To See Right Again - Part 2

By David Quinn

"Keep on with the standard or go to electro? That’s what we’re here to decide." Dr. Iris’s eyes remained lowered, an unconscious hangover from her upbringing in Mississippi where, fifty some years ago when she was born, a child’s role was to be seen and seldom heard.

Cecile, seated to her right, stared boldly across the scattering of paperclip-bound short stories at the bearded Dr. Scott in whose office on the second floor Peter Stone had convincingly passed his first evaluation as a candidate for confinement on the eighth floor of Iowa City’s Veteran Affair’s Hospital: puking convulsively in the direction of the trash can but missing and missing all the time. With electroshock, it’s always encouraging to have a unanimous decision; to have everybody on the same page, as the saying goes. But even that isn’t tantamount to flashing a green light at an intersection. To the contrary, today it is the case that the patient or his ward has to give written permission.

"Before starting, though, I’d like to add that the client we know as Peter Stone isn’t really Peter Stone; has, in fact, written himself as somebody else since standing in front of a bank in Madison, Wisconsin in sixty-three and flipping a coin with different names on both sides."

This was news only to Dr. Scott since Dr. Iris and Cecile were as up front and open with each other as the lovers they were. Scott, the outsider, felt the gaze of his colleagues across the table and his brow rippled a moment. He didn’t look up, but the fingers of his left hand tapped the eraser end of a pencil on the stack of short stories arranged before him. "That’s what these stories are all about," he finally muttered, his pencil now moving even faster. "A seaman, a labor organizer or an academic?" he continued, looking up and meeting Cecilia’s dark gaze. "Some of us know what we wanna be right from the git-go and others…"

"Got deported twice," Dr. Iris continued in her role as chief physician. "First from Holland to Norway. Then from London to Wilmington, N.C. Back then in the later fifties and early sixties the McCarthy scare was still real and even the suspicion of being a Communist…" She paused a moment as it struck her still again how ironic it was that so many patients there in the VA had put their life at stake either in Korea or in Viet Nam in defense of America’s democracy that supposedly was threatened by the spread of Communism across the face of Asia.

"Any truth in that: in him being a Communist?" Dr. Scott asked and his pencil, for the first time, stopped its insistent tapping.

"Claims there’s none at all. Fled from the Catholic Church he’d been born in and never willingly joined anything else…except…except the NAVY, of course. Graduated from high school when he was sixteen and then joined up right after turning seventeen."

There was a question hanging in the air about how somebody could have graduated from high school so young. But nobody asked it.

"I’m speaking for myself," Scott interjected, realizing he had already said enough to open a possible door for misunderstanding. "Graduating from the Writing Workshop out at the U and getting a couple of stories published…none of that, I can tell you, a writer makes. But themes… Themes can turn into obsessions and then… and then we’re talking about something else, eh?"

"Not always," Cecile objected. "I’ve knocked around a bit after majoring in psychology and couldn’t find anything to do with it until…" She stole a sideways glance at Dr. Iris who wasn’t paying any attention whatsoever for the very reason that she had heard all of this so many times before: being given credit for getting Cecile into the P.A. program. "Didn’t know what was really what until Liz here set me straight."

Dr. Iris flashed back a cursory thanks-for-the-compliment, stole a quick glance at her watch and then reminded them again what they had to do: "Is Stone a threat to himself; somebody everybody else should look out for, or should we keep on with the Valium and the controlled eating?"

"Scoring with the Saints," Dr. Scott mused aloud as though having been misunderstood. "That’s where you find, starting as early as high school, his disillusionment with organized religion; with the dominos and biscuits of the Catholics…with the already and forever risen Christ of the Protestants." He paused a moment and was almost afraid to look up because he knew he had already committed one of the major sins of psychiatry: the projection of one’s inner self onto the client. But it was true: Peter and he had become disaffected at an early age and the two of them later found themselves written alive and large in Bishop Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

"But it’s also the case," he rushed to add: "It’s also the case he blew a 4.6 in my office the first day and if that’s not suicidal… I’ve encountered two others who’ve blown just a bit higher… And they’re both dead now."

"He’s potentially dangerous to others, too," Cecile opined quickly. Experience had taught her to talk that way, minimizing the time for people to stare at her trying to figure out if she was a full-blood Geechie from one of the islands off South Caroline or a half-blood whose most significant inheritance from the other race are her freckles; ones that are most pronounced when she is perfectly relaxed. "Freud’s being up-dated all the time, but with ‘projection,’ I think he’s right on the mark…and always will be."

