Strangers (15 page)

By the offhanded way that Brendan had mentioned the dream, almost as an afterthought, he obviously wanted to believe that it was of no consequence. However, his face was paler than before, and there was a vague but unmistakable flutter of fear in his voice.

A burst of winter wind rattled a loose window pane, and Stefan said, “The man with black gloves—does he say anything to you?”

“He never speaks.” Another shudder. Brendan lowered his hands, thrust them in his pockets. “He touches me. The gloves are cold, slick.” The curate looked as if he could feel those gloves even now.

Acutely interested, Father Wycazik leaned forward in his chair and said, “
Where
do these gloves touch you?”

The young priest’s eyes glazed. “They touch…my face. Forehead. Cheeks, neck…chest. Cold. They touch me almost everywhere.”

“They don’t hurt you?”

“No.”

“But you’re afraid of these gloves, of the man wearing them?”

“Terrified. But I don’t know why.”

“One can’t help but see how Freudian a dream it is.”

“I suppose,” the curate said.

“Dreams are a way for the subconscious mind to send messages to the conscious, and in this case it’s easy to see Freudian symbolic meanings in these black gloves. The hands of the devil, reaching out to pull you down from grace. Or the hands of your own doubt. Or they could be symbols of temptations, of sins seeking your indulgence.”

Brendan seemed grimly amused by the possibilities. “Especially sins of the flesh. After all, the gloves
do
touch me all over.” The curate returned to the door and put his hand on the knob, but paused again. “Listen, I’ll tell you something odd. This dream…I’m half-sure it’s not symbolic.” Brendan let his gaze slide away from Stefan’s, down to the worn rug. “I think those gloved hands represent nothing more than gloved hands. I think…somewhere, someplace, at some time or other, they were real.”

“You mean you were once in a situation like the one in your dream?”

Still looking at the rug, the curate said, “I don’t know. Perhaps in my childhood. See, this might not have anything to do with my crisis of faith. The two things might be—probably are—unconnected.”

Stefan shook his head. “Two unusual and serious afflictions—a loss of faith and a recurring nightmare—troubling you at the same time, and you want me to think they’ve no relation? Too coincidental. There must
be some connection. But tell me, at what point in your childhood would you’ve been menaced by this unseen, gloved figure?”

“Well, I had a couple of serious illnesses as a boy. Maybe during a fever I was examined by a doctor who was a little rough or scary-looking. And maybe the experience was so traumatic that I repressed it, and now it’s coming back to me in a dream.”

“When doctors wear gloves for an examination, they use throwaway white latex. Not black. And not heavy rubber or vinyl gloves.”

The curate took a deep breath, blew it out. “Yeah, you’re right. But I just can’t shake the feeling that the dream’s not symbolic. It’s crazy, I suppose. But I’m sure those black gloves are real, as real as that Morris chair, as real as those books on the shelf.”

On the mantel, the clock struck the hour.

The soughing of the wind in the eaves became a howl.

“Creepy,” Stefan said, referring not to the wind or the hollow striking of the clock. He crossed the room and clapped the curate on the shoulder. “But I assure you, you’re wrong. The dream
is
symbolic, and it
is
related to your crisis of faith. The black hands of doubt. It’s your subconscious warning you that you’re in for a real battle. But it’s a battle in which you’re not alone. You’ve got me beside you.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“And God. He’s beside you as well.”

Father Cronin nodded, but there was no conviction in his face or in the defeated hunching of his shoulders.

“Now go pack your suitcases,” Father Wycazik said.

“I’m leaving you short-handed when I go.”

“I’ve got Father Gerrano and the sisters at the school. Now, off with you.” When his curate had gone, Stefan returned to his desk.

Black gloves. It was only a dream, not particularly frightening in its essence, yet Father Cronin’s voice had been so haunted when he spoke of it that Stefan was still affected by the image of shiny black rubber-clad fingers reaching out of a blur and prodding, poking….

Black gloves.

Father Wycazik had a hunch that this was going to be one of the most difficult salvage jobs upon which he had ever embarked.

Outside, snow fell.

It was Thursday, December 5.

