Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil (48 page)

“Why? It would save time, no?”

“Remember Rosenhan?” Rosenhan was a psychology professor who sent a group of his graduate students into a psychiatric ward with instructions to fake schizophrenia. None were exposed by the experts, despite the fact that the impostors had been briefed only superficially about what to simulate. To prove his thesis beyond doubt, Rosenhan then presented a group of experienced psychiatrists with genuine schizophrenics, telling the doctors ahead of time that they were fakers. The doctors interviewed the real schizophrenics at length and agreed they were phonies. Rosenhan’s chilling conclusion: the psychiatrist sees what he expects to see.

“I’m insulted,” Toni complained. “And intimidated. I feel like I’m taking a quiz.”

“No, no. I’m concerned that what I thought was a successful therapy with Gene was a failure and I don’t want to prejudice you. I’m not sandbagging. I have more faith in your working with Gene than me.”

“Rafe, that’s a crock.”

“No, I mean it. I’m not really good treating grown-ups. I’m mesmerized by the past. I get stuck in the archaeology. With children, I’m always in the here and now.”

“Sounds like a rationalization.”

“It’s not.” I thought back to the grown-up Gene, in his student clothes, his boyish manner. Was he a grown-up?

Toni interrupted my silence. “Anyway, I thought Gene was a kid when you saw him.”

“Yeah, a teenager.”

“So?” Toni sounded triumphant.

“So what?”

“You’re telling me you don’t think you’re a good therapist for teenagers?”

“Toni, remember Bertha?” Bertha was a fifty-two-year-old black patient during my internship at Hopkins, a mute whom I and my colleagues diagnosed as schizophrenic. Toni discovered Bertha was from Haiti, did some research and eventually uncovered Bertha’s conviction that she had been hexed by a neighbor who, like her, practiced an obscure religion, a kind of Santería, a mix of Catholicism and a Voodoo sect. Toni gathered a group of us in the cafeteria at midnight during a full moon, lit purple candles, and we performed a ceremony (our solemnity was aided by two bottles of cheap red wine) that involved borrowing a skull from the anatomy lab. One week later, a cheerful, confident Bertha was discharged. That was one of many instances of Toni’s unusual ability to avoid the Rosenhan syndrome.

“I don’t follow, Rafe. Bertha was basically a cultural problem. Nobody thought to talk to her in her own terms.”

“And that includes me. I didn’t mean Rosenhan was your problem. I’m not testing you. I’m testing my former treatment.”

“Well … Okay. I still think you could save me time. Anyway, Gene is convinced his problems are all about work. Actually, I believe work is the one place he’s comfortable.”

She could be talking about me, I thought later. I hadn’t taken a vacation in six years, I hadn’t allowed a woman into my heart since Julie, my friendships were really all professional, my evenings devoted to writing a book about “Timmy” and the Grayson Day Care case. I decided it was time to take time. Besides, I had decided to use half of my ten-million-dollar inheritance from Uncle (obviously, I was not his sole heir) to construct a two-story building to house a clinic for the treatment of abused children and there wasn’t any insight I could contribute to its design and construction.

I also arranged to pay for Isaac’s college education. I told Aaron it was Bernie’s wish—in a sense, that was the exact truth.

Aaron didn’t believe me. “Yeah?” he said. “Show me where it says that in his will.”

“There wasn’t time to change his will,” I said.

“Thank you, Rafe,” Aaron said. “That’s what I should be saying.”

