Wax Apple (6 page)

T
HREE P.M., GROUP THERAPY
in a large square room with bookcase-lined walls. A large oval table dominated the room, flanked by armless wooden chairs with padded leather seats and backs. By two minutes before the hour there were seven of us seated at the table, well-spaced, no two people sitting directly side by side. Doctor Fredericks had not yet arrived, and both ends of the oval table were unoccupied, so I didn’t yet know which end was considered the head.

The six others included some faces I already knew, plus some new ones. The ones I knew were Molly Schweitzler, the fat lady eliminated as a suspect because she’d been one of the first two victims, plus Jerry Kanter, who’d shown me to my room, and either Robert O’Hara or William Merrivale, one of the two young men I’d first seen washing the station wagon. The new faces were two women and a man, all more or less middle-aged.

There was very little conversation. Jerry Kanter was in low-voiced but animated discussion with O’Hara/Merrivale—I was looking forward to learning which of those two was which—but the rest of us simply sat in silence, glancing at our watches and waiting. It reminded me for some reason of a Roman Catholic church I’d once been in on a Saturday afternoon. The people sitting in the pews next to the confessionals, waiting their turn to tell their sins to the priest, had worn much this same look of vaguely worried introspection.

Which in turn reminded me of Linda Campbell, because it had been with her that I’d gone into the church. I’d sat in the rear pew, alone, and waited while she went to confession, and I’d wondered what she would have to say to the priest about me. “Father, I am a married woman having an affair with a married man.” Or, worse: “Father, I am having an adulterous affair with the policeman who arrested my husband and is responsible for him now being in jail.”

Not that Dink Campbell had been railroaded by me in the role of some sideshow Solomon, not at all. Daniel “Dink” Campbell was a professional burglar, and he was guilty of the crime I arrested him for and a judge sent him over for. But I, after Dink’s arrest and imprisonment, became guilty of sleeping with his wife.

I tried not to think of Linda Campbell these days—or Jock Sheehan either—but somehow the atmosphere in this room was conducive to poking at aching teeth, opening old sores, relighting the purgatories of the past. I was deep in the chain of events that had led to my dismissal from the force and my present life of limbo when the door opened once again and Doctor Lorimer Fredericks walked in.

He could have been no one else. He was a youngish man, about thirty, and he carried himself with a prim confidence and self-assurance that no recent mental patient could possibly bring off. He wore a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, dark trousers, brown walking shoes and a green shirt open at the throat. His head was small and fine-boned, with black hair slicked straight back. He sported a thin pencil moustache and a look of such complete self-satisfaction that I detested him on the spot, and began at once to try to find some motive for Doctor Cameron’s assistant to be guilty of causing the accidents. Trying somehow to squeeze the doctor out and take his place? Running some sort of psychiatric experiment of his own? The ideas that popped into my head were nonsensical and I knew it, but that was the effect the man had on me.

He took a seat at one end of the table, thereby making that the head, and we all watched him carefully take a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his jacket pocket, clean them with a handkerchief held between thumb and first finger, and then use two hands to precisely fit the glasses to his face. He then flashed a brisk professional meaningless smile around at us all and said, “Not a bad turnout today.” He looked at me. “You’re the new man, aren’t you? Tobin.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“I understand you’ve had an accident.”

I was sitting there wearing a pajama top, with my cast-enclosed arm sticking out the bottom at my side, which made the fact of the accident fairly obvious, but I understood he had merely used a polite form of statement. Still, just about anything the man said could immediately get my back up. I quelled an impulse to be sarcastic, saying only, “Yes. I fell and broke my arm.”

“Is this the first time you’ve ever broken a bone?”

It was. I’d been shot in the leg once, seven or eight years ago when I was still on the force, and had spent five weeks in the hospital, but no bone had been broken. “Yes, it is,” I said.

He studied me with impersonal interest through his horn-rims. “Do you recall what you were thinking as you were falling down the stairs?”

