Sins of the Flesh

Todo pounced. “Scary work,” he said. “How do you manage to keep your cool sitting in a session with a homicidal maniac?”

“Oh, really!” Melos exclaimed. “There speaks the ignorant layman. Sometimes I think the general public still believes that the warders wear suits of armor and keep the inmates at bay with high-pressure water hoses. Inmates are properly prepared for their sessions. If they need to be sedated, they are. It’s not dangerous work, Todo—in fact, it’s more likely to be boring.”

Dr. Fred took over. “HI has state and federal funds, and has one aim: to remove violent, sociopathic crime from humanity’s list of unacceptable behavior. One day we’ll be able to cure the physiologically violent criminal.”

“Oh, sure!” Todo sneered, looking militant. “It happens now, guys—some axe murderer is released as cured, and what’s the first thing he does outside the prison walls? Kills more people with his trusty axe. Psychiatrists play God, and that’s a very dangerous role.”

But Melos and Dr. Fred merely laughed.

“Blame the press, Todo, not psychiatrists,” Melos said. “No journalist ever wastes space on the thousands of successful cases. The one-in-a-million failure gets the publicity.”

Dr. Moira chimed in. “Setting an inmate at liberty isn’t under psychiatric control,” she said. “The steps taken to release a patient considered a danger to the community are multiple as well as agonizing for all concerned. Boards, committees, panels, reviews, outside consultations, exhaustive enquiries, investigations and tests—it’s a near-endless list.” She looked complacent. “Besides, Asylum inmates aren’t ever considered for release. HI is like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.”

Animation had crept in; the shrinks had undergone a sea-change now the subject was their work. If only, thought Delia, they could abandon their air of superiority, they might win a few fans, but they couldn’t. Her eyes encountered Jess, also listening, and saw an echo of her own sentiments; Jess too deplored their snobbery.

“I’ve never cottoned on to the idea of using tax dollars to create a place like HI,” said Todo, enjoying himself. “I mean, isn’t it bad enough that public funds have to keep the criminally insane fed and housed, without also providing health services ordinary citizens can’t afford? I hear that HI has a modern hospital capable of treating anything from a heart attack to cirrhosis of the liver.”

Rose piped up. “But how can it be helped?” she asked, sure of her ground. “This is a civilized country, people have to be treated for their illnesses. But what hospital can cope with violent patients who can’t be reasoned with? The Institute is a prison, and the general hospital side of it was installed to protect the community. Our psychiatric research unit is quite separate again, so is its funding.” Her rather plain and ordinary face had become flushed.

The mother defending her young, thought Delia; she’s new to this, and resents the criticism.

“There’s no altruism involved, Todo,” said Dr. Moira crisply. “Ours is a job that has to be done. The cost of long-term—no, life-long!—incarceration is so astronomical that we have to find some answers, or at least make the tax dollars go farther.”

“Our work is immensely valuable to society,” said Ari Melos. “In the long run, it’s units like HI that will make the whole problem of the criminally insane a cheaper exercise.”

I think, said Delia to herself, that I have just heard the same old arguments that come up every time these two disparate groups of people get together. Rha and Rufus invite them to please Ivy, who wants to please Jess, who wants to please her staff. And it’s all to do with music.

Around six, while the sun was still lighting the sky brilliantly, blinds and curtains were unobtrusively drawn, plunging the big room into semi-darkness. A most alluring after-shave essence stole into her nostrils, the mark of Nicolas Greco, whom she’d met only in passing. The Rha Tanais Inc. accountant of the Savile Row suits, easily the best-dressed man Delia had ever seen, and, she suspected, as close to indispensable as people got.

“Rufus has issued stern instructions,” said he, piloting her with a hand under her left elbow. “I am to put you in Fenella’s chair—it has the best outlook.”

People were taking seats all over the place, no system or method to it except for this one smallish armchair, which had a footstool and, across its padded back, a sign that said RESERVED. Placed in it, she had an uninterrupted view of one large, octagonal niche wherein a grand piano, a harp, drums, and music stands were located. Even Betty Kornblum of the Siamese cat wore an excited expression, and the shrinks, clustered together, were positively animated.

What had been an ordinary, if magnificent, party turned into what in Delia’s days at Oxford had been called a “salon.”