With that off my conscience, I tried again to reach my father in Havana, writing to the last address Grandpa Pepín had for him. (Naturally one of the by-products of Susan’s therapy was that I reestablish contact with my father’s people. Although this irritated Uncle Bernie, my suicide attempt had frightened him enough so that he tolerated it. I was eighteen when I stood on the old porch and made my apology and explanation to Grandpa Pepín of why I testified against his son. He nodded when I was finished and said, “I understand. You were brainwashed by the barbarians.” Confused, I mumbled, “The barbarians?” Grandpa nodded in a direction over my left shoulder. I turned to look. Far in the distance, past the low roofs of what seemed to be miles and miles of modest homes, light in the windows of a new office building twinkled at me. I looked back at Pepín. “You mean the capitalists?” I asked. “I mean the barbarians,” he said and never raised the subject of my treachery again.) This was my fourth attempt to resume contact with Francisco since I petitioned successfully to restore his American passport and again there was no response. For almost a decade he could have returned to the States. To my knowledge, he hadn’t. Through a colleague, I was introduced to the Cuban attaché to the U.N. Other than confirming that my father was alive and well, residing where I had written him, all he could suggest was that I go to Havana to confront Francisco. Since my letters to Francisco were requests to come see him, and I now knew that he had definitely gotten them, I assumed such a visit would be unwelcome. Perhaps I was merely intimidated. From both Grandpa and the Cuban attaché (who claimed to know my father fairly well) I got the distinct impression that Francisco had money problems. I arranged for fifty thousand dollars—an American ransom, the Cuban attaché joked—to be deposited in a Canadian bank in his name. That was a legal and safe way to deal with both America’s and Cuba’s different brands of restrictions. The money wasn’t refused—indeed, a bank official told me the account was immediately activated—yet no letter or phone call was forthcoming. I had asked for forgiveness and received none. Maybe that was just. I didn’t want to seek more punishment, despite my guilty feelings.

The spring and summer of 1988, I made an effort to relax and take care of myself, limiting my hours with the children to no more than eight a day, joining a health club (and using it), and, the most significant change, ignoring my reservations about becoming involved with a co-worker. During the Grayson Day Care case, Diane Rosenberg split up with a man she had been living with since college. We became close, apart from the intimacy of our work. I resisted, for more than a year, risking our friendship by introducing romance, not only because I was putting companionship in danger, I was also chancing the loss of an intelligent and dedicated colleague. I had no illusion that if we were to become estranged lovers we would be capable of returning to the harmony of our platonic relationship.

To be blunt, our first few attempts at sex were self-conscious and a little comic. If, as Freud observed, there are six people in every bedroom—the lovers and the ghosts of their parents—then the bedroom of two psychiatrists is as crowded with spirits as Halloween. I suggested a change of scene might relieve the awkwardness and we took our first vacation in years together. The two weeks in Paris were idyllic in every way. We shed more than our clothes. Assuming the naive skins of tourists, we discovered our bodies could dance in the dark without poltergeists mocking our rhythm.

Taking time away from my work seemed to improve my results. In July, “Timmy” made a series of dazzling breakthroughs—a rapid integration of his multiple personalities that began with a deeply moving and eerie scene in which the various selves were introduced to each other. Also, my book on incest was well received and debated in a healthy way, even by its critics. August brought the opening of the clinic, although some of the construction wasn’t finished; the revelation to our friends that Diane and I had become an item was greeted with less surprise and disapproval than either of us had expected; and I worked hard to finish the book about the Grayson trial, inspired by “Timmy’s” bravery facing his painful memories and what I had learned from his remarkable insights into the methods and motivations of his abusers.

The last week of August, Gene appeared. He had followed his mentor to Minotaur. Its research and development labs were in Tarrytown, thus Gene had moved his family to northern Westchester county. I hadn’t heard from Toni since our Rosenhan conversation. Gene told me she hadn’t been much use to him; he stopped seeing her after only three sessions. “It was a practical problem anyway. I had to make this decision and it was tough. I was scared to stay and scared to go.” He wanted to see me professionally. He felt the new job—he was going to be project director for Minotaur’s new machine—would put him under unbearable pressure. Unbearable was his word.

“I don’t see adult patients anymore, Gene. I’m devoting all my time to the clinic. The few adults who come here will see other therapists. I specialize in working with children who have been severely abused. I’m not up to date treating adults.”

“You mean they’ve made therapy new and improved?”

“There’s always good work going on. It’s no different than anything else. If you came to see me you’d have to play Candyland and draw pictures with Crayolas.”

“Sounds okay to me. I’m pretty good at Candyland. I’m better at Monopoly.”

I laughed. “You sound healthy to me, Gene. Are you sure you really feel the need for therapy? Feeling pressure at taking a new job is realistic, you know.”

“Well … thanks. But …” He sighed. “Forget it.”

