her brother. She
turned and looked back across the expanse of square to where he
sat. As she did, her brother waved to her. Slowly, she raised her
arm and waved back.

    Chapter 13

    • Next morning, after breakfast with his sister, Dr.
Deane took the bus to Orly. He had given up smoking three years
ago, but when he arrived at Orly he went into the duty-free shop,
bought a carton of Gauloises, and ripped open a package. The first
puff made him dizzy. Inhaling, he went to another counter and, in
penance, purchased bottles of Chanel toilet water for his wife and
two daughters. Then, still smoking, he entered the bar and ordered
a brandy-and-soda. He had thought of phoning Agnes from the airport
to let her know he was on his way home, but after drinking the
brandy, he ordered another and decided he would make the call when
he stopped over in London. Halfway through the second brandy, he
changed his mind and asked the barman where the telephones were.
But as he started to walk to the phone booth, the flight to London
was called.

    So that was that. He would have to decide later just
what to tell her. He was certainly not going to tell her that he
had lost his temper and shouted at Sheila. That was just what Agnes
would like to hear. But, still, that was what he had done. What
sort of a way was that to try to help people, shouting at them? I
should have gone off to the Louvre this morning, looked at some
pictures, and gone back again this afternoon to apologize to her. A
doctor should never try to treat his own family. It doesn’t wash.
If my father had been a medical man, what would he have done? What
would he have said to her?

    Dr. Deane walked out toward the waiting plane,
thinking of his father and his father’s great friends, Dr. Byrne
and Chief Justice McGonigal, remembering their arguments about Shaw
and Joyce, about Mussolini’s policies vis-à-vis the Vatican, and
the morality of Ireland’s neutrality during the war. Not
intellectuals, but men who read a lot, who loved discussion and
despised golf, who never cared about the size of their house or the
make of their motorcar. That older generation, passionate,
literate, devout, still seemed to him more admirable and
interesting in their enthusiasms and innocence than the later
generation which claimed him as its own. His father would have made
mincemeat of Sheila’s arguments. His father would never put
pleasure before principle as Sheila did, especially in an
affaire du coeur
. But then, as Sheila said, that older
generation lived in the certainty of their beliefs. That was the
point, exactly the point. If this were 1935 and Sheila were my
father’s younger sister, the whole discussion would have been
conducted in the context of sin. I can talk about it only in the
context of illness. My father would have talked of the moral
obligations involved. I can only surmise the emotional risks.

    And even then, wasn’t I on thin ice? Do I know that
she is ill? Of course not. In my opinion what she’s doing could
endanger her mental health and cause her grief and remorse. But do
I know that for certain? All my opinions are reversible. They say
that’s a sign of intelligence, but is it? Fifteen years ago people
like me read Freud as if we had found an answer. He seemed a
genius. Today I am not so sure. Yet when I spoke to Sheila this
morning my mouth was full of phrases from psychoanalytic textbooks,
comfortable, because they offer an explanation which fits my
prejudice. “Acting out” and “fugue state” and so on, and so forth.
All out of books. Books have been my substitute for life. What do I
know about a woman in love? Damn all. She looked happy, didn’t she?
I can tell myself till I’m blue in the face that she’s in her manic
phase, but I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m a gynecologist. Why did I
get mixed up in this business?

    I suppose because of Ned. The only hell I
do
know about is the hell of Ned’s nervous breakdown. And
how can you explain that hell to a person who believes she’s happy?
Who is—what was it she said?—”in a state of grace.”

    The stewardess waiting at the top of the ramp looked
at his boarding pass, smiled at him, and said to sit anywhere in
tourist. There were so few people traveling that he had a row of
three seats all to himself. He removed his hat and placed it beside
him, on top of his copy of the
Times
. Last night at dinner
that Yugoslav said this American boy is head over heels in love
with Sheila. What was it, he said? “Falling in love is a crime
usually committed by innocent people. So they rarely get away with
it.” Very aphoristic, the French. Except that he is not French.

