Gaits of Heaven (12 page)

In the manner of a public park, the Brainard-Greens’
yard was equipped with a small covered trash can and a weatherproof metal box that dispensed doggie clean-up bags. Having availed myself of one of the bags, used it, and deposited it in the trash can, I walked Dolfo around for a few minutes. Probably because he’d been spending time next door with Barbara and George, his demeanor was calmer than usual, which is to say that he wasn’t acting like a yo-yo at the end of the leash or trying to jump on me. Since Dolfo was for once in a highly trainable state, I couldn’t resist taking him to the far end of the yard and working with him for a few minutes. I started by “charging the clicker,” as it’s called, clicking and immediately treating him to a tiny snack of liver as a reminder that the click meant that food was on the way. Then I used a bit of food to lure him into a sit, and I reinforced the behavior with a click and treat. We practiced for a few minutes. He didn’t hold a sit for more than about five seconds, but I felt proud of him anyway.

When Dolfo and I got back inside, Ted was talking about Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, he said, Eumie was beautiful, sensitive, and gifted. Within my hearing, at least, he didn’t refer explicitly to suicide, but he didn’t need to; it was sufficient to mention Sylvia Plath at all. I half expected Caprice to stand up and protest, but she didn’t, and Ted moved immediately to a new topic, which was the special role that each of us had played in Eumie’s life. “Let’s get started by going around the room and introducing ourselves and saying a few brief words about who we are in Eumie’s life,” he said.
A few brief words
. I hate that phrase. At best, it’s redundant. But what irritates me is that it’s misleading. What are brief words? Words that take less than a second to speak? Words under three syllables? But there’s another phrase I hate even more. “In your own words,” Ted said, “tell us about your role.” I mean, whose words would we be likely to use? Wouldn’t our own be the likely choice? Or was there some weird warning embedded in the phrase?
Don’t quote T. S. Eliot or else!
Anyway, Ted assured us that we’d have time to speak at length after the introductions, and he got us started by saying, as everyone already knew, that he was Ted Green, Eumie’s husband.

As a person who has attended hundreds or maybe thousands of classes, workshops, seminars, and other gatherings, I’m used to the initial ritual of having participants introduce themselves by saying their names and a few words—of any length—about themselves:
I’m Holly, this is Rowdy, and we’re just getting started in rally obedience
. Those are my words, obviously. Rowdy’s principal spoken word is the syllable
woo
, often melodiously repeated—
woo-woo-woo
—and thus, now that I think of it, laudably brief and his own, unless he filches it from other malamutes, many of whom do, I concede, say exactly the same thing. I am, however, used to relatively small groups, even when you count the dogs, as I certainly do, whereas there must have been eighty or a hundred people in this one. Fortunately, the introductions moved speedily along. Here in the People’s Psychotherapeutic Republic of Cambridge, therapists had no hesitation about presenting themselves as such:
I’m Vee Foote, Ted and Eumie’s couples therapist. Nixie Needleman, Eumie’s therapist. Alex Tortorello, Ted’s therapist
. Missy Zinn used the phrase “part of the team.” Quinn Youngman said that he was “one of the helpers.” Not everyone was a therapist. Patients of Eumie’s presented themselves as such, as did some patients of Ted’s. Some used the word
client
. Some were “seeing” Eumie or Ted. We heard from Eumie’s personal shopper, her personal trainer, and her Reiki healer. Quite a few people were, as Caprice had told me, parents from the Avon Hill School. George McBane and Barbara Leibowitz described themselves as friends and neighbors. I just said that I helped with Dolfo. With the exception of Caprice, not a single person there was a blood relative of Eumie’s, and the only relative of Ted’s was his son, Wyeth, who was, in effect, excused from participation in the introductory ritual. When the boy’s turn came, Ted spoke for him: “And Wyeth, of course. Eumie’s beloved stepson, right, boychick?”

Now that the introductions were complete—it was twenty minutes after nine—Ted invited all of us to share our memories of Eumie. “My Eumie,” he said, “
mayn basherter
, my soul mate, is what we call a yenta, a busybody, in the best sense of the word. She meets somebody, anybody, she cares. She’s got to know the person, got to know everything, understand everything. That’s who she is. Bubee, we love you for it and…” When he’d finished going on at considerable length, he finally invited people to speak to and about Eumie.

