The Uses of Enchantment (25 page)

Roz View-Mastered from defensive to sympathetic.

“Seeking closure is selfish business. That doesn’t make it unworthy. Just don’t expect too much solace to come of it. While Dr. Hammer might yet forgive you, your mother never will.”

“But you said she’d changed…”

“She may have forgiven you in her lifetime—I’m not at liberty to say. But what good would it do you, even if I could say ‘Yes, Mary, your mother forgave you’? The fact remains that you will never be forgiven
by
her. That’s what I meant when I said I was sad not to have seen you before she died. I wasn’t accusing you of anything.”

“You accused me of being selfish,” Mary said.

“Yes,” Roz said. “You’re being selfish. And what an improvement that is.”

Mary’s face and neck grew hot—as if she’d received a compliment for something she hadn’t realized it was good to be good at.

“I should go,” Mary said.

“But I haven’t given you what you came for.”

“What was that?” Mary said. She was too muddle-brained to remember why she’d come.

“That good reason your mother had for contacting me,” Roz said. “The letter you found in her desk. Aren’t you curious?”

“Maybe not anymore,” Mary said. She was embarrassed, suddenly, by her quest. How silly it was, as Roz wisely pointed out. How pointless and silly. It was as pointless and silly as her own mother’s obsession with clearing the name of Abigail Lake. Abigail Lake was dead—so very, very dead, she was three hundred years worth of dead, her body nothing but a black lichen imprint on the bottom of a pine box. Forgiveness being sought for the dead, or from them—a vain endeavor. Vain, pointless, selfish. She should return to the West Salem living room and learn how to be sad. Sad that her mother was dead. Sad that she’d blown all opportunities to rectify their relationship while her mother was alive. A classic example of “failure to yield.”

Roz tore a sheet of paper from the pad on her desk. She folded it in two. Mary shoved the paper into her pocket without reading it. Uncertain how to end things, she extended her hand.

Roz took her hand but did not shake it. She held onto it with the firm-yet-light grip of a psychic trying to get a surreptitious read off a stranger.

“Maybe I’ll see you again,” Roz said. “But I’m guessing I won’t.”

“OK,” Mary said dumbly.

“You have a chance to set things right for yourself, Mary,” Roz said. “Don’t screw it up.”

Mary found herself fighting back a second humiliating bout of tears as Roz’s office door shut behind her with a scarcely audible click. She stood in the tiny hallway, made smaller by the space-consuming exhalations of the white-noise machine. How unportentious it all seemed, Mary thought. No definitive slamming of doors. No flickering streetlamps. No bolts of lightning. All these years of hating Roz Biedelman, and now the woman was—possibly—gone from her life for good. How many times a day do such disappearances occur without a person noticing? These final meetings between two ambivalent humans. The last opportunity she might ever have to speak her mind to Roz Biedelman. The last opportunity to apologize to Miss Pym for her “failure to yield.” The last opportunity to ask Bettina Spencer-Weeks why she did what she’d done to Dr. Hammer. Just like that, people are eradicated from your life, without any cosmic fanfare accompanying that final handshake, that final glance. It seemed useless to even
remember
a person like Roz Biedelman; what was the point? The Roz portion of her brain could be erased now. Forget the bad feelings. Utilize that nubbly area for something more productive. Amnesia was not a disease, it was a practical use of storage space.

Mary waited until she’d reached the lobby before withdrawing the folded paper from her pocket.

48 Water Street

Chadwick

He will want to see you.

Notes

MARCH 25, 1986

I
would not be the first person to suggest a similarity between the job of a psychiatrist treating a patient faking a severe anterograde memory disturbance and that of a prosecutor cross-examining a witness of dubious integrity. This similarity was suggested by H-F in a paper entitled “ ‘Cross-examination’ and the Faked Severe Anterograde Memory Disturbance” that he delivered at the 1982 New England Psychiatric Conference. As H-F learned from studying prosecutorial techniques, abrupt transitions during the interrogation phase with the defendant—“the patient”—can reveal inconsistencies in his or her story; as the ground shifts, the defendant/patient does not have the opportunity to recalibrate his or her position, and the effect is as revealing as any lie detector.

Had I been more attuned to the similarities between a perjurer and a patient, I might not have been so easily duped by Bettina Spencer’s “false memory”—that she had been abducted and abused by her field hockey coach. In fact, had I been privy to her police testimony—at the time, such documents were off-limits to a psychiatric volunteer—I might have more immediately identified Bettina’s confabulation pattern and been able, thus, to treat her more effectively.

Call it curiosity, call it a hunch, or call it, as my own analyst might be inclined to call it, an attempt to rectify a past mistake. Regardless, after my fifth session with Mary, I thought it might be helpful to read the transcript from Bettina’s questioning by the police after she reappeared on November 7, 1971. (
November 7
. A brief glance at Mary’s file confirmed: she had disappeared on the exact same day that Bettina had reappeared, fourteen years earlier.) The transcripts were available through the the Massachusetts Mental Health Governing Board, the same board that assigned a caseworker to investigate my methods and procedures after I testified on Bettina’s behalf in a preliminary court hearing against her field hockey coach. Curiously, the revealing transcript had nothing to do with Bettina’s disappearance. Appendix F: Interrogation Transcript May 19, 1972, included the entirety of the conversation between Bettina and a police detective named Morse after she was arrested on suspicion of setting fire to the Semmering library. The relevant part of the exchange went as follows:

M
ORSE
: You say you were not responsible for your own actions.

B
ETTINA
: That’s what I said.

M
ORSE
: Because you were under a spell.

B
ETTINA
: Yes.

M
ORSE
: And you claim that your headmistress, Miss Pym, cast this spell on you.

