“Did you believe I was dead?”
“We had no reason not to. The Bickleys never informed me until two days ago, and there was no mention of you in the trust, as there is of Alchemy.”
“Is my death part of her delusion?”
“Possibly, yes. With Salome, one never knows. She does not accept ‘psychology’ as existing in the remotest realm of science.”
“Is she sane?”
“That’s a definition question. One’s psychological state is based on a cluster of disparate symptoms that, no matter what any authority claims, we don’t really understand. Thomas Szasz made some good arguments, but mental illness is no myth. Salome’s received many reductive diagnoses over the years, ‘severe dissociative disorder,’ ‘depersonalization disorder,’ ‘dissociative fugue,’ ‘dissociative amnesia,’ ‘identity disorder,’ and simple schizophrenia. At first, she was accused of faking to escape arrest for her violent actions. If so, she is an even better actress than her mother.”
Moses’s head tilted forward quizzically.
Ruggles shook his head. “I’m sorry. I should not have said that. In Salome’s first visit here in 1976, the doctors treated her and others with insulin therapy and a primitive form of electroshock, which repulses me.” Ruggles stopped himself, refocused, and continued. “Sorry, I’ve been both too technical and veering off course. As I say, it is difficult for me to make a reductive classification for her. We have adjusted her drug regimen. She certainly has a keen memory when she wants to. The ECT caused some retrograde amnesia and anterograde memory loss, but it has not been significant. She functioned for many years, broke down, and then functioned again. Her accomplishments as an artist are well documented. I believe she can function again. She’s only fifty-seven and physically in excellent health.” Moses did a quick calculation and realized Salome must have been fourteen or fifteen when she had given birth to him. “Right now, with Alchemy being away and Nathaniel Brockton’s physical constraints, her risk of another traumatic …” Ruggles waved his hand and pointed toward some unknown beyond. “Alchemy, not the Bickleys, is now her guardian and her anchor.”
“Where is he?”
“At a Zen monastery in New Mexico. He’s in the middle of a three-month retreat. It was communicated to him that she is back here, but he’s taken a vow of silence, which I suggest you interrupt immediately.”
“I’m inclined to agree. Let me think about it overnight.”
“The question arises: Should you meet and be introduced to Salome now? Should I tell her? I am at a loss. In all the years I’ve been practicing, and I have experience with extreme and rare cases, never before have I encountered such a conundrum. If you want to meet her, I’ll need at least a few days to prepare myself. And her.” Ruggles rubbed the mole on his cheek with his right index finger and shook his head as if to acknowledge, You don’t have the time.
“Meet her? Maybe. No. I think I’ll find Alchemy, and then, who knows? I need to avoid any more blows until, well, things are clearer. I’m not sure it is best for her. Or me. Can I see her and maybe …?”
“Yes, of course.” Ruggles looked at his watch and leaned back in his chair, relieved to be able to put this confrontation off. “She’s probably taking her before-dinner walk around the grounds. I can casually introduce you as a visitor.”
Ruggles led Moses outside. They walked along a tree-lined pebble path until Ruggles pointed. “That’s her.” Ten yards ahead of them, a woman ambled as if she were strolling freely in a park rather than a walled-in compound, head angled toward the sky. “If we speed up a bit we’ll catch her.”
“No, let’s follow her a minute.”
Moses began to sweat profusely; his knees jellied and his body trembled. Fear overwhelmed his curiosity. He grabbed Ruggles by the arm to steady himself. “I can’t. I can’t now.”
Ruggles, grim-faced, nodded. “You can come back anytime.”
Moses drove back to the hotel, still feeling emotionally unmoored from the guideposts, internal and external, that had marked and peopled his world.
At the hotel he called Jay. “Guess what? I got two moms. Both are living on worlds they created. One includes me and one doesn’t.”
“You should call the one that includes you. She is not in good shape. She feels neglected.” Jay and Hannah had spent the morning and afternoon together, and Jay went home after a late lunch.
“What? Why? I called last night and you saw her today.”
“It’s not rational, but she’s afraid to lose you.”
“Jay, I am so worn out. I feel so beaten down. I feel like giving up.”
“NO! You can’t.” Jay panicked. “You can’t. It would destroy your mom. And me. Please, Moses.”
Jay’s fear of losing Moses was colored by the loss of her mother who, when Jay was twenty-three, began to slide into the netherworld of Alzheimer’s. Jay had made plans to move back to Miami to be with her mother and to help her father and brother run the art gallery. Jay’s belief in the vows of “for better or worse” were shattered when her father put his wife in a home and began dating one of her nurses. Jay gave up her plans to move back to Miami. Her mother remained in the “home,” too physically strong to succumb yet unable to recognize Jay when she made one of her now rare visits.
When Moses’s illness struck, Jay resisted the notion that the world could be so unjust. Better, she often thought, if he would flee to another woman’s arms than lose him to the sheathing arms of illness and death. She swore unswerving devotion no matter how debilitating his illness became.
Moses understood he had to deny his urge to fade away into nothingness. He had battled with those desires before, and he knew this was the one dreadful fantasy he should never raise with Jay. “I’m sorry. Don’t worry. Please. I’m tired. I need to sleep and not think. I’ll call my mom now, but you have to take care of her until I get back.”
Jay seemed calmer. Moses intended to fly to Albuquerque, find Alchemy, and hope that he’d agree to help.
After they hung up, Moses phoned Hannah. He reassured her that he loved her and all was well and nothing had changed between them. He didn’t want her to feel suddenly peripheral. “Look, I’ll be home in a few days. Please wait.”
Perplexed and overwhelmed, the idea of peaceful surrender appealed to Moses. Nothing like the imminence of death to present one with an existential crisis, to raise questions about meanings and philosophies, God’s existence and faith. Moses flashed back to the vacant glare of a man who, when Moses was speaking at the Skirball Center on his work about the children of survivors of the Holocaust, confronted him after the talk. He spoke with a slight Yiddish accent. “You are smart with words, like him.” He looked at his hands, which held a copy of Man’s Search for Meaning. “You make up words and theories to justify the emptiness inside you that knows there is no meaning and there is no God.” Moses fumbled to respond. The man, with a disdainful shake of his head, turned away.
Moses still had no response. He didn’t understand the meaning in his preverbal drive to meet his biological father, and now his mother. Neither endless hours of therapy nor reading an array of august thinkers delivered any eternal truths from the Tree of Knowledge. No — he felt as if he stood beneath some emotional Tower of Babel and would forever struggle for answers. He cursed himself for possessing no language to explain his feelings, or even understand his own questions.
He lay awake that night as old dilemmas, which had lurked in his nightmares and daymares, and new mysteries rushed along the eaves of his consciousness. Why did his urge to see his father become even greater with each new confirmation that his negation was intentional? And now this new ache for the mother whom he did not know existed — how could he miss what he never knew he had, had never had? Especially when his mom Hannah so loved and nurtured him? And what drove the Savants to hide his birth, if indeed they did? What caused Hannah to abide the charade of the unholy alliance of Teumer, Bickley Sr., and Lively for so long? Finally, fatigue took hold, his eyes closed, and his mind went quiet.