“If you’re interested, I guess I’d have to say that the transference dates from just about this time frame.
“I had my notes. And all those tape recordings of our sessions that I’d play over and over, wearing them out practically. As if they were favorite tunes, the top of the charts, say. Or like those half-dozen old movies in the ship’s library they used to rotate and show us in the Pacific during the war. She really was all the data I had. Never mind my two lousy years’ residency at Cook County Hospital. Those folks were in a clinic, mad on the arm. (Which was how the family got me in the first place. Sure, if a psychiatrist already had a practice he couldn’t just pick up and leave people who were dependent on him. It had to be a kid.)
“My notes and hers. The tapes that we made. Her madwoman’s homework — the journals she kept, the bad dreams she wrote down.
“And access, too, to those letters she wrote other patients. Witty — wit was a symptom — funny and malicious, reminding people whose own bad dreams had just been burned out of them by shock therapy of everything they had forgotten, rubbing their noses in their past, bringing them down from the thin, comfortable air of their electric amnesia. Not making it up but piling it on, some ‘Hasty Pudding’ rendition of their loony doings. Which she never showed me, but which their psychiatrists did, outraged as schoolteachers intercepting passed notes. Of course I spoke to her about it. I asked why she wrote them. ‘Six years,’ she said, ‘I’ve been here six years. A bunch of these crazies are my best pals. I’ve made love to some of the men and a few of the women and spoken with the rest like Francis of Assisi making small talk with birds. What happens if they get well?’ ‘Don’t you want them to get well?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do you want to get well?’ ‘Craziness ain’t much of a birthright.’ ‘I have to give back the letters.’ ‘Their shrinks will destroy them. Or lock them up in the poor bastards’ files.’ ‘I have to return them.’ ‘Make copies,’ she said. ‘They’re poison pen letters,’ she said, ‘as much a record of my nuttiness as theirs. Make copies. Put them in that manuscript you’re writing about me.’
“Because she said ‘manuscript’ now, not ‘book.’ Knowing that if the letters went in, it could never in either of our lifetimes be any published book, that even if I changed their names the facts would be there, that we’d be hung up in lawsuits the rest of our lives.
“But I did what she asked. The letters became part of the record too. I copied them into what only one of us still thought of even as the manuscript. Though the patient had never even seen it. Now she asked about it every day. ‘You’re some doctor,’ she’d say. ‘Eight years in private practice and you’ve yet to cure anyone. What’s with the manuscript? How’s that going at least?’ ‘There’s a lot of material,’ I’d tell her, ‘I’m up half the night transcribing tapes. Copying those letters you write. I’m losing sleep. When I finally get to bed I toss and turn for an hour.’ ‘What’s with the big deal opus manuscript? Do I get to see it soon or do you plan to take another seven years?’ I think this obsession with the manuscript was probably one of her last symptoms.
“So I started to show her pieces of it. The character of our sessions changed. Each morning I’d read the patient part of a chapter. She was fascinated. When the hour was up she was reluctant to leave. I would read her the rest of the chapter during our afternoon session. This went on for about a year. She was very calm, calmer than I’d ever seen her. Those earlier symptoms didn’t seem to obtain any longer. The fears, I mean. She was reading newspapers now, watching TV and switching from channel to channel in the middle of shows and going on to the next show and following it to the end even if she hadn’t seen the beginning. She was getting tolerant about meaninglessness. And put bright bedspreads on her bed, flowery prints, complicated patterns. We’d been taking walks around the grounds together since the middle of winter.
“When spring came she even wanted me to drive her to town. We were with each other constantly now, though the manuscript, which was finished now, was always along. And though we’d long since finished putting it together, I started to read to her from the worst parts of her life. In canoes I would read to her from her childhood. Her symptoms and traumas. We’d go to the park and while she was setting the tablecloth out on the picnic table I’d have her listen to those cruel letters she had written the other patients.
“ ‘Hey, come on,’ she said one day when we were driving back from a weekend visit to her home. She was driving. I had just taken the manuscript out of my suitcase. ‘Give us a break,’ she said. ‘I’m getting awfully tired of hearing about that lady. That was some bad news, sad-ass lady. Why don’t you do us both a favor and tear the damn thing up? Just throw it out the car window or deep-six it in the litter barrel when we stop to pee. I don’t want to hear about that crappy lady anymore.’
“ ‘You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Judith.’
“ ‘Why not? I was a jerk.’
“ ‘You were an interesting woman.’
“ ‘I was a sickaroony.’
“ ‘You’re well now.’
“ ‘Eleven years. Hardly the nick of time, wouldn’t you say?’
“ ‘Eleven years. That’s how long we were together, Judith.’
“ ‘Should auld acquaintance,’ she said.
“ ‘You’re getting discharged next week. Then I guess you’ll get together with that graduate student who’s been visiting you. I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
“ ‘You? Eleven years at seventy thousand dollars a year? That’s more than three quarters of a million dollars. Why, you’re almost a rich man, Doc.’
“ ‘It’s the transference,’ I said.
“ ‘Yeah, I know,’ Judy said. ‘It was a hell of a transference. Thanks, Doc.’
“She thanked me. For the transference. I think it’s what cured her. That I was the only man the patient knew who had loved the patient all those years.”
The recessional! Trumpets and organ music! A bright bang of reverberant bliss! Out of the psychiatrist’s, Breel’s, gawky silence, his bumpkin shuffle. The big breakthrough as foolish grin, lopside heart. While the Meals-on-Wheelers, no longer charity cases so much as a special-interest group, invited observers, say, from some neutral but not indifferent commission, took, under cover of the music, collective liberties with the doings of their hosts, disputing intent and motive and all the ways of doing business that were not their ways, feeling had, the more religious among them, deprived of some final settlement and solace, who had ceremoniously come to grieve for the strange woman who for years now, rain or shine, had fed them lunch. Chatty in her way too, of course, but like some cheery columnist of the wide world whose tales of the fabulous had been, or so they’d thought, mere bedtime stories, meant to entertain or distract, told neither to enlist nor support sympathies, but out of the goodness of an enraged and generous heart, and not, or so they’d thought, to be taken seriously. Postcard information and detail. That there might have been a picture of the death camps on the face of the card had not struck them as unusual since they never expected to see such places themselves.
Now they stood in their pews, their faces turned toward the center aisle as first the thurifer and then the crucifer went by, followed by the acolytes and clergy. It was only when the immediate family passed that they struggled to put names to faces, placing individuals in the context of Judith Glazer’s now heartfelt, retroactive gossip.
Dr. Breel had long since climbed down from the pulpit. Where he had seemed at once both faltering and certain. Now he was again hesitant, trying to decide whether to wait for those peripheral members of the family — cousins (he recognized them easily enough; he’d read the book), pals from childhood, the coaches, cooks, servants and tutors of Cornell Messenger’s speculations — or to plunge himself into mourning’s mainstream. He seemed ready to plunge, determined, deferential only to some graduated kinship principle of his own ordering. Wavering, he thrust himself behind Sam’s sister from California and in front of the dead woman’s first lover.