Rufus began it by playing Chopin on the piano well enough to entrance a Paderewski audience—glorious! Was this what he did for a living? One of the willowy waiters picked up a violin and Rufus passed to Beethoven’s fifth sonata for violin and piano; you could have heard a pin drop, so rapt and quiet was the audience. Roger Dartmont sang, Dolores Kenny sang, and they finished with a duet. Todo danced with a group of the waiters, males for one dazzling athletic number, females for a voluptuous dance, then males and females together for something balletic and graceful.

With pauses and intermissions it went on for five hours, and by the end of it Delia fully understood why all the badgering to obtain invitations for the shrinks went on. To be privileged to witness such first-class performances in the cozy intimacy of a salon was memorable enough to, pardon the hyperbole, kill for. The evening would, Delia knew, live in her memory forever. If anything puzzled her, it was the arrogance of the psychiatrists, who didn’t seem to grasp that they were being honored; rather, they seemed to think they were entitled. And that, she decided, had nothing to do with psychiatry. It was all to do with the mind-set of people who would, could they, ban all exclusivity from the face of the globe. A Rha and Rufus salon was exclusive, and they had managed to invade it. What did that make Jess?

“That was utter magic,” she said to her hosts as she was leaving, “and I want you to know that I deeply appreciate your asking me to come. Truly, I don’t take the privilege for granted.”

Rha’s eyes twinkled. “Rufus and I are greedy, darling,” he said. “Concerts are such a bore! Parking—crowds—coughs—strangers a-go-go—and never exactly the program you feel like. Salons are a total self-indulgence. No grubby money changes hands, performers who love to perform get to do their thing—terrific!”

“Even the loonies wallowed,” she said demurely.

“Poor babies! So ghastly earnest!”

“Were you a concert pianist, Rufus?” she asked.

“Never, Delicious Delia! Too much like hard work. No, I love to play and I keep my hands supple, but life’s too full of variety to lay one’s entire stock of sacrificial goats on just one single altar. I play to please me, not others.”

“If you eat British stodge, I’d very much like to ask the pair of you to dinner at my place,” she said, a little shyly.

“We’d love to come,” said Rha, and looked wary. “Uh—what is British stodge?”

“Bangers and mash for the main course—I drive to a butcher outside Buffalo for the bangers—absolutely authentic! And for dessert, spotted dick and custard.”

“How,” asked Rha seriously, “could we possibly turn down a spotted dick? Especially with custard.”

Delia handed Rufus her card. “Decide on a night, and call me,” she said, beaming.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 1969 (#ulink_1dbfe7b3-ca7b-590e-a156-238fee10f3dd)

Jess Wainfleet kept nothing of her professional life in the small house she owned one block behind the middle reaches of Millstone Beach; it was purely a gesture at the normality of having a private address. When HI had been built in 1960 she had fought to be let have an apartment on the premises, only to find her arguments overridden on the grounds that her own mental health was best safeguarded by living off-site. Once informed of the decision, she had accepted it with grace, and immediately acquired her house in Millstone, a shortish, cross-country drive from the Asylum.

The place did come in handy, she admitted; it was somewhere to put her enormous collection of papers, journals and books, it held her wardrobe of clothes, it had laundry facilities, and it was a mailing address. What it was not was a home: that was HI, for Jess was one of those people who literally lived for her work.

Within six months of HI’s being finished, she had organized herself. A bathroom in close proximity to her suite of offices became exclusively hers; opening off it was a room originally intended as a rest and recuperation area for a member of the staff feeling under the weather, and this too Jess commandeered. To all extents and purposes the Director of HI was enabled to live on the premises provided neither bathroom nor rest room suggested that she was making a home there.

Riddled with complexes and well aware of the degree of her obsessive-compulsive psychosis, Jess had managed to make an iceberg of them; what showed was the tip, the rest successfully buried. It would not have been possible were she intimately involved with another person, but since her psychic weaknesses were benign and she had no intimate friend, her colleagues accepted her failings as they did their own—as part and parcel of the profession.

The only person who had ever broken through Jess’s defensive wall was Ivy Ramsbottom, a fellow obsessive of about the same degree—everything compulsively straightened, catalogued and tidied, without going over the top into a clinical mania.

