The Uses of Enchantment (16 page)

T
he younger Mary had arrived at Roz’s office that first time—the spring of 1987—without an appointment nor any clear sense of why she’d come. In the intervening two weeks since Roz called the meeting with her mother and Dr. Flood in her family’s living room, another associate of Roz’s had stopped by the house on Rumney Marsh. A mole-haired graduate student, he spoke of a lie detector test, he mentioned further therapy, he suggested Mary be deposed before a panel of psychiatric experts and her mother agreed to it.
You are not to say one word to these people.
But no longer. Now her mother was throwing her to the wolves.

And so this younger Mary rang the bell of Roz’s new office and, partially to her relief, nobody answered. Thirty seconds later she heard the grinding honk-buzz-snap of the interior door’s lock releasing. She stepped into the foyer’s gloom, the door locking definitively behind her. Mary walked up the canted and depressingly gray-carpeted staircase to Roz’s office on the third floor. She rang the buzzer and was admitted by a higher-pitched buzz. She walked down the narrow hallway (so narrow that the sides of her backpack rubbed against the walls), past a small bathroom, and into a waiting room furnished with a wicker couch and two matching chairs, all painted dark red, all decorated with generically ethnic-looking throw pillows. A white-noise machine fogged away beneath the scarred side table that abutted what she presumed to be Roz’s office door. A framed photograph of a black woman pinning colorfully striped sheets to a laundry line hung on one wall, a poster from a primitives exhibit featuring a scary or miserable-looking wood mask hung on the opposite wall. She removed her backpack but not her anorak, sat on the wicker couch, and waited.

Thirty-five minutes later the door next to the scarred side table opened. A woman emerged, avoiding Mary’s eyes as she struggled to don her coat in the narrow hall, her elbows thudding dully against the walls as she wrapped her head in a scarf.

“Come in,” she heard Roz say.

Mary sat on the orange corduroy couch. A radiator sizzled in the corner; the neighboring windows were cracked open and Mary could see the waves of heat shimmying past the gap. She still didn’t remove her anorak, even though the steam heat made her feel like her body was swelling to twice its normal size, a feeling of general discomfort unaided by the ceiling’s track lighting, trained directly on the couch.

Roz’s earrings, long silver-tentacled things, reached nearly to her shoulders. One was tangled in her hair like a helpless sea creature suspended in a tuna net.

“Hello,” Roz said.

The radiator clanked in a distressed way. Mary shifted sweatily on the couch, her tights glued to her inner thighs.

“You’ve had a chance to think about our last meeting,” Roz said. “I can see you’ve been thinking.”

Mary wondered how the act of thinking made itself visible on a person.

“I appreciate that. I
appreciate
it, Mary.” Roz placed a hand flat between her breasts, her cloisonné bangles making a tooth-clacking sound. “And I’m assuming, because you’ve come all this way to see me, that you’ve decided the best way out of this situation—for all involved—is to finally tell the truth.”

Mary didn’t respond.

“Mary?” she prodded.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Mary said.

“You’re protecting Dr. Hammer, I know this, and while I admire your loyalty I want you to know that Dr. Hammer doesn’t need your protection. He’s an adult, and like many adults he’s suffered an extremely misguided error in judgment. Nothing bad will happen to him—unless, of course, he’s done something terrible to you that you want to tell me about. Did he do something terrible to you, Mary, that you’d like to tell me about?”

Mary shook her head.

“Well,” Roz said. “Regardless I’m all ears.”

What a strange saying, Mary thought.
All ears
. Roz’s office felt like an interrogation room, with its overactive radiator and its track lights and its woman who was
all ears
. Worse than one of the Greek sirens Mary had been reading about with her tutor, Roz wasn’t a person who would sing you to death—no no, Roz would
listen
you to death. She’d suck every thought and memory you’d ever had right out of your mouth, leaving you empty-headed, dry-tongued, identity-free, a husk.

A person might simply confess to untrue things just to be released from the situation with some of their actual person intact.

“I lied to Dr. Hammer,” Mary said.

“You lied to
protect
yourself from him,” Roz said. “Of course you did.”

“I allowed him to believe things,” Mary said.

“He put words in your mouth,” Roz said. “He put ideas in your head.”