“No. I don’t want to forget it. Go on. But what?”

“I remember you saying I could always come and speak to you. For a tune-up, you called it.”

“A tune-up?” That sounded like Rafe the cocksure therapist. As if I were a master mechanic and people were machines that could be regulated with precision. I had promised him I would always be there to listen. He had trusted me with his tenderest feelings and now I was too busy?

I explained that I had moved from White Plains. The new clinic was in Riverdale. He said the drive was no problem and that his schedule was flexible, since he was a project director. He came at lunchtime, the hour I took off as part of relaxation from compulsive work. The construction of rooms for monitored interviews started at that hour, since we tried to keep the mornings quiet. The work crews were installing video cameras behind one-way mirrors—to lessen their obtrusiveness and improve the coverage for the sake of testimony. Our objective was to meet the requirements of the law without inhibiting the children. Every minute of contact had to be recorded or we could be accused of influencing the process and yet, particularly for early sessions, the obvious presence of cameras is distracting. We planned to show the children the equipment and the one-way mirror, then go into the regular rooms—they don’t seem much different from a cheerful kindergarten—and forget their existence. (Although some therapists tape without telling the children, I felt that was unfair. Unfair and too similar to the kind of lying typical of abusive adults.) We were going to videotape whether or not the law was potentially involved. How could we know in advance, for one thing, and the tapes should provide a useful tool for therapists to review and evaluate.

Gene recognized the video cables on his way in. I explained over the noise of the drilling and apologized.

“Are we being recorded?” he asked. He was in jeans, a wrinkled white button-down shirt and Top-Siders. His black hair was long, one bang cutting off an eyebrow. The style seemed too youthful for an adult. His face had few lines. With a little hair dye he could pass for an eighteen-year-old. Maybe he wasn’t clinging to youth emotionally; perhaps, chemically, he wasn’t a man yet. How could I know? (Joseph Stein, with whom I had renewed our childhood friendship after a twenty-year hiatus, had become a world-renowned neurobiologist, devoting all his energies—as have dozens of other talented people—to discovering how the brain works. Although Joseph still had faith that one day science would be able to locate the precise mechanism the drives every action, thought and feeling of humans, he frankly admitted to me that, as of today, we know very little; each discovery leads to more questions.) Gene not only wanted to be a boy—so did his body. What, in the end, do we really understand about rates of aging? It so often seems that everything in human nature can end up being argued as to which is first, the chicken or the
egg.
I wanted to keep an open mind. After years of training and work I was less sure of all theories. And how confident could I be of technique? Gene and I didn’t seem to have changed much. We were back where we started, asking the same questions.

“Recorded?” I stalled.

“I saw video cables and tape machines,” Gene pointed outside.

“That’s for the rooms where we work with children. Unfortunately, with kids, everything becomes a legal issue. We’re required to report to the police any accusation, whether we believe it or not. I want to stop child abusers, of course, but the truth is, I care much more about helping the kids. There’s part of me that wishes we were only asked to ease their pain, not help punish the guilty. The recording equipment isn’t used with adults unless they are accused of hurting kids.” Gene continued to look outside. After a silence, I added, “This is a safe place. What you say to me stays here.”

“I remember you used to say that all the time. But it isn’t true.” Gene smiled in my direction, although his eyes avoided mine. I was pleased that he had chosen to contradict me. In reviewing notes from our earlier work together, I concluded his trouble expressing anger hadn’t been worked through. I had been wrong not to encourage him to resist me actively.

“You don’t feel this is a safe place?”

Gene’s eyes were focused on my shoulder. They briefly scanned my face and settled on a point off to my left. He crossed his legs. “Oh, I guess it’s safe. I didn’t mean that. I meant it’s not true that what I say here stays here.” He paused and added softly, “I’ve read your books.”

I had published only two that contained histories of my patients. Following tradition, I summarized, with the names altered and other details changed for further disguise. Nothing I had written was like this text. Certainly nothing was revealed about me, and little of the real dialogue. Even so, I had asked my patients’ permission first. More to the point, I hadn’t used Gene’s case in any form. “I’ve never written about you, Gene.”