The Thanatos Syndrome

  Silence.

  “Oh, there is something else of the utmost importance I must tell you—”

  But suddenly he breaks off, frowns, touches his lip as if he has forgotten what he was going to say. Then, frowning all the harder, he appears to sink into thought. Seconds pass.

  This time the pause does not end. Perhaps ten seconds pass. Already there is consternation, exchanged glances, murmurings, shifting about in the seats. Ten seconds is a long time. Then perhaps twenty seconds pass. Now there is anxiety.

  When a speaker who is supposed to speak and then make an end to the speaking, stops speaking inadvertently, like an actor going up in his lines, or a young preacher who has a lapse, his audience at first grows restive, is embarrassed for him. Perhaps there are a few titters. Then the audience develops pure anxiety. The anxiety is worse than any offense the speaker may have given.

  Behind me, two doctors and the representative of United Way and the Chief Leo of the Lions Club are offended. One says to the other, “Church is out.” Another replies, “For us too.”

  All four leave.

  Other people begin to murmur and stir about anxiously.

  Only Father Smith, lost in thought, does not appear anxious.

  Max and I exchange glances. There is the slightest upward movement of his eyes. We understand each other. We have exchanged such a glance in group, past a patient. I rise and hunch over toward the priest with the air of a deacon or usher who knows what he is doing.

  “Father,” I say in a low but ordinary voice, “let’s get on with the Mass.” There are patients, one learns from experience, who will simply do what they are told, never mind Freud and his “non-directive” therapy, and there are times when it is better to tell them.

  “Of course,” replies the priest, giving a start. “You assist me.”

  “What?”

  “I said, you assist me.”

  “But, Father, you know very well—” I am looking around for Milton Guidry, his crewcut assistant. No sign of him.

  “Sure, I know,” says the priest. “But assist me, anyhow.”

  “All right. But I only remember the old Mass.”

  “That will do.”

  He turns and kneels on the platform step. I kneel beside him like an altar boy.

  “I will go up to the altar of God,” says the priest, holding the chalice.

  “To God who gives joy to my youth,” I reply.

  13. ELLEN IS RIGHT AND WRONG about Father Smith. He did not “have his hooks” in me. He only asks me to assist him when he’s out of it, needs help, Milton is sick and can’t bring him the bread and wine.

  The hospice opens and down he comes from the fire tower in his right mind and very much in charge. Very much his old wiry, vigorous self, he jokes with the children, listens to the endless stories of the senile, talks at great length with the dying. He calls on me only when the depression and terrors of his AIDS patients are more than he can handle. We do little more than visit with them, these haggard young men, listen, speak openly, we to them, they to us, and we to each other in front of them, about them and about our own troubles, we being two old drunks and addled besides. They advise us about alcohol, diet, and suchlike. It seems to help them and us. At least they laugh at us.

  But when he invited me to serve Mass routinely, because I was visiting the hospice early every morning, I refused. It is easy to say no at the hospice, because honesty is valued above all. I told him the truth: that since I no longer was sure what I believe, didn’t think much about religion, participation in Mass would seem to be deceitful.

  He nodded cheerfully, as if he already knew.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, doing a few isometrics in the hall, pushing and pulling with his hands. “It is to be expected. It is only necessary to wait and to be of good heart. It is not your fault.”

  “How is that, Father?” I ask him curiously.

  “You have been deprived of the faith. All of us have. It is part of the times.”

  “Deprived? How do you mean?”

  “It is easy enough to demonstrate,” he says, shrugging first one shoulder high, then the other.

  “Yes?”

  “Sure. Just consider. Even if the truths of religion could be proved to you one, two, three, it wouldn’t make much difference, would it? One hundred percent of astronomers have discovered that the universe was created from nothing. The explanation is obvious but it does not avail. Who can handle it? It does not signify. It is boring to think of. Ninety-seven percent of astronomers are still atheists. Do you blame them? They are also boring. The only thing more boring would be if the ninety-seven percent all converted, right? It follows that there must be some other force at work, right?”

