Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (25 page)

For the Countess's part, his attitude toward the revolt on his ranch was ambivalent. One day he would curse the cowgirls as the most disgusting cat pack of female filth to ever gag a decent nostril, and the next day he would reiterate how much he admired women who could make their way without men and would wish them luck. He'd lost interest in the ranch, he said. Now that he had friends in the White House, the taxes the Rubber Rose saved him were a drop in the bucket; he could save more with a single phone call.

“That ranch is anal excruciation,” the Countess complained, his dentures working over his ivory cigarette holder like a chiropractor realigning the spine of a Chihuahua. “When the market improves, I'm going to sell it. Then we'll watch how the new owners handle those little primitives. Say, are you certain the old fleabag who lives on the butte had nothing to do with all this?”

The Countess was never quite satisfied with Sissy's explanations, but he grew quickly bored with making an issue of it. He scrapped his plans for a whooping crane TV commercial and threw himself into new projects.

Julian, on the other hand, had to be forced to muzzle his interrogations and even then his soft brown eyes narrowed harshly at the most innocent and irrelevant references to Sissy's Rubber Rose assignment. He turned off the radio once when the deejay announced a song by Dakota Staton.

Actually, Sissy would have appreciated someone with whom to talk about Jellybean and the Chink—but there was no one she felt she could turn to. Julian, certainly, would not have been a good listener. As it was, he spent a great deal of time, even at his easel, wondering about the changes that had come over his wife, wondering about their origin, whether they were for better or worse. Before her trip West, Sissy had been an ardent lover but a reluctant student. Upon her return, however, she exhibited wolfish intellectual appetites for Julian's discourses upon history, philosophy, politics and the arts, but her responses between the sheets seemed no more than perfunctory. Had the Yale man gained a brain and lost a vagina? And was the Indian happy about it?

As mentioned, the cheer of Christmas brought an end to their discord. One day, while shopping in East Village boutiques, Sissy snapped out of the stupor she'd been in for weeks. Between second and third fingers, she held a sprig of mistletoe over Julian's head and kissed him right on the street. She hummed a carol on the way home. Through the holidays, she was gay and bright, with only an occasional far-away look in her eyes.

Then, on December 31, a few hours before the Gitches were to join the Barths for New Year's Eve at Kenny's Castaways, the news broke that several hospitals in both America and Denmark had been privately following a policy of letting deformed babies die. On the CBS Evening News, one doctor was heard to say, “If a baby is too deformed to be loved, then its life is going to be hell. Death is mercy for the unlovable.” The disclosure slammed Sissy into a dungeon of depression, from which she did not begin to emerge until sometime in February, when she came across by chance an item in the
Times
.

MANILA
, Philippines (AP)—A Manila newspaper reported yesterday the birth of a boy with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot.

"This will bring good luck to the family," said the infant's elated mother.

54.

ALTERNATELY SKIPPING AND STAGGERING,
an overwhelmed Sissy had come down the Siwash Trail after three days at the clockworks. She found a work party of cowgirls, headed by Delores, removing hair dryers and Exercycles from the damaged wing of the main house while a second party, led by Big Red, was busily renovating the old ranch privy. Bonanza Jellybean was nowhere to be seen. Kym disclosed that Jelly and Debbie had hauled a couple of sacks of brown rice out to Siwash Lake in the chuck wagon. They were going to feed the whoopers, who were there now in full strength, and see if the birds couldn't be enticed to extend their usual stay on the ranch.

The cinematographers were no longer at the pond. They had gone off to the Pacific Northwest to shoot a new Walt Disney family feature,
The Living Mud Puddle
. They would be spending a lot of time poking their wide-angle lenses under wet rocks.

