‘Maybe I’ll talk some more to Karen Bliss.’
Klinsman looked asked, ‘What did she think of Jane?’
‘She was thinking along the lines of Multiple Personality Disorder — or whatever the fancy new name is for it these days — but I haven’t had a real chance to talk to her about it yet.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Too late now, maybe tomorrow.’
There was a message on his answering machine when Macandrew got back to his own office. Karen had called at four thirty. If he got back before six, he should ring her; if not, he should call in the morning. It was a quarter before seven. Macandrew looked at his diary for the following day; there was no operation scheduled till the day after but he did have to see the patient and familiarise himself with the case notes. There was a clinical meeting pencilled in for two in the afternoon and a seminar he wanted to go to at four thirty. He wondered if Karen would be free for lunch. He called her extension and left a message on her machine, just in case he should miss her in the morning. He suggested they meet at noon.
Macandrew got Karen’s return message when he returned to his office next morning after examining his surgical case. Karen was free for lunch so he called an Italian restaurant down on the Plaza and made a reservation for twelve fifteen.
‘Maybe our answering machines should be having lunch,’ said Karen as they drove down to the Plaza.
‘I think mine is going steady with the administration people,’ said Macandrew. ‘I get reminders every day about forms I should have completed and returned but didn’t.’
‘Thank God I’m not the only one.’
The restaurant was just over half full. They were shown to a table in a booth well away from the door and left to consider the menu beneath Italian travel posters on the walls and fishing nets suspended from the ceiling. The nets only served to remind Macandrew how depressingly far the mid-west was from the sea. The sea was what he missed most of all. Not being able to drive down to the coast was a big minus.
‘Did you get permission to sedate Jane Francini?’ asked Karen.
‘Her husband gave it almost as soon as he saw her.’ Macandrew told her about his subsequent meeting with Weber and Francini’s attorney.
Karen shook her head in sympathy and said, ‘Heavy stuff. Sometimes the idea of being a country doctor seems very attractive.’
‘It certainly was last night,’ agreed Macandrew. He took a sip of iced water and asked, ‘What did you think of the Francini tapes?’
‘Complicated. Little Emma threw me; she seemed so real. I started out thinking multiple personality disorder but now I’m not so sure...’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘She never seems to be herself,’ said Karen. ‘That particular personality seems to have gone completely missing.’
‘I suppose that’s the saddest thing,’ said Macandrew.
‘There are lots of recorded instances of patients who’ve sustained head injuries in car accidents undergoing a personality change. They make what appears to be a good recovery as far as the nursing and medical staff are concerned, but once they’re home, their family and people who know them start complaining about big changes in the way they behave. The words, “different people” keep cropping up.’
‘That’s more or less what Tony Francini said,’ said Macandrew. ‘He said Janey was a different person. She looked like Janey but she wasn’t...’
Karen nodded. ‘Not too much is known about this but it’s been recorded in patients who’ve had strokes. It’s also been the basis of several lawsuits. Big insurance claims for changes of personality. Previous nice guy becomes selfish monster, that sort of thing.’
‘But this is more than a change of personality trait,’ said Macandrew. ‘Jane Francini becomes an entirely different person — maybe several.’
‘But it is interesting that she’s always, Emma when she starts to come out of sedation,’ said Karen.
Macandrew nodded. ‘It’s only when she regains full consciousness that she becomes totally confused.’
‘I tried working on the confused bits from the tapes I made but I’m really not sure what’s going on. She’s obviously suffering but the strange thing was that she didn’t look deranged at any point.’
‘That’s exactly what I thought when I saw her like that for the first time,’ said Macandrew. ‘She sounded deranged but didn’t look it. It was kind of spooky, almost as if she thought I was the one with the problem.’
‘I suppose that might fit with multiple personality disorder. Believe it or not, Carl Jung’s own cousin suffered from it. She was in reality a shy fifteen-year-old girl of only mediocre intelligence, hesitant and unsophisticated. Quite suddenly and without warning, she would change into a smooth, assured, educated lady who spoke good, literary German instead of the rough Swiss dialect she normally spoke. This is often a feature in reports of this sort of case. The foreign personality is that of a much stronger character altogether than the patient.’
‘Jane Francini is normally a quiet, reserved lady,’ said Macandrew.
‘The character she becomes when she’s not sedated is certainly not,’ said Karen. ‘But there again, when she is under partial sedation, she’s a little girl from Moscow who doesn’t speak Russian...’
Macandrew shook his head. ‘If only one of her personalities could be Jane.’
‘Mac, I know you’d like me to tell you that her condition might be treatable and, with time, she’ll get better but I can’t. I’d dearly like to but I can’t. I think she’ll have to be certified and sent out to Farley Ridge.’
Six
Two days later, Jane Francini was transferred to Farley Ridge Sanatorium: Macandrew was there to see her off. He knew there was a danger that his presence might be construed by some as an admission of guilt but despite this, he wanted to be there. He liked her as a person in their talks before the operation and, as she had pointed out, they were fellow “Scots”.
Jane was lightly sedated and appeared comfortable in her Emma persona. Her eyes reflected bemusement at what was going on around her but nothing like the distress she showed when sedation was completely withdrawn. She continued to ask about her mother and the staff continued to assure her that she would be along presently as they wheeled her out of the Med Centre and lifted into the back of the waiting ambulance.
‘Good bye, Emma,’ said Macandrew as she passed by.
Jane turned her head towards him and Macandrew felt a hollow in his stomach. The look in Jane Francini’s eyes was perfectly in tune with her Emma character. He was looking into the clear, intelligent, innocent eyes of an eight-year-old girl who wasn’t at all sure what was going on. The attendants closed up the back of the ambulance and she was gone.
Things gradually returned to normal over the course of the following week although the Francini case was never far from Macandrew’s mind. He had resolved to find out as much as he could about Hartman’s tumours — something which involved him spending a good deal of time in the medical library and which proved easier said than done because of a dearth of published information. There was no text book material available on the subject: what information there was, had to be gleaned from medical journals and research papers.