The first person to accept the invitation was a frail young woman with a beatific smile who’d been Eumie’s muscular therapist and who described the tension locked in Eumie’s body and the progress she’d made in releasing herself from the bonds of her armor. But, she concluded, trauma had triumphed. A parent from the Avon Hill School talked about Eumie’s love of children and her commitment to excellence. Another parent praised her generosity. George, who’d been grumbling almost inaudibly about having an eight o’clock patient the next morning and wanting to get to bed, took Barbara’s hand and walked with her to the front of the room. Far from addressing Eumie, they spoke of her in the past tense, but their remarks were fond and, by my standards, appropriate to the occasion. They took turns talking about her love of life, her enthusiasm, and her curiosity. “Barbara and Eumie,” George said, “shared a love of birds and the great gift of being able to see them through the eyes of a child. What Eumie saw weren’t so much birds as magical creatures, delightful visions with feathers. She had the great good fortune not to take the magic for granted.” Barbara spoke of Eumie’s pleasure in giving presents. As it turned out, my experience was typical. She’d had a habit of sending flowers, food, books, music, and films only because she’d sensed what her friends would like and had wanted to offer happiness.

When Barbara and George had finished, they made their way to the back of the room and slipped out through one of the glass doors to the deck. Although someone else had stepped forward and had begun to eulogize Eumie, I followed Barbara and George outside and caught up with them as they were about to go through a gate in the fence that separated their yard and the Brainard-Greens’. Dolfo was, of course, with me. When we reached Barbara and George, he wiggled all over and then cuddled up to Barbara, who stroked his side.

“I just wanted to tell both of you that that was lovely,” I said. “This gift giving was a part of Eumie that I didn’t know at all. Until today. She’d ordered something for me that was delivered this afternoon.”

“Eumie had many good qualities,” Barbara said.

After Barbara and George had wished me good night, I took a few minutes to do a little more work with Dolfo on his sit. This time, I began to cue the behavior (“Dolfo, sit!” plus a signal with my left hand), and Dolfo succeeded in staying for eight seconds. When we got back inside, a woman was testifying to Eumie’s commitment to helping her patients overcome the effects of trauma. As the woman spoke, she began to choke up and then to sob. In horrible pain, she eventually cried, “How could she have abandoned me? How could she?”

Three people hurried to the heartbroken woman and, with their arms around her, led her away. I fervently wished that Kevin Dennehy were there and that he’d stand up and assure Eumie’s patients that she had not committed suicide.

The person who actually moved to the podium was Caprice. “My mother did not kill herself. Not deliberately and not accidentally. She placed a high value on herself and her own life. She was not self-destructive.” And that was all she said.

Before Caprice had even taken a seat, she was replaced at the podium by the woman who had introduced herself as Nixie Needleman, Eumie’s psychiatrist. I remembered who she was because of her distinctive appearance: mountains of platinum hair, heavy makeup, and a black dress with a neckline that plunged almost to her navel. By
distinctive
, I mean that she looked radically different from everyone else at the service. On certain street corners, her appearance wouldn’t have been distinctive at all; if the police had been present, they’d probably have kept an eye on her in case she started soliciting. When she spoke, however, it wasn’t to offer the wares she was displaying but to repeat what others had said, namely, that Eumie placed a high value on life. “Furthermore,” Dr. Needleman said, “she had no history of suicide attempts or gestures and no suicidal ideation. Any loss touches off fantasies of primitive abandonment and betrayal, with concomitant grief and rage. In some cases, it arouses powerful feelings of guilt. All of those emotions can be traced to sources far back in our own lives. They have no basis in present reality. We need to remind ourselves that no one, including Eumie, could have foreseen her death.”

Dr. Needleman’s definitive tone had a simple, obvious effect on Dolfo, who spontaneously sat. I did not, of course, interrupt the proceedings by pulling out the clicker and startling everyone with its sharp metallic sound. Rather, I just slipped Dolfo a treat and rubbed his chest.

As I was doing so, Vee Foote stepped forward to second everything that Dr. Needleman had said. “Eumie made no preparations,” she declared. “There was no note. There were no warnings. There was, in fact, nothing to hint at self-destruction.”