Sissy debated waiting for the boss cowgirl's return. She packed slowly, but when the rucksack had been snapped shut there was still no Jellybean. Kym suggested that maybe Jelly and Debbie had stopped to “roll around.” That settled it. Sissy shouldered her rucksack and trudged away. She had walked no more than three miles when the goat-chawed Cadillac limousine—which, as it turned out, was registered to the Rubber Rose—pulled up alongside her. Kym leaned out the driver's window. “Well,” she called. “Aren't you gonna hitchhike me?”

Kym, who had defied Delores in order to give Sissy a ride, dropped her off at the main highway. She hugged her. “You're always welcome,” she said. Over the cowgirl's shoulder miles of wheatgrass shimmered like the brushed hairs of a
gopi
. Violet hills and burnt umber buttes rested in their still American places like novels on Zane Grey's bookshelf. The sun, which in those parts appears as a half-breed—its father a prairie fire and its mother a wolf bite—shampooed Siwash Ridge in blood, so that it resembled the freshly scalped head of a trapper. This was the West. Dakota.

Back in Manhattan . . . Sissy gazing over the primordial rim . . . of mixing bowls . . . dishpans . . . brandy snifters. Sissy listening to the lope of Tenth Street traffic. Sissy staring down the poodle. Sissy, the next time Marie made a pass at her, surprising them both by taking the offensive, and afterward, while getting dressed, feeling that it had been a mistake and swearing off women forever. Sissy pumping Julian for ideas, facts, opinions—then sometimes interrupting his lectures to snigger “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” Sissy painting her nails so that they were a blizzard of cherry coughdrops when she hitched from room to room. Sissy introspective, Sissy brooding, Sissy calm as ever except that now her lifelong serenity seemed thin and brittle and she gave people the disquieting impression that at any moment she might lunge away in an unexpected direction.

Julian refused to give up on her. “She is immature and self-indulgent,” he explained. “Those traits can be overcome.” It was the Mohawk's belief that his wife had been born into an ordinary family in the ordinary way, and had not some gene broken down under pressure, some chromosome slipped and fallen on its ass, she might have become a woman like any other. “She's lovely and intelligent. She needs only to be taught to overcome her affliction instead of reveling in it.”

“Quite probably you are correct,” agreed Dr. Goldman. “As you know, some social and behavioral deviants develop subcultures that, like the ethnic and racial ghettos, constitute havens where the individuals can live openly and with mutual support and insist that they are just as good as anyone else. Social deviates such as homosexuals and drug addicts may congregate in enclaves or live in small communities and take the line that they are not only as good as, but actually better than, 'straights,' and that the lives they lead are superior to those led by the majority. The socially stigmatized individual, by entering a subculture, accepts his alienation from the larger society, and by identifying himself with like souls claims that he is a full-fledged 'normal' or even a superior human being and that it is the others who are lacking. This type of adjustment is much more available to ethnic minorities, such as Jews, Amish or Black Panthers, and to stigmatized social deviants, such as hippies, drug addicts and homosexuals, than it is to the blind, the deaf and the orthopedically handicapped. So your wife may have chosen to become a subculture of one, so to speak.

“You say that she frequently makes a sincere effort to function as a normal woman in a normal household; well, every nonconformist secretly believes that he or she could live a straight life if only they so chose, and no doubt your wife yearns to prove that, within her dextrous limitations, she can adapt at will. Yet, as you say, so long as she indulges her handicap and the fantasy life she has constructed around it, she is not likely to succeed.

“At this juncture, however, I see no need in forcing her to visit the clinic against her will.”

“No, no, I wouldn't wish that,” said Julian.

But that evening when he returned home and saw what Sissy had done, he telephoned Dr. Goldman:

“I'm bringing her in,” he wheezed.

55.

"THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF CRAZY PEOPLE,"
Dr. Goldman said. He said this privately, to close friends, and with no intention of being quoted. “There are those whose primitive instincts, sexual and aggressive, have been misdirected, blunted, confused or shattered at an early age by environmental and/or biological factors beyond their control. Not many of these people can completely and permanently regain that balance we call 'sanity,' but they can be made to confront the source of their damage, to compensate for it, to reduce their disadvantageous substitutions and to adjust to the degree that they can meet most social requirements without painful difficulty. My satisfaction in life is in assisting these people in their adjustments.

