“True. But let me ask you. When she talked about her family, her experiences during the war. The circumstances of your daughter’s birth. Or set that to one side. Generally speaking, in the course of your life with her, in her expressions of emotion and the patterns of her thought, would you say that there was a . . . coherence to her? What we might call her presentation of self—did it feel consistent?”
It was like when you climbed a stairway with the lights out, reached for the top step, and lurched into a hole in the dark. From that long-ago Sunday afternoon outside the doors of Ahavas Sholom synagogue when, from one day to the next, my grandmother seemed to have forgotten or switched off a supposedly acute aversion to the touch of animal skin, the answer to Dr. Medved’s question had always been No.
“Here’s what worries me,” Medved said gently when my grandfather didn’t say anything. “Because of the incident with the tree and your response to it. What if she were to tell you something or you learned something about her, her account of who she is, her history, that caused you to question everything she had told you before?”
“Sounds like I ought to tell her not to tell me,” my grandfather said.
“Really.” Dr. Medved looked surprised. Maybe he was even a little disappointed.
“If she’s feeling better, that’s all I care about.”
“But as I suggested, I hope I made it clear—of course we’ll continue her on the Premarin, but there’s no history or precedent here. I’ve never seen a case like hers, and there’s no way of knowing whether the effects we’re seeing will be durable, let alone permanent.* If she should stop feeling better . . .”
“Whatever bad or ugly thing it is, Doc. Whatever’s at the bottom of whatever’s the matter with my wife? I’ve already seen and heard it. I know it’s ugly and she hates herself for it—”
“I doubt it’s quite as simple as that. It isn’t something she did or didn’t do but the action of her particular hormonal, ah, situation on a set of circumstances—”
“Doc, I’m an engineer, an electrical engineer. That’s my training. Engineers spend a lot of time on what’s called failure analysis. Whether you’re designing, or testing, or building, you . . . because, you know, things break. They fail, they explode, collapse, burn out, there’s stress, fatigue, fracture. And you want to find out why it failed, that’s part of your job. You want to figure out what’s wrong so you can fix it. Maybe I used to look at my wife in that regard. At the beginning, maybe for a long time. Wanting to know what went wrong. Thinking I could fix her. But I don’t want to think of her like that anymore, you know, looking for the bad capacitor. I just want to, I mean . . . I accept her and I . . .” He was going to say that he loved my grandmother, but that didn’t feel like something one man ought to bother another man with. “She’s broken, I’m broken,” he said. “Everybody’s broken. If she’s not in misery anymore, I’ll take it.”
Dr. Medved blinked. It looked like he was organizing an argument in his thoughts. “I— All right,” he said. “You know yourself better than I do.”
“Don’t be too sure,” my grandfather said.
There was a soft tap, and then the door swung open and my grandmother was there. Hair curled, looking into him from somewhere on the far side of those damaged eyes, blue as the Monte Carlo night. Her face, all the angles of beauty and torment he had fallen for then, in spite of combat fatigue and a blanket disdain for sentimental conventions, at first sight. She was wearing the navy dress, the one she’d been wearing on admission to Greystone Park. It had a wide belt that cinched her waist very much to the advantage of her breasts and hips. She had put on a little weight, and that also proved advantageous.
“Hello, darling,” my grandfather said. He got up and went to put his arms around her. He kissed her. It was meant only to be a kiss hello, but it lasted a while and ended with her giving his lower lip the gentlest of bites. If the damn doctor were not there with his diplomas and his Bromo-Seltzer and his useless addiction to the truth, my grandfather would have laid my grandmother on her belly across the desk in a shower of pens and paperclips. Testing the connection that never seemed to fail. They parted. She looked at Dr. Medved. Hopeful, afraid, wanting to know: “It’s okay?”
My grandfather glanced at the doctor. Dr. Medved, on his feet now, looked from my grandfather to my grandmother and then back. He offered his final judgment on the situation, on the failure in her circuitry that my grandfather chose not to analyze. “If it works for you,” he said. “I guess it’s okay.”
*
A widower like my grandfather, Dr. Leo Medved died of heart failure in 1979. His professional correspondence and the records, stored in marbleized cardboard boxes and still under seal of confidentiality, passed into the hands of his adult daughter and son. The Medved children tried to find an archive that might take their father’s documents and tapes: at the New Jersey Psychiatric Association, at Tulane and NYU, at the library of his synagogue in Fair Lawn. But there were an awful lot of boxes: “at least two hundred and fifty,” according to his eldest child, Lorraine Medved-Engel, a retired schoolteacher and holotropic breathwork facilitator in Mantoloking, New Jersey.
I tracked Lorraine down in early 2013. I had been thinking of writing a novel based on what I knew about my grandmother and her illness, and I was hoping I might find something useful in Dr. Medved’s records. By the time I found my way to Lorraine Medved-Engel, the number of boxes had been reduced to twenty-seven by vicissitude, disaster, and Dr. Medved’s son, Wayne. “Always sort of resentful-slash-worshipful about Dad,” according to Lorraine, Wayne Medved consigned most of the boxes to a landfill shortly before taking his own life on the tenth anniversary of his father’s death. Hurricane Sandy, on its way through Mantoloking and Lorraine’s basement in September 2012, had done for most of the rest of the boxes.
Two of the remaining twenty-seven boxes contained tape reels of treatment sessions from the mid-1960s, after Medved had left Greystone Park and gone into private practice in New York City. A few more held a small fraction of what must have been hundreds of Fisher scientific notebooks—black covers, numbered gridded pages—in which Medved set down treatment notes at the end of every workday. Unfortunately, none of these journals happened to coincide with my grandmother’s time at Greystone Park. As far as I could determine over the course of two days’ intrusion on Lorraine’s hospitality, the sole trace of my grandmother in the surviving Medved records were two paragraphs in an entry that filled out the back pages of the lab notebook in which the doctor had completed the writing of his unpublished memoir, “Greystone Notes.”
Dated 11 November 1979—two days before his fatal heart attack—and headed next project, the ten-page entry outlines a book that Medved intended to call either The Bathyscaphe or Rapture of the Deep. It was to be a series of extended case studies, modeled on Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour, culled from the pages of all those other Fisher notebooks consigned by poor Wayne Medved to molder in the Meadowlands. Medved laid out the narrative contours for five of a proposed nine memorable “dives” he planned to revisit in his literary bathyscaphe. After these, running out of pages and—did he sense it?—time, Medved jotted down a few more paragraphs, sketching the four other cases he saw as likely candidates for inclusion. Among these last words of Dr. Leo Medved I found this: