Pharmakon (3 page)

What did occur to Friedrich at that moment was that one of the reasons he had lost faith in psychoanalysis—the unearthing of old wounds, the deconstruction of dreams, the dissection of fantasies and choices of words—was that after years of analyzing himself, he wasn’t an iota happier. Exhausted, drained, and dissatisfied by a lifetime of picking his own scabs, he wanted to heal his patients, not listen to them bleed. He had enough of that in his own head.

Laughter erupted from the table behind him. A gang of Yale profs were holding court under a halo of cigarette smoke. He’d seen them at the club before. They always commandeered the same booth. Had they come in while he was building the dollhouse or thinking about Homer? Whatever, they were on their second round of cocktails and, as usual, were having a hell of a lot more fun than he was.

The five faculty members at the table belonged to a subset of academia Friedrich’s wife called PWM—professors with money, either inherited or married into. Their vowels were polished by boarding school; they swam and played tennis at the New Haven Lawn Club; and they sent their children to a private school called Hamden Hall and “summered” in places Friedrich had never heard of much less wanted to be invited to until he had “come east.” They prided themselves on knowing famous Negroes, having best friends who happened to be Jewish, signing anti-McCarthy petitions, and loving abstract art. All of which combined to make them feel superior to your average everyday garden variety snob, not to mention Friedrich and everybody else in the world.

The only member of the gang Friedrich recognized by name was Dr. Winton. Even if she hadn’t been the first and only female instructor of psychiatry at Yale medical school, Bunny Winton would have stood out. She was over six feet tall, counting the long red braid she coiled on top of her head like a snake. Forty years old, she looked a decade younger. Her skin was pale, white, and translucent, like skimmed milk, and she was never seen outdoors without a hat. While her fellow profs had cocktails, she imbibed a cup of hot water—she’d brought her own tea. Plainly smart, in a tweed suit—just in case you didn’t notice she was special even among the table full of men who had made careers out of being special—she wore a gold pre-Columbian frog on a leather thong around her neck.

“Best martini in the world,” called out the man in the herringbone suit.

“21,” boasted the guy who was cleaning his glasses with the end of an orange-and-black tie that he wore to let you know he went to Princeton.

“21’s for tourists . . . Bath & Tennis, Newport.”

“Harry’s Bar.” The only Harry’s Bar Will Friedrich knew was in Evanston, Illinois. “San Marco, Venezia . . .”

Bunny Winton had the last word without looking up from the article she was reading in the
Lancet.
“It’s the ten to one formula, gin to vermouth.” Whereas the others smelled of money, she stank.

“How would you know, Bunny? You don’t even drink.”

“My father did. And besides, you don’t have to have a weakness to appreciate it in others.” She was bored with the game. She’d played along just to remind the old boys she could beat them at their own game.

A history professor he’d seen tooting around campus in a red sports car with the top down, even in the rain, sagely posed the next point of debate: “Happiest people in the world.”

“You mean, besides us?” Everybody at the table laughed. Friedrich mouthed the words “horse’s ass” and asked for his check.

“Firemen. They’re heroes, everybody loves them, and they get to spend three weeks out of four away from their wives.”

“Doesn’t count, Fred,” Bunny protested.

“What are you talking about?” Fred was the history professor.

“Women can’t be firemen. You said ‘happiest
people.
’ ” Dr. Winton held up her empty cup, signaling for more hot water.

“Women are people?” The group thought this was a scream.

Bunny laughed. Not at his joke but at the one she was about to make: “We’re just like you boys, only smarter. Believe me, if there were a way to do without you, we would have thought it up a long time ago.”

The prof with the beard thoughtfully stirred his drink with his forefinger. “I’ve got it. Happiest people are . . . soldiers, nurses, or doctors of either sex . . .” he lifted his drink in acknowledgment of Bunny, “. . . still in uniform, on the way home from a war they’ve won thinking about the sweetheart that’s waiting for them at home who they don’t know has been cheating on them.”

“I thought we were talking about real people, not characters in one of your novels.” Bunny had a nice way of making you feel stupid.

“Okay, Doc, what’s the right answer?”

“The Bagadong.”

“You’re making that up.”

“No, I’m quite serious. They’re a tribe in New Guinea. We had a field hospital near their village during the war.” She was Bunny Rutledge when she’d signed up straight out of medical school. When the U.S. Army refused to promise the woman doc a combat zone assignment at the start of the war, Bunny had taken the train to Canada and wangled a commission in the British Army.

“Are you talking about cannibals?”

“They are, among other things.” Bunny smiled as she sipped her tea.

“You’re telling us eating their enemies makes them happy?”

“I think it had more to do with fermented kwina leaves. The shamans call it ‘
gaikau dong
.’ It means ‘The Way Home.’ They take it after bad things happen to them, after stressful events. Head-hunting trip gone wrong, child being eaten by a crocodile. And of course, they give it to girls after ritualized clitoral circumcision with a flint scalpel.” Bunny Winton was having so much fun shocking the men that she didn’t notice Friedrich taking notes on his cocktail napkin.

FEBRUARY 1952

Though they had never spoken or corresponded, Friedrich had learned all sorts of things about Dr. Bunny Winton over the previous two months. A trip to the library had told him that she had attended Radcliffe and Yale medical school, and worked out of Yale’s pillared and domed Institute of Human Relations. He had dropped by IHR in the hopes of bumping into her. It didn’t happen, but he did discover that the previously all-male department had decided she deserved office space commensurate with her first and only woman on the faculty status—her desk was wedged into a six-by-eight cubicle that before her arrival had been home to the janitor’s mops, buckets, and brooms.

Behind her back they called her “Dr. Bunny.” And scrawled above a urinal in the second-floor men’s room, he had found a dirty limerick about Bunny that included her home phone number.