Her eyes and Dr. Scott’s met and held for the first time and before she could continue, it was now his turn again to bring to bear a piece of non-medical information.

"A friend of mine named Young at the U majored in Spanish Lit and decided to write his Ph.D dissertation on an exiled Spanish novelist teaching at the U. of New Mexico. Sender, I think his name was. Ramon Sender. Yeah! That’s him, for sure," he beamed uncharacteristically as the fingers of his right hand ruffled his beard that is prematurely almost half grey. "Anyhow, my friend tried pumping Sender for some biographical information that couldn’t be found as a standard part of his personnel file. But no go: Sender told him that what he was looking for could be found in the novels he’d written. ‘You might think they’re fiction’ Sender insisted. ‘But they’re not. To the contrary, they’re my soul written in capital letters.’"

The conference room fell silent, like the chirping of birds a single moment after the setting of the sun.

"Said something like that to me," Dr. Iris almost whispered. "Stone studied Spanish literature in Spain for four or five years…we can’t fix the chronology any closer than that. And his intellectual mentor is Unamuno, a writer who died in thirty-six. The way he put it is that once something’s created…even a work of fiction, it’s as real as the rest of us and it’ll be that way forever."

A second time silence became the unaccustomed absence of the day. This time, though, it was Cecile and her theme of violence that set things straight.

"If there’s any truth to be found in "Panintoil," he fought a Norwegian seaman with a knife. It was about who was going to Persia on a flat-bottomed Mississippi River barge and the Norwegian told him ‘you’s no seaman and I ain’t gonna cross The Pond with no schoolboy like you. Got me?

"A bowlegged German who later turned out to be a demented hangover from Hitler’s Youth Corp; a guy who kept ‘stink soap’ and a piece of a lampshade made from a boiled down Jew in his locker… He promised to teach Stone how to fight with a knife. And he did: Stone is left-handed and got the Norwegian’s right arm across the muscle and the forearm. You read that story, didn’t you?" she asked anxiously, addressing herself to Dr. Scott.

Cecile wasn’t making up a thing. Simultaneously, all three of them picked up their duplicated copies of "Panintoil" as proof.

Dr. Scott agreed by tapping the stack of stories in front of him with the rubber tipped pencil. "And it was with Stone’s knife that Hoope attacked Christensen, the Danish captain, a couple of months later when they anchored off Aden," he added as further proof that he had indeed done his homework. "And got his head blown off for the effort, eh?

He knew what he knew and wasn’t really expecting an answer.

"It’s not every day you come across somebody who has actually been in a knife fight but, of course, that Spanish writer, Sender, could have been exaggerating about the fine print of his personal biography or was, at a minimum, slightly delusional. Life’s one thing and regardless of what anybody has to say about the processing of his psychic behavior, biography’s still something others can verify and most cases it’s also the case that they can do a better job at it."

"Scott was also run over in the middle of the night in Madrid," Dr. Iris added as the official reader of the client’s records. "Two months in La Paz hospital for an ‘accident’ that was anything but. That’s what his ‘friend’ Bernardo told him once it became obvious he was going to survive. Recommended he leave the country as soon as he got discharged."

"With friends like that…" Dr. Scott muttered and even before Dr. Iris wagged her hand negatively from side to side, he had already fallen quiet.

"I think we’re on the safe side in concluding that Stone isn’t a danger to anybody else," she continued while stealing a quick glance at her watch. "He…"

"He’s run through women like there’s no tomorrow," Celeste interrupted and there was a semblance of fire in her eyes; one that seemingly had just been doused with a disappointing splash of water. "You don’t have to actually kill somebody to ruin them in a way that’ll change them for the rest of their lives."

"Two and a half wives," Dr. Iris quickly seconded as though in apology. "He and his last one… Florence, I think her name is…he and his last wife are going through a divorce."

That information had been supplied to her through the VA official in Macomb who had made all the official arrangements to get Mr. Stone transported to Iowa City and then admitted in their hospital.

"What bothers me are all the ‘Jennifers’ he had one night stands with," Cecile continued. "Same as his Uncle Jim…the one with the anchor tattoo with that name on it."

