Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

He was cordial, offering a strong hand that waited for mine to let go, and gestured to the coffee. I declined. “We had a big lunch,” Copley said. He puffed out his cheeks to indicate he was stuffed. He was all muscle and bone and I doubted he had really eaten a lot. When he inflated his cheeks they were so elastic he reminded me of Louis Armstrong playing the trumpet. I wondered if he had once been fat. He reached for the Wedgwood cup. “We had steak. I haven’t eaten red meat in years and I don’t think I will ever again. Leaves me feeling groggy.”

“Thank you for seeing me on short notice.”

“Well, I was pretty curious when Edgar said you were Gene’s psychiatrist. I didn’t know he was seeing anyone.”

I was convinced that was a lie. His eyes shifted away from me as he said it, although they hadn’t wavered until then, not when he sat or reached for the coffee. Also, he crossed his legs and put his hands together, both gestures of self-protection.

“I saw your daughter yesterday. Or I tried to.”

He raised his brow as if that were news, but he didn’t say it was, and his eyes stayed on me, a faint smile on his closed lips.

“I thought maybe Gene told her he had been in therapy and she told you.”

He shook his head. He glanced down, lifted the sharp crease in his charcoal gray pants and said, “She wouldn’t tell me something like that.” He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward and refilled his cup. “They had a love affair,” he said and his eyes were on me, unexpectedly, since he was pouring. He didn’t miss the target and he knew, without looking, when he needed to stop. “Daughters don’t gossip about their love lives with their Daddies.” He put the pot down and leaned back with his filled cup. He shrugged. “At least mine doesn’t.” He sipped. “How can I help you, Doctor?”

“Well, obviously, I failed with Gene. I feel responsible—” I smiled and paused. I had caught him by surprise, evidently. His cup was in midair, stopped en route back to the saucer on the table. He studied me with absolute concentration. He appeared to be physically frozen, as if his brain was so busy thinking it couldn’t bother with anything else. “I am responsible, I should say. I treated Gene, off and on, over a fifteen-year span and he destroyed himself. Basically, I want to check over the crash site. Figure out what I did wrong. I know it’s unorthodox and an intrusion, an unfair intrusion on you and your daughter, but you were both important to Gene and knew him well. I hoped you might help me figure out where I went wrong.”

He remained stuck for another moment. Then he released a gust of air through his wide thin lips. Not his daughter’s complicated expression of noise; his was closer to a horse’s neigh and communicated a single clear message: scornful dismissal. “I’m sorry,” he shook his head, no longer frozen in position. The cup went back to the saucer. He sat straight in the chair, a hand skimming over his tie, flattening it against his white shirt. “I apologize. It’s none of my business.”

“What’s none of your business?”

“How you evaluate yourself. I have about a half an hour before my next meeting, but I’ll be glad to answer your questions about Gene. Edgar told me of your fine reputation. In fact, I think I recognize you. He said you’ve been on television a fair amount. I watch way too much television. Very bad habit.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your help. But please, go back a moment and tell me what you were thinking when you said it was none of your business how I evaluate myself.”

“Well, I don’t know very much about psychiatry. I took Psych 101 like everyone else, but I don’t see how you can be blamed for Gene’s suicide. I mean, in the end, we” using his index finger, he poked himself on the lapel of his suit, “each of us are respons ible for our own will to live. I don’t see how you can give that will to someone. In fact, if anything, I’m probably more responsible for Gene’s suicide than you.” Copley turned away, showing me his profile. His chin lifted and he studied one of the rows of leather-bound books. He brought a hand to his eyebrows, rubbed them thoughtfully, and dropped it to join his other hand. He locked the fingers together and — to my horror — cracked his knuckles. It was exactly the gesture Gene had adopted in the latter years of his therapy. An imitated mannerism, just as he had once imitated his mother, mimicking someone he perceived as powerful. And the hair, the moussed hair, I realized — that too Gene had copied. Copley, meanwhile, spoke to the leather-bound books. “I mean unintentionally, of course. I fired him because he …” he slid his fingers together again and I winced ahead of the sound. This time, when he flexed, none came. “… Well, he burned out. He flamed out and he got real arrogant too. Demanded promotions and raises even though he lost control of production. I pushed him over the edge when I fired him.” Copley calmly moved off the books, his gaze returning to me. He brought a hand to his moussed hair, to smooth what was already flattened. “I’m sorry Gene killed himself. But I don’t regret firing him. I would do it again. You can’t save a drowning man if he’s in so great a panic he’ll take you with him.”

I didn’t say anything, returning his stare. I considered carefully, and as literally as possible for a psychiatrist, the merit of his remarkably frank speech. Stick must have interpreted my silence as confusion (perhaps it was) or as offended sensibility. He shrugged. Another wan smile played on his lips. “I’m sorry to sound ruthless,” he continued. “I was a certified lifeguard as a teenager and I remember the instructor’s little rhyme about what to do if a big man, a grown man, is drowning. ‘Throw,’” he tossed an imaginary sphere onto the library’s Keshan rug, “‘Don’t go.’” He wagged a scolding finger. “I’m sure you could talk to everyone who knew Gene, find out everything there is to find out, and, in the end, the answer lies in whatever happens at the mysterious moment when life is created. Something was left out when they assembled Gene. There was a bug in the programming.”

After I thanked Copley and left, I told myself to give up. And yet I wandered from the St. Regis into a bookstore, the old Scribner’s on Fifth Avenue, now swallowed by a national chain. I asked if they had anything on lifesaving.

“You mean CPR?” the clerk asked.

“I mean being a lifeguard,” I said.

We climbed narrow stairs to a small balcony at the front where they kept sports books. Nothing. Check at the library, the clerk suggested.

Feeling more and more amused by my foolish pedantry, I found a phone booth and called the YMCA near the clinic in Riverdale where we took our resident patients for swimming lessons. (Inner-city kids — Albert, for example — often don’t know how.) I asked for Jim Gagliardi, one of the instructors.

“What’s up, Rafe?” Jim’s voice echoed in the tiled acoustics of the indoor pool.

“If I say to you, ‘Throw — Don’t go,’ does that remind you of something?”

“You’ve got it wrong.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, you mean for lifeguard training? It’s, ‘Reach or Throw — Don’t

“I left out Reach.”

“Yeah,” Jim said with a laugh. “Hope nobody drowned.”

COPLEY DIDN‘T LIKE IT MUCH. HIS TONE WAS GRUFF WHEN I REACHED HIM at his office in Tarrytown the following day. But he agreed to persuade Halley to see me again.

“I can’t promise you she’ll be happy about it,” he said. I noted, however, that he was sure she would do it. We arranged I should call her in an hour.