By coincidence, a graduate student at IHR named June, who came to him for therapy on Thursdays and whose husband wanted her to quit therapy and grad school to have babies, had brought up Dr. Winton’s name in a session. She identified Winton as her role model, and worried that she didn’t have the “intestinal fortitude” to put up with what Dr. Winton had to put up with.

All Friedrich had to say was “What do you think she puts up with?” and he was treated to an in-depth rehash of how Winton had written a paper about a study she had conducted entirely by herself on the use of hypnotics to bring out a patient’s thought process. When she submitted it for publication, her name alone graced the title page, but when it appeared in print, the name of a male psychiatrist who was younger and less intelligent appeared on its cover first, even though her last-minute collaborator’s surname started with the letter Y. Friedrich felt worse about what had happened to Winton than he did about milking one of his patients for information.

Will Friedrich couldn’t remember where he’d overheard the gossip passing for gospel that Bunny had been hired solely because her uncle had already given Yale Rutledge Hall, and university elders were hoping Uncle would write another check. But nothing he learned changed his original opinion of Winton. He still thought she was spoiled and a snob, but he sensed that she had one quality he could both relate to and take advantage of: She was hungry.

What he didn’t know was if he could trust her. But he would soon find that out, since at that moment Will was riding up the elevator to the office Dr. Winton retreated to when the broom closet became claustrophobic. She saw her private patients just off campus in the penthouse of a smart, professional building on Chapel Street. Will could have arranged a meeting in her broom closet at IHR, or at his office over in the psych building. But he did not want to run the risk of having other men’s names attached to the idea he was carrying inside his head.

Friedrich knocked on the door. It buzzed open with an electric click. Bunny had a receptionist/secretary, but she was out to lunch. Her waiting room was decorated with Salvador Dalí drawings and a Corbusier leather couch. They shook hands. “I’m Dr. Winton.”

“Will Friedrich.”

She glanced at the small suitcase he was carrying and eyeballed him up and down as if she were trying to guess his height and weight. He had on his best suit, and yet her gaze made him feel shabby. That wasn’t Dr. Winton’s intention. It was just that he didn’t look like an insurance executive who wore women’s underwear, the patient she had never met but was expecting.

She gestured toward the room with a view of the green where she conducted her therapy sessions, taking note that he took the Danish modern recliner upholstered in pony fur and let her sit on the couch.

“So . . .” She smiled. “What brings you here, Mr. Friedrich?” She had a small notebook and a gold pen in her lap.

“Curiosity.” Friedrich tried to sound casual, but there was an edge to his voice—he was nervous. She was looking at his hands. They were nicked with scars. He found himself wondering whether she read them as a sign of hard work or a propensity for violence. Friedrich knew he was projecting, and shook the thought out of his head.

“What specifically are you curious about?” She fingered the gold frog around her neck.

“Depression.”

“What about it?”

“How to get rid of it.”

“Your wife told me she’s noticed a change in you.”

“You’ve talked to my wife about me?”

“I thought you knew.”

Realizing she thought he was a patient, Friedrich decided to make the most of it and play dumb. “Gosh, what’d she have to say?”

“Well, that she’s disturbed and confused.”

“About what?”

“You’re not the first male patient I’ve had who’s found it arousing to wear women’s undergarments.”

Her stare was unblinking, her voice professional. Giving her credit for that, he threw his head back and began to laugh. “I’m sorry, Dr. Winton, I think you have me mixed up with a patient. I’m a psychologist over at the psych department. I made an appointment with your secretary.” Putting people on the defensive always made Friedrich feel more comfortable.

Friedrich smiled innocently as she checked her secretary’s appointment book. He could tell she wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t suffering from delusions as well as erotic confusion.

“My mistake, Dr. Friedrich. I should have recognized your name.” Had she heard of him, or was she just being the kind of phony rich people called being polite? “So, what brings you here?”

“I’ve been thinking about something I overheard you say at the faculty club a couple of months ago.” Friedrich had his suitcase on his lap.

“I’m sorry, but for the life of me I don’t recall having been introduced to you or ever having . . .”

Friedrich cut her short. “We didn’t meet. I was eavesdropping on a conversation you were having about the happiest people on the planet; you mentioned something called The Way Home?”

“Gai kau dong.”
As she slowly pronounced the words, Friedrich noticed that there were two photographs on her desk. He guessed the glamour shot of the guy on the yacht was her husband. He could tell the other one was taken during the war—it showed a younger Bunny, hair cut as short as a boy’s, sitting in a dugout canoe wearing khaki shorts and mud-caked boots, an Enfield jungle carbine slung across her back.

“So what is it about The Way Home that interests you?”

“How do you know it’s the plant your shamans brew up that’s affecting behavior, and not superstition, the power of suggestion?”

Friedrich watched her smooth the wrinkles in her dress before she answered. “In the fall of 1944, I had a patient, a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers. In addition to suffering from malaria, dysentery, and the usual assortment of jungle parasites, he had been a Japanese prisoner for six months.” She looked out the window. Her voice softened. “And in that camp, there was a Japanese sergeant, a textbook sadist, homosexual tendencies; he did things, unspeakable things, to my lieutenant . . .”

Friedrich took note of her use of the personal pronoun. Dr. Winton caught herself as soon as she said it: “I say ‘my’ because we were all such a long way from home, and the young men in those hospitals suffered so much, we were all possessive and protective of our patients.” Friedrich wondered if the emaciated officer in the dugout canoe next to her was her lieutenant.

“I think the worst part for him was the things he was made to do to others in order to survive that left him feeling . . .” She turned back to Friedrich, “. . . less than good about being alive. He was severely depressed; he had attempted suicide twice. I had thirty patients under my care; it was just a matter of time before he succeeded, and so I gave him
gaikau dong.
”