Postcards from Pinsk Read online

  “Doctor, I wish you wouldn’t. You know how I rely on you, and to think you might consider any of it a joking matter …”

  “Hardly, my dear. I am sorry, Alice. I’m not quite myself today, and the truth is I should probably give you a cut rate. But—” And he had to wave her off.

  Orrin had realized only yesterday, weeks en retard, that he and Gail had for the first time in sixteen years missed their annual Foliage a Deux Weekend at the Fitzwilliam Inn in New Hampshire. That fact alone spoke volumes to him of the change in their relations. But here poor Harris had gone so abruptly hangdog sympathetic on him that he had to slam it quickly into reverse. Had he not seen her face droop in unintended parody, Orrin might have gone ahead and spilled out his own troubles, physician-heal-thy-selfishly.

  A few stuttersteps got them back on line, however, and soon the Harris Express was rolling full speed ahead; unfortunately for Orrin, it came back too soon to the sticking-point, the unanswerable Harris Despair, and from there to the malpractice.

  “I just know it’s all a waste of time,” Harris was saying. “We have tried it all. I sometimes worry we may have tried everything. What else is there, really?”

  “Well, there is always lethal injection,” said Orrin, and at once they separately registered that here was error. Clearly overcompensating for all those sleep-inducing elements in the room (not least among them the Harris Lament itself), Orrin had cued himself up with a stroke or two of humor, simple as that. He had meant of course to keep such tidbits to himself but, frankly, he had failed. Might as well face up to that. Failure too is part of the human scheme, to deny it would be foolish.

  The damnedest aspect was that he had really almost made it. This magnum error, the one for which no ready correction existed, came with a minute to go in Regulation Time. (Orrin always saved out two minutes of Overtime, as a concession to reality.) And the irony was that he would have been better off in the end had he simply dozed off—fatigue being one thing and malpractice, surely, another.

  Asprawl atop his coverlet that night with an abridged snifter, a fractional indulgence, Orrin reflected on how much of his private time and energy he gave to every patient. In the evening, during his meals, or even in bed (waking to a care and then drifting back), he would concern himself with their concerns. And that was what made one-fifty a fair rate to charge, since you could hit them only for the office hour.

  Ted Neff could keep a fine clock in his head (and a General Electric geared to his phone and God knows a microscopic Swiss chip inside the cake of soap in his showerstall, where he did his best thinking) and if ever he gave the slightest consideration to a client’s problem, Bingo!, the meter was off and running. In fact it was likely that at this very moment Ted was hitting him up for some serious overtime, as Orrin had naturally alerted him earlier in the evening to the malpractice.

  “I’m sure it will blow over, Orrin,” Ted told him. “Yes I understand she spoke the word malpractice, but these days that’s just a part of speech. Very few people follow through.”

  “She gave me her personal guarantee.”

  “In a moment of extreme shock, yes. By now she’ll have forgotten all about it, and be picking over her shrimp cocktail.”

  “But is it malpractice, Theo? If she did go ahead, would she prevail in court? I want you to answer that.”

  “Trust me, old man, they have to throw it out.”

  “They do?”

  “Certainly they do. You simply and flatly deny it ever took place. What could sound more delusional than a charge like this one? Your record is impeccable. In fact, I’d wager you could convince the woman herself it never happened, the very next time you see her.”

  “What if I don’t deny it, though? Would they still toss it out?”

  “Cop to it? That’s crazy, Orrin. There is no way on earth they can prove it happened. Your word against hers. It isn’t medical—there isn’t an incriminating x-ray, or a scar that shows up on her CAT-scans. It’s just an allegation.”

  “Except that the allegation is true, of course.”

  “Orrin.” Ted was getting impatient (there would be the personal inconvenience surcharge soon) but Orrin held loosely firm.

  “I do have professional ethics, you know. She is my patient. In the past year she has handed over about six thousand dollars American. I owe her something in return.”

