Private Eyes

was wearing plenty: pale foundation, artfully applied blush, mauve eye shadow, deep-red lipstick. Aiming for severe and hitting the target.

“Dr. Delaware? Come in.”

“Alex,” I said. “Fair is fair.”

That confused her for a moment; then she said, “Yes, of course. Alex.” And smiled. And turned it off.

She motioned me into what would have seemed like a generous entry hall if I hadn’t just done time at Dickinson Manor. Parquet floors, architecturally paneled oak walls stained shoe-polish brown, plain-wrap craftsman benches and coat trees, a clock that said SANTA FE below the 12 and RAILROAD above the 6. On the walls was a scattering of muddy California plein-air landscapes- the kind of stuff the galleries in Carmel had been trying to palm off as masterpieces for years.

The living room was to the left, visible through half-open sliding wooden doors. More oak walls, more landscapes- Yosemite, Death Valley, the Monterey coast. Black-upholstered straight-backed chairs arranged in a circle. Heavy drapes hid the windows. What would have been the dining room was to the right, set up as a waiting area with mismatched couches and magazine tables.

She stayed a couple of steps in front of me, heading for the rear of the first floor. Quick, deliberate steps. Tight dress. Fluid glutei. No chitchat.

She stopped, opened a door, and held it.

I stepped into what had probably been a maid’s room. Small and dim and gray-walled, with a low ceiling. Furnished with simple contemporary pieces: a low-backed pine and gray-leather stenographer’s chair behind a pine table-desk. Two side chairs. Three bracketed shelves full of textbooks on the wall behind the desk. Diplomas filling the wall to the left. A single window on a side wall was covered by a gray pleated shade.

A single piece of art, next to the shelves. Cassatt drypoint etching. Soft color. Mother and child.

Yesterday I’d seen another piece by the same artist. Another simple gray room.

Therapeutic rapport taken to the nth?

Chicken-egg riddles jumped into my head.

Ursula Cunningham-Gabney went behind the desk, sat, and crossed her legs. The dress rode up. She left it that way. Put on her glasses and stared at me.

She said, “No sign of her yet?”

I shook my head.

She frowned, pushed the glasses higher on her thin, straight nose. “You’re younger than I expected.”

“Ditto. And you squeezed in two doctorates.”

“It really wasn’t that remarkable,” she said. “I skipped two grades in elementary school, started Tufts at fifteen, went to Harvard for grad school at nineteen. Leo Gabney was my major professor and he guided me through- helped me avoid some of the nonsense that can trip a person up. I did a double major in clinical and psychobiology- had taken all the premed courses as an undergrad. So Leo suggested I go to med school. I did my dissertation research during the first two years, combined my psych internship with my psychiatric residency, and ended up with licensure in both fields.”

“Sounds pretty hectic.”

“It was wonderful,” she said, without a trace of smile. “Those were wonderful years.”

She removed her glasses, set her hands flat on the desk.

“So,” she said. “What are we to make of Mrs. Ramp’s disappearance?”

“I thought you could cue me in.”

“I’d like to take advantage of the fact that you saw her more recently than I did.”

“I thought you saw her every day.”

She shook her head. “Not for some time. We’ve cut our individual sessions to two to four times a week, depending upon her needs. The last time I saw her was Tuesday- the day you called. She was doing quite well. That’s why I felt it was acceptable for you to speak with her. What happened with Melissa that upset her so?”

“She was trying to let Melissa know she was fine, that it was perfectly okay for her to go away to Harvard. Melissa got angry, ran out of the room, and her mother had an anxiety attack. But she handled it- inhaled a drug she described as a muscle relaxant and worked on her breathing until she’d recovered.”

She nodded. “Tranquizone. It shows great promise. My husband and I are among the first to use it clinically. The major advantage is that it’s very focused- works directly on the sympathetic nervous system and doesn’t appear to impact the thalamus or the limbic system. In fact, so far no one’s found any CNS impact at all. Which means the addictive potential is lower- none of the problems you get with Valium or Xanax. And respiratory administration means you get improved breathing quickly, which generalizes to the entire anxiety syndrome. The only drawback is that the effects are very short-lived.”

“It worked for her. She calmed down pretty quickly, felt good about handling the attack.”

“That’s what we work on,” she said. “Self-esteem. Using the drug as a springboard for cognitive restructuring. We give them a success experience, then train them to see themselves in a power role- see the attack as a challenge, not a tragedy. To zero in on small victories and build from there.”

“It was definitely a victory for her. After she calmed down, she realized the issue with Melissa was still unresolved. That upset her, but the anxiety didn’t recur.”

“How did she react to being upset?”

“She went looking for Melissa.”

“Good, good,” she said. “Action-orientation.”

“Unfortunately, Melissa was gone- had left the house with a friend of hers. I sat with Mrs. Ramp for about half an hour, waiting for her to come back. That’s the last I saw of her.”

“What was Mrs. Ramp’s demeanor while you waited?”

“Subdued. Worried about how she’d work things out with Melissa. But no panic- actually, she seemed quite calm.”

“When did Melissa finally show up?”

I realized I didn’t know and said so.

“Well,” she said, “the whole thing must have affected Gina more than she let on. Even to me. She called me this morning and said there’d been a confrontation. Sounded tense but insisted she was all right. The ability to perceive herself as masterful is so essential to the treatment that I didn’t argue with her. But I knew we had to talk. I offered her the choice of an individual session or discussing it in group. She said she’d try group- the next one was today- and if that didn’t resolve things for her, maybe she would stay late and talk one-on-one. That’s why I was especially surprised when she didn’t show up- I’d expected it to be an important session for her. When the group took its midsession break at four, I called her at home, spoke to her husband, and found out she’d left for group at two-thirty. I didn’t want to alarm him but I did suggest he call the police. Before the sentence was out of my mouth, I heard screaming in the background.”

She paused, pressed forward so that her breasts rested atop the desk. “Apparently Melissa had come into the room- hovering- asked her stepfather what was going on,found out, and gone hysterical.”

Another pause. The breasts remained there, like an offering.

I said, “You don’t seem to like Melissa very much.”

She lifted her shoulders, moved back against the chair. “That’s hardly the issue, is it?”

“Guess not.”

Tugging, now, at her hemline. Pulling harder when it didn’t yield.

“All right,” she said. “You’re her advocate. I know child people get into that kind of thing all the time- perhaps sometimes it’s necessary. But that’s totally irrelevant to the issue at hand. We’ve got a crisis situation here. A severely phobic woman- one of the most impaired patients I’ve ever treated, and I’ve treated lots. We’ve got her out on her own, dealing with stimuli she’s totally unprepared for, having broken her treatment regimen- taken steps she wasn’t ready for, due to pressure exerted by her relationship with an extremely neurotic teenage girl. And that’s where my advocacy comes in. I have to think about my patient. Surely you can see that the relationship between the two of them is pathological.”

Blinking hard several times. Real color deepening the rouge on her cheeks.

I said, “Maybe. But Melissa didn’t invent the relationship. She was made, not born, so why blame the victim?”