Other Women (6 page)

Discovering from Holly that her next appointment had canceled, Hannah returned to her office, sat in her chair, lit a cigarette, and gazed out the window. An orange Le Car crept up

the street beyond the parking lot. Hannah exhaled.

The driver, a former client named Harold Mortimer, was one of her most outstanding failures.

She could see his strained white face gazing at her office window, hoping for a glimpse of her. Sometimes he stopped to leave messages of undydevotion under her windshield wiper. Maybe her new car would fool him.

As the orange Le Car turned the corner, Hannah speculated on Caroline’s emerging pattern. She’d probably try to win Hannah over, then try to get Hannah to reject her. And at that point Hannah would refuse to cooperate.

The one useful skill she had learned at the Sussex boarding school her grandmother had shipped her off to was fencing. She did the same thing in here all day-exchanging thrusts and paruntil one day she’d drop her foil and allow a client to plunge right at her. And she’d observe their bafflement when she neither crumpled to the floor nor slashed back. But of course she’d learned to do this by sparring with Zorro during training.

Hannah’s shoulders sagged. She propped her elbow on the desk and rested her chin in her hand. Her grandmother probably proher for this tedious profession by telling her all the time how gifted she’d be at working with troubled people, if only she’d get her own garbage out of the way. She smiled faintly as she thought about her grandmother, white hair in an elaborate bun, corseted bosom jutting out like a Victorian sideboard as she ran jumble sales for charity behind a stall in the High Street.

Hannah had always predicted the old battle-ax would outlive them all, but she hadn’t. And no doubt raising an angry, rowdy granddaughter hadn’t prolonged her stay. She recalled how the old woman’s white eyebrows fluttered with dismay OTHER

when Hannah spent afternoons after school racing her bike down the sidewalks through the Heath with a pack of boys and dogs, while other girls went to ballet lessons. Or balancing along the high garden walls of neighboring houses, peering into upstairs windows at neighbors changing clothes, taking baths, or making love. Or careening down Christ Church Hill on roller skates with pedestrians leaping out of the way. Or using her pocket money to ride a double-decker bus to the end of the line and back. Or making kites to fly from the high hill on the Heath out of the Financial Times before her grandfather had read it.

Hannah’s father had gone to Australia as a young man to convalesce from tuberculosis on a sheep station owned by a family friend. There he met Hannah’s mother, a daughter of the owner. They marand produced Hannah. Hannah had hazy

memories of straining to interpose herself between her parents while her father shouted. Her mother died of typhoid picked up while tending an aboriginal who camped on the station. Her father brought Hannah back to his parents in Hampstead prior to departing for service with the British High Command in Trinidad. She remembered him as a handsome, breezy man who turned up in Hampstead every few years with a deep tan and smiling teeth like tiny white tombstones. All he ever said to her was a phrase he’d picked up in Australia: “So how’s it going then, mate?” He’d pat her awkwardly on the shoulder while gazing at a far wall.

Hannah glanced at the bark painting on her office wall. The aboriginal gave it to Hannah’s mother before he died, and Hannah’s father brought it back to Hampstead. Her grandmother thought it was hideous and kept it in a closet under the stairs. In white on reddishbark, it featured a bizarre leaping creature called a mimi spirit, with hollow eyes and sticklike limbs. It had terrified, yet fascinated, Hannah. Whenever her grandmother found her looking at her, she’d shake her head and sigh, “My wild aboriginal granddaughter.”

Looking at it now, Hannah remembered a farm pond encircled with ghost gums, in whose branches kookaburras laughed; a lamb named Mutton, who gradually turned into a sheep and wandered across the wide verandah of their cottage, shitting little round turds on the flowered parlor carpet; flocks of garish galahs, flashing flaming

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waistcoats; small dark children tumbling with her in a dusty paddock; flies buzzing incessantly; her father’s hat, with corks hanging from the brim on strings, to keep the flies away; the winter rains drumming on the iron roof. She remembered a hand pushing damp hair off her forehead when she was half asleep. But she couldn’t remember her mother’s face. The only face she could summon was from a faded photo, sad and strained. A little girl, Hannah, clutched her arm, as though aware her mother was about to vanish.

“Why so somber?” asked Jonathan from the doorway, holding out a wrapped sandwich.

