The Uses of Enchantment (21 page)

Mary put on her coat and returned Anne’s covertly enthusiastic wave, her hand tucked close to her chest, vibrating more than waving. Out on the street the temperature had dropped to the predicted low, the shock of the unseasonable chill lessened by the fake fir boughs and illuminated plastic berries already strung from the streetlamps, even though it was still seven weeks to Christmas. She walked with a very specific destination, listening to the rhythmic crunching of her boot soles on the salted sidewalk and the crinkle of the paper bag under her arm. She remained dogged by guilt and could not shake from her head Anne’s blushing face, her capped teeth. Shame wrapped around her heart and squeezed it even smaller than its already paltry size.

Soon Mary found herself in front of Roz’s office brownstone again. She rang the bell and stated quite firmly and clearly when asked to identify herself: “Mary Veal. It’s Mary Veal, here.”

Notes

MARCH 18, 1986

T
he statistics on child molestation in the suburbs of Boston are astonishingly high given the area’s comparative per capita wealth, a topic to which many psychiatric papers are dedicated at the annual Massachusetts Association of Mental Health Professionals Convention. The stricter Freudians among my colleagues presume this number to be wildly inflated by the recent influx of feminist psychoanalysts (most, but not all, are women) who insist on giving literal credence to abuse incidents formerly chalked up to sexual fantasy. I sympathized with the feminist psychoanalysts to a point; if ever there were a culture upon which the Freudians would have an unquestioned lock, it would be a repressive culture like New England. However, in a culture of inculcated repression, a backlash of equally distorted proportions must be expected. While a graduate student at BU I found myself caught unawares by exactly this sort of equalizing dynamic. As the resident mental health adviser at Semmering Academy, a position I held from the fall of 1971 until the spring of 1972, my job primarily involved counseling the student body—an intelligent if highly strung collection of adolescent girls, prone to suffering from illnesses rarely more serious that the side effects of overachievement. To say that I was, initially, less than sympathic to their suffering would be an understatement; so unmoved was I by their traumas that I soon warranted a visit from the headmistress, Dorothy Pym, who memorably informed me that girls, like horses, needed apples as much as they needed the crop.

And so I fed them apples. I considered every B plus a world-threatening tragedy. I was empathic to a saintly degree. Which was possibly why I allowed myself to be duped by the school’s then most infamous student, Bettina Spencer.

Following my reprimand from Miss Pym, I possibly became lazy in the face of simple plausibility; I became an enabler, and I enabled Bettina Spencer to temporarily derail the life of an innocent man by failing to see that the girl suffered from an easily diagnosable cluster B personality disorder—more precisely, she was a pathological liar and a narcissist who exhibited grandiose tendencies. Bettina, I later came to learn, had been abused by an uncle when she was twelve years old. Always an imaginative girl with a tendency toward exaggeration, Bettina’s accusations were dismissed by her mother as a more malignant strain of her usual tall tales. Thus exaggeration mutated into mendacity, and Bettina, seeking a way to right a wrong she believed she’d suffered at the hands of doubting adults, decided to fabricate a more believable situation of abuse. This did not excuse the burning of the library, nor the accusations directed at Miss Pym, nor various other injustices visited upon the innocent by Bettina’s desire to make a name for herself through the destruction of property and other people. But I take responsibility for failing to diagnose Bettina’s illness in the early stages; had I done so, perhaps the old library would still be intact, as would the lives of her victims. As Plutarch said, “It is worse to be sick in soul than in body, for those afflicted in body only suffer, but those afflicted in soul both suffer and do ill.”