"Who in his right mind would voluntarily go to Nam in ’65 when it was about then we’d start seeing on the nightly news what we’d gotten ourselves into" Dr. Scott was still ventilating the same theme, he knew, but there was a bit of jealousy in his mind if not exactly in his voice. "Stone must’ve started asking himself the same thing when his ship got to Na Bey down the river from Saigon," he mused almost wistfully.

"And he saw the bow of the Sacramento pointing out of the water and the stern of another," Cecile continued.

It is decidedly harder to read some emotions on blacks as it sometimes is on Whites—blushing, for example--, but when Dr. Scott looked up he knew something was bothering the ofttimes moody P.A.

"Neither ship in…" Scott objected with a rising of his pencil. "Those doomed ships in… in ‘Jennifer is Calling,’ he finally affirmed, beaming through his beard. "There’s no name given for either of them."

"You’re right," Dr. Iris admitted with a waving of her arms. "There was a lot of reading to get through and…"

"But the ‘Jennifers’ he and his cousin got involved with in Nam?" Dr. Scott asked, trying to move on from the subject that both of his colleagues were finding more than a little problematic. "Doesn’t anybody here think that kind of behavior has its own story to tell?"

"Not all of them were one-night-stands," Dr. Iris corrected. "There’s no proof he ever married Berit, the Norwegian nor…what was her name? Nor Ann Marie, the Swede." She paused a moment, feeling there was more to this than first meets the eye. "And there’s no record, either, that he and Flo…" This time she paused and looked directly at Celeste as though on the verge of concluding a discussion the two of them had entertained before without ever resolving it. "Does it really make any difference in a relationship if two people get married in a church, in a courthouse…in the woods with just Nature as a witness? What if they don’t get married at all?" She paused a moment and then went on. "Why all this fuss in Massachusetts, California and Oregon about gay marriages…? Does it ever make any difference getting a third party involved in what’s always such a very personal thing?"

"And the Joan Livingston girl from ‘In the Belly of the Beast’… Pure fiction." She threw this in as a clincher.

Celeste kept her eyes lowered and Dr. Scott’s pencil began rapping again on the stack of short stories and, this time, it was he who stole a quick look at his watch. "It’s the uncle who intrigues me," he said matter-of-factly. "He’s not in all of the stories but in more than a share of them…in too many to not mean something we might be looking for here, don’cha think?"

The question remained unanswered but even without physically assenting with an up-and-down nodding of the head, as was the case with Dr. Iris, everybody was in agreement. Never before had a one of them participated in such an evaluation in which they had been supplied so much information ahead of time and the experience was more than a little exciting. It was like being back in the first year of medical school when just about everybody still believed, mistakenly perhaps, that everything they learned would be a boon to man and maybe even to Mankind itself.

"What’s best for the patient," Dr. Iris whispered aloud. "That’s what we all want; why we’re here."

"Pip in Great Expectations," Dr. Scott continued, still with his head down, his pencil stilled. "The Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes from the middle of the sixteenth-century and…and from just the other day John Irving’s Until I Find Him…: What they’ve all got in common, along with countless other novels, is the protagonist’s search for a father."

A long moment seemed to hang in the air without a sense of direction, but this identification of underlying themes was precisely what Dr. Iris looked for. Accordingly, she was about to say as much, but Cecile beat her to it. "Missing fathers and missing mothers, too," she blurted with her eyes closed. "How ‘bout that Livingston girl in…in…, I don’t remember the name of the story. The one about—Jill! Yeah, that’s her name—in the story about the how the student from SIU’s Mortuary School winds up working on her own mother who’d been Carbondale’s biggest prostitute. And the mortician himself…"

"Her father," Dr. Iris added quickly and if words were capable of betraying facial gestures, there would have been a signal for a blush. As Cecile’s best friend and lover, there was almost nothing she didn’t know about her. Abandoned first by her father who got a job with the Merchant Marine as a cook and then being taken from her mother for prostitution. Adoption by an elderly, church-going family in Des Moines… Dr. Iris knew all of this already but they had promised never to say a word about any of it because it was nobody else’s business. "That story’s called In the Belly of the Beast," she added with her best attempt at concealing what she was really feeling.

"Stone seems to have spent a lifetime looking for a father," Dr. Iving continued while fraying his graying beard with the back of his right hand. "For a father and for a cause. So if you’ll put up with me for a few minutes, I think we’ll find some of his richest ore buried in "To See Right."

