Compulsion (7 page)

"Good?" she said bitterly.

"All the tissue they left looks healthy," I said.

She rolled her eyes.

"The last thing you’d want," I said, "would be a surgeon who wasn’t willing to follow the infection all the way to its source."  I noticed a tear start down Lilly’s face.  I grabbed a tissue from the nightstand and blotted her cheek dry.

She turned her head toward me, but said nothing.

"It’s really no different that what I try to do," I said.  "I have to help my patients trace the roots of their pain as deep as they go."

A few seconds passed.  "What if your patient doesn’t know what caused the pain?" she asked.

"
Asking the question is half the answer
," the voice at the back of my mind said.  "
She wants to take the journey.  At heart, everyone wants the truth
."

My breathing slowed.  My eyes closed an instant, then reopened.  "If you don’t know, then we both have to find the courage to figure it out," I said.

Lilly blushed.  "I have trouble talking about myself," she said.

"Why is that?" I asked.

"I guess I think it’s safer to keep things inside."

"Safer?"

She didn’t respond.

"What’s the danger in opening up?" I asked.

"People who tell too much about themselves end up..."  She stopped short.

"End up... what?" I asked.

"I don’t know."  Her brow furrowed.  "Alone, I think."

That statement spoke volumes about Lilly.  Fabricating an illness — lying — had brought her close attention from a team of doctors.  Coming to terms with the real source of her suffering, especially if that source was abuse at her grandfather’s hand, would end her relationship with him, and possibly with other family members as well.  The risk of abandonment was real and had been with her since her childhood.  There was no sense candy-coating the stakes.  "I know how frightening it is for you," I said, "but you have to be willing to be alone, for a while.  At the very least, you have to be willing to be alone with your own thoughts."

She nibbled at her lower lip, like a timid little girl.  "I can’t stand being by myself."

That was a pretty clear message.  She needed something —
someone
— to count on, no matter what she divulged.  I touched her thigh, just above the incision.  "I promise to stay with you every step of the way," I said.

"But how can you say that?" she asked.  "You don’t even know me.  How am I supposed to trust you?"

I could have come up with a platitude to sidestep that question, but only an honest response would count with a person whose life had become a lie.  "You can’t be sure that I’m trustworthy," I said.  "You can never be certain — not with anyone.  Eventually, you’ll have to take a leap of faith.  You’ll have to go with your gut."

"I don’t know," she sighed.  "I’m so confused."

Another small victory; confusion is often the first sign of weakening in the mind’s defensive mechanisms.  I didn’t want to seem too eager to breach them.  "Shall I stop back in a few days, then?" I asked.

She stared at me several seconds.  "Okay," she said.  "Yes."

*            *            *

I made it home just before 11:00
P.M.
  A message from North Anderson on my voice mail told me I was scheduled to interview Billy Bishop at 10:30
A.M.
the next day.  Judging from my experience flying to Manhattan on other cases, that would mean taking the 7:30
A.M.
shuttle, planning for it to be late by a couple hours, which it pretty much always is.

I decided to hop on the Internet and learn what I could about Darwin Bishop.  Yahoo! Came up with 2,948 references, from sources like the
Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek
, and
CNN Financial News
.  The pieces told me Bishop had founded CMM with over $40 million of venture capital, that he had recruited engineers and metallurgists out of MIT, CalTech, and the University at St. Petersburg, and that his company had grown to one thousand employees within eighteen months.  A mention in the
New York Times
noted Bishop’s winning bid of $4.2 million for a Mark Rothko oil painting that had been predicted to bring $800,000 at auction at Sotheby’s.  His lavish lifestyle caught the eye of
Vanity Fair
, which published photographs of his vintage car collection and his nineteen-thousand-square-foot River House penthouse, as large as a quaint hotel.  The property, located on 52
^nd
Street, on a cul de sac between First Avenue and the East River, was also home to Henry Kissinger and Sir Rothschild.  The penthouse had itself been owned by the Astor family before Bishop picked it up for a mere $13 million.  And that was before Manhattan real estate really went through the roof.

I lingered over an archived, older piece from
New York
magazine entitled ‘Bishop Takes Bride on Ride of Her Life’ that focused on Bishop’s marriage to ‘socialite and Elite model Julia Oakley.’  A photo captured the Bishops in tuxedo and wedding gown, driving a red Ferrari Testarossa down Fifth Avenue.  Julia looked ravishing.

Midway through the article, Bishop commented on his first marriage.  "Lauren and I had two great years," Bishop had told the reporter.  "I wouldn’t trade our time together for anything.  We just sort of woke up one day and said, ‘We’re better as friends than we were as husband and wife.’  And let me tell you something:  I couldn’t have a better friend."

I chuckled.  You had to figure there was a lot more to that story.

I scanned dozens of entries, flew past a couple hundred others, then stopped short when my eye caught one that seemed out of synch with the rest.  It was a 1995 article in the
New York Daily News
, headlined ‘Trouble at the Top,’ that described Bishop’s arrest for drunk driving.

STUART TABOR

SPECIAL TO THE DAILY NEWS

MANHATTAN

A Manhattan man was arrested shortly after 2:00
A.M.
yesterday when his Porsche Carrera slammed into two other cars on the Triboro Bridge, and he then fled the scene.

Darwin Bishop, age 45, of 32, East 49
^th
Street, was charged with driving under the influence, driving to endanger, leaving the scene of an accident and resisting arrest.  Police apprehended him after a high-speed chase that ended in Astoria, Queens.

Despite a prior 1981 conviction for assault and battery, Bishop was released today on personal recognizance after posting $250,000 cash bail.

Estelle Marshfeld, 39, was transported from the scene of the crash to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where she is listed in guarded condition, with injuries to her chest and abdomen.  There were no other reported injuries.