Which was why Mary’s confession regarding her abuse at the hands of Kurt, and her family’s failure to believe her, seemed of linchpin importance. It also explained why Mary’s diagnosis failed, up to this point, to cohere. If, as I suspected, Mary’s mental status belonged to cluster B, then this would explain her erratic, dramatic, and nongenuine emotional behavior; it would explain the vagueness of her answers and her generally evasive temperament; it would explain her love of open-ended questions and florid, if often contradictory, responses. It would explain her flirtatiousness, which often took the form of hostility or cruelty. And it would explain my general sense of disorientation, for such is the danger of treating grandiose narcissists—they are expert mimics, able to inhabit the disorder profiles of many competing illnesses so that the bewildered doctor finds him- or herself taking wrong turn after wrong turn at the bottom of many pointless rabbit holes.

Subsequently, my next appointment with Mary felt extremely crucial, the fulcrum meeting upon which the rest of our work together would teeter. I was reminded of a conversation Mary and I had had during the third session, during which I’d claimed that therapy wasn’t a chess game in which tactical errors could be made. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I
began our next session, our fifth, with a game.

What kind of game, Mary said. She arrived again in a hostile mood. Her complexion had improved, however; she even appeared, to my eye, prettier than I’d ever before given her credit for being. She admitted that she’d been to a tanning booth on a lark with her sister Regina, that she hadn’t worn underwear and thus didn’t have a tan line. She offered to show me this lack of a tan line, and even stood up and began unbuttoning her jeans, expecting me to stop her. She slowed her fingers, watching me intently, waiting for me to object.

I did not object.

You’re such a pervert, Beaton, she said, rebuttoning her jeans and dropping back onto the couch. What would your colleagues say? Encouraging a patient to undress in front of you. Next you’ll be begging for a striptease.

I didn’t encourage you to do anything, I said.

Not making a decision is a decision, Mary said.

I was allowing you to act on an impulse that consumed you.

I wasn’t
consumed
, she said. What are you writing?

More notes, I said.

Who cares about you and your notes? she said. Nobody reads them.

That’s not true, I said. I’m part of a weekly workshop in which my performance is reviewed and critiqued by colleagues.

Reviewed how, she said.

They read my notes. They listen, if there’s a reason to listen, to these tapes. It’s done anonymously, of course. Your name will never be disclosed.

Mary regarded the tape recorder.

Huh, she said. So they’ll be listening to my voice?

I nodded.

Huh, she said again. Maybe I should tell them how I really feel about you.

You may say whatever you like, I said.

An endorsement, she said. You can use it on your book.

What book, I said.

Mary smiled. The book you’re going to write about us.

Mary pulled out her compact, she checked her lips. She dropped the compact into her lap but failed to insert the obsessive swirling finger.

I need to jot this down, she said. Can I have a piece of paper?

I tore a sheet of paper from my pad.

A pencil?

I handed her a pen.

I need a pencil, she said.

I fetched a pencil from my desk drawer. She stared at my face as she passed the pencil back and forth over the sheet of paper.

What are you doing, I said.

Sketching you, she said. You have a very high forehead. Have you ever studied phrenology?

Have you? I asked.

A high forehead means you are well suited to public speaking and occupations involving water.

Is that your endorsement of me, I asked.

No, she said, this is my endorsement of you. “Dr. Hammer is a man endowed with incredible intellectual and physical resources. His obsession with genitals is a source of constant stimulation for both doctor and patient. I feel thoroughly explored by this man, if scarcely understood.”

Mary smiled. Would you like to see my sketch?

If you would like to show it to me, I said.

Mary turned the sheet of notebook paper to face me. She had shaded in the top half with the pencil; in doing so she had revealed the depression caused by my pen as I had written my notes about her.

Can’t believe you fell for that old trick, Beaton, she said.

Maybe I wanted you to know what I thought about you, I said.

Nice try, she said. What’s faked anterograde memory disturbance?

Do you know what paramnesia is, I said.

No, she said.

Paramnesia is a term for the story a patient creates to explain their lives. They’ve substituted what they’ve forgotten with a new memory, I said.

Why don’t you just call them liars, she said.

Because it’s more complicated than lying.

Lying is complicated, Mary said.

It can be, I said.