Dr. Iris stole a quick glance at her watch and Cecile’s freckles, for the first time since the meeting began, popped out like raisons dotting her already chocolate face.

"Just listen to the way it starts: the perceived sense of loss; of something being kept under cover. ‘Uncle Jim never really fit in the family; neither ours nor the one he was born into but which the rest of us never met or ever heard stories about.’"

A moment’s pause and then: "'Marriage or not, Uncle Jim was never a truly-trusted part of us. He hid things.'"

Still no comments.

"He goes on to talk about his uncle’s tattoo of an anchor that nobody ever got to see because he always kept it hidden under the buttoned-down sleeves of his dress shirts. ‘Uncle Jim’s anchor, though, was different: he got his scar voluntarily. And with sailors being sailors, it was always assumed there were more points to be made of that story than the two upward-curved flukes of an anchor. The same, too, with all the other secrets hidden away by his key to Davey Jones’ Locker: no names, no foreplay, and no memory afterwards.'"

"Is there a point here?" Dr. Iris asked, stealing another glance at her watch.

"Maybe something about seeing…about not seeing or understanding; accepting, maybe, how things are. Let me continue, please. Stone was in the seventh-grade when he first started questioning what all the fuss was about his Uncle Jim. And it was then he found out. ‘Uncle Jim was drinking Johnnie Walker Red and all the other grown-ups had beer or high balls. Eight or nine people were gathered around the dining room table and seated in my father’s place, holding court, was Uncle Jim. Some were seated and others standing. And I was passing through on my way to the refrigerator in the kitchen. He smiled in my direction and then unexpectedly covered his face with both hand, with all of his fingers doing pushups over his eyes. Then it happened! Uncle Jim’s right eyeball rocketed across the table like the first of five shots in a pinball game. A woman behind me gagged like a frog that just got stepped on and immediately buried her face in her husband’s chest. The glass eyeball wasn’t perfectly round, so it first darted in one direction, swerved unexpectedly in another, spun a bit in a circle and then just stopped with its blue lens staring face to face at a Santa Claus in the pattern of the holiday oilcloth on the table.

"'Uncle Jim raised his head, staring straight ahead with his good left eye. Where the glass eyeball had been there were just red-edged eyelids that kept feeling for each other like clam tongues checking out the world outside the perpetual blindness inside their shells. Each time they gropingly slithered up close to each other and then darted away, they left minuscule strings of mucous quivering like rope bridges between them.'"

Another pause as Dr. Scott caught his breath.

"'The dining room was holding its breath and then very slowly Uncle Jim’s left eye started focusing and it was staring straight at me. And so was everybody else. "Will you get it for me Dick?" he whispered. "I can’t see right without it."

"'"Make my light shine," Uncle Jim entreated. Something inside told me that, joke or no joke, my uncle had exposed himself with all of his cards face up on the table and now it was up to me to make a winner out of him. That’s when I knew I could do it---that I had to do it.'

"And he did," Scott concluded, pushing himself back from the conference table with both hands.

The two female doctors on other side of the table sat expressionless like somebody walking into a crowded, silent room in which it had just been announced that one of them would not leave alive.

"We do things…good and bad things because at the moment we’re doing them we believe they are nothing but right. And when that’s the case, there’s no going back. No apologizing. An’ know what?" Scott wheezed and then, looking up at his expressionless audience, quickly waved his arms back in forth in front of him, like a janitor at the end of the day erasing a teacher’s best pearls of wisdom.

"And that seventh-grade kid got a little older and at another New Year’s Day gathering he told his uncle that unions might be alright in some cases but in others…in others they don’t do anything but make parachutes for people who shouldn’t be in planes in the first place."

"And the uncle invited him to take a walk to the nearest fire station right after he’d been elected president of the firemen’s union in Philadelphia," Dr. Iris interrupted, consciously aware that she had skipped forward toward the end of the story that was taking up so much of their precious time. "And Secretary of the National Maritime Union at the same time."

Dr. Scott took the hint, rushing the speed of his narration, but continued reading from the text that he had highlighted the evening before.