  “This is not a discussion about ethics, this is a discussion about your insurance premiums. Six thousand dollars won’t get you halfway to Hartford if you go and cop to malpractice. And suppose she takes a lethal injection, for that matter, and is barely rescued from death. Sees the light and then she sues. My God, man, what then? Ten million? Twenty billion? You stonewall it and sprint on down to the confessional, that’s what you do.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Theo. Maybe she won’t follow through. If I call her up and apologize—”

  “Listen to me, will you. You cannot apologize for something you did not do, if you will please take my meaning. I have got to get off the line now, Orrin, but do me a favor. If you must call her, to sound her out, have Sarah do it in the guise of confirming the next appointment or something. Making no mention of any odd behavior on your part, whether real or imagined. Understood?”

  “I could tell her the whole episode was meant as a wakeup call, a sort of misguided shock therapy—”

  “Schlock-therapy-forget-it. I warn you, Orrin. And another thing. I do want you to relax, but how’s about relaxing without relying quite so much on the distilled essence? Know what I mean?”

  “Oh just a little gargle now and then, to tide me over.”

  “You will get yourself in real trouble.”

  “And you will be there to get me out of it. But do you want to hear about real trouble? Get this; Gail refuses to speak with me on the telephone. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t know that. But I am afraid I have to do the same thing myself at the moment. Time to get off the line.”

  “Is she there, Ted? Is Gail at your place right now?”

  “Of course she isn’t. What would make you think so?”

  “Let me speak with her. Please! For just one minute.”

  “Not here, Orrin. Can’t speak with her if she’s not here?”

  “Let me speak with May, then. May can’t lie. And you can. You even want me to lie under oath in a court of law! Why should I put any stock in your denial?”

  “Orrin, my porridge is getting cold. I won’t put May on because she is about to erupt on the subject of cold porridges as it is. Just a word, my friend. Relax?”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  Hours had passed since they spoke, but Orrin was nowhere close to relaxation. He stood at the bay window for the twentieth time, looking out. At dusk he had watched gray fog float right past his windows and transform the Boston Common into a great swirling bowl of smoke. Now it looked like an ocean, like a black sea spattered with the white light of many small craft, and he was drawn to it in spite of the hour.

  He rallied his bones into sweater and coat and rushed out, only to find that the sea had receded, and the blackness, leaving behind a wake of drab gray streets and the inevitable cordon of parked cars on either side. A surprisingly chill wind flew down off the bare hills of the Common. This was just Halloween week, yet already the swan-boats were in drydock and all the flowerbeds were smothered under mulch. In no time, the low waters of the lagoon would be stretched over with skins of ice.

  An analyst should not shoot off his mouth, Orrin mused as he made his way. To do so was no different, no better, than performing trial-and-error surgery. It was silence that made you safe and rich, and in all likelihood kept you from making a bad situation worse. And it was absurd for anyone to suppose you might improve a situation, for who were you, really? Orrin sometimes had a genuine humility in the matter. Shrink ≠ God was his formula. If you went to Shrink = God, well then soon enough you were probably just fucking them, like Harold Bamford.

  On the
other hand—and the other hand was literally elaborated in his purview by a couple on a nearby bench, the young lady offering an ungrammatical though possibly first-rate reading of the young man’s palm—what the hell. Because if people were going to select their behaviors from information in the tabloid horrorscope, or from situation comedies on the television, or from fortune cookies at cut-rate Chinese lunchrooms where the fortune was always mis-spelled (if otherwise quite palatable), or from Dear Abby and Ask Aunt Nelly, then why the hell not play God!

  At least we do enjoy a familiarity with the human condition and have our clients in a clear objective light. Perhaps there was a mandate to play God after all, though Orrin could hear Ted Neff’s crystalline rejoinder: relax, cork up the old quart bottle, we are not discussing religion here we are discussing insurance premiums …

  But were we? Orrin might not be halfway to Hartford but what about Heaven—was he halfway there? Maybe he would be able to restrain it (for he was far from home and, liking the walk, walking farther) but he had a powerful impulse to phone Alice Harris right now, midnight be damned, and tell her the whole truth and nothing but. Why apologize for calling to her attention the lethal injection option? Better apologize for failing to call to her attention all the possibilities for joy; for failing to shake that awful solipsistic self-pity out of her.