Here was an unexpected problem. Doctor Fredericks not being privy to the truth about me, he was unconsciously skirting close to areas of questioning I might have trouble finding the right answers for. Hoping he’d switch to someone else soon—after all, this was supposed to be
group
therapy—I said, “I guess I was just frightened.”

“That’s all?” The eyes seemed to glint behind the glasses. “No feelings of guilt? You weren’t blaming yourself for having been clumsy?”

“I wasn’t clumsy,” I said, but this line of questioning was difficult to deal with. I tried to think what my reactions would have been if it had been a true accident. Would I have been angry at myself for stumbling? Probably, it would only be natural. But not very angry, and not guilty. But what was I to say, beyond the denial that I’d been clumsy. Lamely I said, “It was just an accident.”

He smiled, a large false smile that made me think of an animal trainer who’s just gotten a fairly stupid dog to roll over on command. “Very good, Tobin,” he said. “You understand why I asked that, of course.”

I didn’t, and I suppose I just looked blank.

“Because of your history,” he reminded me, frowning slightly. “Wasn’t it an overpowering feeling of guilt that sent you to Revo Hill in the first place?”

Then I remembered the false background Doctor Cameron and I had prepared. It had made me someone who believed he was responsible for the death of a co-worker—as in fact I was—and who had become unable to function as a result of the conviction of his own guilt. (The false background had been uncomfortably close to the truth in a number of ways, but Doctor Cameron had assured me it would be much easier for me to behave like a facsimile of myself than as, for instance, a suicidal transvestite or an irresponsible schizophrenic.)

So I said, “I’ve gotten all over that. That’s why they let me out of Revo Hill.”

“I’m glad to see they were right,” he said. “Since you’re the new man, would you like to fill the others in on your background, how you happen to have been at Revo Hill and so on?”

Which was just exactly the sort of detailed question I couldn’t possibly handle at all. Doctor Fredericks would see through me first, and some of the others might also smell a rat. Mental patients would know whether someone in their midst was a real mental patient himself or not, unless he kept his mouth discreetly shut. I said, “I’d rather not today, Doctor. I just got here, and had the accident, and I’m feeling a little shaky still.”

He frowned at me again, more thoughtfully this time. I knew it was a false note I’d just struck, that the whole concept of group therapy is built on the fact that mentally sick people enjoy describing their symptoms just as much as physically sick people do, and that it wasn’t properly in character for me to attend this session and not want to talk, but this was the lesser discrepancy when compared to the Swiss cheese I’d create if I tried to narrate my fake history to these people. So I had to remain silent.

Doctor Fredericks said, “Then why did you join us today?” Exactly the question I knew I’d raised in his head.

I said, “I wanted people around me, I guess. I didn’t particularly want to be alone.”

Up till now, the other six residents had merely sat and watched the doctor and me, their eyes on whichever one of us was talking, but not one of them joined the conversation. It was Molly Schweitzler, the fat woman, who was sitting across the table from me. Almost glaring at me, as though in some sort of challenge, she said, “Did anybody laugh at you?”

I looked at her, not understanding the question but relieved at distraction in any form. “Laugh at me?”

“When you fell,” she said.

“Nobody was there when I fell,” I told her. “The people I’ve seen since then have all been very kind. Nobody’s laughed at all.”

Doctor Fredericks, thank God, hared off on this new scent, saying to Molly Schweitzler, “Why should anyone laugh at a man with a broken arm?”

“Well, they sure laughed at Rose and me,” she said, “when that table broke on us.” She turned back to me. “That was about a month ago,” she said, “and I still got bruises on my legs.”

Doctor Fredericks said, “Molly, no one laughed when they found out how serious the situation was.”

“No, they had their fun first, and then they came around to see if Rose and me were okay.”

Doctor Fredericks was off in hot pursuit of this new quarry by now, and it was with a great feeling of relief that I sat back and let the hunt go on without me.

