“Well,” Sam whispered, “if you’re all squared away.” He started to leave, looking at the men and women on the aisles as he walked to the front of the church, accepting their handshakes, bending to receive the women’s hugs. He was at once solemn and oddly hospitable, a flexibly expansive man.
Mills excused himself to the lady on his right — they were seated boy-girl, boy-girl, as if it were a formal dinner party — and asked if he might say something to the gentleman. The man smiled at him. “Pardon, sir,” Mills said, producing his white gloves, “I took care of Mrs. Glazer down there in Mexico for a while and it seems she asked for me to replace one of the real pallbearers, but she didn’t specify which real pallbearer I was supposed to stand in for. If you’re…”
“Sure,” the man said, “Judy was the coach. The coach calls the shots.”
My God, Mills thought, it’s what’shisname, the guy with the franchise.
(Because he knew nothing about obsequy, understanding well enough from his yokel’s back bench condition the ins and outs of grief and loss — hadn’t Mr. Mead, his father-in-law, a man he both respected and liked, died within the season? hadn’t Mrs. Glazer? — reassured by the hang of his gut, the small, packed, sorrowful nausea there like a darning egg or some discrete, comfortable orthodoxy which fondled his sentiment and vouchsafed his heart. But nothing at all, not even curiosity, about the stately weights and measures of public ceremony — which may have explained the muddy color of the mood ring plugged to his mild, even-tempered boredom — the organ solos and responsive readings, the bishop’s ringing exhortation of Heaven, his official encouragement of the immediate family, and his feeling denial of death, Mills in a way not even present, a time server, a clock watcher, waiting for whatever signal he knew must come when his pallbearing colleagues would rise and arrange themselves at the big, silver-handled box — and in what order? would the funeral director line them up, drill-sergeanting precedence, their disparate seniorities? or had Mrs. Glazer, who, Mills knew, called the shots here, called this one too, choreographing the last detail of all, the procession to and from the back door of her hearse, Mills’s presence sheer habit by this time, as if the dead woman had become accustomed to his assisting her in and out of rental cars? — George ready to go it alone if there should be a hitch, prepared to throw his studied leverages into one final, mighty eviction.
(Listening again only when a chubby, acne’d, middle-aged man rose from where he had been sitting behind Sam and the two girls and took a position in the empty pulpit.)
The man waited for the anthem that had accompanied him (or that, rather, he had accompanied, his bearing gradually enhanced by the music) to finish. Then, glancing first at McKelvey and then at the Glazers, he started to speak in a voice that was almost conversational, almost offhand.
“Well,” he began, “the patient insisted that everything have meaning. That’s familiar enough, I guess. Once they’re into it I don’t suppose there’s been a dozen analysands in the history of analysis who haven’t brought their dreams and even the least encounters of their day to their analysts for examination. Believe me, I’ve seen them come like cats with birds in their jaws, like kids with swell report cards. That’s not what I’m talking about. Lots of people are like that. You don’t have to be neurotic. I guess not.
“I mean the patient demanded that everything have meaning. She had no tolerance for things that didn’t. ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoons drove her up the wall and she couldn’t understand why ice cream came in so many flavors. Let’s see…Symptoms. She could be phobic about fillers in newspapers. As a matter of fact, during her worst years, she wouldn’t even read a paper. She couldn’t take in why the stories weren’t connected, and it terrified her that an article about a fire could appear next to a piece on the mayor. She was the same about television. She couldn’t follow a story once it was interrupted by a commercial. Variety shows, the connection between the acts. So that was one of her symptoms.
“Let’s see…
“For a while she was nervous about bedspreads. They gave her the creeps. So did tablecloths, folded napkins. She thought they might be hiding something that wasn’t supposed to be there. That whole business about bedspreads and tablecloths, though, that was a new one on me. Of course they’re all new ones. I mean there’s really no such thing as a classic symptom. If there were, madness would be easier to treat than it is. It’s hard to treat. Actually, in a way, the patient’s got to get tired of her disease. Well, that’s my theory anyway. A lot of psychiatrists disagree.
“The patient was institutionalized eleven years. That’s a long time. The saddest thing was this terrible fear. She was very intelligent, but because agoraphobia was another of her symptoms, she refused to go out and never quite grasped what was going on outside her window. She was afraid of weather. Autumn nearly killed her. When the leaves turned color. When they dropped off the trees, that gave her the heebie-jeebies altogether. Snow and rain, lightning and ice. You can imagine what spring did to her with its buds and green shoots and all the furry signals trees put out before they go to leaf.
“She couldn’t understand temperature swings, why her windows were open sometimes and shut at others. What am I saying? She couldn’t understand nighttime and daytime. So those were other symptoms.
“Look,” he said, “this is difficult for me. I’m not sure this is even ethical. Strictly speaking, it’s all privileged information. She asked me to tell these things. She arranged it with Bishop McKelvey. Well, they’re open secrets anyway. Most of you were her loved ones. You know this stuff. But it’s cat-out-of-the-bag, and it makes me nervous. Probably I seem ridiculous. Under the circumstances, even if I’d just been her orthopedist telling you about her broken leg or bad back, I’d still seem silly. It’s all time and place. She’s put me in a bad situation. I don’t know what she thought she was up to. I suppose that sounds dopey too. I mean I was her psychiatrist, I charted her head like the New World. I’m supposed to know. Anyway, I don’t.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.
“A lot of you know I was retained by the family. That I was her very own bought-and-paid-for personal psychiatrist. Like some high-priced music coach or the princess’s astrologer. I lived in.
“I guess you know I wrote a book about her case. Or manuscript. It was never published. Well, that whole business was the patient’s idea. She saw herself as material, subject matter for a book. Maybe you could put that down as another symptom, but if it is, God knows it’s one the patient shared with nine out of ten people alive. I didn’t have to write it, I suppose. I was on retainer and the family paid top dollar. (This was just after I’d completed my residency. I couldn’t realistically have expected to make that much money for another five or six years at the inside.) The Claunches made it clear from the outset that I was, well, that I was the doctor. So I didn’t have to write it. I guess I went along because I didn’t have much else to do. Madness is a full-time occupation, but only for the madman. (That’s really how the cure works. My notion of it anyway, though most don’t agree with me. If the patient doesn’t do herself an injury and just lives long enough she’ll probably wear herself out.) Anyway, the patient was all the data I had. So I started to write her up about the middle of the third year.