Mary stared at Roz, flicking an octopus earring with her stout forefinger. For a so-called feminist, she was strangely quick to assign to women the most helpless of roles.
Who’s to say
, she wanted to say,
that I didn’t put ideas in his head?

“He was not completely wrong in his assessment of me,” Mary said evasively.

“But he was not completely right, either. An important distinction. Ultimately, he suppressed your own story with his theory.”

“My story wasn’t suppressed,” Mary said. “My story was—in process.”

“Of course it’s in process. It’s
still
in process. Given the subpar treatment you’ve received, you couldn’t possibly claim to know what happened to you in any accurate way. Your past, you believe, could as easily be a product of your imagination. It’s going to take some work, Mary, but together I know we can ‘adhere,’ as we say, your so-called fantasy life with your actual life. This is the only way that healing can begin, the only way that you can become the author of your own narrative. By accepting that the fantasy is not, in fact, a fantasy. In the meantime, however, you’ll need to testify to how Dr. Hammer’s…
enthusiasm
…for his theory posed, shall we say, a conflict to your own best interests as his patient.”

Mary fiddled with the expired ski passes on her anorak’s zipper.

Roz spun around in her armchair and opened her desk drawer, withdrawing what looked to Mary like a college catalog, with a glossy cover and a picture of a squat pillared building, a library or judicial court, flanked by two autumnal-leafed trees.

She handed it to Mary.

“The Massachusetts Mental Health Governing Board was founded in 1973 to protect people like you,” Roz said. “People who have sought the help of a mental health professional and who have received
subpar
care. Most psychiatric licensing boards allow their members to re-up without checking their records or inspecting their performance. Many doctors and therapists don’t even bother to renew their licenses in a timely manner. Dr. Hammer, during the months he saw you, was working with an expired license. Of course, Dr. Hammer isn’t an actual
doctor
. He dropped out of his Ph.D. program. He isn’t a trained psychiatrist. He studied therapeutic social work at Boston University and received his certificate by the skin of his teeth. He’s been long associated with an experimental and uncertified school of therapy that borrows randomly from pop psychology and elementary psychoanalysis. Finally, though he was never officially indicted, while in graduate school he was brought up on dubious practice charges because of his mishandling of a sociopathic patient named Bettina Spencer. I presume you’ve heard of her. I’ve written a letter to your parents to this effect. I’m hoping your mother will now be able to direct her outrage toward the more deserving target.”

Mary opened the brochure and was confronted with a blank white page and a Voltaire quote: Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

“Of course I’m not underestimating what parents go through in these situations. True, it cannot compare to what you, the victim, experienced. But parents are especially hard hit by the limits of their own power—of their ability to effectively
protect
their children from harm. It’s only natural that they should reject those who have their best interests at heart.”

“Why did you share an office with him?” Mary said.

“Excuse me?”

“If you think Dr. Hammer’s so dangerous. Why did you share an office with him?”

Roz smiled. “Would it predispose you toward me to know that I, too, have my weaknesses?”

“I doubt it,” Mary said.

“Weak men are my weakness. I cannot help myself from helping pathetic men. But even I have my limits.”

Mary closed the brochure. Also like a college catalog, it made her queasy about her future.

“Just because someone doesn’t have a driver’s license doesn’t mean they don’t know how to drive,” Mary said.

Roz tented her fingers, the knuckles flexing inward like roof joists about to cave.

“A person who drives without a driver’s license—to extend your own metaphor—tends to be a person who owes his landlord rent money, a person who doesn’t make his alimony payments, a person who believes that the rules do not apply to him. Dr. Hammer did not believe that the rules applied to him. But the rules do apply.”

Mary nodded. Her queasiness persisted. She’d made a mistake coming here.

“Our board has a remarkable record,” Roz said. “One hundred percent of the wrongful treatment cases we’ve investigated have resulted in the successful prosecution of the doctor in question. Which is only to say: we do not waste our time chasing innocents. If a case has been brought to the board’s attention, it’s for a well-founded reason.”

Doubt is not a pleasant condition
, Mary thought,
but certainty is absurd
.

“But if I haven’t yet…
adhered
,” Mary pointed out, “how can I testify that what Dr. Hammer wrote about me was false?”

