Sarah Duncan had survival instincts that I’d come to appreciate: she didn’t look back. The past was another country to her, one that she had no intention of visiting given its dangerous reputation.
By the time I sauntered into her office the following day, still enjoying the sensations of love and professional salvation, the news had reached her that the hospital’s legal liability in the Shapiro case had been lifted and a member of her board was being interrogated in Yaphank for murder. It hadn’t yet made the evening news, so there was a curious lull for those who knew about Nora before bedlam struck again, and Duncan didn’t hang around. Seconds after my arrival, a summons came.
“This is shocking news,” she said after I’d been speeded into her sanctum in a record-breaking five minutes. “I’d come to regard Nora as a friend.”
She didn’t look in the least perturbed, and her slightly more distant way of phrasing their relationship felt as if it would be the first in a series of downgrades. This time, she’d come to sit by me on the sofa and had rustled up a bottle of sparkling water. Lots of people seemed to have regained their respect for me suddenly.
“Tell me about you,” she said. “How do you feel? It must be a relief.”
“Do you still want my resignation?”
“Resignation?” she said, frowning. “I don’t know why you’d resign, Dr. Cowper. You are a valued member of our team. We have great hopes for you.”
With that, as far as Episcopal was concerned, the affair was filed and forgotten. Within months, she’d found a way to remove Nora’s and Harry’s names from the pavilion and from the plaque above the FDR Drive. A hedge fund manager who’d made billions by shorting mortgage-backed securities came forward and the Shapiros disappeared into the recesses of the hospital’s history.
I saw Harry once after that, when they’d indicted Nora and had let him out of the Riverhead jail. There was talk of charging him as an accomplice, but Baer needed Nora to testify against him. She wouldn’t do it voluntarily, and as Harry’s wife, she couldn’t be compelled.
It was August by then, in the full gridlock of a Long Island summer, with cars jamming the Long Island Expressway and crawling down Route 27. East Hampton was one long line of vacationers, and I felt a proprietary sense of resentment at having to squeeze past a pickup truck with surfboards in the back that had halted by the village pond.
A middle-aged man wearing a white jacket like a chef’s opened the door to my knock. He regarded me sternly, as if I were being over-familiar by coming to the kitchen rather than the main entrance, which I’d never used. Once I’d announced my business, he softened a little and led me through to Harry’s study, where the ex- jailbird sat with a book. Harry rose and clasped my hand, taking off his glasses and resting them on the desk.
“Come on, let’s take a walk,” he said.
We strolled through the conservatory, which had been redecorated yet again, and crossed the lawn to the dunes. Harry was still thinner than when I’d first met him, and there was some hesitation in his stride. He took the steps gingerly, as if they might give way.
“You’ve got new staff,” I said conversationally.
“Thomas is here now. He runs the place. That girl had to go after what she did. Oh yes, she’s … Nora told me,” he said.
He grinned as if, whatever he thought of Anna, he could appreciate man-to-man my having fallen for her. It was the first time he’d ever shown any interest in my life, and I found it endearing.
“How are you feeling?” I said as we reached the beach and walked by the sea.
“I’m okay. It’s Nora I worry about.”
I stopped walking at the mention of his wife’s name. We were about two hundred yards along the sand to the west-the same route taken by Nora on the night of the killing, and by Anna, too. Far in the distance, I saw a lone figure walking down the beach. The wind was blowing off the sea and Harry shielded his eyes as he looked at me.
“I won’t apologize for what I did, Mr. Shapiro, because I’d be lying. But I am sorry you’re apart from your wife.”
“You had a right to defend yourself,” he said sadly.
We walked on for two minutes in silence before Harry spoke again.
“You know about Lauren, don’t you? She came to see me in Riverhead, and I told her we couldn’t see each other again. I don’t blame her for running away, but Nora stuck with me. My wife’s an amazing woman, isn’t she?”
“Remarkable,” I replied.
30
Unlike Duncan, I found it hard to write off what happened to experience, the kind of character-forming incident you recall happily in age, marveling at your innocence. I did think of staying at Episcopal. It would have been easy enough, once Jim Whitehead had extended an olive branch, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
The past means something to shrinks-we can’t dismiss it as Duncan wanted me to. I’d escaped punishment and my reputation had been restored, but I felt guilty. Harry had been my patient and I’d let him down. If I’d kept him in there for a while longer, Nora’s plan would have fallen apart. Felix had been my companion in distress, and I should have saved him. The joy had gone out of my time in New York when Harry had walked into the psych ER, and it wasn’t going to return.
The climate is different here: damper, softer, and less brazen than New York’s. It has its pleasures, though they’re subtle. I miss the pure skies, the monsoonlike storms-they have the city’s bluntness. I swapped my apartment off Gramercy Park for a house in Kew, a cottage next to the towpath, tucked near a concrete wall they’d built to stop the river from flooding. “It used to get quite damp,” an old man who’s lived here forever told me when I arrived. Sometimes at night I hear the groan of the river flowing out to the estuary.
Anna loves it, and I hope she doesn’t fall out of love. I bought her a rainproof jacket and Wellington boots as preparation for the English mud and rain, and she is sweetly enveloped in them as she strides along by the water’s edge. It was a crazy way to start a relationship, but none of them are fully rational. If they were, I’d be out of business. She’s been here twice and we are still tentative-neither of us wants to push our luck.
There’s plenty of work for a psych in London, with everyone getting in touch with the feelings they used to hide away. There is the same proportion of madness, too, although I haven’t settled at this hospital as I did at Episcopal. There are more rules; there is more drudgery. It isn’t easy to combine private practice with my day job. I hear an unspoken note of disapproval, see the raised eyebrows, at my mixing of the two.
It would be easiest simply to forget the National Health Service and devote myself to private therapy. London has the same rich pastures as New York of financiers and professionals who’ve turned their neuroses into professional success and now want to talk about it at great expense. Yet something holds me back. Perhaps it is idealism about public service, but I could talk myself out of that if I wanted. Deeper than any idealism is fear-a fear of exposing myself fully to the gravitational pull of money, of placing myself at the whims of the people who are wealthy enough to afford me.
I remember Harry’s face when I first saw him. He had lost his job and all that it meant to him-the power it gave him to control others, without even having to think about it. I wonder, if he had gone into therapy, whether I might have helped him. It was probably too late, for his wife had her own way of coping with loss-by revenging it with blood. Nora had never believed in my profession, although she realized when she came across me that I’d have my uses. Her cure for Harry’s loss was not to sit in a chair and discuss his plight, but to take down the man who’d put him there. I think of the contempt in her voice when she talked of pills and therapy, and the curious way in which she was right. Harry really did recover when Nora killed Greene; she shocked him out of his despair.
The intensity of Harry’s devotion to her remains with me. It was a strange affirmation of marriage-that death doesn’t weaken love, it only strengthens it. It reminds me of Gabriel telling me about broken heart syndrome.