4

Boston, Massachusetts

On Friday, four days after the catastrophic fugue that followed the aortal graft on Viola Fletcher, Ginger Weiss was still a patient at Memorial Hospital, where she had been admitted after George Hannaby led her out of the snowy alleyway in which she had regained consciousness.

For three days, they had put her through exhaustive tests. An EEG study, cranial X-rays, sonograms, pneumoventriculography, a lumbar puncture, an angiogram, and more, repeating the several procedures (though fortunately
not
the lumbar puncture) for cross-checked results. With the sophisticated tools and processes of modern medicine, they searched her brain tissue for neoplasms, cystic masses, abscesses, clots, aneurysms, and benign gummatous lumps. For a while they concentrated on the possibility of malignancies of the perineural nerves. They checked for chronic intracranial pressure. They analyzed the fluid from the spinal tap in search of abnormal protein, cerebral bleeding, a low sugar count that would indicate bacterial infection, or signs of a fungus infection. Because they were physicians who always gave their best to a patient, but especially because Ginger was one of their own colleagues, her doctors were diligent, determined, thoughtful, thorough, and firmly committed to pinpointing the cause of her problem.

At two o’clock Friday afternoon, George Hannaby came to her room with the results of the final battery of tests and with the reports of consultants who had given one last round of opinions. The fact that he had come himself, rather than let the oncologist or the brain specialist (who were in charge of her case) bring the news, most likely meant that it was bad, and for once Ginger was sorry to see him.

She was sitting in bed, dressed in blue pajamas that Rita Hannaby, George’s wife, had been kind enough to fetch (along with a suitcase full of other necessities) from the Beacon Hill apartment. She was reading a paperback mystery, pretending to be confident that her seizures were the result of some easily corrected malady, but she was scared.

But what George had to tell her was so bad that she could no longer hold fast to her composure. In a way, it was worse than anything for which she had prepared herself.

They had found nothing.

No disease. No injury. No congenital defect. Nothing.

As George solemnly outlined the final results and made it clear that her wild flights, performed in a fugue, were without a discernible pathological cause, she finally lost control of her emotions for the first time
since she had broken into tears in the alleyway. She wept, not noisily, not copiously, but quietly and with enormous anguish.

A physical ailment might have been correctable. And once cured, it would not have prevented her from returning to a career as a surgeon.

But the test results and the opinions of the specialists all conveyed the same unbearable message: Her problem was entirely in her mind, a psychological illness beyond the reach of surgery, antibiotics, or controlling drugs. When a patient suffered repeated incidents of fugue for which no physiological cause could be found, the only hope of ending the seizures was psychotherapy, though the finest psychiatrists could not boast of a high cure rate with patients thus afflicted. Indeed, a fugue was often an indication of incipient schizophrenia. Her chances of managing her condition and living a normal life were small; her chances of institutionalization were dismayingly high.

Within reach of her lifelong dream, within months of beginning her own surgical practice, her life had been shattered as thoroughly as a crystal goblet struck by a bullet. Even if her condition was not that extreme, even if psychotherapy gave her a chance to control her strange outbursts, she’d never be able to obtain a license to practice medicine.

George plucked several Kleenex from the box on the nightstand and gave them to her. He poured a glass of water. He got a Valium and made her take it, though at first she resisted. He held her hand, which seemed like that of a very small girl when clasped in his large mitt. He spoke softly, reassuringly. Gradually he calmed her.

When she could speak, she said, “But George, damn it, I wasn’t raised in a psychologically destructive atmosphere. Our home was happy, at peace. And I certainly got more than my share of love and affection. I wasn’t physically, mentally, or emotionally abused.” She angrily snatched the box of tissues from the nightstand, tore Kleenex from it. “Why me? How could
I
, coming from my background, develop a psychosis?
How
? With my fantastic mother, my special papa, my damned-if-it-wasn’t-happy childhood, how could
I
wind up seriously mentally disturbed? It isn’t fair. It isn’t right. It isn’t even
believable.
”

He sat on the edge of her bed, and he was so tall that he still loomed over her. “First of all, Doctor, the consulting specialists tell me there’s a whole school of thought that says many mental illnesses are the result of subtle chemical changes in the body, in the brain tissue, changes we’re not yet advanced enough to detect or understand. So this doesn’t have to mean that you’re screwed up by your childhood. I don’t think you’ve got to reevaluate your whole life because of this. Second, I’m not—I repeat, not—at all convinced that your condition is anything as serious as debilitating psychosis.”