  Silence be damned! Tell her she was simply dead wrong about her mother (and about her son) and that she was obviously paranoid about the poor cleaning-woman. Tell her moreover that she was fired, he had no use for such incompetent clients. Why not give the girl her money’s worth? Tell her she was depressing! Put that in your fortune-cookie, lady!

  Halfway to Hyde Park by now, on a wide expanse of Washington traversed only by taxicabs and cocaine-laden conversion vans with blackout windows, he started back home. It all came to nothing anyway. You could not hope to revolutionize the fortune-cookie industry overnight. And Orrin knew perfectly well that this was all his fault, and no one else’s; that he ought not play God, or even Man Joking with Alice Harris, and that he was only in the swamp because he had too much to drink with his lunch.

  Even God did not play God so openly—telling people what to do. He had known that in the past and he would know it again by tomorrow morning, when the dull October sun washed the dry unfallen leaves with soft Etruscan color. Mornings did that for people, where the evenings could be so confusing. (Especially now, without Gail, Orrin was disoriented, and was never sure what to make of them.) In the morning you knew what to do, knew where to go. Really, wasn’t that all one could ask?

  3

  When he considered the members of his once-nuclear family as individuals (a fair enough proposition ontologically), Orrin could see no reason why each should prove unwilling to speak with him on the phone. He had loved them all for decades, and supported them handsomely for decades too. He would be happy to support them still, except they did not want that from him, nor his love anymore. They wouldn’t even come to the phone.

  Perhaps this was overstating the case. What actually happened was that he called Clyde during office hours and Clyde wanted to put him on Hold.

  “I don’t do Hold.”

  “Then I’ll have to get back to you, Dad. Sorry.”

  “But I don’t do I’ll-have-to-get-back-to-you either.”

  “Well then, you’ll have to get back to me. Why don’t we plan to talk this evening, after the boys are in bed. Then we’ll have a nice clear field.”

  So it was not so bad with Clyde. A college professor might well be busy during his morning office hours, and they would indeed have a long talk that evening. Clyde was a reasonable human being (too much so, Orrin had feared at times) whereas his sister Elspeth insisted on keeping her life in utter Bohemian disrepair and furthermore on glorifying the squalor under a shroud of secrecy. El was disconnected in every way; her alleged phonelessness was really the least of it. But Orrin did not buy the story that no one in the family knew her address in the South End. He guessed both Gail and Clyde knew it, just as each of them had met the mysterious “Hickey” and he, Orrin, had never had the pleasure.

  Hickey, Christian name unknown (or maybe Christian name Hickey, patronymic unknown—for who could know or unknow, nowadays), was Elspeth’s boyfriend. A tall pale man with three beards, deposited, or isolated upon his face like correctly spaced shrubberies and a curling row of beebees that defined his left ear like a constellation. Clyde’s description, of course. They had showed up at Clyde and Phyll’s in Lexington looking for forty dollars of the needful and fast, though Hickey had taken the trouble to frame a little joke: “Worse luck, locked out of the Mercedes again, and all my Magic Money Cards inside with the gloves!”

  This Hickey would talk to him on the phone, thought Orrin, hobnob for half an hour, in exchange for a little Magic Money, or a few lines of cocaine. Did it come in “lines”? Well, between the lines, if not, or in baggies, or boxies. Whatever it took, he would be able to grab Hickey’s attention because Hickey had needs. Elspeth apparently did not need, or want, anything Orrin could offer her.