A photograph showed a very different Darwin Bishop from the unflappable man I had seen earlier in the day on Nantucket.  His head was down and his hands were cuffed behind him as two police officers escorted him into the Twenty-third Precinct station.  Bloodstains covered the front of his blue and white pinstriped shirt.

I kept looking at the image of a drunken Darwin Bishop with bowed head.  He had seemed so starched and buttoned-down in his Nantucket digs.  Invulnerable.  The picture made him real to me because it confirmed what I had long believed:  Everyone — rich or poor, black or white, educated or not — is in emotional turmoil, in some sort of pain.  For years I had doused mine with booze and cocaine.  Bishop obviously had had his own trouble with alcohol.  Now he was high on money, a drug at least as intoxicating.

But maybe that meditation on humanity was only part of what kept me looking at the photograph.  Maybe I
liked
seeing a humbled version of Bishop because the thought of him with his new bride, Julia, irked me.

I wondered why Julia Bishop had made such an immediate and powerful impression on me.  She was stunningly beautiful, but that didn’t feel like the whole reason.  It didn’t even feel like half the reason.  I thought back to our conversation in front of the Bishop estate and realized that, within those few minutes, I had come to feel that she was suffering and that she might need my help.  And, for me, a woman in distress is the ultimate motivator.

My mind wandered to my mother, a weak person who had the unattractive habit of locking herself in the bathroom when my father was three sheets to the wind and looking for somebody to hurt, no doubt to avoid the hurt festering inside himself.  I was the only other one in the apartment, the top floor of a run-down tenement house in decaying Lynn, Massachusetts, and my father invariably spent his rage on me, until
he
was spend and fell down, or fell off into a drunken slumber.  And even though my mother was not a loving person, nor brave, nor responsible enough to get us out of that house and out of harm’s way, she was my mother and I loved her.  And that made me feel a little bit like a hero as the blows landed.  And with all the time I spent on Dr. James’s couch, untying the knots in my psyche, I was never able to free myself from that double bind of pride and pain.  I am still happier to suffer than to watch a woman suffer.

I shook my head and refocused on the computer screen image of Darwin Bishop being led away in cuffs.  I wanted to find an article that would fill me in on what sort of sentence he had received for his crime.  I spotted one entry slugged
Bishop’s Day in Court
, clicked onto it, and got a nice glimpse of how money speaks in the courts — or whispers behind the scenes.  The entry was for coverage in the
New York Post
six months after Bishop’s arrest, buried as the second-to-last item in the ‘Local Notes’ section of the paper.  It told of the case against Bishop being dismissed.  He didn’t get a day of probation, let alone jail time.

BISHOP’S DAY IN COURT

A Manhattan court dropped charges of driving under the influence, driving to endanger and resisting arrest lodged against Darwin Bishop, 45, of 32, East 49
^th
Street, citing questions about the validity of the field sobriety tests administered to him at the scene, a lack of credible eyewitnesses and the unavailability of key police testimony.  Defense attorney F. Lee Bailey stated, "No one came forward in this case because everyone knows Mr. Bishop had an accident, plain and simple.  Then things got out of control, as much due to overreaction on the part of law enforcement as anything else."  Bailey said he has not decided whether he will file litigation against the city or against any of the officers involved.

I tried to find information about Bishop’s prior conviction for assault and battery in 1981, but couldn’t come up with any other reference to it.

I looked at the clock — 12:54
A.M.
  That didn’t leave much time for sleep.  I turned off the computer and headed to bed.  But as tired as I was, my mind kept racing as I lay there.  Because I had the growing suspicion that Darwin Bishop was playing me.  I just didn’t know exactly how — or precisely why.  And while shielding a woman from harm can fill me with mixed-up pride, it is nothing compared to the energy that fills me when a man tries to use me, or bully me, or make me the fool.  Maybe that surge of determination is all tied up with the rush of adrenaline that used to course through my bloodstream every time my father came up with some cockamamie reason to take his belt to me.  Maybe my inability to step away from trouble, to retreat one inch from aggression, is irrational — rooted in a boy’s shame for yielding so much to a brutal father.  But Dr. James never managed to untie that knot in my psyche, either.

*            *            *

Monday, June 24, 2002

The shuttle into LaGuardia was only eighty minutes late, so I arrived shortly before ten at Payne Whitney, a nondescript building at 68
^th
and York, on the New York Presbyterian Hospital-Cornell Medical Center campus.  Billy Bishop was a patient on the third-floor locked unit for children and adolescents.  I took the elevator up, followed signs down a long white hallway, and pressed the buzzer at the side of a gray steel door labeled ‘3 East.’  Through a security glass window in the middle of the door I could see girls and boys of various ages milling about the unit, while staff members circulated among them.

"Yes?" a female voice emanating from a speaker next to the door asked.

"I’m Dr. Clevenger," I said.  "I’m here to interview Billy Bishop."

"We were expecting you at ten-thirty," she said.

"I’m early."

"Did you want to get a bite in the cafeteria?"

Psychiatry units are all about establishing boundaries and maintaining control.  Patients whose minds are unraveling are comforted by the rigid structure.  The trouble is the staff can get addicted to it, unable to budge an inch, on anything, for anyone.  "No," I answered.  "I already ate."

"There’s a very nice coffee shop across the street."

"I’d rather get started with the interview."

"I’ll find out whether that’s possible," the voice said coldly.  "Please wait."

Five minutes passed before a portly woman about my age, wearing half-glasses and a blowzy Indian print dress, walked to the door, unlocked it, and let me in.  Her graying hair was long and unruly.  She wore half a dozen strands of pearls.  "I’m Laura Mossberg," she said, in an unmistakable New York accent, "Billy’s attending psychiatrist."