Legends (43 page)

“And then?”

“And then a whisper of wind coming off the river brought with it the distant sound of a brass band playing Yankee Doodle. Under cover of darkness the Federals had finally thrown their pontoon bridges across the river and were starting to come over in force. There were scattered shots from Fredericksburg as the Confederate rear guard pretended to put up a fight to suck the Federals into the trap that awaited them once they captured Fredericksburg and started across the plain Richmond-bound. The notes of Yankee Doodle and the hollow reports of muskets set everyone to peering toward the river. Bobby Lee reined up next to Jackson, who touched his hat in salute. They talked for a moment, Lee pointing out the Chatham Mansion, which served as Burnside’s command post, within eyeshot on the other side of the river. And then Lee happened to glance in my direction. His eyes fixed on me and he called, What the blazes is going on down there} My interrogator called up that I was a Federal spy caught behind the Confederate lines the previous evening; that they were about to bury me alive as a warning to others. Lee remarked something to Jackson, then stood in his stirrups and, removing his white hat, shouted down, There will be enough killing on these fields today to last a man a lifetime. Tie him to a tree and let him watch the battle, and set him free when it is over. Which is how I came to see the elephant again to witness the carnage that unfolded below Marye’s Hill that terrible December day. Burnside’s army burst out of Fredericksburg onto the plain and formed up. The 114th Pennsylvania Zouaves with their white headbands were the first to charge the stone wall along the sunken road they came on with pennants flying while a drummer boy set the cadence for the attack until his head was severed from his body by a cannon ball. It was a massacre from start to finish. Through the afternoon wave upon wave of Federals charged the sunken road, only to be cut down by a hail of minie balls. I counted fourteen assaults in all, but not a one of them made it as far as the wall. The cause was so hapless, the Confederates looking down from the hill took to cheering the courage of the Federals. I could see the Rebel sharpshooters dipping their hands in buckets of water so they could load their Whitworths, scalding hot from being shot so much, without blistering their skin. At one point in the afternoon I could make out groups of Federals trying to take cover behind some brick houses on the plain but the Yankee cavalry, using the flats of sabres, forced them back to the battle. It was a Godawful thing to behold there have been days since when I wished they’d gone ahead and buried me alive so that the sight and sound of battle would not be graven on my brain.”

“And they let you cross the battlefield to your lines when it was over?

“As for the field of battle, the less said about it the better. The temperature that night dipped below freezing and my breath came out from between my chattering teeth in great white plumes as I negotiated its pitfalls. I ripped the square of strawboard off my back and started toward the flames I could see burning in Fredericksburg, tripping over the bloated bodies of horses and men, stumbling onto limbless corpses entangled at the bottom of shell craters. Even in the cold of winter there were horseflies drawn to the blood oozing from wounds. The maimed Federals who were still alive dragged the dead into heaps and burrowed under the corpses to keep warm. To my everlasting regret I could do nothing for them. I stopped to cradle a dying soldier who had a slip of paper with his name and address pinned to the back of his blouse. He shivered and murmured Sarah, dearest and expired in my arms. I took the paper, meaning to send it to his next of kin but somehow lost it in the confusion of the night. Riderless horses pawed at the frozen ground looking for fodder, but the only fodder at Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862 was cannon fodder.”