“Some truths transcend adherence,” Roz said. “Don’t get fouled up by adherence.”

“But if I don’t remember what happened to me, how can he be wrong?”

Roz leaned her elbows on her knees, hunching so low that Mary could see the part running down the center of her head and the raised mole that protruded from the center of the part like a beetle or a drop of blood.

“I have a vested interest in you, Mary,” she said. “You were supposed to be my patient. I passed you along to Dr. Hammer because I was busy with my book, and don’t you think I feel
guilty
about that? Don’t you think I feel guilty that my self-absorption meant that you’ve been made the object of psychiatric ridicule by a man I was trying to help emerge from a professional holding pattern? Post-traumatic amnesia, yes, it’s in vogue right now, but if I’d been your doctor, here’s what I would have said: You know what happened to you. You have the power and authority to tell your own story. And you know that I know that you know this. Isn’t that why you’ve been avoiding me? Isn’t that why you treat me as though I’m your enemy?”

Mary puzzled this out.
Roz knew that she knew that she knew
…And what did she, Mary, know exactly? She knew that she had ostensibly started this game as an imaginative way to complete a school assignment. But it was more complicated than even that—a complication that arose, in part, when she had been assigned, via sheer coincidence, to Bettina Spencer’s former doctor. She had muddled Bettina and Dora and herself together so tightly that nobody’s story felt distinct anymore. Dora had been kissed by Herr K; Bettina, so went the Semmering rumor, had been abused by an uncle, which explained, or was meant to explain, her troubledness. Mary had been kissed by her parents’ friend Kurt Thatcher. A harmless enough event, the kiss had occurred while the two families were on vacation at the Cape and Kurt had been so drunk at the time that he was able to look Mary in the face the next day without any sense that a boundary had been trespassed. Mary, who was twelve, was ecstatic. She viewed the kiss—which was gently administered and almost fatherly, a just-this-side-of-too-long pressing of dry padded flesh against dry padded flesh—as confirmation that she was, or had the power to be, bewitching. That night in her bunk bed, still headily replaying that two-second snippet of the evening in her mind, she stupidly confided in Regina. Her mother cornered Mary the next day as the two of them were shopping for dinner in the local grocery:
Do not ever tell lies about our friends again
. She’d slapped Mary in full view of a college boy buying beer, and the boy had sheepishly abandoned them in the aisle to their shameful mother-daughter business. The kiss did not ruin her; her mother’s slap did. And so years later, when she had read
Dora
, the book ignited a chain of electric connections. She thought of herself like a bulb in a string of Christmas lights; one bad bulb left the bulbs after it in darkness. So she ignited herself, and the string reached back and back and back, and she became emboldened not only by her own injustice but by a continum of injustices linking her to Bettina and Dora and Dorcas Hobbs and Abigail Lake and beyond. She’d begun playing games, games inside of games inside of games. But now when she tried to visualize that string of lights, all she could see was an expanding brightness that erased more than it revealed.

“I don’t remember,” Mary said. “And if I don’t remember, then Dr. Hammer’s version is as good as true.”

She slung her backpack over her shoulder with a finality that implied
we’re done here
.

Roz placed her hands on the arms of her chair, threatening to stand but remaining seated.

“This may sound like a cheap platitude,” she said, “but I honestly believe that truth is what you make of it.”

Mary rolled her eyes.

“I’m trying to encourage you to be a little more circumspect. A little less selfish.”

“Selfish,” Mary said.

“You might not be willing to come to terms with your own past. But girls like you need to be protected from men like Dr. Hammer.”

“You want to make an example of him,” Mary stated bluntly.

“As you well know,” Roz said wryly, “
pour faire une omelette il faut casser des oeufs
. And what we will gain—what the innocent Marys of the world will gain—it will be immeasurable. You could be a part of this, Mary. We’re involved in a narrative revolution here. The eradication of Freud’s legacy of misogyny—Freud who, like Dr. Hammer, chose to overlook instances of actual patient sexual abuse to support his fantasy theories. The freeing of the stories of hundreds of women and girls, like your friend Ida Bauer, whose own versions were plowed under the dirt so that the careers of their male doctors could flourish in the sun.”