Сэмуэль Шэм - Mount Misery

"But most of them don't want to stay," Hannah said. "They want out."

"Of course they want out," Blair said derisively, "they're

borderlines."

He dismissed us. Henry, Hannah, and I stood dazed in the lobby.

"He's crazy," I said. "And cruel."

"It seems cruel," Hannah said, "but he's an expert in cruelty to this kind of patient. What do we know? I've got to believe Blair knows what he's doing. Don't you have the sense that underneath it all he's a sweetheart?"

Neither Henry nor I said that we had that sense.

"WelL, I do. He comes on tough in public, but behind the closed doors of an office, no one knows what goes on. I bet his patients adore him."

"No fooh'n'," Solini said, "he's probably fucking 'em all on that desk."

"Lucky them," Hannah blurted out. Then she blushed and said, "Oh gosh."

WHY DO MEN follow leaders?

Without realizing it, trying all the while not to try it, as gradually and inevitably as the turning of summer toward fall where from day to day you can't really see the changes but one day you wake up chilled, your throat scratchy, the air crisp, chilled, not only almost fall but even containing the seeds of winter, we began to be affected by the Heiler machine.

How could we not be? Given the ferocity of the patients, and the vagueness of psychiatry in dealing with such definite ferocity, we felt constantly under attack, constantly criticized, constantly made to feel we were failing, that compared to Heiler and a lot of other experts we were simply inadequate, as psychiatrists and as human beings. Faced with these violent, raging people, what were we supposed to do? It wasn't like treating someone with a broken bone, where you took an X ray and saw the crack and followed the manual on how to set it. Here there were no white bones and black cracks. Here there were spectra of color with no edge between one color and another, and if you took an X ray you'd see pitch-black. In the chaotic gray of emotional pain, we needed something definite, something that would show us what to do.

Blair Heiler, in the hell of Emerson that he had created, was strangely comforting.

Especially after Malik, after the vagueness of Malik who

gave us no THEORY except to be human and who was always asking us to keep asking questions and telling us that our innocence was our power and our way of empowering our patients who were not OBJECTS to us but much like us, in being, basically, human beings-it was comforting to have some certainty, for the one thing you could say about Blair was that he was certain. There were no shadows in his sun. Follow Heiler, and you knew what to do. You never had to think. Heilerized, we could be certain of ourSELVES. Certain of ourSELVES, what did it matter that our patients, our OBJECTS, seemed so uncertain, so stuck? Given Heiler logic, stuck could be unstuck, could it not? Heiler was marching music, stirring up feelings of high school glory when I, trombonist in the Columbia High Fish Hawk Marching Band, would blast out "The Dominator" and kick my legs out and move swiftly through "Semper Fidelis" up from the river to the cemetery for the Gettysburg. Heiler was Sousa; Malik was all Ravel.

Blair assured us that once we got out all the Latent Negative in each borderline, we'd ride out the storm of rage, and the adjustment of borderline character to normal character would be profound. We'd sail off into a sunset of mental health, a sheaf of published papers under our arms, our patients safe and sound and married to appropriate OBJECTS and each secure in a healthy SELF. Like each of our own SELVES, yes.

To drive this point home, Blair would often quote from the historical figure he revered above all others, the man he said was the beacon to which all men aspire, the greatest American of all, who else but Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"Star by Star, world by world, system by system shall be crushed- but 1 shall live." (Emphasis, Blair Heiler)

Hearing this, how could you help but think of poor Ike White? Hadn't Malik told me that Lloyal von Nott, Heiler's mentor, had been "crushing" him?

The goddamn thing was that when you were with him, being scanned by that radar of bedroom-blue eyes, and blond

forelock and Huck Finn grin, it all felt so right that it immediately brought up the idea that it was in fact so wrong you'd be a dickhead to buy it, all in all confusing as hell, as if you'd shown up for some pain-relieving but terrifying dental work only to find a sign on the office door reading "Dentist Dead." Confusing, yes, for the harder I tried not to try it, the harder I seemed to be trying it. Or it me.

Five

SCHLOMO AND DIXIE DOVE were the twin constellations in the New England Freudian firmament, a kind of Big and Little Dipper of neurosis. The Doves were almost public figures, so out front that everybody thought they knew them. They had been born of immigrant Jewish parents, and in both were nurtured the seeds of a cultural hunger to "make it," a hunger that blossomed to indulgence in him, denial in her. Trim and tight as a fighting fish, Dixie was called by him, in public and with all good humor and even a twinkly affection,

"the Barracuda."

They'd met on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and worked their way through college in Manhattan-he CCNY, she Hunter-and then on to Boston, where he made it in Tufts Medical and she at MIT, in astrophysics. Both were analyzed by men analyzed by Freud, he by the pathetic Nash (ne Nis-chgedankberg), she by the bellicose Bebring. Nothing unusual in all this, I thought, driving up the hill to their mansion one afternoon in early October. Except for the psychoanalysis, they were much like my own parents, yes. But then something else had happened, something essential to the perverse self-promotion at the heart of the American Dream, and in a life-move of sheer implausibih'ty, which in hindsight seemed inevitable, Schlomo parlayed his vulgar wit to a prodigal power. Without anyone knowing quite how he did it, everyone woke up one morning to find that the good Dr. Dove had captured a share of the market on fixing up neurotic people with neurotic therapists. It was brilliant, for suddenly many of the therapists in the area were dependent on Schlomo for patients, and thus money. Schlomo was ballsy on money: you paid in advance, in cash only, a hundred fifty for twenty minutes-

"Gratuity included," Schlomo would say, laughing-after which he'd guarantee you the right shrink. If you didn't like the one he sent you to, he'd send you to another, and another, until you did. For no extra charge. He'd keep for himself the patients he wanted.

They were an outrageous-appearing couple, Schlomo's sloppiness countered by Dixie's being a florid fashion rack, all colorful dresses and blouses and skirts and pants with tropical flowers, with her signature floppy hats, real flowers pinned amidst the fake. Notorious for never refusing an invitation, they went to all social functions and always seemed to have a good time, Schlomo's laughter bouncing up from the center of the room, Dixie's commentaries on Schlomo slashing in from the corners. Not that everything had always gone well. One reason, everyone said, for their good cheer and impulsive social functioning was the matter of the swimming pool. Growing up in the searing and cindery summers of the city, Schlomo and Dixie had always dreamed of having their own pool. Finally, with the money from his booming practice, they bought the mansion and dug the hole. And swam. Swam and swam. Swam for years, until one day their two-year-old son was found facedown just below the surface, dead. It makes sense, I thought, parking under an elephantine copper beech. All this hyper humor is the frantic eruption of that immigrant hunger denied, the slow starvation of their outliving their only child. You had to feel for him, yes.

I was at Schlomo's house for a supervisory session. I knocked, went into the kitchen of the mansion, and was face-to-face with Dixie, in a housedress that could have passed for an advertisement for a cruise up the Congo. "Wrong door," she said. "He's in the carriage house."