“You reached the town “

“Fredericksburg resembled Sodom. Buildings had been set ablaze by the retreating Federals, the emporium lay gutted, its furniture and wares littering the planks of the sidewalk and the dirt in the street. What was left of silken gowns that had been cut up for handkerchiefs and towels hung limply from placards projecting over the entrances to stores. Mad women from the asylum, in sooty shifts and bare footed, picked through the debris, collecting pocket mirrors and colored ribbons and fine ladies hats imported from Paris France, which they pulled over their matted hair. Two of them were struggling to carry off a Regulator clock. I was surely one of the last to cross the bridge because the engineers began to unfasten the pontoons behind me. On the other side I wandered from campfire to campfire, past dispirited troops dozing on the ground, past pickets sleeping on their feet. I must have become feverish because much of what happened to me subsequent to the retreat across the pontoon bridge is disjointed and fuzzy in my head. I seem to remember great lines of woebegone soldiers trudging back toward Washington, the wounded piled three and four deep in open carts drawn by mules, the dead buried in shallow graves where they succumbed. When I came awake, I don’t know how many days later, I found myself on a cot stained with dried blood in a field hospital. Doctors decided I was suffering from hypochondria, what your fancy doctors call depression nowadays. A gentleman with a kindly face and a soiled white shirt open at the throat was sponging my chest and neck with vinegar to bring down the fever. We got to talking. He told me his name was Walter. Only later did I discover him to be the celebrated Brooklyn poet Whitman, scouring the field hospitals for his brother George, who’d been listed as wounded in the battle. Luck would have it, he’d found him in the same tent as me. One morning, when I felt stronger, Walter put his arm around my waist and helped me out of the tent into the sunlight. We sat, only the two of us, with our backs to a stack of fresh pine coffins. I remember Walter staring at the heap of amputated limbs behind the tent and opining, Fredericksburg is the most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever yet known in the earths wars. After some while orderlies appeared from the tent carrying three stretchers with corpses on them and set them on the ground to attend burial. The dead men were covered with blankets, with the toes of their stockings sticking out and pinned together. Pushing himself to his feet, Walter walked over to the bodies and, squatting, lifted aside the blanket from one and looked for a long, long time at the boy’s dead face. When he sat back down next to me, he pulled a notebook from a pocket inside his jacket and, licking the stub of a pencil, began to write in it. When he finished I asked him what he’d written and he read it off and the words stuck with me all these years.” Lincoln shut his eyes to keep back tears (so it seemed to Dr. Treffler) as he dredged up Walter Whitman’s lines. Sight at daybreak, in camp in front of the hospital tent on a stretcher (three dead men lying,) each with a blanket spread over him I lift up one and look at the young man’s face, calm and yellow, ‘tis strange! (Young man: I think this face of yours the face of my dead Christ!).

Lincoln, drained of arrogance, looked at Dr. Treffler as he recited in a sing-song whisper, “A woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat ‘em I can’t recall the rest.”

“I believe you, Lincoln. I can see that you really were at Fredericksburg.” When he just sat there, his chin on his chest, breathing unevenly, she said, “Shalimar.”

“What?”

“That’s the name of the perfume I’m wearing. Shalimar.”

1994: BERNICE TREFFLER LOSES A PATIENT

Dr. Treffler turned around the statue of Nathan Hale outside the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, studying the expression on the face of the young colonial spy from various angles, trying to imagine what might have been going through his mind as he was being led to execution. It occurred to her that nothing had been going through his mind; perhaps he had been too distracted by the lump in his throat, which is called fear, to think clearly. She couldn’t remember if Nathan had seen the elephant (though the term probably didn’t come into use until the Civil War) before he set off on his mission behind British lines in Manhattan Island. She wondered if the British executioners wore striped shirts; wondered, too, if they had wedged a cigarette between his lips before they hanged him on the Post Road, what today is Third Avenue in Manhattan. It is a matter of tradition, Lincoln Dittmann had remembered the executioner saying. A man condemned to death is entitled to a last cigarette.

A whey-faced young man with a laminated card pinned to the breast pocket of his three-piece suit approached. “He was the first in a long line of Americans who died spying for our country,” he noted, looking up at Nathan’s wrists bound behind his back. “You must be Bernice Treffler.” When she said In the flesh he asked to see her hospital identity card and driver’s license and carefully matched the photos against her face. She peeled off her sunglasses to make it easier for him. Apparently satisfied, he returned the cards. “I’m Karl Tripp, Mrs. Quest’s executive assistant, which is a fancy name for her cat’s-paw. I’m sorry if we’ve kept you waiting. If you’ll come with me …”

“No problem,” said Dr. Treffler, falling in alongside her escort. She was mesmerized by the laminated card on the suit jacket with his photo and name and ID number on it. If lightning struck him right now, right here, would she have the good sense to tear it off and send it to his next of kin?

“First visit to Langley?” he asked as he showed his ID to the uniformed guard at the turnstile, along with the signed authorization to bring in a woman named Bernice Treffler.

