“Force me to what? Tell them?” She nodded at the house. The tears had abated. She wasn’t in conflict. I was. These were settled matters for her. “How could we have made a family together in front of them? I have beautiful children. You don’t know. You’ve ignored them.”
“You know why.”
“You’ll do anything for them, for Aaron, for Helen, you’ll gush over their kids and you won’t even look at pictures of mine.”
“You can’t expect me to be glad that you’re happily married.”
“I am happily married.”
I let go. The impulse to kiss was certainly gone.
“I know you don’t want to believe that,” Julie said. “But I am. I love Richard. I’m furious at you that you won’t let go and see me for who I am. I’m a middle-aged woman with two kids and a husband. I was never as complicated as you wanted me to be. I loved you and I was willing to give up having a family to be with you. I couldn’t do better than that.” She sighed and covered her face. “I’m just as conventional as they are,” she mumbled. “That’s the truth.”
She was right, not about the last remark, but about me. Losing the fantasy of Julie was as painful as actually losing her, maybe more so. Her hands came away. I stared and tried to see the real woman. Was she there, the girl who had fought my mother and my uncle on my behalf? The woman who had once brought me the grace of mature love? The tennis court’s clarifying light left nothing for my imagination. She looked tired and her eyes were dead to the silent pleas in my own. She was a stranger and that meant in some way I was still a stranger to myself.
In the distance, a voice called, “Ray-feel!” A figure ran toward us from the house, a shape I didn’t recognize.
Julie squeezed my arm. “Be happy, Rafe. You deserve it.” She stood up. “Get away from us. We’re not good for you.”
“Ray-feel,” the figure called. He was carrying two racquets and a can of balls. The dumpy shape reached the border of the court’s lights. It was cousin Daniel, in his black trousers, his jacket and shirt off. He looked like a photograph of a turn-of-the-century boxer: bare-chested, big-bellied, in long dark pants. “Tennis, anyone?” he said and laughed.
“You drunk?” Julie said quietly.
I stood up.
“Come on,” Daniel offered a racquet. “I bet I can still beat you.”
“I’m sure you can,” I said and walked Julie back to my dead uncle’s house.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Rosenhan Warning
TONI REPORTED THAT GENE TALKED A BLUE STREAK IN THE FIRST SESSION, but said nothing. He was preoccupied by an offer from his boss, Theodore Copley, the leader of Flash II’s creative team. Copley had confided in Gene that he was seriously considering a job at Flashworks’s main rival, Minotaur. If he accepted, he wanted Gene to come with him. Gene believed the anxious contemplation of this decision — to leave the company where he had been successful and move his family against his wife’s wishes to another state — explained his insomnia. Toni was unconvinced. I hadn’t sent her any information on Gene or told her details of our work together. She asked for them now. I declined.
“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.