“Why else? I’m sure he thought I was just stalling when I said I couldn’t go. He had the grand idea that I could take my ‘rest cure’ simultaneously with the divorce.”
“Oh, good lord,” said Helen. “Now that is a package holiday! He should put that in a letter to the state tourism commission. What a heel.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “And we are getting a divorce, I assured him. Uncontested. I accede to my abandonment. But I really just don’t have the mind or strength or spirit to go to Nevada at this particular moment. Much less to cope with lawyers. I only have it in me to grapple with one overeducated professional at a time, and right now that’s Dr. R. So Max has agreed to do it the slow, old-fashioned way, right here in New York State, once I’m up to it.”
“What a sweetheart,” said Helen.
“Always a romantic,” I said.
Helen’s arm was now bearing an unfair share of my Thorazine-inflated weight; my legs had grown leaden, my mind fogged, given to repetition and forgetfulness. It’s fun to be around someone who appreciates wit, but only to the extent one is able to be witty, and I was fading fast.
“How’s Johnny taking it?” Helen asked.
“The Great Schism, you mean?”
Helen’s voice snagged in her throat for an instant. “All of it,” she said.
I slowed to a stop, bracing myself against a bench to still a twitch in my legs. “I try to console myself,” I said, “with the notion that this will all be character-building for him. Johnny, fortunately, is thirteen years old. His intense self-regard will get him through anything. Helen, would you forgive me if I told you I need to rest? This delightful excursion has just about finished me off.”
She signed me back in at the desk, then insisted on waiting—reading a book in the common area with a quiet cavalcade of nuts, drunks, and dope fiends drifting around her, a lone bloom amid rock-slide debris—while I took my nap.
Afterwards we had a late lunch together, and then she had to leave to catch her train back to Manhattan. “I’ll be back,” she said. “As often as you’ll have me. And I’ll bring Johnny as soon as Dr. R says you’re ready.”
We hugged good-bye. As I watched her go, she in her smart traveling coat, I admired how impressive she had become. As a dewy youth she’d been lovely, as a successful illustrator she’d been elegant, but now her application of patience and poise had somehow made her formidable: the sort of figure one stares at on the street, trying to recall what she’s famous for.
I realized, without surprise, that I had neglected to inquire after all the good news her recent letters had contained. Her young Merritt was out of the Army at last, in one piece, in fine spirits, sporting a chestful of medals from Korea. One stepdaughter was sending her twins to high school, while the other—summa cum laude at Barnard, J.D. from Fordham, not, as they say, interested in boys—had hired on as legislative counsel for Senator Lehman and was helping to give that tub-thumper McCarthy his long-due comeuppance, much to her father’s delight. Dwight himself was a dynamo at seventy-one, still bounding down the front steps every morning to his battle station at The New Republic, where he’d been the art editor now for a decade. And Helen had just gotten a letter “out of the blue” from her alma mater: They were planning a retrospective exhibition of her illustrations, maybe even a catalogue. So your important work won’t be forgotten, they’d said. “Of course they’ll have to feature your verses, too,” Helen had written. “All my best doodles took root in your rhymes. We’re a package deal!”
She was a damn good egg, that Helen McGoldrick. Even though Silver Hill gave me analysis aplenty, her ear was superior to ten thousand psychiatrists, and I was grateful beyond words for her loan of it that Saint Patrick’s Day.
If you can fool even your closest friends into thinking you’re sane, then maybe you’re not so crazy after all.
*
Dr. R was handsome, but devoid of threat. Blandsome. A generic doctor-ish set of good looks.
He was not much of a reader, it turned out, though his office was book lined. They were for show. I looked at them, their spines on the shelves, whenever I needed to break eye contact, so as not to appear too intense. It was early May, and I was angling for a change in my inmate status.
“With all due respect, Doc,” I said, “I don’t like therapy—talk therapy. I have a lot of friends, and I’m up to contacting them now. So I don’t feel like I need to keep paying someone to listen to me.”
“One of the key features of therapy, Lillian,” he said, “is that the therapist is an outsider. Coolheaded and objective. Not your friend, but a trusted professional.”
This I ignored.