Private Eyes Page 9

  “What about volunteer work?”

  He clapped his hands over his ears and grimaced. When he removed them, I said, “What?”

  “Heard it before. Every day, from the altruistic Dr. Silverman. The Free Clinic AIDS group, homeless kids, Skid Row Mission, whatever. Find a cause, Milo, and stick with it. Only problem is, I feel too goddam mean. Coiled. Like someone better not say the wrong thing to me or they’re gonna end up sucking the sidewalk. This . . . hot feeling in my gut— sometimes I wake up with it; sometimes it just comes on. And don’t tell me it’s post-traumatic stress syndrome, ’cause giving it a name doesn’t do squat. I’ve been there before— after the war— and I know nothing but time is gonna bleed it out of me. Meantime, I don’t want to be around too many people— especially people with heavy-duty misery. I’ve got no sympathy to give. I’d end up telling them to shape up and get their goddam lives in order.”

  “Time heals,” I said, “but time can be sped along.”

  He gave me an incredulous look. “What? Counseling?”

  “There are worse things.”

  He slapped his chest with both hands. “Okay, here I am. Counsel me.”

  I was silent.

  “Right,” he said, and looked at the wall clock. “Anyway, I’m gone. Gonna hit little white balls and pretend they’re something else.”

  He began barreling out of the kitchen. I held out an arm and he stopped.

  “How about dinner,” I said. “Tonight. I should be free by seven or so.”

  He said, “Charity meals are for soup kitchens.”

  “You’re a charmer,” I said, and lowered my arm.

  “What, no date tonight?”

  “No date.”

  “What about Linda?”

  “Linda’s still in Texas.”

  “Oh. Thought she was due back last week.”

  “She was. The stay’s been extended. Her father.”

  “The heart?”

  I nodded. “He’s gotten worse. Bad enough to keep her there indefinitely.”

  “Sorry to hear it. When you talk to her, give her my best. Tell her I hope he mends.” His anger had given way to sympathy. I wasn’t sure that was an improvement.

  “Will do,” I said. “Have fun at Rancho.”

  He took a step, stopped. “Okay, so this hasn’t been party-time for you either. Sorry.”

  “I’m doing fine, Milo. And the offer wasn’t charity. God knows why, but I thought dinner would be nice. Two guys shooting the bull, all that buddy stuff, like in the beer commercials.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Dinner. Okay, I can always eat.” He patted his gut. “And if you’re still struggling with your term paper by tonight, bring a draft along. Uncle Milo will render sage editorial input.”

  “Fine,” I said, “but in the meantime why don’t you think about getting yourself a real hobby?”

  7

  After he left I sat down to write. For no apparent reason it went more smoothly than ever before, and noon arrived quickly, heralded by the second doorbell ring of the day.

  This time I squinted through the peephole. What looked back at me was the face of a stranger, but not foreign: remnants of the child I’d once known merging with a photo from a twenty-year-old newspaper clipping. I realized that at the time of the attack her mother hadn’t been that much older than Melissa was now.

  I opened the door and said, “Hello, Melissa.”

  She seemed startled, then smiled. “Dr. Delaware! You haven’t changed at all!”

  We shook hands.

  “Come on in.”

  She entered the house and stood with her hands folded in front of her.

  The transition from girl to woman appeared nearly complete, and the evidence pointed to a graceful process. She had fashion-model cheekbones that asserted themselves through flawless lightly tanned skin. Her hair had darkened to a sun-streaked light brown and it hung, poker-straight and gleaming, to her waist. The straight-edge bangs had given way to a side part and flip. Below naturally arched brows her gray-green eyes were huge and wide-set. A young Grace Kelly.

  A miniature Grace Kelly. She was barely five feet tall, with a cinch-waist and tiny bones. Big gold hoop earrings dangled from each shell-like ear. She carried a small lambskin handbag, wore a blue pinpoint button-down shirt, a denim skirt that ended an inch above her knees, and maroon penny loafers without socks. Maybe Preppy still ruled in San Labrador.

  I showed her to a chair in the living room. She sat, crossed her legs at the ankles, hugged her knees, and looked around. “You have a very nice home, Dr. Delaware.”

  I wondered what my eighteen-hundred square feet of redwood and glass really looked like to her. The castle she’d grown up in probably had rooms bigger. Thanking her, I took a seat and said, “It’s good to see you, Melissa.”

  “Good to see you, too, Dr. Delaware. And thanks so much for doing it on short notice.”

  “My pleasure. Any trouble finding the address?”

  “No. I used my Thomas Guide— I just learned about Thomas Guides. They’re terrific.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Amazing how so much information can go in one book, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.”