“But there are other people, people who
choose
to be crazy in order to cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have
adopted
craziness as a lifestyle. I've found that there is nothing I can do for these people because the only way you can get them to give up their craziness is to convince them that the world is actually sane. I must confess that I have found such a conviction almost impossible to support.”

By Dr. Goldman's unofficial classifications (and he would have been the first to term them personal and oversimplified), the mental “problems” of Sissy Hankshaw Gitche should have fit squarely into the first category, for she had certainly been attended by sufficient traumas in her formative years. Yet, after two sessions with her, one in which she was administered the talk serum to penetrate her reticence, Dr. Goldman was left with the uneasy notion that Sissy belonged partly, if not wholly, in the category of the voluntarily crazed.

Since he was frustrated, annoyed, even a little scared by the second category, Dr. Goldman decided to turn over Sissy's case to one of his assistants. In particular, he decided to dump Sissy's case on Dr. Robbins, the young intern who had only recently assumed duties at the upper East Side clinic.

Dr. Robbins spent much of his time in the garden, a dreamy expression on his face. He looked like Doris Day with a mustache. He had been overheard yelling at a patient who complained of a lack of purpose in life: “Purpose! Purposes are for animals with a hell of a lot more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever its going.”

To a patient who had expressed a wish to overcome his alleged irresponsibility, Dr. Robbins had said, “The man who considers himself 'responsible' has not honestly examined his motives.”

To a patient expressing outrage, Dr. Robbins had shouted, “Don't be outraged, be outrageous!”

At least two patients had received from Dr. Robbins the following advice: “So you think that you're a failure, do you? Well, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with wit style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre success. Embrace failure! Seek it out. Learn to love it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free.”

It should come as no surprise that some of the clinic staff looked upon the new intern with less than favor. Dr. Goldman, however, resisted pressure to dismiss Dr. Robbins. “These young guys come out of school nowadays with their heads dripping Erik Erikson and R. D. Laing. Robbins is bright and those radical ideas are temporarily attractive. After he's been in the field for six months he'll recognize what idealistic hogwash they are and gradually reject them.”

Dr. Goldman summoned Dr. Robbins from the garden, where he'd been fingering a crocus. He gave him Sissy's file. “When you interview Mrs. Gitche, you should consider the following variables: Depression—tensions combined with guilt derived from feelings that deformity is a punishment, tending to immobilize the deformed with consequent sadness, helplessness and inadequacy; Pessimism—a defense against the environment reflected by verbalization of a limited level of aspiration; Inadequate feminine role identification—poor identification with that which in our society constitutes womanhood, with resultant passivity and lethargy; Sociopathic impulsivity—emotions translated into aggressive action regardless of consequences to others; Inadequate compensatory ambition—the inability to mobilize additional effort to overcome the physical limitations of deformity; and, especially in this case, Inverted compensation—denial of the deformity or an irrational capitalization upon the deformity, exaggerated to the point of delusions of grandeur. A well-prepared line of questioning should narrow these variables down fairly quickly to one or two of primary interest and I rather suspect it will be the last that you will find yourself acting upon.”

When he met with Sissy the next morning, however, Dr. Robbins ignored Dr. Goldman's suggested line of inquiry, asking Sissy directly and simply, “Okay, why did you turn your husband's birds loose?”

“I couldn't bear to see them caged any longer,” answered Sissy. “They deserved to be free.”

“Yeah, I understand. But don't you see, those birds had been in a cage their whole lives with somebody to provide for them. Now they're having to fend for themselves in a huge alien city where they don't know the rules and where they're probably frightened and confused. They won't be happy being free.”

Sissy didn't hesitate. “There's just one thing in this life that's better than happiness and that's freedom. It's more important to be free than to be happy.”