“The world is full of people like us,” Jess had said to Ivy on first meeting, just after noting that Ivy’s china-headed pins were stuck in their little cushion in a shaded pattern that turned them into a graduated rainbow. “It would kill you to stick a black-headed pin into that row of red ones, wouldn’t it?”

A startled Ivy laughed, and owned that it would.

Jess had been walking on Holloman Green to take in the beauty of its copper beeches when her eye caught a fascinating picture framed by cuprous leaves: a jet-black shop window containing three unrealistically slender plastic mannequins, a bride and two bridesmaids clad in fabulous dresses. Above the black window it said in white letters Rha Tanais Bridal. Unable to resist, Jess had crossed the road and walked into the shop. It was a large premises whose changing booths were big enough to hold a client in a full crinoline, and whose dress racks were entirely devoted to wedding clothes.

An extremely tall, attractive woman in a modish purple dress approached her, smiling.

“You’re here out of curiosity, not custom,” the woman said as she shook hands. “I’m Ivy Ramsbottom.”

“I’m Dr. Jess Wainfleet, a psychiatrist,” Jess said bluntly, “and your window fascinated me. The crowds it draws! Even cars passing by slow down to a crawl.”

“There’s not a woman born doesn’t yearn to be a bride. Come into my den and have an espresso.”

That had been eight years ago. The friendship had bloomed, mostly because of their shared obsessive tendencies—it was so good to have someone to laugh with about them! In Ivy, the type was pure, extending to meticulously straight notes on a refrigerator door and the pattern on the china facing all the same way, whereas in Jess it was joined by a manic quality that pushed her to work too hard, sometimes become impatient.

Of course by now Jess knew Ivy’s story, and had been of help to her; the insights and sensitivities of her field made her the best kind of confidante an Ivy could ask for. If there was pain and sorrow in it, that was because Ivy couldn’t reciprocate with the kind of advice Jess’s problems needed. Those, she continued to bear alone and unaided save for the act of friendship itself.

So after the salon at Rha and Rufus’s place, Jess visited her house only long enough to change out of evening wear into an HI outfit of trousers and a plain blouse; then she went home: that is, she drove out to the Asylum.

First step was to patrol her kingdom, its shiplike corridors of rails and unmarked, anonymous doors; sometimes she opened one and entered a particularly beloved room, such as the neuro O.R. When she had agreed to take this job in 1959, she had insisted that HI have all the appurtenances of a general hospital; it cost money, yes, but general hospitals weren’t geared for criminally insane patients in any way, especially security. So when an Asylum prisoner became ill, he was treated at HI, even including surgery or intensive care. Of course the O.R. was also used for experimental animal surgery, chiefly primates—how did one deal with the Todo Sataras of this world, with their tax dollars and inability to understand that trying to treat the violently insane in a general hospital ended up being more expensive than an HI?

Finally, as the big clock on the wall opposite her desk said 4.47 a.m., she eased into the padded armchair behind her desk and opened the cupboard door that occupied her desk’s right side. A safe with a combination lock came into view. Cupping her hand around the striated and sparsely numbered disc, she performed the necessary twirls back and forth until, with a faint “thunk” the last tumbler disengaged. Her hand dropped. A stupid thing to do—anyone trying to see her manipulate the disc would have to have eyes in the end of the chair arm, yet still she did it every single time. That was the obsession, of course. Like knowing no one’s back was going to break because you trod on a crack—but what if someone’s back did break? Therefore you stepped over the crack just to make sure. Rituals were so powerful, so stuffed with meanings that went all the way back to the apes.

“Language,” she said as she lifted bundle after bundle of files out of the safe, “is an expression of the complexity in a brain. Like the verb ‘want.’ An animal can indicate want by making some physical movement or gesture of vocalization aimed at want fulfilment. ‘I want it!’ Only a human can actually say it, including indications of the degree of want, the specific kind of want, the niche want occupies. Without moving any muscles except those of the lips and tongue and upper airway. How do the pathways open up between an infant’s saying ‘I want!’ and a mature adult’s saying ‘I want, but I can’t have my want because to take it would destroy someone else’s superior entitlement to it?’”