B
ETTINA
: That’s what happened.

M
ORSE
: Can you describe this spell to me?

B
ETTINA
: No.

M
ORSE
: No?

B
ETTINA
: I can’t remember.

M
ORSE
: But you know you were under a spell. You remember that much.

B
ETTINA
: The last thing I remember was a bright flash.

M
ORSE
: What kind of flash?

B
ETTINA
: The flash came from a solid object. An ax. Like those axes Indians use.

M
ORSE
: A tomahawk.

B
ETTINA
: Yes. A tomahawk. But it was made of gold.

A golden tomahawk. A coincidence? Impossible, unless you believe in spells—and even more impossible when you consider the corresponding dates of appearance/disappearance. The question was, how had Mary gained access to this exchange between Bettina and Morse? I phoned Miss Pym and was informed: Semmering sponsored an after-school internship program with the Massachusetts Mental Health Governing Board; the previous spring, Mary Veal had been one of these interns.

Now I had proof, even if circumstantial, that Mary’s “story” was a fabrication—or an unconscious confabulation—and that she was either hiding something by lying or that she was simply, like Bettina, suffering from an antisocial personality disorder. The latter diagnosis would be the more troubling, from both a recovery and a treatment perspective; the antisocial personality disorder patient will “play along” only so long as you do not resist their manipulations. Any attempt to confront them or criticize them typically results in the patient terminating treatment. A therapeutic alliance can only be formed by presenting yourself as an ally; a tone of accusation or judgment must be avoided at all costs, unless you wish to lose the patient’s cooperation. At the same time, a doctor must be careful not to condone the actions of an antisocial sociopath, for fear of becoming an enabler. The difference between an enabler and an ally, of course, is a difficult line to walk. And since I had been an enabler in the past, I was more than a little leery of making that misstep again.

D
espite my best intentions—to restrain from judgmental or confrontational behavior—Mary’s own behavior at our next appointment made it difficult to respect these intentions. She appeared wearing a Semmering field hockey jacket, her hair in two braids. As the session progressed, and Mary’s hostility toward me mounted, I could no longer chalk up to coincidence the fact that Mary resembled, to an uncanny degree, one of the much-circulated photos of the missing Bettina Spencer. It was as if she had intuited my discovery of the Bettina Spencer transcript and was flaunting her total lack of intimidation.

Atypically, it was she who began the conversation.

I had fun last week, she said.

Good, I said. We strive to make the process of self-discovery an enjoyably challenging one.

You’re a fun bunch all right, Mary said. Did you know that my last shrink tried to kiss me?

I know Dr. Hicks-Flevill extremely well. He’s not…

He’s not the kissing type, she said.

He’s professional above all else, I said.

He’s professional above sexual, she said. He’s professional above residential.

Are you warm? I asked her. You haven’t removed your jacket.

She peered at her jacket.

Do you know where I found this? In a storage room at school. It must date back to the mid-seventies.

Interesting that you should pick that date, I said.

I’ve seen the yearbooks, she said. And the girls used to wear their hair like this.

She gestured toward her head.

Did you know girls look at girls more than guys? she said.

Homoeroticism, even when unrealized—

It’s not because they’re lesbians, she interrupted. It’s because they desire inspiration.

You find other girls inspiring, I said.

Oh yes, she said. I am very inspired by other girls. I doubt I’ve ever had a single original thought of my own. I’m not the creative one in the family. “Regina,” my mother loves to say, “is a poet. She writes poetry at night by flashlight under an afghan.” Which isn’t true. She did it once, under the afghan like that, because she knew Mum would find her and repeat the story to everyone.
Regina writes poetry at night under an afghan!
How brillant and odd!

Does that bother you, I said.

The fact that the afghan thing was staged?

The fact that your mother believes your sister is the poet in the family.

She
is
the poet in the family, Mary said. She’s just a really shitty one.

But you’re not even a shitty poet, according to your mother, I said.

I’m a slut, she said.

Why are you a slut?

Because I disappeared and can’t remember what happened to me.

So your misfortune reflects poorly on your mother, I said.

Mary rose from the couch and walked to the window. She put her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, collapsing her shoulder blades; the
S
on the back of her field hockey jacket coiled, springlike. From the rear, with her hair in braids and wearing this jacket, her resemblance to Bettina evolved from uncanny to distressing.

She sighed. We’ve been over this before. It’s boring.

I must insist you sit down, I said. And remove your coat.

I’m cold, she said.

Are you sick?

Can’t a person just be cold?

It’s plenty warm in here, I said. Please sit down and take off your coat. Stay a while, I added, trying to appear jovial. I did not feel jovial. I feared, irrationally, that time had collapsed and I was experiencing the worst professional mistake of my life anew.

I’ll sit down, she said. But you can’t make me take off my coat.

Fine. Returning to your mother, I said. Her egocentrism.

Snoozeville, Beaton, she said.

But the issue persistently arises, I said. So obviously your mother’s tendency to internalize your misfortune upsets you.

Can we switch places again? Mary asked. I really like your chair.

Not today, I said.

How about if we switch places but you could still be you and I could still be me.

I don’t understand, I said.

I could ask you questions, say, about your former patients. It might feel good to unload. I’m an impartial listener. Unlike your own therapist.

My analyst, I corrected.

Whatever. Your
analyst
has issues with you as a professional. He will want to prove to you that he’s better than you.

And you won’t want to prove you’re better than me, I said.

That’s different, she said.

How is it different?

Because if I’m better than you, I’ll be the only one who knows it.

How is that possible?

Because I’ll make it so, Mary said. Haven’t you ever had the satisfaction of besting somebody who didn’t know they were bested by you?