"'Down the basement they went. There wasn’t anything there except a giant-sized, asbestos-covered furnace with bulging and twisting sheet metal ducts climbing and then disappearing through the raftered ceiling. Uncle Jim picked up a metal poker and pulled open the fire doors. The basement flashed alive, swelling with the suffocation of heat and the nose-clearing smell of coal gas. The two of us stood there listening to the roar and watching orange and blue flames devouring each other.

"'Down the basement they went. There wasn’t anything there except a giant-sized, asbestos-covered furnace with bulging and twisting sheet metal ducts climbing and then disappearing through the raftered ceiling. Uncle Jim picked up a metal poker and pulled open the fire doors. The basement flashed alive, swelling with the suffocation of heat and the nose-clearing smell of coal gas. The two of us stood there listening to the roar and watching orange and blue flames devouring each other.

"'"Take it back," Uncle Jim rasped, still mesmerized by the flames.

"'Our eyes met and his were now the color of tungsten with yellow swords dancing up and down on them. That’s when I knew for sure that Uncle Jim wasn’t really a part of our family because right in front of my eyes he turned into a perfect foreigner. His brown hair that was always brushed straight back suddenly started rearranging itself into ten or twelve rows, the dotted and dashed skin on his face sucked in under his cheekbones and his mouth became a perfectly horizontal mail slot. And on top of everything, he didn’t seem to understand a word I was saying.'

"He jerked the kid off the floor," Scott exploded, rushing forward and consciously leaving behind bits and pieces he knew the narration could do without.

"'"On three you’re goin’ in," Uncle Jim coughed and I’d already made my first swing on his tattooed hoist. "Take it back NOW."

"'Should I? He’s drunk. He’s crazy. And he can’t even see or hear right.

"'"Two," he counted incorrectly and I could feel his fingers securing a tighter purchase on my butt.

"'What you do is hit the burning coals, spend a half second getting over the shock and then you look up real fast. There’s gonna be a difference in the light: the way out…And then you just dive for it. You can make it!

"'"Two and a half," he screamed.

"'I felt myself going forward for the third and last time, stole a quick look at the inside of Dante’s inferno, and just let go… When the end comes, it’s just gonna come, so stand up tall and take it. We’re all gonna die some day, and we’ve all got our sorry sins to make up for. So do it! Go on! Just let it happen!'"

Silent moments, like muffled heartbeats, circled their way into full-blown minutes with only the whispering sound of the air vent on the ceiling breaking the silence.

"That’s the way the uncle died," Dr. Iris whispered like a penitent in confession. "Walked out the front door of his house late one evening and when he looked up, there they were: two of his union men sitting in a car across the street and one of them shoved a machine gun out the back window.

"He could have run back inside. Maybe should have run back inside. But he didn’t."

"'"Do what you gotta do," the uncle challenged and kept walking toward the car.'" Dr. Scott had taken over the narration again as though it were somehow personally his own. "'"Do what you gotta do," he repeated. And they did. The night lit up like Chinese firecrackers. Pop! Pop! Pop-a-Pop-a-Pop, Pop, Pop! And that was that. It was over!'"

"Yes!" Dr. Iris seconded, pulling herself closer to the table and more in charge of the meeting. "Time’s up and we have to…"

"Another moment," Dr. Scott interrupted and he was pointing again with his pencil at both of his colleagues on the other side of the table. "We haven’t come to the end of that story yet, don’t you agree?"

"I have arrangements to make with Administration," Dr. Iris protested. "Clearance forms to sign."

"Napalm bombs to Viet Nam again," Cecilia enjoined. "It’s what his aunt sent him right after his uncle got air-conditioned with the machine gun. His uncle’s right eyeball enclosed in a plastic film container." She didn't mask the hostility in her voice.

"The very same, Cecile. He brought it with him and it’s in Security in the basement along with laminated seaman’s papers issued way back in the early sixties: A picture of him as a kid and a confirming fingerprint."

Dr. Iris pulled herself even closer to the table and feigned a cough to signal an end to the discussion. "More meds or electro?" she asked bluntly.

"I don’t think…" Scott began slowly but was cut off immediately.

"Electro," Cecile voted.

"Electro," Dr. Iris seconded.

"This has to be unanimous," Dr. Scott protested. "And I for one don’t think…"

Still again he was cut off in mid-sentence.

"I was hoping for unanimity. Like getting a second opinion, but in this case, it’s not necessary. Stone already gave his consent; signed the permission forms on the bottom line."

**********

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