  “Right,” I say, noting with alarm the same brightness of eye and chipper expression he used to have in the fire tower.

  But before I can escape, he has taken me by the arm and drawn me aside, as if some poor dying soul might overhear.

  “Do you recall what happened in Yugoslavia a few years ago?” he asks in a low confidential voice.

  “Yugoslavia,” I say, wishing I had not gotten into this.

  “The six little children to whom the Mother of God appeared?”

  “Oh. I do recall something of the sort, yes. Now if you will excuse—”

  “What she told them has been much publicized, doubtlessly exaggerated by the superpious—who knows?—but one little item has been largely overlooked.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yet I think it highly significant—one of those unintentionally authentic touches which make a story credible.”

  “Very interesting. Well, I—”

  “I’d like your professional opinion on this,” he says in a low voice, drawing me still closer.

  “Certainly,” I say, glancing at my watch.

  “The story of the apparitions is well known. Of course, no one knows for certain whether the Virgin appeared to them. The Church does not know. Many pious people believe that she did. That is not what interests me. It is one small detail which they related about one of the many apparitions which seemed so outlandish that no one could make sense of it and either laid it to childish fantasy or overlooked it altogether. You recall that though she identified herself as the Mother of God, one of the children related that she appeared not as the Queen of Heaven with a serpent under one foot and a cloud under the other, crowned with stars and so on—but as an ordinary-looking young red-cheeked Jewish girl, which of course she probably was. But what she told them on this one occasion and which they related without seeming to understand what they were saying was this: Do you know why this century has seen such terrible events happen? The Turks killing two million Armenians, the Holocaust, Hitler killing most of the Jews in Europe, Stalin killing fifteen million Ukrainians, nuclear destruction unleashed, the final war apparently inevitable? It is because God agreed to let the Great Prince Satan have his way with men for a hundred years—this one hundred years, the twentieth century. And he has. How did he do it? No great evil scenes, no demons—he’s too smart for that. All he had to do was leave us alone. We did it. Reason warred with faith. Science triumphed. The upshot? One hundred million dead. Could it be a test like Job’s? Then one must not lose hope even though the final war seems inevitable as this terrible century draws to a close. Because almost everyone has lost hope. Christians speak of the end time. Jews of the hopelessness of the mounting Arab terror. Even unbelievers, atheists, humanists, TV anchormen have lost hope—you’ve heard how these commentators speak in their grave style which conceals a certain Ed Murrow delectation of doom. Do you think that there is a secret desire for it? But you must not lose hope, she told the children. Because if you keep hope and have a loving heart and do not secretly wish for the death of others, the Great Prince Satan will not succeed in destroying the world. In a few years this dread century will be over. Perhaps the world will end in fire and the Lord will come—it is not for us to say. But it is for us to say, she said, wheth
er hope and faith will come back into the world. What do you think?”

  “What? Oh. Do you mean about Yugo—about the ah predictions. Very interesting. Well, Father, I really must be—”

  “So don’t worry about it,” says the priest. He has let me go and is absently doing a few calf isometrics, balancing on the ball of one foot, then the other.

  “And to be specific in your case, Tom.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do what you are doing. You are on the right track. Continue with the analysis and treatment of your patients.”

  “All right,” I reply, somewhat ironically, I fear. “But I don’t have many patients.”

  “You will. You are on the right track. I have watched you. Carry on. Keep a good heart.”

  “All right.”

  “I will tell you a secret. You may have a thing or two to add to Dr. Freud and Dr. Jung, as great as they were.”

  “Thank you.” Did he wink at me?

  We shake hands. He gives me his old firm Ricardo Montalban handshake, turns, throws a punch or two and is gone.