    But Peg Conway thinks the whole thing will end next
week when Sheila gives up her flat. I hope so, but I don’t believe
it. I think she’s a bolter: she’ll run off with this boy. There’s
that strain of oddness in our family, an instability. Ned and
Kitty, and now Sheila. And don’t forget Yours Truly. No, I am not
forgetting Yours Truly.

    When the plane took off he sat up, rigid, his hands
gripping the sides of his seat. The cloud was thick all the way up
and he was sure the left engine sounded as though it were out of
whack. Once he would have been saying an Act of Contrition at this
very moment. But now he remembered some remark of Agnes’s about
opening a dress shop if anything ever happened to him. Which was
nonsense, she had no business sense at all, she could never run a
shop. The plane began to shake. If I crash now, Agnes will blame
Sheila for my death.

    But then the plane came up to an empty blue sky and
the seat-belt sign went off. That strain of oddness in our family.
If Sheila had any sense she’d know there’s nothing but trouble
ahead for her. As the old women back in Donegal used to say of a
pregnant unmarried girl, “Now, she’s crying the laugh she had last
year.” And Sheila will do the same thing. I told her that. I said,
“You’re behaving like a selfish silly woman, how long do you think
this will last? In ten years’ time,” I said, “you will look like
this boy’s mother.”

    Of course I was shouting at her by then. Home truths
that should have stayed at home. Before that, damnit, we
were
having a reasonable discussion. Before the shouting I
said to her, “You talk about being happy now. But I wonder. Are we
supposed to be happy in this life?” And she laughed and accused me
of still being a Catholic. But I said to her, “No, seriously, do
you think it’s possible for anyone to be more than intermittently
happy in life? Continual happiness just isn’t a possible state for
anyone with a brain in their heads. If you were happy all the time,
you’d have to be selfish and insensitive about all the unhappiness
around you. You’re happy now, I grant you. But I don’t think it can
last.”

    “Neither do I,” she said. “Well, then,” I said. “If
it doesn’t last and it leaves you more unhappy than you were
before, is it really worth all you seem prepared to sacrifice for
it?” And she said that it wasn’t something you could put a value
on. She said, “Kevin used to tell me that life wasn’t all dancing
in the dark. You know that old song. He said I was impractical,
that I never faced facts. He was wrong. If I’d been impractical I’d
never have married him. I’d have gone off to London or Paris and
tried for a job, no matter how impractical that sounds. If I’d been
romantic I would have tried for a different life.”

    “But you might not have found it,” I said to her.
“Yes, that’s true,” she said. “But I would have tried. That’s what
I blame myself for now. I didn’t try.”

    And, damnit, that angered me and I said to her, “I
think you’re a bit late to try now.” I never should have said that.
That’s when I told her she was a selfish, silly woman and about the
boy being too young for her. I started shouting at her. What sort
of way was that to try to help her?

    The stewardess came around offering duty-free
cigarettes. He pulled out his Gauloises and lit up. What will Agnes
say when she sees me smoking again? What will I tell her when I get
home today? She’ll not keep it to herself. I might just as well say
it’s all settled, say it was a dustup between Sheila and Kevin and
that Sheila will be back next week, as per schedule. That’s what
Peg thinks. I hope she’s right. Yes, I’ll tell Agnes that. Let’s
leave it at that.

    Chapter 14

    • She lay in semi-darkness, the window open to the
noise of night traffic along the Seine. His arms were around her,
her head rested on his shoulder, and he was talking about the
future as she might have talked about it were she his age and
unmarried. “At any rate,” he said, “the next step, first thing
Monday, is to go to the rue Saint-Florentin. You have your
passport. It’s a British one, right?”

    When we make love he seems older and more
experienced than me. Is that why he always plans our future after
sex? Sex seems to give him authority. How does he know all those
sex things that Kevin never knew? Do all Americans do them?