Ghost Country (8 page)
Authors: Sara Paretsky
Harriet laughed, but shook her head. “Beebie, you take everything too hard. I know why you worry so much about homeless women, but sometimes I think Grandfather is right, that you’re identifying too much with them.”
Mara’s face scrunched into lines of angry hurt. “Beebie” was Harriet’s pet name for her, rarely used, and it always made Mara feel too hurt by the sense of love gone missing from her life. She loved Harriet. She hated Harriet. She saw the feelings running
through her veins like two different-colored streams of blood that never mixed; she never could tell which one dominated.
Mara turned back to the piano. Harriet left the room, a momentary impulse to hug her sister replaced by a more typical irritation with her. Grandfather was right: Mara just never made any effort.
Open-air Clinic
Haven’t written in several weeks. Been run ragged between work with street people for Lenore Foundation and regular hosp duties. Disappointed that work with Hagar’s House doesn’t include more time with Boten. He met with me before I started there, remembered me from my interview when I applied for residency, which was pleasing, but told me bluntly there wasn’t going to be much scope for general therapy work. He will meet with me once a month to discuss patients and progress—if any—but no budget for him to play more active role. It’s ail on my shoulders.
So I’ve been going every Friday to a room in a converted coal cellar at the Orleans St. Church where men and women, mostly women, from different shelters come in and talk to me. More men without shelter than women, but women more willing—more eager—to see doctor, have someone to talk to, try to get help. No cost containment committee to limit sessions to fifteen minutes. On the other hand, after first week—where only two people showed up in five hours—numbers have been growing and I have to limit sessions based on my own stamina.
Another negative is the hostility of some of the church staff. Shelter and counseling room have a separate entrance, on Hill Street, but you can’t just walk in: church is like a fortress, with pseudo-Gothic buildings
behind eight-foot-high castiron fence. Intimidates me, no doubt worse for the mentally ill.
“The security discourages people who most need help,” Hector said to Patsy Wanachs, the executive director at the shelter. “If you’re paranoid, you’re not likely to respond to a voice coming out of the wall demanding to know your business.”
“Running a shelter in a church like Orleans Street involves a series of compromises, Dr. Tammuz,” Patsy Wanachs told him, keeping one hand on her phone so he’d realize how busy she was. “A lot of our client base has serious problems with drugs and alcohol, as you surely realize. And we’re a stone’s throw from one of the city’s most dangerous housing projects. Perhaps our security system keeps away some people who badly need help—but it also keeps out drug dealers and pimps.”
She picked up the receiver as a sign of dismissal. One of the volunteers followed him to the hall.
“This isn’t really the hostile place you’re taking it for,” she told Hector. “Women feel a sense of safety here, and that’s important on the street. And we’re one of the few places in the city where women can shower, and get a hot breakfast.”
Suppose you can put up with a lot for safety, food and shower. Including prayer meetings or Bible study, whatever they call it.
Sessions led on Wednesday night by a forty-something commodities trader who’s found Jesus and wants to bring him to the homeless women at Hagar’s House. Rafe Lowrie. Raspy voiced, but smooth, well-dressed, no light of fanaticism in his eyes, maybe motivated by need to be in charge of everyone’s life. He came along my second Friday to interrogate me about my methods and goals. Told me he doesn’t want me undoing the good he’s achieving with Hagar women through heightening their spiritual awareness.
Thinking of some of the visions my patients are seeing, I suggested to Lowrie that tamping down their spiritual awareness might be a good thing. He became very huffy, said he had warned the parish council that
bringing a Jew in to work with the homeless not a good idea at all. Jesus cast out devils; if the Holy Spirit was really at work in the Orleans St Ch the parish ought to be able to pray these people well, I said, anything that could cure schizophrenia was fine with me, whether prayer or Prolixin, or both together. He stared at me for a several minutes without speaking—probably thought he was looking like Clint Eastwood staring down Lee Van Cleef, but looked more like a man who’s found a cockroach in his soup. Then in Eastwood style turned on his heel and slowly stomped off.
