Maybe that sounds heartless; maybe you think I should have been worrying about Wilma, and in a way I was, far back in my mind. But a doctor learns, because he has to, not to worry actively about patients until the worrying can do some good; meanwhile, they have to be walled off in a quiet compartment of the mind. They don't teach that at medical school, but it's as important as your stethoscope. You've even got to be able to lose a patient, and go on back to your office and treat a cinder in the eye with absolute attention. And if you can't do it, you give up medicine. Or specialize.
I had dinner at
Chapter three
Next morning when I got to my office, a patient was waiting, a quiet little woman in her forties who sat in the leather chair in front of my desk, hands folded in her lap over her purse, and told me she was perfectly sure her husband wasn't her husband at all. Her voice calm, she said he looked, talked, and acted exactly the way her husband always had – and they'd been married eighteen years – but that it simply wasn't him. It was Wilma's story all over again, except for the actual details, and when she left I phoned Mannie Kaufman, and made two appointments.
I'll cut this short; by Tuesday of the following week, the night of the County Medical Association meeting, I'd sent five more patients to Mannie. One was a bright, level-headed young lawyer I knew fairly well, who was convinced that the married sister he lived with wasn't really his sister, though the woman's own husband obviously still thought so. There were the mothers of three high school girls, who arrived at my office in a body to tell me, tearfully, that the girls were being laughed at because they insisted their English teacher was actually an impostor who resembled the real teacher exactly. A nine-year-old boy came in with his grandmother, with whom he was now living, because he became hysterical at the sight of his mother who, he said, wasn't his mother at all.
Mannie Kaufman was waiting for me when I arrived, a little early for a change, at the Medical meeting. I parked beside the Legion Hall just outside town – we use it for our meetings – and as I set the hand brake somebody called to me from a parked car down the line. I got out and walked toward it, figuring it was just another instalment of razzing about my green convertible.
Then I saw it was Mannie and Doc Carmichael, another Valley Springs psychiatrist, in the front seat. Ed Pursey, my Santa Mira competition, was in the back seat. Mannie had the door on his side open, and was sitting sideways on the front seat, his feet out of the car, heels hooked on what would have been the running board if there'd been one. Elbows on his knees, he was leaning forward smoking a cigarette. He's a dark, nervous, good- looking man; looks like an intelligent football player. Carmichael and Pursey are older, and look more like doctors.
'What the hell's going on in Santa Mira?' Mannie said as I walked up. He glanced at Ed Pursey in the back seat to show he was included in the question, so I knew Ed must have been having some cases too.
'It's a new hobby over our way,' I said, leaning an arm on the open door. 'A cinch to replace weaving and ceramics.'
'Well, it's the first contagious neurosis I ever ran into,' Mannie said; he was half laughing, half mad. 'But, by God, you've got a real epidemic. And if it keeps up you'll kill our racket; we don't know what to do with these people. Right, Charley?' He glanced over his shoulder at Carmichael, at the wheel of the car, who frowned a little. Carmichael upholds the dignity of Valley Springs psychiatry, while Mannie has the brains.
'Most unusual series of cases,' Carmichael said judiciously.
'Well' – I shrugged – 'psychiatry is in its infancy, of course. The backward stepchild of medicine, and naturally you two can't – '
'No fooling, Miles; these cases have got me stopped.' Mannie looked up at me speculatively, drawing on his cigarette, one eye narrowed against the smoke. 'You know what I'd say about any one of these cases, if it weren't absolutely impossible? The Lentz woman, for example? I'd say there was no delusion at all. From every indication I know anything about, I'd say she's not particularly neurotic, at least not in that respect. I'd say she doesn't belong in my office, that her worry is external and real. I'd say – just judging from the patient, of course – that she's right and that her uncle actually is not her uncle. Except that that's impossible.' Mannie drew on his cigarette, then tossed it to the dirt, and ground it out with the toe of one shoe. Then he looked up at me curiously, and added, 'But it's equally impossible for a total of nine people in Santa Mira to suddenly and simultaneously acquire a virtually identical delusion; right, Charley? Yet that's exactly what seems to have happened.'
Charley Carmichael didn't answer, and no one else said anything for a moment. Then Ed Pursey sighed, and said, 'I had another this afternoon. Man about fifty. Been a patient of mine for years. Has a daughter, twenty-five. Now she isn't his daughter, he says. Same kind of case.' He shrugged and spoke to the front seat. 'Shall I send him over to one of you guys?'
Neither of them answered for a moment, then Mannie said, 'I don't know. Do what you want. I know I can't help him if he's like the others. Maybe Charley doesn't feel so hopeless.'
Carmichael said, 'You might send him over; I'll do what I can. But Mannie is right; these are certainly not typical cases of delusion.'
'Or anything else,' said Mannie.
'Maybe we should try a little blood-letting,' I said.
'By God, you might as well,' said Mannie.
It was time to go in, and they got out of the car, and we all went into the hall. The meeting was as fascinating as usual; we heard a speaker, a university professor who was rambling and dull, and I wished I were with Becky, or at home, or even at a movie. After the meeting, Mannie and I talked a little more, standing in the dark beside my car, but there really wasn't anything more to say, and finally Mannie said, 'Well, keep in touch, will you, Miles? We've got to work this out.' I said I would, got into my car, and drove on home.
I'd seen Becky at least every other night all the past week, but not because there was any romance building up between us. It was just better than hanging around the pool hall, playing solitaire, or collecting stamps. She was a pleasant, comfortable way of spending some evenings, nothing more, and that suited me fine. Wednesday night, when I called for her, we decided on the movies. I called telephone-answering, told Maud Crites, who was on that night, that I was heading for the
'You look swell,' I said to Becky, as we walked toward my car, parked at the curb. She did, too; she had on a grey suit with a sort of spray of flowers worked into the material in silver, and running up onto one shoulder.
'Thanks.' Becky got into the car, then grinned at me, sort of lazily and happily. 'I feel good when I'm with you, Miles,' she said. 'More at ease than with anyone else. I think it's because we've each been divorced.'
I nodded and started the car; I knew what she meant. It was wonderful to be free, but just the same, the break-up of something that wasn't intended to turn out that way leaves you a little shaken, and not too sure of yourself, and I knew I was lucky to have run into Becky. Because we'd each been through the same mill, and it meant I had a girl to go out with on a nice even keel, with none of the unspoken pressures and demands that gradually accumulate between a man and a woman, ordinarily. With anyone else, I knew we'd have been building toward some sort of inevitable climax: marriage, or an affair, or a bust-up. But Becky was just what the doctor ordered, and driving along now through the summer evening, the top down, I felt fine.
We got the very last parking space in the block, and at the box office I bought two tickets. 'Thanks, Doc,' the girl in the booth said. 'Just check in with Gerry,' meaning she'd relay any call that came in for me if I'd tell the manager where we were sitting. We bought popcorn in the lobby, walked in, and sat down.
We were lucky; we saw half the picture. Sometimes I think I've seen half of more movies than anyone else alive, and my mind is cluttered with vague, never-to-be-answered wonderings about how certain movies turned out, and how others began. Gerry Montrose, the manager, was leaning into our aisle, beckoning to me, and I muttered a blasphemy to Becky – it was a good picture – then we pushed our way out past fifty people, each of them equipped with three knees.
As we came out into the lobby, Jack Belicec stepped forward from the popcorn stand and came toward us,
