Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Schaeffer interrupted her. “Miss Marshall, what does any of this have to do with us?”

She sighed. “It has everything to do with you, Mr. Schaeffer,” she said, more forcefully than Pace expected. “If you’ll let me finish, you’ll see that.”

Schaeffer bowed his head in agreement and waved his hand for her to continue.

She said, “There was so little known about Tourette’s back then that Jimmy was eight years old before a doctor got him started on some medication to help him. I think the first one he took was an antipsychotic called Haldol. Except in times of extreme stress, the Haldol controlled the tics and stopped the coprolalia, uh, the compulsion to shout curse words. But the drug depressed Jimmy so doctors gave him a second medication, called Bensylate, to counteract the worst of the reaction to the Haldol. Jimmy also began to receive psychotherapy to help overcome the emotional problems the Tourette’s Syndrome caused.” She paused, trying to gather her emotional strength.

“For almost two years, Jimmy led a nearly normal life. He was able to go to school. His classmates stopped making fun of him, and he was happy, except he said he felt ‘slow,’ and he forgot stuff all the time. The doctors said that was normal. A Tourette’s victim is so hyper that when medication slows him to a normal pace, he feels like he’s moving through Jell-O. Mom and Dad felt like that was a small price to pay for relief from the symptoms of the disease.

“Jimmy became more willing to take social chances, to be with other people. He began to gain a measure of self-confidence since he didn’t have to worry about embarrassing himself, or us, in public. When he was nine, he watched Dad get ready to go on a fall hunting trip, and he wanted to go along. Of course that was impossible. But in the months that followed, going hunting became an obsession with Jimmy. It was all he talked about. Finally, in the spring, Dad began to talk to Jimmy’s doctors about the possibility, and they agreed the medication was helping him enough that he could go on the trip and carry a gun. So for his tenth birthday, Daddy got him a .22 rifle.” She smiled. “I remember Jimmy was so happy and so proud. He practiced with the rifle all summer, shooting at tin cans and paper targets Dad set up for him out in the country.

“When the next fall came, Dad set aside a weekend day when he would take Jimmy out on his first rabbit hunt. The whole family was going to go—you know, to give the kid a lot of support—but I came down with the flu and had to stay home. A couple of days before the trip, Jimmy started agitating to go off his medicine on the day of the hunt so he wouldn’t feel slow. Mom and Dad didn’t want to permit it, but Jimmy’s main doctor said it would be all right if it wasn’t for more than the span of one dose. But as it turned out, it wasn’t all right at all.”

Sharon Marshall stopped and bit her lower lip. Pace and Schaeffer waited patiently for her to continue, and when she didn’t, Schaeffer prompted her. “Miss Marshall?”

She looked up, startled. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve never told this story to strangers, and it’s sort of hard. Late on the day of the hunt, Jimmy showed the first signs of the tics returning. Dad noticed, and he tried to take Jimmy’s rifle away, but Jimmy wouldn’t hear of it. He was a proud little boy. He knew the symptoms were coming back, but he was determined to carry his own gun through the fields and back to the car. Rather than cause him stress, which could have made the symptoms worse, Daddy let him keep the rifle. Ten minutes later—they could see the car from where they were standing, and Jimmy’s medication was in the glove compartment—it happened. Jimmy had a bad convulsion, and he accidentally pulled the trigger. The bullet hit my mother in the chest, piercing her heart. She died instantly.”

Schaeffer leaned forward in his chair, totally focused on the story now. Pace felt as though he was intruding on a family tragedy he had no business witnessing. Sharon Marshall plunged on, her voice quavering.

“The effect of something like that would be severe for any child, but for Jimmy, it was catastrophic. He shut down. He stopped speaking, but not for organic reasons. The doctors said he was ‘electively mute.’ He acted functionally retarded, unable to feed or dress himself. Daddy tried to keep him at home and care for him with a nurse around the clock, but when Jimmy became encopretic and enuretic, which means he lost control of his bowels and his bladder, six nurses came and went, and Daddy finally gave in and put Jimmy in a residential treatment center.

“With the institution came institutionalization. Jimmy was surrounded by children who truly were retarded, and he was cared for by adults who treated him as retarded. He received no stimulation, and his withdrawal from the world became more and more complete. When he was fifteen, a new psychologist at the school recognized that he could be helped. It took four years of daily work, but she began to draw him out, to force him to do things for himself and to be more self-reliant. His own expectations for himself began to rise, and that helped increase his sense of self-respect. He began to speak again.”

“Where was this treatment center?” Schaeffer asked.

“In Cleveland,” she said.

“Okay.”

“When he was nineteen, Jimmy got a day job folding laundry. Just after his twenty-first birthday, he moved to a Boardman, Ohio, halfway house that served as a supervised home for eleven functionally-impaired young adults. Jimmy learned to do his grocery shopping, to take care of his money, and to use a checkbook. He got a job at a neighborhood filling station where he still works. It’s a low-pressure job. The customers know him and accept the fact that he’s impaired. He has his own apartment and,” she smiled, “a girlfriend. He gets along fine, all things considered.

“The last time Dad saw Jimmy was on Jimmy’s thirteenth birthday. I remember Dad ran away in tears. He couldn’t bear to be around his son. He couldn’t handle the guilt he felt for a whole lot of things: for bringing an afflicted child into the world, for buying Jimmy that rifle, for not taking it away from him at the end of the hunting day, for not being able to keep him at home so he could be with his family, or what was left of it. Even as Jimmy got better, Dad couldn’t bring himself to visit. It would have meant explaining where he’d been for the past several years. He was also afraid if Jimmy remembered him, it could bring back the horror of the day his mother died and set Jimmy back emotionally.”

Pace put up a hand. “You mean Jimmy forgot his family?” he asked.

Sharon Marshall nodded. “When Jimmy left the treatment center, he had selective amnesia. He could recall recent things very clearly, but he had no memory predating his sixteenth birthday party. He didn’t even know me as his sister. He thought of me, and still thinks of me as a friend, somebody who calls every day to say hello and to ask if things are okay, who brings presents on birthdays and holidays, checks his bank account and gives him money when he needs it. Dad always made sure I had enough money for both of us.” She laughed ruefully. “We had more than enough, actually. Dad insisted I invest money for my future and Jimmy’s. But we could never spend everything he gave us. All the money everybody’s fussed over so much, it was Daddy’s legitimately. So was all the Converse stock. The million dollars he took out of his bank in cash on the day of the airplane accident… well, he sent it to me.”

She picked up her purse and fished in it for something. What she pulled out looked to Pace like a bankbook. She opened it and handed it to Schaeffer.

“You’ll see I made a deposit of $1 million dollars to my account the next day.”