Behind me, someone softly exhaled. Turning around, I saw that Quinn Youngman was now standing at the back of the room. Out of nowhere came the realization that he was not just exhaling; rather, what I’d heard was a sigh of relief. As Eumie’s psychopharmacologist, he had prescribed for her. Dr. Needleman, an M.D., might well have written prescriptions, too. Vee Foote was also a psychiatrist, an M.D. The picture I had been given by Kevin and by Caprice was of a family with a pharmacopeia of psychoactive drugs, presumably including the prescription medications that had caused Eumie’s death. The cynical thought came to me that Eumie’s doctors were not “sharing memories,” as Ted’s e-mail had phrased the purpose of the memorial service, but were using the occasion to make self-serving, self-protective claims that had nothing to do with Eumie and everything to do with themselves. Were they afraid of lawsuits? Were they simply protecting their reputations? I had no idea.

The service continued. Other patients of Eumie’s spoke of their attachment to her. I took Dolfo out. And brought him back in. More than once. Eventually, I returned to find that Ted was concluding the service by reading Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
, which I’d read in a college English course. It consisted, if I remembered correctly, of 133 incredibly long poems in memory of a dear friend of the poet’s, Arthur Hallam, who, I’d thought at the time, was lucky to have been the subject of the lamentations instead of what I felt myself to be, namely, their bored-to-death victim.

Ted couldn’t possibly have read the work in its entirety. But he did read a lot of it. Dolfo and I found it tedious. We left. We returned. At eleven-thirty, when the service finally ended, Dolfo was sitting and staying on command. In a small way, I had kept a promise to Eumie: I had used exclusively positive methods to train her dog.

It is five minutes after nine on Friday morning, and Rita
is in her office seeing her second patient of the day. Rita and her patient are sitting in expensive and extraordinarily comfortable chairs designed to minimize back strain. The chairs are upholstered in a pale beige fabric that is neither sensuous nor scratchy. They are identical. Rita’s hair is newly trimmed—it always is—and lightly streaked with blond highlights. She is almost certainly wearing a linen suit and high-heeled leather shoes. So far, I am limiting myself to facts and to near certainties. For example, I know everything about the chairs in Rita’s new office because she agonized over them. When she rented this new office on Concord Avenue, she decided that her old chairs were shabby and had to be replaced. Because she spends so much time sitting down, she had to have a chair that would protect her back from the chronic strain that is an occupational hazard of doing therapy. Or so therapists think. It’s my observation that one of the hazards of the profession is hypochondria. But maybe I’m being harsh. Still, it does seem to me that a great many therapists are valetudinarians. But to return to my knowledge of facts and near certainties, as opposed to the fantasies and reconstructions that will follow, I know about the chairs because Rita dragged me along when she shopped for them and used me as a sounding board in long debates about them. If she chose a large, imposing chair for herself and a lesser chair for the patient, wouldn’t the difference create a sense of hierarchy that Rita wanted to avoid? I said that in my layperson’s opinion, it was a good idea not to enthrone herself while making the patient feel small. My professional opinion was, of course, that a clearly defined hierarchy was an ideal arrangement, providing that the high-ranking individual was the handler rather than the dog. In fact, my goal in training was to secure for myself the position of benevolent despot. Still, many dogs find it threatening and unpleasant to have people loom over them, and I suspect that psychotherapy patients feel the same way. So, Rita ended up with identical chairs, three of them, in fact, because she sometimes treated couples, an act of madness, if you ask me. Breaking up a dog fight now and then is one thing, but voluntarily doing it all the time as a way to earn a living? With or without identical chairs, that’s just plain nuts.

This Friday morning, however, Rita is seeing an individual patient, a woman. Having spent a great deal of time watching Rita as she listens to me, I know for certain that Rita’s expression as she listens to her patient is at once calm and alert. Rita is remarkably easy to talk to. She possesses the gift of being able to make sense of the senseless. So, Rita looks calm and alert as her patient briefly discusses the effectiveness of the medication that Dr. Quinn Youngman has prescribed for her bipolar illness.