  “I’ve never really been up to these canyons. It’s quite pretty.”

  Smile. Shy, but poised. Proper. A proper young lady. Was it for my benefit? Did she metamorphose into something giggly and ill-mannered when she and her friends hit the mall?

  Did she go to the mall?

  Did she have friends?

  The ignorance born of nine years struck home.

  Starting from scratch.

  I smiled back and, trying not to be obviously analytic, studied her.

  Posture straight, maybe a little stiff. Understandable, considering the circumstances. But no obvious signs of anxiety. Her hands remained motionless around her knees. No kneading, no evidence of chafing.

  I said, “Well. It’s been a long time.”

  “Nine years,” she said. “Pretty unbelievable, huh?”

  “Sure is. I don’t expect you to sum up all nine of them. But I am kind of curious about what you’ve been up to.”

  “Just the usual,” she said, shrugging. “School, mostly.”

  She bent forward, straightened her arms, and hugged her knees tighter. A sheet of hair fell across one eye. She brushed it aside and checked out the room again.

  I said, “Congratulations on graduating.”

  “Thanks. I got accepted to Harvard.”

  “Fantastic. Double congratulations.”

  “I was surprised they took me.”

  “I’ll bet there was never any doubt in their minds.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, Dr. Delaware, but I think I was pretty lucky.”

  I said, “Straight A’s or close to it?”

  Return of the shy smile. Her hands remained clamped on her knees. “Not in gym.”

  “Well, shame on you, young lady.”

  The smile widened, but maintaining it seemed to take effort. She kept looking around the room, as if searching for something.

  I said, “So when do you leave for Boston?”

  “I don’t know. . . . They want me to notify them within two weeks if I’m coming. So I guess I’d better decide.”

  “That mean you’re thinking of not going?”

  She licked her lips and nodded and brought her gaze to rest, meeting mine. “That’s what— that’s the problem I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Whether or not to go to Harvard?”

  “What going to Harvard means. In terms of Mother.” She licked her lips again, coughed, and began rocking, very gently. Then she freed her hands, picked up a cut-crystal paperweight from the coffee table, and peered through it, squinting. Studying the refraction of the gold-dusted southern light streaming in through the dining room windows.

  I said, “Is your mother opposed to your going away?”

  “No, she’s— She says she wants me to. S
he hasn’t objected at all— as a matter of fact, she’s been very encouraging. Says she really wants me to go.”

  “But you’re worried about her anyway.”

  She put down the paperweight, moved to the edge of her chair, and held out her hands, palms up. “I’m not sure she can handle it, Dr. Delaware.”

  “Being away from you?”

  “Yes. She’s . . . It’s . . .” Shrug. She began wringing her hands. That saddened me more than it should have.

  I said, “Is she still— Is her situation the same? In terms of her fears?”

  “No. I mean, she still has it. The agoraphobia. But she’s better. Because of her treatment. I finally convinced her to get treatment and it’s helped.”

  “Good.”

  “Yes. It is good.”

  “But you’re not sure treatment’s helped her enough to cope with being separated from you.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, how can I be sure . . . ?” She shook her head with a weariness that made her seem very old. Lowered her head and opened her bag. After fumbling for a few moments she drew out a newspaper article and handed it to me.

  February of last year. A “Lifestyles” piece entitled “New Hope for Victims of Fears: Husband and Wife Team Fight Debilitating Phobias.”

  She lifted the paperweight and began toying with it again. I read on.

  The article was a profile of Leo Gabney, a Pasadena-based clinical psychologist, formerly of Harvard University, and his psychiatrist wife, Ursula Cunningham-Gabney, alumna and former staff member of that august institution. An accompanying photograph showed the two therapists sitting side by side at a table, facing a female patient. Only the back of the patient’s head was visible. Gabney’s mouth was open, in speech. His wife seemed to be looking at him out of the corner of her eye. Both doctors wore expressions of extreme earnestness. The caption read: DRS. LEO AND URSULA GABNEY COMBINE THEIR SKILLS TO WORK INTENSIVELY WITH “MARY,” A SEVERE AGORAPHOBIC. The last word had been circled in red.

  I studied the picture. I knew Leo Gabney by reputation, had read everything he’d written, but had never met the man. The camera revealed him to be sixty or close to it, with bushy white hair, narrow shoulders, dark, drooping eyes behind heavy black-framed glasses, and a round, smallish face. He wore a white shirt and dark tie, had rolled his sleeves up to the elbow. His forearms were thin and bony— almost womanish. My mental image had been something more Herculean.

  His wife was brunette and good-looking in a severe way; Hollywood would have cast her as the repressed spinster, ripe for awakening. She was dressed in a cowl-neck knit top with a paisley kerchief draped over one shoulder. A short perm fit nicely around her face. Glasses hung from a chain around her neck. She was young enough to be Leo Gabney’s daughter.