“Oh, George, please don’t coddle—”

“Coddle a patient?
Me?
” he said, as if no one had ever suggested anything half as astonishing to him. “I’m not just trying to lift your spirits. I mean what I say. Sure, we didn’t find a physical cause for this, but that doesn’t mean there
isn’t
a physical problem involved. You might have a condition that’s not yet sufficiently advanced to be detectable. In a couple of weeks, or a month, or as soon as there’s any worsening of the problem, any indication of deterioration, we’ll run more tests; we’ll take another look, and I’d bet everything I own that we’ll eventually put our finger on the problem.”

She allowed herself to hope. Discarding a wadded mass of tissues, she fumbled for the Kleenex box. “You really think it could be like that? A brain tumor or an abscess so small it doesn’t show up yet?”

“Sure. I find that a hell of a lot easier to believe than that you’re psychologically disturbed. You? You’re one of the steadiest people I’ve ever known. And I can’t accept that you could be psychotic or even psychoneurotic and not exhibit unusual behavior
between
these fugues. I mean, serious mental illness isn’t expressed in neatly contained little bursts. It slops over into the patient’s entire life.”

She had not thought about that before. As she considered his point, she felt a little better, though not wildly hopeful and certainly not happy. On the one hand, it seemed weird to be
hoping
for a brain tumor, but a tumor could be excised, perhaps without gross damage to cerebral tissues. Madness, however, responded to no scalpel.

“The next few weeks or months are probably going to be the most difficult of your life,” he said. “The waiting.”

“I suppose I’m restricted from hospital work for the duration.”

“Yes. But depending on how you come along, I don’t see why you can’t help me out at the office.”

“And what if I…threw one of these fits?”

“I’d be there to keep you from hurting yourself until it passed.”

“But what would your patients think? Wouldn’t exactly help your practice any, would it? To have an assistant who suddenly turns into a
meshuggene
and runs shrieking through the office?”

He smiled. “Let me worry about what my patients think. Anyway, that’s for the future. Right now, at least for a week or two, you’ve got to take it easy. No work at all. Relax. Rest. These last few days have been emotionally and physically exhausting.”

“I’ve been in bed. Exhausting? Don’t knock a teapot.”

He blinked, confused. “Don’t what?”

“Oh,” she said, surprised to have heard those four words pop out of her, “it’s something my father used to say. It’s a Yiddish expression.
Hok
nit kain tchynik:
don’t knock a teapot. It means, don’t talk nonsense. But don’t ask me
why
it means that. It’s just something I used to hear all the time when I was a kid.”

“Well, I’m not knocking a teapot,” he said. “You may have been in bed all week, but it’s been an exhausting experience nonetheless, and you need to take it easy for a while. I want you to move in with Rita and me for the next few weeks.”

“What? Oh, I couldn’t impose on you—”

“It’s no imposition. We have a live-in maid, so you won’t even have to make your bed in the morning. From the guest-room window, you’ll have a nice view of the bay. Living around water is calming. In fact, it’s quite literally what the doctor ordered.”

“No. Really. Thank you, but I couldn’t.”

He frowned. “You don’t understand. I’m not just your boss but your doctor, and I’m telling you this is what you’re going to do.”

“I’ll be perfectly fine at the apartment—”

“No,” he said firmly. “Think about it. Suppose one of these seizures struck while you were making dinner. Suppose you knocked over a pot on the stove. It could start a fire, and you might not even be aware of it until you came out of the fugue, by which time the whole apartment could be ablaze and you could be trapped. That’s only one way you might hurt yourself. I can think of a hundred. So I have to insist that…for a while you must not live alone. If you don’t want to stay with me and Rita, do you have relatives who’d take you in for a while?”