So at the hospital I have Hanaper telling me I’m like a witch doctor because I prefer therapy to drugs, and here at the shelter I have this born-again Lowrie telling me I’m a heathen—worse, a Jew—who believes in medicine instead of prayer.
Starting to have dreams in which I’m shaving, and my face comes loose. Sometimes behind the skin I’m a monster—a savage concoction of bone and blood. Sometimes I’m a woman. Always the question of—who am I really?
As Dr. Boten warned Hector, most people who came to the Orleans Street clinic were in state of acute crisis. What he wasn’t expecting was the rough good humor with which many met life’s most trying conditions. He found himself looking forward to the visits of a number of regulars, including two women who always seemed to travel together. Jacqui and Nanette didn’t want separate sessions of therapy, just Hector’s empathic ear. They told him bloodcurdling tales of life on the street: that most women who were out there any length of time were raped, sometimes by homeless men, even by cops, but just as often by white businessmen on their way home to suburbs, wife, and family.
Jacqui is black, Nanette white. Apparently on the streets racial differences stop mattering as much as they do aboveground. Last week, J & N told me they have a third friend, woman named Madeleine Carter, who has always had mental health problems, but now they’re seriously worried
about her. Took some doing to get the story out of them—they were afraid I would either laugh or tell them to take the tale to Jesus.
They say Madeleine thinks the Virgin Mary appeared to her on a wall on Underground Wacker. She won’t leave wall now, even in the foulest weather. The three women used to sleep at Hagar’s House, or sometimes, when they had enough money, rent an apartment together, but now Madeleine won’t leave the street at all. J & N found a big crate that a generator came in around the corner from Madeleine’s vision; when their money is short the two of them sometimes sleep there with her, and they fixed it up with blankets so Madeleine could get some shelter.
J & N tried to persuade Madeleine to come to me, but she won’t leave her post at Virgin’s side. So—they want me to go to her. After a lot of arguing with them—I’m stretched too thin to visit people on the streets, I say—This isn’t just anyone, Doctor, she’s our friend. Imagine dozens of their friends scattered around town, they prodding me into visiting all of them, but there’s something about the friendship between J & N that moves me, so I agree to go, on Monday afternoon after finishing up at the hospital.
The woman at the wall was reading a Bible. When Hector arrived with her friends, Madeleine marked the place and put the book away in a plastic bag.
Before Hector could work his way into an interview Jacqui said, “This here is Dr. Tammuz, Madeleine. He’s come to talk to you about your wall.”
Madeleine turned and touched a crack in the concrete. Hector looked at it intently, but could see no Rorschach that looked like a face. The concrete was split by a line that looked like a flattened sine curve; by tilting his head to one side he supposed he could make out the shape of a woman’s breasts, or a child’s rendition of a bird in flight, but no face.
A faint reddish liquid oozed from the crack, rust from the rebars behind it. Madeleine dipped her fingers in it and sucked them. Hector tried not to let his disgust show in his face.
“Her blood,” Madeleine explained to Hector. “The Mother of God weeps tears of blood. I was looking for the place in the Bible where it says it but I can’t find it. All I can see is the place where Jezebel was murdered and her blood splashed on the wall. But I know this isn’t Jezebel, this isn’t the blood of a whore, I can tell by the taste.”
She looked fiercely at Hector, as if expecting him to argue the point with her. Instead he asked her how long she had known the Virgin was present in the wall.
“Since She spoke to me one night when I was walking by. Some man had been doing his business on me and I came by here and She spoke to me out of this crack. She tells me I’m Her daughter, I’m as pure as She is, and She’s crying because the rest of the world isn’t pure enough, they won’t listen to Her, but I listen to Her. I loved my own little girl, I wouldn’t never leave her but they made me go. The Holy Mother says She loves me just that much as I love my own little girl.”
“That’s right, honey,” Jacqui said. “You need the Virgin Mary to look after you, but you need to eat, too. You tell her, Doctor.”
Persuaded her to go around the corner to their generator box to perform a cursory exam. M very frightened of men, understandable, if they’ve been “doing their business” on her, so Jacqui and Nanette promise to stand right outside, talk to her while I examine. Underneath the layers of coats and socks M a wraith, skin transparent from weeks out of the sun. Seems to be a case of acute schizophrenia, probably intensified by vitamin deficiencies, oh, not to mention lack of sleep, fear of rape, etc.
