deserted by their analysts. I expected the hour to dispose of itself lightly: fifty minutes of chitchat amounting to a delicate farewell.
Right on schedule, the loudspeakers reappeared in the lobby (one week before Thanksgiving somehow signaling to unknown authorities the official start of the Christmas season). Lights twinkled along the high moldings; poinsettias bloomed unnaturally in green plastic pots planted upon the podium; “Jingle Bells” played to distraction. As I approached the elevator—the music treacling a quarter tone out of tune, the speakers buzzing, as they had a year ago—I realized this was a time when I should be succumbing to my familiar despair. The crows should be taunting me: laughing all the way.
Yet where were they? Perhaps they were hiding, as they often did, the wily ones, the cowards; hovering just below the sensory limit, or so they thought. They did not know that if I stilled myself I could hear them, sense them, taste their bitterness.
I ascended in the crowded cab. It was damp from wet coats; eyeglasses fogged in the sudden heat. All felt normal: people going to work, pleasant people who made way for one another as they reached their intended floors, some even wishing the departing passenger a good day. Perhaps all this civility was a clue, a phony niceness, a prisoner’s village designed to make one relax vigilance.
But something seemed changed in the very atmosphere. For the first time in many years—how many I did not wish to name, for the days wound back to my boyhood and the onset of my condition—I felt no sense of menace. Things seemed, oddly for me, just as they were. The fogged eyeglasses were just that. The damp coats were only wool and polyester and dye. They signified nothing. Nothing hid in the fog; lurked in the folds.
I dared to think: Perhaps I had indeed undergone a miraculous cure. Perhaps the therapist’s teachings about my circling thoughts (Let them go! Let them go!) had robbed the demons of their power. Perhaps the patient’s presence in my life, and mine in hers, had transformed me.
I thought back to the prior session, to what the patient had said about her mother’s life: Her story and mine do not intersect.
As the cab rose floor by floor, the fear that I had done her harm began to evaporate. By the time I stepped out on eight, I was convinced that my intervention had been salutary; that I had given her the gift she had come to want above all else: knowledge of her mother, and—much more—freedom from her.
I sat in my office. The hours floated away, and at last my dear patient arrived. She sat down. But where was the opening chat? There came only silence, then the patient’s words:
There has been a complication.
Oh? replied the therapist.
One could hear the patient take a breath, then stop to retrieve whatever further words she was about to speak.
And? the doctor prompted.
Then finally the patient said:
I saw Mother.
(Oh, no! I thought.)
Big-M Mother? asked Dr. Schussler.
Mother. Big M.
(Mother! I wanted to shout. Just when we were about to dispense with mothers for good, why did this other mother have to return to our narrative?)
But of course this was precisely what Dr. Schussler had been waiting for! I thought with some disgust. This return, this hope of rapprochement with the stiff couple the patient called Father and Mother. Hadn’t the therapist said as much to Dr. Gurevitch? One could hear the doctor’s happy expectation in the quick creak of her leather seat, in her sudden, small intake of air, as if she had taken a sip of a drink about to give her pleasure.
And? she asked.
The patient said nothing.
I think I’ve only come back to where I started, the patient finally said.
111.
Immediately following last Wednesday’s session, my dear patient had received a phone call.
Did someone die, Mother? she asked upon hearing the familiar smoke-huskied voice.
Why would someone have died?
You never call me unless someone has died or is sick enough to be on the verge of it, said the patient.
Nonsense, dear.
The mother went on to say that she and the patient’s father would be in Pebble Beach over the weekend.
That is near you, dear, isn’t it? her mother said.
Yes, Mother. A two-hour drive at most.
We’re going to be there this weekend. All expenses paid!
A large building-supply corporation was rewarding architects who specified their products, said her mother. Friday seminars for the men. Coffee circles for the ladies. On Saturday the men would play a round of