  I looked up. Melissa was still turning the crystal. Pretending to be enthralled with the facets.

  The knickknack defense.

  I’d totally forgotten this particular knickknack. Antique French. A real find, rescued from the back shelves of a tiny curio shop in Leucadia. Robin and me . . . the amnesia defense.

  I resumed reading. The article had the self-consciously laudatory tone of a p.r. release striving to sound like journalism. It recounted Leo Gabney’s pioneering work in the research and treatment of anxiety disorders. Cited his “landmark success treating Korean War G.I.’s for combat trauma when clinical psychology was still an infant science, pioneering research in frustration and human learning,” and tracing his career through three decades of animal and human studies at Harvard. Thirty years of prolific scientific writing.

  No blockaroo for him.

  Ursula Cunningham-Gabney was described as a former student of her husband’s and possessor of both a Ph.D. in psychology and an M.D.

  “We joke,” said her husband, “that she’s a paradox.”

  Both Gabneys had been tenured members of the staff of Harvard Medical School before relocating to southern California two years previously and establishing the Gabney Clinic. Leo Gabney explained the relocation as “a quest for a more relaxed life-style, as well as the chance to bring to the private sector our combined body of research and clinical skills.”

  He went on to describe the collaborative nature of the Gabney approach:

  “My wife’s medical training is especially useful in terms of detecting physical disorders, such as hyperthyroidism, that present symptoms similar to those of anxiety disorders. She’s also in a unique position to evaluate and prescribe some of the more recent— and superior— anti-anxiety drugs that have come along.”

  “Several of the new medications look promising,” Ursula Cunningham-Gabney elaborated, “but none is sufficient in and of itself. Many physicians tend to view medication as a magic bullet and prescribe without carefully weighing cost-effectiveness. Our research has shown that the treatment of choice in debilitating anxiety disorders is clearly a combination of behavior and carefully monitored medication.”

  “Unfortunately,” her husband added, “the typical psychologist is ignorant about drugs and, even if knowledgeable, unable to prescribe them. And the typical psychiatrist has little or no training in behavior therapy.”

  Leo Gabney claims this has led to bickering between the professions and inadequate treatment for many patients with incapacitating conditions such as agoraphobia— a morbid fear of open spaces.

  “Agoraphobics need treatment that is multimodal as well as creative. We don’t limit ourselves to the office. Go into the home, the workplace, wherever reality beckons.”

  More red circles, around agoraphobia and the home.

  The rest consisted of pseudonymous case histories, which I skimmed.

  “Finished.”

  Melissa put down the paperweight. “Have you heard of them?”

  “I’ve heard of Leo Gabney. He’s very well known— has done a lot of very important research.”

  I held out the clipping. She took it and put it back in her bag.

  “When I saw this,” she said, “it just sounded right for Mother. I’d been looking for something— we’d started talking, Mother and I. About how she should do something about . . . her problem. Actually, we talked for years. I started bringing it up when I was fifteen— old enough to realize how much it was affecting her. I mean, I always knew she was . . . different. But when you grow up with someone, and the way they are is the only way you know, you get used to them.”

  “True,” I said.

  “But as I got older, started to read more psychology and understand more about people, I began to realize how hard it must be for her— that she was really suffering. And if I loved her, my obligation was to help her. So I started talking to her about it. At first she wouldn’t talk back, tried to change the subject. Then she insisted she was okay— I should just take care of myself. But I just kept at it, in small doses. Like after I’d done something good— gotten a really good grade or brought home an academic award— I’d bring it up. Letting her know I deserved to be taken seriously. Finally, she started to really talk. About how hard it was for her, how bad she felt not being a normal mother— how she’d always wanted to be like all the other mothers but that every time she tried to leave, the anxiety just got to her. More than just psychologically. Physical attacks. Not being able to breathe. Feeling as if she were going to die. How it trapped her, made her feel helpless and useless and guilty for not taking care of me.”

  She gripped her knees again, rocked, stared at the paperweight, then back at me. “I told her that was ridiculous. She’d been a terrific mother. She cried and said she knew she hadn’t but that I’d turned out wonderful anyway. Despite her, not because of her. It hurt me to hear that and I started to cry, too. We held each other. She kept telling me over and over how sorry she was, and how glad she was that I was so much better than she was. That I would have a good life, get out and see things she’d never seen, do things she’d never done.”

  She stopped, sucked in breath.

  I said, “It must have been s
o hard for you. Hearing that. Seeing her pain.”

  “Yes,” she said, letting loose a rush of tears.