The patient then talks about Eumie Brainard-Green, who was her previous therapist. “I should never had confided in her. Never. That was terrible judgment on my part.”

Rita thinks about pointing out that Eumie was, after all, the patient’s therapist, so passing along private information was perfectly appropriate. But Rita reconsiders and decides to wait before either speaking as the voice of reality or interpreting the concern about confidences as a question about the safety of confiding in Rita herself.

“I do have an excuse,” continues the patient, “in the sense that I wasn’t on lithium, but goddamn it! That was half her fault, too. One hundred percent, she recast everything about me as trauma. One hundred percent.”

Rita refrains from informing the angry patient that the emotion she feels is anger. Instead, she says, “I wonder whether it might be useful to take a moment to look at things from her point of view. How she might have viewed you and your situation.”

“Clever, aren’t you? Well, yes, okay, that’s how she really saw it. She didn’t say to herself, well, here’s a bipolar person who needs lithium, but I’ll try to fool her into thinking she’s been traumatized. Oh, okay. She was perfectly genuine. Not too bright. And wrong. But genuine. And that’s why I told her things I wish I hadn’t. That’s why I trusted her.”

“I’m wondering whether there’s anything else. Anything in addition to your bipolar disorder. Maybe something else that you sense was missed. Or misread.”

After a moment of silence, the patient says, “Yes, she could’ve realized that sooner or later, I’d hear about her husband’s book, and I’d hear the rumors about it. She knew the contacts I have. It should’ve crossed her mind that I was one patient she should’ve shut up about. That I’m not the kind of person who wants to end up half disguised in someone’s husband’s pop psychology self-help book. It’s possible that she
did
realize that. Maybe she never said a word to him about me. Or to anyone else. But I know she talked about other clients. Not only to her husband. To Avon Hill parents, among others. And I know why she did it. She wanted to feel important. Who doesn’t? So, if someone’s name came up, a big name, obviously, she’d let it slip that she couldn’t talk about him or that she knew things she couldn’t say, stuff like that. Not that she came right out and said that these people were in treatment with her. But she might as well have. And then there was this conference where Ted Green, her husband, gave a talk, maybe two months ago, and supposedly the cases he described were composites or some such—he didn’t use real names, at least—but the mother of a friend of my daughter’s, the mother of one of her classmates, told me that these people were very easy to identify. At least for people in Cambridge. And that one of them was a patient of Eumie Brainard-Green’s. Not Ted Green’s. Hers. And Ted Green is apparently writing a second book.”

Rita says nothing about the narcissism evident in her patient’s fantasy of being so interesting that Ted Green will be unable to resist the temptation to write about her case, of which, in reality, he may or may not have secondhand information blabbed by his wife. It should also be noted that Rita is not given to corny statements of the form
You haven’t mentioned your mother lately
. Even so, she does notice crucial omissions. What she says is casual and quite vague: “And Eumie Brainard-Green’s death?”

“It’s all I’ve been thinking about.”

Without making even the most oblique reference in this session
. But Rita doesn’t say that, either.

The patient continues. “When I heard she’d died, the first thing I felt was this incredible relief. That my secrets would go to the grave with her. Unless she’d told her husband. But, really, why should he write about me? I mean, for one thing, I was hardly one of their success stories. My therapy with her was a total failure. I didn’t embrace the concept of trauma and use that to revolutionize my life. I quit therapy with her, I started seeing you, you sent me to Dr. Youngman, and we’re working on how I learn to live with my illness. That doesn’t exactly make me a likely candidate to star in Ted Green’s next book. But I felt relieved anyway. And then I felt guilty. She dies, and my only reaction is that my secrets are safe. What kind of person does that make me? But now I have to wonder. All I did was wish that I’d never told her a thing. But there must be other clients of hers who were more worried than I was. The police think she was murdered, you know. There’s a little paragraph in today’s paper. And I have to wonder whether someone didn’t regret confiding in her even more than I do.”

It’s all fantasy, of course. Well, most of it. What I know is that Rita had a patient, male or female, who’d been in treatment with Eumie Brainard-Green and who passed on the rumor that Ted Green gave a conference presentation in which two cases were readily identifiable to Cambridge cognoscenti as patients of Eumie Brainard-Green’s.