“I’m sorry, Gene,” I said with all the feeling I thought he should have. I didn’t have to fake it; I felt true sympathy. His relationship with his mother had been difficult and, as far as I knew, unresolved. The timing of her death was cruel; not that death can be well-timed, but, given her emotionally incestuous relationship to Gene, somewhere it must have felt to him that she died because he had replaced her with another woman, another family. Had Gene really managed this without the need for help? If so, that was impressive and meant our work together had been much more successful than I had any right to expect.
[Cure is used too casually, to say the least, in my profession. Psychopharmacologists use it when an objective observer might say the patient has had his most severe symptoms overwhelmed by chemicals. Talking therapists use it when others might say that a particular issue has been resolved. In theory, a cure should mean that a patient has achieved a feeling of harmony — homeostasis — and has the strength to regain that balance on his own each time life deals one of its inevitable blows. In my experience the latter is the rarest of accomplishments. An event such as Carol Kenny’s early death just as Gene was pouring the foundation for his own family, often sends a patient back to therapy, usually to repeat what was done before, but sometimes — this was Jung’s main preoccupation — for the sake of consolidation and further growth. Some believe, in particular psychopharmacologists, that this apparent recidivism proves talking therapy doesn’t work. That seems to me to underestimate life’s difficult terrain. To scale one mountain doesn’t mean a higher one won’t require a guide or that previously acquired skills were useless.]
The waiter had returned. Gene occupied himself with taking his change and leaving a tip. He hadn’t acknowledged my sympathy. He stood up, feet wavering from the alcohol.
“It must have been hard on you.”
Gene pressed his lips in and nodded. “I thought about calling you.”
“You could have. I hope I made it clear—”
“Oh yeah. I knew that.” He was so unsteady on his legs that he reached for the wing chair with his left hand. “But what could you say? She didn’t last long. They caught it late. Cathy got me through it. And then Pete was born. I was just sorry Mom never got to see him.” He looked down and was a sad sight, in his prep school clothes, seemingly on the verge of tears. The frantic energy of the computer triumph was gone. “Well,” he said with a sigh. “Time to go home.”
I walked him downstairs to the lobby, pausing near the doors. I asked him if he wanted me to recommend therapists near his home.
“You got a network, huh?” Gene said with a laugh.
“I can ask around and—”
“Thanks,” he lightly touched my shoulder and immediately let go. “Everything’s okay now. Really. I gave you the wrong impression. If Flash II had been a bust, I would need help, but now I’ll be fine.” I got one of his sideways glances: his eyes were bloodshot and, to my mind, scared. The doorman asked if Gene wanted a cab. He said yes and offered me his hand. “Thank you for everything. That’s what I wanted to say.”
I shook his hand and said, “Wait.” I removed a card from my wallet. “Here’s where you can reach me. Call if you want me to recommend someone to see in your area. Or just to talk, of course.”
Gene declined with a shake of his head, eyes down. “I’m okay.” Then he accepted the card. “Okay. Thanks.” He hurried out the revolving door, stumbling when he reached the curb. The doorman took his elbow for a moment. Gene looked back before entering the cab and waved, still, to my eyes, a little boy bravely going to school.
I knew it was only a matter of time before I would hear from him again. He called a few months later, in the spring. He said he was having trouble sleeping. “We worked like madmen on Flash II,” he told me. “Eighteen, twenty hours a day. Sometimes I didn’t sleep for two nights running. I guess I can’t get back to norm, I can’t unwind. Is there someone I can see who will give me some sleeping pills?”
Obtaining sleeping pills, unfortunately, is easy in America, the land of instant gratification, so I assumed this was a smoke screen. I wondered why Gene was embarrassed to admit he needed help. Did he feel he was letting me down? “Let me make some calls and get a few names for you. I want to make sure I can tell you something about them so you have a basis for making a choice.”
“Well … it might only be for a session or two, you know. Don’t go to too much trouble.”
Yeah, why go to any trouble? It’s only your mental health. I was annoyed. Passivity and the self-defeating fear of satisfying his needs — his symptoms were back, full-blown. Maybe Gene had been right to be afraid to ask me for help; my vanity didn’t seem to be taking it well. “No trouble,” I said. “You know, Gene, I don’t really think merely taking some sleeping pills will help. You might need only a few sessions, but if this has been going on for months, there’s more to it than getting a night’s sleep.”
“Oh,” he said and was quiet.
“I’ll get you some names and call you back.”
Once again, I felt there was an odd connection between Gene and myself, and I was relieved I could pass him on to another therapist. The timing of his reappearance felt provocative. That very day Uncle Bernie was in the Tower at New York Hospital, about to undergo a gruesome radical treatment for advanced pancreatic cancer. His doctors planned to flood his body with a massive dose of chemotherapy, dangling him over the edge of death. His appendix and spleen were to be removed. His kidneys would be continuously filtered, a respirator would breathe for him, his blood would be changed many times over. For three days he would run a fever of one hundred and four. He would probably need to be packed in ice to keep it that low; any higher and there would be brain damage. And throughout this there would be excruciating pain, none of it able to be relieved with morphine; Uncle would have to endure unaided. Basically the idea was to kill all the stem cells, followed by a bone-marrow transplant from his daughter. If he survived, presumably the cancer would be permanently gone. The treatment was a roll of the dice. To me it sounded like the old joke: if the medicine didn’t kill him, he would be cured. This procedure had been tried only six times. Four were a success — in the immediate sense, since the survivors had been in remission for merely a year. The two failures died within twenty-four hours. Of course the numbers were too small to be meaningful. The rationale for its horrific risk was that Bernie was doomed anyway.
Before leaving for the city, I had a free half hour to call a friend from Hopkins, Bill Roth, now at Cambridge Hospital. I assumed he could recommend psychiatrists near Gene in Massachusetts. I was in my office in White Plains, used as a base for our work with abused children. We were minutes from a state-run child welfare center where Diane, Ben and I were on the staff, our prime responsibility. The Grayson Case continued to keep at least two of us traveling to Boston, now for the sake of treating the children rather than satisfying the law. Thus, things were backed up at the welfare center and I was going to lose at least three more days because of Bernie.
“Is your ex-patient a serious fruitcake?” irreverent Bill asked. “Or just a whiner?”
“I think he could use some grief work, but I don’t know for sure. I’ve been out of touch.”
“Oh, you want a hugger. How about Toni? Remember her?” She was an excellent psychologist we knew at Hopkins. “She’s somewhere in the Massachusetts burbs now. She could make anyone feel glad to be alive. Press against her melons and you could watch your house go down in flames without a peep.”