  14. SITTING ON THE FRONT PORCH of my office sailing paper P-51s at the martin house.

  A fine warm Louisiana winter day, my best time: the morning sun booming in over the live oak, the air yellow and clear as light, oak leaves glossy, bottle-glass green. Pollen gone. My nose clear as a bell. The white-throated sparrows are back, kicking leaves under the bushes like chickens.

  In the next few minutes I must make a decision and phone Max.

  I must tell him either/or.

  Either take him up on his offer, join him in Mandeville, do group work and divorce facilitation with his aging yuppies, crisis intervention with their stoned-out teenage children. It’s good work and I need the money, but I’d rather do my old-fashioned one-on-one therapy with depressed and terrified people.

  Or take the directorship at the hospice. Low-paying but steady. No one else wants the job. Father Smith had had to be let go after all. In fact, he became a patient. He wanted to go back to the fire tower for good. Max diagnosed Alzheimer’s, pointing out his strange harangues, his memory loss and disconnected speech—more and more now he is given to short gnomic utterances which grow ever more gnomic and disconnected, as if he cannot remember what he said five seconds ago. I disagreed, pointing out that his CORTscans showed no loss of cerebral tissue and his PETscans no loss of cerebral function, and other tests were negative. And he is too old. Alzheimer’s dementia usually sets in in the fifties or sixties. But there was no denying his strange behavior. Perhaps it is presenile dementia. I agreed to co-sign his commitment—on one condition: that he be allowed to stay in the tower as long as he wanted. For he remains quite agile and can scramble up like an old mountain goat. He watches the horizon, mainly in the east, like a hawk, and at the first sign of a smudge he’ll line up his azimuth, call another tower, crisscross his fishing-line coordinates, report the fire as precisely as you please, talk at length and in the peculiar ham lingo to Emmy in the Waldheim tower. He did not object to being committed, seemed quite happy in fact. Max is pleased. Our treatment of Father Smith accorded well with new ideas in geriatrics—which boil down to making the elderly feel useful.

  Only occasionally does he seem confused. Then it is not clear whether he is speaking of locating brushfires or God by signs and coordinates. Milton Guidry looks after him, assists at Mass. But Milton’s emphysema is worse. When he can’t make it up the tower, Father Smith calls me and I substitute—when I can.

  I must make up my mind about the future. We’re in debt. Tuition at the Pentecostal school is high and Ellen has given away all her money to the Baton Rouge evangelist.

  A doctor needs patients to make a living. What happened to the sort of patients I used to see, the lonely-hearts, the solitary aching consciousnesses—they were my kind of people—the fears, the phobias, the depressions? Have these symptoms been knocked out for good by the heavy sodium? Or are they being treated by GPs prescribing pills? Or by pharmacists? In any case, who needs me?

  One good sign. Ellen is back as my secretary-nurse-receptionist.

  She’ll be here any minute. Better go inside. Wouldn’t do to be caught out here sailing P-51s.

  She’s canny, cheerful, businesslike. It’s like the old days, having her back, hearing her nimble voice in the outer office, weeding out undesirable patients, charming the desirable ones. She’s already got referrals from her bridge crowd, her Episcopalian book-review group and her big Pentecostal church. The Pentecostals are decent folk, honest and forthright, no crazier than liberal unbelievers and a good deal less neurotic, but perhaps a bit paranoid, given to suspecting godless conspiracies under every sofa. But if I keep them off the couch, don’t mention sex, wear a white coat like a TV doctor, speak to them face to face, take their blood pressure—they tend to hypertension—examine their eyegrounds, they’ll tell me their troubles.

  The telephone is ringing inside. A patient? There is still no Ellen but I needn’t hurry. The answering machine clicks on during the third ring. I can hear my voice and a woman’s which I almost recognize. There is a familiar overtone of hushed urgency.

  Go inside. Play the message.

  It is Mickey LaFaye. She’s not asking for an appointment or even for a return call. She speaks in the hushed-mouth-in-the-phone voice of a woman hearing a prowler and calling the police.

  “I’m coming in—now,” she all but whispers. Click. The silence of the machine roars.