Hannah looked up. “I was just thinking about my mother.”

“That’ll do it.”

“Come in. Sit down. Thanks. Is this ham?”

Jonathan nodded his bushy gray head. “What’s happening?” He sat down on the tweed couch and unwrapped his own sandwich.

“The usual.” Hannah picked up half her sandwich. “Loss, sorrow, betrayal, and deceit.”

Jonathan smiled. Mary Beth appeared from the next office. She wore a high-necked ruffled blouse, Mao slippers, and generally resembled Little Miss Muffet after forfeiting her curds and whey to the spider.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Jonathan.

“I’ve just realized I don’t like clients giving me all this power.”

Hannah took a large bite. Mary Beth was fresh out of graduate school and still thought real life was an ongoing seminar. Hannah knew the upcoming conversation by heart. A client had split with his wife because he thought Mary Beth had told him to. Now he was miserable and was blaming Mary Beth.

Jonathan was making all the usual responses about clients hearing what they wanted to hear, not having to come back,
etc.

“Call it trust instead of power,” suggested Hannah between bites. “It’ll help you feel better.”

“It doesn’t matter what you call it,” said Mary Beth, leaning up against the doorjamb. “It’s still power.”

Hannah shrugged. “So be a veterinarian.” When they were interviewing, she hadn’t been sure about Mary Beth, who seemed a trifle earnest. But Jonathan insisted they needed another woman, someone young, with credentials as impressive as Mary Beth’s. It was hard to tell if she’d work out because she still had what Hannah called novice nerves, took everything that happened with clients too seriously and too personally. Sheer exhaustion would no doubt cure her of that.

“A client has to relinquish a certain amount of power for the process to work,” Jonathan was saying.

Hannah watched him look up at Mary

Beth with a patient smile. He felt Hannah was too harsh. Hannah felt he drowned people in honey.

They used to argue over this issue of power. But she was still convinced clients didn’t hand over any power at all. All they did was to use the therapist as a standin for the strong part of themselves, until they were ready to face their own strength.

Caroline went through the lunch line, taking salad and coffee. Holding her plastic tray, she glanced around the large, drafty tiled room. Diana was sitting at a table with Brenda, Barb, and Suzanne, all dressed in white uniforms.

Feeling no wish to be pleasant to Suzanne, who’d spent the past week lurking behind oxygen tanks in the halls to pop out for chats whenever Diana passed, Caroline walked to a table inhabited by Brian Stone in light green scrub clothes and plastic booBrian was a young surgeon whose wife had recently left him, taking their children to Boston without a backward glance. Caroline had assisted him several times in the ER, and they’d sometimes drunk coffee together between cases. She admired the delicacy and deftness with which he tied sutures, as though assembling a sailing ship in a bottle. He struck Caroline as a touching fellow, with his receding hairline, his mournful eyes, and his endless grief over Irene’s departure. Although she scarcely knew him, she’d become his confidante. It was impossible not to because Irene was all he ever talked about.

“Mind if I join you?”

Brian looked up with bloodshot eyes and a pained smile. “Delighted.”

Taking the dishes off her tray, Caroline asked, “So how’s it going?” “Fine. Just fine.”

Caroline sat down and picked up her fork.

“Pretty day?” “Not bad for December.”

“What’s new?”

Brian sighed. “Nothing much. Same old grind.”

“As the burlesque queen said to the bishop.”

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“What?”

“It’s an old joke.”

“Sorry. I guess I’m pretty out of it today.”

“Please don’t tell your patients,” said Caroline.

“They’re out cold. They don’t know the difference.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, I talked to Irene this morning.”

“How’s she?”

“All right, I guess. But I really don’t understand women.” Brian was handling his knife and fork as adroitly as he did a scalpel, with long graceful fingers.

“Don’t look at me,” said Caroline, her mouth full of lettuce. “That makes two of us.”

“I mean, for example,” he said, gesturing with his fork, “Irene loved to buy all this stuff clothes, furniture, cars, trips. And I had to bust ass to pay for it. But then she complained I was never home.

I don’t get it.” He shook his head.

Caroline thought she got it, but she wasn’t sure it would be kind to explain that maybe all those purchases were an attempt to fill the gap where a husband should have been. “Sounds like my marriage.”

