“Here she is!” Mrs. Outcault said. “You’re fine, honey, aren’t you?”
My mother nodded, though she was not entirely sure. She averted her eyes from the wallpaper and found Mr. Casamonaca beside her. He had his chin in the air and was looking down his long nose at her with an air of satisfaction and calm. Don’t worry, said his eyes, everything is unfolding just as I intended.
“I enjoyed your play,” my mother told him.
In reply, Mr. Casamonaca gravely unscrewed an invisible jar. My mother heard heels tapping, a rustling that was also a rattle. My grandmother came running into the small lobby minus her wings, with her crown askew, pressing it against her head with one hand. Mrs. Outcault stood up, and everyone stepped back and looked at my grandmother except Mr. Casamonaca, who seemed not to notice. My mother got up too fast. Her pulse drummed its fingers along the hinge of her jaw.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” my mother said. It was the first thing she could think of to say.
My mother went to her mother, who slid her cool bare arms alongside my mother’s neck and scissored her between them. It was an awkward but sincere embrace. My mother’s gaze strayed again to the wallpaper with its thousand gaping, long-eared faces, and my grandmother knew without following it what there was to see. “You don’t have to look,” she said.
My mother turned her face from the wallpaper for good.
*
“You have been in prison,” Dr. Medved said.
“Wallkill,” my grandfather said. “Thirteen months.”
“For a violent crime.”
My grandfather had anticipated that from time to time, over the course of his life to come, he would be expected to give some account of events between August 1957 and September 1958. He would do so, he had decided, only when asked directly by someone who had a reasonable right to know. Employers, inevitably; though in his present situation, since he’d been recruited by Sam Chabon—who was filled in by the warden—on the very grounds of the prison, nothing had needed to be said. He would tell my grandmother about his time served, provided she asked; the details were nothing he felt a need to volunteer. As for my mother, What was it like in prison? had been among the few spontaneous questions aimed his way during their drive down from New York City, and she had seemed content—or, according to her version, she had been obliged to content herself—with a one-word answer: Interesting. Beyond these moments, my grandfather had estimated that he was likely to be forced into, and had therefore budgeted, ballpark three to five discussions of his incarceration between now and the day he died. He decided to spend one of them now.
“I attacked a man. My employer. I tried to strangle him with a telephone cord.”
“I see. And what had he done to deserve such treatment?”
“Nothing,” my grandfather said. “As far as I know.”
“Ha,” the doctor said. “And to provoke it?”
“I got fired.”
“Ah.”
“It was the day after the first time she tried to burn the tree. I was, you know. I was agitated.”
“Because she had set fire to this tree. After a period of more than a year—”
“Almost two years.”
“—during which her illness appeared largely to have disappeared. The hallucinations abated.”
“Yes. Only looking back, I could see . . . I realized they . . . It had been there all along. It was just that somehow we all managed to ignore it for a while.”
“And then it came charging back that night. In a great fiery rush. That must have been terrifying.”
“It definitely seemed to invalidate the sense of relief, I’ll tell you that.”
“And the next day. The attack. How much of the anger that led you to try to strangle your employer do you feel was really misdirected anger toward your—”
“All of it. I didn’t even really know the man.”
“Ah.”
“It wasn’t her, exactly, I was angry at. I didn’t blame her, and I don’t now. I knew she couldn’t help it. I knew she had no way to stop herself.”
“Which is why you felt you had to take your anger out on someone else.”
“It’s not impossible.”
“I’d say it’s quite likely.”
“It has a certain logic.”
“And what if—well. What if you had not been so clear in your own mind about her fundamental lack of culpability due to mental instability? What if you did feel that somehow she was to blame for her actions? Do you think your anger would have directed itself more, ah, more appropriately? In the sense that you would have tried to take it out on her and not a relative stranger.”
“What are we talking about here? Is there something that I don’t know about? How could she be to blame?” My grandfather caught himself before the next logical question slipped out: Was the Skinless Horse real? Then he saw a look in Medved’s face that made his heart want to rephrase the unasked question, come at it from the opposite side: Or had she been making the whole thing up?
Medved sat without saying anything for an uncomfortably long time. He gripped the arms of his chair and pushed himself to his feet. He went to a large steel cabinet in the corner. Inside it on steel shelves were rows of thin cardboard boxes, lined up like books with their spines outward, five or six dozen. The spines of the boxes had blank white rectangles on each of which a patient’s name had been written, along with some dates. Each patient had at least three boxes; my grandmother had seven. Medved pointed to a chunky gray machine sitting on a low steel typing table beside the cabinet. “Know what that is?”
“A tape recorder. Looks like a Wollensak.”
“It is. I use it to record my sessions with patients.” He pointed to the boxes in the cabinet that had my grandmother’s name on them. “These are my sessions with your wife. I can’t share them with you, of course. I am not really supposed to characterize or paraphrase or even discuss them with you at all.”
He closed the cabinet and sat back down. He grabbed hold of his cheeks and pulled on them, worked them between his fingers. “At first there was not much of interest that she wanted to tell me. Her guard was up, not against me and my questions so much as against her tormentor. But once we began the Premarin treatment . . . Well, it has had a profound effect on her symptoms and behavior. On the pattern of her thoughts and the way she expresses them. The effect has been so considerable that I am forced to question the earlier diagnosis of trauma-induced schizophrenia and consider that all along your wife has been suffering from some kind of acute hormonal imbalance, some deficiency in the production of estradiol by her ovaries.”
“Unless that is schizophrenia.”
“Not out of the question, in females, at any rate. Clearly, it’s possible that estradiol played some critical role. We really know nothing at all about it. At any rate, as soon as the voice began to recede . . . as soon as her guard could be let down . . . She began to talk, during our sessions, with a freedom she had never had or felt before. Naturally, I listened. And not only because that is what I am obligated and paid to do. The account she gave. Of her experiences. During the war. It was . . .” Medved settled his chin in his left palm, his left elbow resting on the desk. He looked out the window of his office at the sky turning black in the east. “I will be honest. I really don’t know how to finish that sentence,” he said.
“I’ve heard it,” my grandfather said. “I know.”
“You have heard something. Have you heard everything?”
“I would have no way of knowing that.”