  But his pain from El was nothing new. The real problem at hand was Gail. Orrin had been dialing her number for a month, every day right after breakfast and just before dinner, and had never reached her once. Preternatural in so many ways, could she somehow know his ring? The Information Girl confirmed the number was good and when Orrin complained it was no good to him, the Girl did not even pretend to sympathize. Finally, two weeks ago, there-was a slip-up at Gail’s end: she lifted the receiver and spoke the one-word greeting. But when—in the face of treatment that might have soured a saint—he greeted her back as sweetly and lovingly as ever man could, she hung up without a word of farewell. Hello yet no goodbye, he thought, the story of our life.

  And the very next time he called, a scant nine hours later, a machine had answered. Talk about impulse buying!

  It was Orrin who had to hang up that time, and it took him two days to reorganize his emotions. Then he submitted to form—waited for the beep like a good modern boy, read off his carefully worded message of apology and devotion, and rendered the dinner invitation to which Gail would make no response.

  Yes it was Gail who had sealed him off. On each of the next six days he dictated similar messages and on the seventh day he screamed. Waited for the bloody beep and was for all the world intent on reading his latest revision of the protocol, but couldn’t—cutting loose instead with one long hoarse primal scream into her over-industrialized ear.

  This was not good lobbying, he realized as he let ’er rip, it would scarcely serve to advance his position with Gail, but what was a person supposed to do?

  “I’m very glad to hear from you, Doctor Summers,” said Orrin to his son, who did call after nine. “I have to apologize for my boorishness earlier …”

  “Quite all right, Doctor Summers. No one should have to hold a dead line. If I had my way, we’d change back to the old phones.”

  “The good old hello-and-how-are-you single party line!”

  “That’s right. So tell me how you’re getting on.”

  Haven’t been getting on for ye-e-ears, Orrin drawled silently, in his best W. C. Fields. To Clyde he said: “Very well, actually. And you, Clydie?”

  “Phyll wants you Friday—” (Would that it were so-o-o, went Fields again) “—for dinner. Any chance? I realized the boys haven’t seen you since the summer.”

  “Haven’t seen them either,” said Fields, aloud this time. “Friday sounds fine—delightful, in fact. What time and what wine, my dear lad?”

  “Why don’t we say seven. And we’ll have you choose the wine from our own ample cellars. No sense bringing coals to Newcastle. Let me play the squire and you play the sated guest.”

  “The sated guest it will be, then. So good to hear from you. I never hear from your sister, you know.”

  “Of course not, Dad. She’s living out on The Edge. You must realize one can’t call in from The Edge?”

  “I suppose n
ot. But why is she living there? What’s with her?”

  “She tells me that it’s a time of raging action for women.”

  “She said something like that to me once, too. You don’t suppose she really believes it?”

  “Oh and it’s true.”

  “It’s agitate agitate—that’s what she said. It’s all out there, Dad, tough times for a girl to settle down. I say she’s gone a little silly on us.”

  “Elspeth is living it, Dad, that’s all. Out there on—”

  “The Precipice.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well you, Clyde, are a good man, truly you are. To call me up and compel your best wife to invite me for dinner—”

  “Nonsense, we all want you here. You know how the boys love you. And we’re an awful long way from The Precipice ourselves, so we may as well take the time to enjoy some good wine with our loved ones.”

  “You haven’t heard from her?”

  “El? Not since they came to pay back the last loaner. They always do, by the way, and with a nice Pouilly-Fuissé for the vigorish last time.”

  “Oh honourable Hickey.”

  “It’s all a question of cycles,” said Clyde, who was after all an historian by trade. “Ten years from now, El will be settled on a farm someplace raising pigs and triplets, and Hickey will be riding the commuter train in a gray flannel suit with his brimming attaché. And I will be sailing to Byzantium with a mossy beard.”

  “And where will I be, ten years from now?”

  “Now that is a question which warrants significant discourse on Friday, over the rare roast beast.”

  “At the Clyde E Summers Symposium.”

  “That’s right. And we can propose toasts to your future whatever it holds. I want to hear your plans.”