“I didn’t realize you’d been married.”

“Many years ago.”

He laughed. “Come on, you can’t be that old.”

“Some days I feel older than King Tut.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

Do you, wondered Caroline. If only they had more time, it might be interesting to find out. Besides, she’d just seen Diana glance in their direction.

“I always wondered why an attractive woman like you wasn’t married.” Brian studied her with his sad eyes, resting his chin on his fist.

Oh, give me a break, thought Caroline. She stood up. “Gotta run, Brian. Nice

talking with you.”

Caroline sat down behind the ER admissions desk and picked up a pencil from atop a stack of patients’ charts, intending to make the list for Hannah and hoping no one would come rolling through those swinging doors on a stretcher. She used to feel such delight at the People’s Free Clinic when a woman hemorrhaging from a coat hanger

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abortion or a student on a bad trip staggered into the cluttered storefront office in Somerville. She was needed. She could help. Now she wished they’d leave her out of it. She’d lost her nerve. She was terrified she’d freeze with horror at some crucial moment, as she had that afternoon over the little boy with the gaping head wound. Who was she to think she could help anybody? It was all she could do to keep herself

alive.

She wrote the word “kind,” just to prime the pump.

But what about the hats of street musicians she hadn’t tossed coins into, the hitchhikers she’d driven past, the Muscular Dystrophy cannisters she hadn’t deposited change in, the phone market surveys she hung up on, the times she pretended not to be home when Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked? She crossed out “kind.”

Brian was being paged over the PA: “Dr. Stone, Dr. Stone, fourth floor, fourth floor …”

Caroline wrote “honest.” But was it honest to pretend that she and Diana were just roommates simply in order not to lose their jobs and cause their children harassment on the playground? Was it honest to sit behind this desk and dread the arrival of patients? She drew a line through “honest” and scribbled “unkind” and “dishonest.” She studied those words. That was the effect of her behavior, but it wasn’t the intention, any more than Jim Jones originally intended to poison his followers.

Marking out “unkind” and “dishonest,” she wrote “well-meanBut was she, she wondered as she chewed her pencil eraser. To eat she allowed plants and animals to be slaughtered in her behalf. When she walked, she squashed insects. When she breathed, she butchered bacteria. Her white blood cells were destroying germs every second. Even to live was to be a murderer.

Diana sauntered down the corridor, her head with its scrambled red hair turned toward Suzanne, her bedroom eyes laughing. Suzanne looked as thrilled and expectant as Arnold when he confronted his first dead woodchuck. They wore street clothes-corduroy jeans, parkas, boots.

As they headed out the door, Diana called to Caroline, “Don’t worry about me if I’m out late.”

Pencil poised, Caroline considered this remark.

If Diana stayed out late tonight, it would be no comfort to know she was doing so with

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Suzanne. It would be preferable to have her dead on the highway. So Diana wanted to play hardball?

Maybe Brian Stone should be encouraged. Too bad he had to be a man.

Inspecting these thoughts, Caroline added “ungenerous”

to her list. But damn it, she’d usually done her best. When Maureen, the Irish maid who told horror stories about British rule, sobbed with homesickness, Caroline patted her

orange hair and told her everything would be all right.

When her father limped home with colitis from fighting court cases for minority groups, Caroline ran his bath and rubbed his temples. As he bathed, she polished his shoes. When her mother returned from the welfare office where she began working after the war, Caroline brought her tea, turned on the opera, and covered her with a blanket in her armchair under the seal from her college that read “Non Ministrari sed Ministrare.” Not to be ministered unto but to minister.

Which was what Caroline had always tried to do. While her parents rested, she kept Howard and Tommy quiet by locking them in the playroom and making them play medical missionary.

For Christmas one year their parents gave them each sponsorship of a Save-the-Children child. Caroline’s, from Kentucky, was named Stanley Horton. In his picture he had no shoes and very few sound teeth.

He wrote every month and sent a picture of his house, a shack sided with tar paper and roofed with tin Nehi signs. At dinner she, Howard, and Tommy would pass around the pictures and notes, and their parents would explain that because they were so privileged, they had a responsibility to those less fortunate. Caroline began saving her baby-sitting money to buy Stanley special treats, like Band-Aids in the shape of stars.