She pointed to the upper left-hand corner of the paper on which I had written “BS Connection?” and circled it.

You think I’m bullshitting you, she said.

That’s your interpretation, I said, relieved that she hadn’t interpreted the notation correctly as “Bettina Spencer.”

So you think I’m a liar, she said.

Do you think you’re a liar, I said.

If I say no and I’m a liar, then I might be a liar; then again I might be telling the truth.

And if you say yes?

If I say yes and I’m a liar, then that means I’m not a liar. And yet I’ve lied to you.

I’m still curious how you’d diagnose yourself, I said. Presuming you would tell the truth in this one instance.

Never presume. It makes a pre out of sue and me. And besides, she said, I’m not the doctor.

How would you like to be the doctor, I said.

What do you mean, she said.

You’ll be me, and I’ll be you.

This is the game, she said.

This is the game, I said.

She tried to appear skeptical of this suggestion, but I could sense it excited her.

I think this will be harder for you than it will be for me, she said. I just have to repeat everything you say and ask obvious stupid questions. You need to be creative.

I’ll have to try my best, I said.

Can I wear your coat? Can I sit at your desk?

I’ll be in the waiting room, I said.

I retreated to the waiting room. Two minutes later the door opened.

Come in, Mary said.

I entered the office. She was seated in my swivel desk chair, facing the window.

Lie on the couch, she said.

You want me to lie down?

Facing away from me. You’re so tense, she said. I want you to relax. I want you to forget I’m even here.

I lay on the couch. I heard the squeak of my desk chair.

So, she said, you think you have problems.

No, I said.

No? she said.

I’ve been told I have problems, I said. It’s not the same thing as believing I have problems.

Who told you that you have problems? Mary said.

My mother.

I doubt that, Mary said. She’s not able to recognize, much less articulate, her feelings about me. About you, I mean.

She telegraphs her disapproval in other ways.

So she disapproves of you, Mary said.

She disapproves of anyone with problems, I said.

Mary didn’t respond. I turned my head toward her but she reprimanded me.

No absolutely not, she said.

You didn’t respond, I said.

I nodded, she said.

I can’t see you nodding, I said.

Good point, she said. I’m nodding again.

I’ve thought about telling my mother that I can sense her disapproval, I said.

That would be a waste of breath, Mary said. In my professional opinion.

But as I’ve learned from my mother, there are ways to communicate that don’t involve talking.

Such as? Mary said.

Actions, I said. Actions that involve deceit.

Interesting, Mary said. Is this being tape-recorded?

Of course, I said. If I’m paying for this session I want there to be a record of our work.

Maybe I should take notes, Mary said. Just to be safe.

Whatever you need to do, I said. You’re the doctor.

I heard Mary rummaging through my desk drawer.

OK, she said. I’m ready now. What was it you just said?

I said that one could communicate using actions involving deceit.

Nice, she said. I think we’re nearing a breakthrough.

Really?

I think of breakthroughs in a sexual manner. They can be extremely erotic. I need a cigarette.

I heard the snip of a lighter, smelled cigarette smoke.

You’re not supposed to smoke in here, I said.

There’s no smoke detector, she said. Unless you rat me out, nobody will be the wiser.

I’m not here to rat you out, I said.

Huh, she said. Somehow I doubt that.

You’re very paranoid for a doctor, I said.

I’m not paranoid, she said. I am
paying attention to you
. You are paying me to pay attention to you.

I’m not here to rat you out, I repeated. I thought you were here to rat me out.

To whom? she said. To your mother? All she wants is a doctor’s note claiming that you weren’t raped. You could agree to let me tell her that, in my professional opinion, you weren’t raped, and then we could stop this therapy I-care-about-you-a-total-stranger bullshit. Because I
don’t
care about you. I’m just trying to further my career.

How will this further your career?

Mary exhaled.

A white girl disappears from a white prep school in a white suburb. Nobody knows what happened to her. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened. This must be resolved by whatever means possible.