“I’m afraid it is,” she said.

The guard issued a visitor’s pass that expired in one hour, and noted Dr. Treffler’s name and the number of the pass in a log book. Karl Tripp pinned the pass to the lapel of her jacket and the two of them pushed through the turnstile and made their way down a long corridor to a bank of elevators. She started to walk into the first one that turned up but Tripp tugged on her sleeve, holding her back. “We’re taking the express to the seventh floor,” he whispered.

Several young men relegated to the plebeian elevators eyed the well dressed woman waiting for the patrician elevator, wondering who she might be, for the seventh floor was, in naval terminology, admiral’s country and outsiders went there (the elevator didn’t stop at other floors) by invitation only. When the door finally opened on the seventh floor, Tripp had to walk Dr. Treffler through another security check. He led her down a battleship-gray corridor to a door marked “Authorized DDO staff only,” unlocked it with a key at the end of a chain attached to his belt and motioned her to a seat at a crescent-shaped desk. “Coffee? Tea? Diet coke?”

“I’m fine. Thanks.”

Tripp disappeared, closing the door behind him. Treffler looked around, wondering if this tiny windowless cubbyhole could really be the office of someone as important as Crystal Quest, whom she had spoken to several times on the phone since she first began treating Martin Odum. A moment later a narrow door hidden in the paneling behind the desk opened and Mrs. Quest appeared from a larger, airier office. She was obviously a good deal older than she sounded on the phone, and wearing a pantsuit with wide lapels that did nothing to emphasize her femininity. Her hair, cropped short, looked like rusting gunmetal. “I’m Crystal Quest,” she announced matter of factly, leaning over the desk to swipe at Dr. Treffler’s palm with her own, then sinking back into the wicker swivel chair. She reached into the bottom drawer of the desk and pulled out a thermos. “Frozen daiquiris,” she explained, producing two ordinary kitchen tumblers but filling only one of them when her visitor waved her off. “So you’re Bernice Treffler,” she said. “You sound older on the phone.”

“And you sound younger Sorry, I didn’t mean…” She laughed nervously. “Heck of a way to start a conversation.”

“No offense taken.”

“None intended, obviously.”

“Which brings us to Martin Odum.”

“I sent you an interim report “

“Prefer to hear it from the horse’s mouth.” Quest flashed a twisted smile. “No offense intended.”

“Martin Odum is suffering from what we call Multiple Personality Disorder.” Dr. Treffler could hear Crystal Quest grinding slivers of ice between her molars. “At the origin of this condition is a trauma,” the psychiatrist continued, “more often than not a childhood trauma involving sexual abuse. The trauma short-circuits the patient’s narrative memory and leads to the development of multiple personalities, each with its own memories and skills and emotions and even language abilities. Often a patient suffering from MPD switches from one personality to another when he or she comes under stress.”

Crystal Quest fingered a chunk of ice out of the kitchen tumbler and popped it into her mouth. “Has he been able to identify the trauma?”

Dr. Treffler cleared her throat. “The original trauma, the root cause of these multiple personalities, remains shrouded in mystery, I’m sorry to report.” She could have sworn Crystal Quest looked relieved. “Which is not to say that with more treatment it won’t surface. I would very much like to get to the trauma, not only for the sake of the patient’s mental health but because of the medical paper I plan to write “

“There won’t be any medical paper, Dr. Treffler. Not now, not ever. Nor will there be additional treatment. How many of these multiple personalities have you detected?”

Dr. Treffler made no effort to hide her disappointment. “In

Martin Odum’s case,” she replied stiffly, “I’ve been able to identify three distinct alter personalities, which the patient refers to as legends, a term you will surely be familiar with. There’s Martin Odum, for starters. Then there is an Irishman named Dante Pippen. And finally there’s a Civil War historian who goes by the name of Lincoln Dittmann.”

“Any hint of a fourth legend?”

“No. Is there a fourth legend, Mrs. Quest?”

Quest ignored the question. “How many of these legends have you personally encountered?”

“There is Martin Odum, of course. And at the most recent session, which took place last week, I came face to face with Lincoln Dittmann.”