Ought to be hospitalized, but would mean a trip over to County, and she won’t leave her “face.” Under prodding from her friends agreed to an injection of Prolixin. Worry about ethics of dispensing medication in such a setting, how can she give an informed consent?
The next week Jacqui and Nanette came to Hector, ecstatic: the shot he’d given Madeleine had changed her dramatically, She
was eating now, and would leave the wall sometimes to get some sunlight in the world overhead. She’d even spent the night at Hagar’s House a few times. She was still guarding her “face” on the wall, but not drinking rusty water from the crack as much as she’d done before.
Jacqui and Nanette bought him a potted daisy at Woolworth’s to show their gratitude. They also started spreading the word on the street that Hector was a miracle worker, a sympathetic man who would listen to their troubles, and give them the kind of drugs that could really help. The two women started bringing patients in to see him. Hector tried telling Jacqui that she shouldn’t force anyone to come against their will.
Jacqui shook her head. “You’re thinking of poor Ashley, Doctor. You don’t know her life. She ran to the streets to get away from her mother’s boyfriends, that was when she was thirteen, and she ran straight into the arms of a pimp who started working her over for his own gain. She’s like a lot of people out here, thinks she’s worthless, she wouldn’t ever come see you on her own. Me and Nanette have to see she gets help, otherwise she’ll be dead in six months. And even though she doesn’t say anything to you, those pills you give her really help.”
Ashley won’t let me give her an injection, and won’t take pills when she’s on her own, so J brings her in every week and watches her swallow a handful
of
Haldol.
Funny how my eye for street people changed by working with them. Tough lives. In shelter have to follow strict set of rules, yet handle it all without losing dignity.
Am trying to learn from them how to put up with Hanaper’s petty rules without losing my own dignity. Hanaper vastly entertained after looking over clinic sheets for last three months to see Mrs, Herstein, the compulsive hoarder, has been coming in every week. Daughter still with her. One of these nuclear families created by fission, turning into black hole that sucks in all joy, light.
“Ah, your black eyes, Dr. Tammuz, I knew Mrs. Herstein would find them Irresistible. Cultivate her—she may be one of these demented women who keeps a fortune stuffed under the bedclothes. Where she apparently would like to reside with you.”
The dark man in America, even if not from Africa, always has great sexual prowess. Foolish grandfather—thought by fleeing the Aryan nation could leave behind the greasy Jew of perverse sexuality.
But Hanaper’s so-called banter good for me: makes me feel like vomiting, his image of sex with Mrs. H, and that in turn makes me try to figure out why my reaction so acute.
Dreamt last night that Jacqui, Nanette, and Madeleine were the three witches from Macbeth, stirring a pot on Underground Wacker. I came along to treat Madeleine’s schizophrenia and the three turned to me—
on
me—and laughed. Madeleine flourished a gigantic wooden spoon and hissed, “Physician, heal thyself!” Then she turned into Mother, and the wooden spoon dissolved into a jar of face cream.
It frightened him sometimes, how much the homeless women knew about him—part from information gleaned from some informal street network, part from a hypersensitivity honed by life in the open, where they had to decide in an instant whether chancemet folk were friend or foe.
They knew Hector was unmarried, that he’d grown up out east, that he didn’t get along with his boss.
“Seems to me you’re running away, Doctor, running away from your family out east, from your boss, from everything you can’t stand to face, so you’ve run to the last place you can find: the streets,” Jacqui observed one morning. “One of these days you’re going to have to stop running from and start running to.”
If you were an ambitious, superstitious thane you would pay close attention to their words. But in their own eyes they were ordinary women with the usual concerns—for their children (Nanette had a son, in and out of prison on drug charges; Jacqui, two daughters raised by their grandmother, one of them a
secretary in a law firm who made enough money to vacation in the Caribbean), or their hair, or even the men in Springfield and Washington who wanted to line their own pockets at the expense of education, of old people, and of the living breathing poor.
Rude Awakening