Molly Schweitzler’s feelings of having been laughed at when she’d hurt herself were easily plumbed, of course. A grossly fat woman like Molly could hardly go through life without running into cruel humor now and again, and of course in overeating Molly was hurting herself, just as much as when the table had hit her. Her anger at the laughter that apparently really had gone around the dining room when the table first gave way was really much older anger than that. She was angry at all the people who had been funny at her expense all her life, and angry at herself for never having done anything about it. She’d never fought back, never stood up for her own dignity, and she had the angry frustration of someone determined to fight back when the last round is already over.

Still, however obvious Molly’s misplaced anger, it proved interesting to the group at large, and led to a discussion which shortly switched to another woman, Doris Brady, whom I was seeing for the first time. Doris Brady was a young woman suffering from a fairly recent addition to the list of mental illnesses, called culture shock. She had joined the Peace Corps at twenty-seven, after a childless marriage of five years had ended in divorce, and was sent to one of the most backward and poor of the emerging African nations. She was expected to be a schoolteacher, in a society so totally different from anything she’d ever known before that her mind was incapable of encompassing it. This doesn’t happen frequently, and the Peace Corps people try to weed out ahead of time those to whom it might happen, but when it does occur it is a brutal and terrifying experience. Doris Brady had found herself suddenly cast adrift, between two cultures neither of which she could any longer see as viable. The values and assumptions she’d grown up with in the United States had been swept away by the realities of the African village to which she’d been sent, but the values and assumptions of the village were too alien for her mind to live with. Life without some safe bedrock of accepted truths is insupportable for most people, among them Doris Brady. From what she was saying now, as the focus shifted to her from Molly Schweitzler, the hospital where she’d spent the last three years had done an adequate job of rebuilding her faith in the assumptions we live by in the United States.

The session lasted two hours, and in that time everyone present got a chance at the limelight. I found it fascinating to sit and listen to them, watching them reveal themselves a thousand times more freely than if they’d known they were suspects being observed by a hired ex-cop.

I finally got to resolve the O’Hara/Merrivale problem, when the one in this room turned out to be William Merrivale, the young man who had once tried—almost successfully—to beat his father to death. He had never been as sick as his home situation, and the last year in a private sanitarium had helped him primarily by giving him somewhere other than his own home in which to live. Now The Midway was performing the same function, and it developed in the conversation that he was still ambivalent about where to go and what to do when his six months here was ended.

So if this was Merrivale, the missing one must be Robert O’Hara, who had begun his career as a child molester while still a child himself, and could never for very long keep his hands off little girls. O’Hara and Merrivale were both twenty-one, the two young males at The Midway, both blond and muscular, both looking like Marines or college football players.

The day twelve years ago when Jerry Kanter took a rifle downtown and killed seven people he’d never met before was so distant in his mind these days that he didn’t even mention it. All he wanted to talk about was his brother-in-law’s car wash operation, and was the brother-in-law trying to cheat Jerry, and would Jerry be happier working for strangers who didn’t know about his past, and so on and so on. He was still chipper and cheerful, the same spry little man who’d first showed me to my room, but even though I knew he’d been insane and not in control of his senses on that day twelve years ago, I kept thinking of those seven dead people and wondering about their questions about brothers-in-law and job opportunities and the rest of it, clicked off now, silent forever. And the man who’d clicked them off was now cured, happy, cheerful, weighing his possible futures. The seven, unfortunately, were uncurable. I knew it was an unfair reaction, but I disliked Jerry Kanter intensely all the time he was talking.

The last two new faces turned out to belong to Nicholas Fike and Helen Dorsey. Nicholas Fike was forty-three and looked seventy, a man who had gone from simple alcoholism to mental collapse. The only trouble was, he’d done it twice now, and neither his body nor his mind was up to that kind of punishment. He talked with a very bad stutter, blinked constantly, and was in an obvious agony of self-consciousness whenever Doctor Fredericks asked him a question. Why he’d come here when it was such plain torture for him I couldn’t guess, unless it was some belief that if he forced down every bit of bad-tasting medicine he could lay his hands on, sooner or later a cure would result.