Ralph thought he had been following closely, but apparently he had lost her on one of the turns. "Knew? How could they know?"
"Because Litchfield told them!" she shouted. Her face twisted again, but this time it was not hurt or sorrow Ralph saw there but a terrible rueful rage. "That tattling son of a bitch called my son on the telephone and TOLD him EVERYTHING!"
Ralph was dumbfounded.
"Lois, they can't do that," he said when he finally found his voice again. "The doctor-patient relationship is. -well, it's privileged.
Your son would know all about it, because he's a lawyer, and the same thing applies to them. Doctors can't tell anyone what their patients tell them unless the patient-"
"Oh Jesus," Lois said, rolling her eyes.
"Crippled wheelchair Jesus. What world are you living in, Ralph? Fellows like Litchfield do whatever they think is right. I guess I knew that all along, which makes me double-stupid for going to him at all, Carl Litchfield is a vain, arrogant man who cares more about how he looks in Ills suspenders and designer shirts than he does about his patients."
else when I'm taken advantage of. again.
"That's awfully cynical."
"And awfully true, that's the sad part. You know what? He's thirty-five or thirty-six, and he's somehow gotten the idea that when he hits forty, he's just going to... stop. Stay forty for as long as he wants to. He's got an idea that people are old once they get to be sixty, and that even the best of them are pretty much in their dotage by the age of sixty-eight or so, and that once you're past eighty, it'd be a mercy if your relatives would turn you over to that Dr. Kevorkian. Children don't have any rights of confidentiality from their parents, and as far as Litchfield is concerned, old poops like us don't have any rights of confidentiality from our kids. It wouldn't be in our best interests, you see.
"What Carl Litchfield did practically the minute I was out of his examining room was to phone Harold in Bangor. He said I wasn't sleeping, that I was suffering from depression, and that I was having the sort of sensory problems that accompany a premature decline in cognition. And then he said, 'You have to remember that your mother is getting on in years, Mr. Chasse, and if I were you I'd think very seriously about her situation down here in Derry."
"
"He didn't!"
Ralph cried, amazed and horrified. "I mean... did he?"
Lois was nodding grimly. "He said it to Harold and Harold said it to me and now I'm saying it to you. Silly old me, I didn't even know what 'a premature decline in cognition' meant, and neither of them wanted to tell me. I looked up 'cognition' in the dictionary, and do you know what it means?"
"Thinking," Ralph said. "Cognition is thinking."
"Right. My doctor called my son to tell him I was going senile!
Lois laughed angrily and used Ralph's handkerchief to wipe fresh tears off her cheeks.
"I can't believe it," Ralph said, but the hell of it was he could.
Ever since Carolyn's death he had been aware that the naievety with which he had regarded the world up until the age of eighteen or so had apparently not departed forever when he crossed the threshold between childhood and manhood; that peculiar innocence seemed to be returning as he stepped over the threshold between manhood and old manhood. Things kept surprising him... except surprise was really too mild a word. What a lot of them did was knock him ass over teakettle.
The little bottles under the Kissing Bridge, for instance. He had taken a long walk out to Bassey Park one day in July and had gone under the bridge to rest out of the afternoon sun for awhile. He had barely gotten comfortable before noticing a little pile of broken glass in the weeds by the stream that trickled beneath the bridge. He had swept at the high grass with a length of broken branch and discovered six or eight small bottles. One had some crusty white stuff in the bottom.
Ralph had picked it up, and as he turned it curiously before his eyes, he realized he was looking at the remains of a crackparty. He had dropped the bottle as if it were hot. He could still remember the numbed shock he had felt, his unsuccessful attempt to