  It is as if even the machine could grasp the urgency and reach me.

  Ellen arrives before Mickey. I try to tell her about Mickey, but she’s excited about something.

  “That priest called you at home, said he couldn’t reach you here—” She pauses for an explanation.

  “Probably hadn’t arrived. I walked.” I’m not about to tell her about sitting on the porch and flying P-518.

  “For once I think he’s being helpful.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He’s got an important referral for you.”

  “Who?”

  “It may be royalty.” Ellen lowers her voice.

  “Royalty.” Is Princess Di—I almost say, but decide not to joke.

  “He wouldn’t give names—it’s all very hush-hush—but do you know who I think it is?” Royalty really lights her up, and her an American Pentecostal. I’ll never understand it.

  “You know that the new king and queen of Spain are in New Orleans paying a state visit to commemorate Spanish rule in the Vieux Carré—which is in fact more Spanish than French.”

  I am nodding, mystified, more puzzled by the change in Ellen than by the Spanish king.

  “The priest wants you to meet them out there. Tomorrow.”

  “I see.”

  “Now get this,” says Ellen. She’s in her chair and I sitting on her desk in the outer office.

  “All right.” She’s got it figured out.

  “He only gave me three hints. Royalty, a visit, gifts and—a Jewish connection.”

  “That’s four.”

  “Right. Now get this. I happen to know that the new queen, Margarita, has Jewish blood—a noble old Sephardic family from Toledo.”

  “Ohio?”

  “And you know what?”

  “No, what?” I don’t know what, but I’m pleased to see her so pleased.

  “I happen also to know that your friend Rinaldo has a Spanish connection, is highly regarded in certain circles over there—which would account for him being called in in case of some trouble—and I also happen to know that Queen Margarita has a psychiatric history. I think she might be your patient.”

  “I see.”

  “Tomorrow morning at eight—why eight I don’t know.” She’s briskly writing down the appointment. “Out there.”

  “Very good,” I say as briskly, frowning to keep from smiling. “Why don’t you call him and tell him I’ll be there.”

  “Don’t you worry.” She’s already on the phone.

  What Fath
er Smith has told her and she me without knowing it is that he needs me tomorrow morning. Milton must be sick again. It’s a little code. Neither of us likes to upset Ellen. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Epiphany. A Jewish girl, a visit from royalty. Gifts.

  “He says fine.” She’s pleased. “I think it’s a valuable connection for you.”

  “You may be right.”

  In blows Mickey LaFaye, brushing past me and Ellen in the outer office without a word, headed for the sofa in the inner office.

  Ellen and I exchange looks, shrugs. She’s still pleased.

  Mickey’s back on the couch as she used to be, facing the window. No Duchess of Alba she now. She’s almost Christina again. She’s quite beautiful actually, but beginning to be ravaged again, thin, cheeks shadowed under her French-Indian cheekbones, but not yet too thin, not yet wholly Christina. I wonder if she has stopped eating.

  “Mickey, please come over here and sit where we can see each other.”

  She does.

  She doesn’t mind looking at me.

  “Well, Mickey?”

  “I—” She breaks off, nods as if nodding could finish the sentence.

  “I’m—”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m having an—”

  “You’re having an attack.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of—”

  “I’m—Driving over I was terrified—of killing someone.”

  “Well?” Well.

  Her great black eyes, as rounded as a frightened child’s, are full on me. One hand is holding the other. She is actually wringing her hands, something you seldom see.

  “Are you afraid, Mickey?”

  “It’s—It’s not like anything I ever had before. Something is about to happen. I dread something, but I don’t know what it is—” Her eyes fall away, unconverge, as if she saw something, someone, behind me, far away but approaching. Now she’s nodding, reassuring herself. “Now isn’t that something?”

  “What?”

  “My life is fine. Durel is fine. My kids are fine. My horses are fine. My painting is fine. But—” She stops, eyes coming back to me, focused, seeking out. She gives a little laugh.