“I can understand the need to take charge of your life. Mine seems to be swinging completely out of control.”
“Mine, too, but I’m better able to handle it now. As I think back on it, though, I was probably just going through menopause, but Diane made me believe that something terrible had happened to me, something so terrible that I couldn’t remember it.”
Where had I heard that before? “Are you saying there was nothing seriously wrong with you?”
“Nothing that a few hormone pills couldn’t cure.”
I paused to organize my thoughts. “Diane and I hadn’t come along that far before she…” I faked a sniffle. “… before she died.”
“You were new to the group?”
“Very. Now I’m wondering if it wasn’t all for the best. I would have hated going to therapy if all I was going to do was be forced to think about terrible things!”
“I did hate going to therapy. With a passion. It was painful and tough, but in a way, that’s what made it so attractive. I thought if I could just make it to the other side, I would really have accomplished something. I’d be free! Maybe I’d be on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”
“So you joined up.”
“Yup. I bought a ticket on that pop psychology train and hopped right on. Diane was my fairy godmother, holding one hand for the journey while I was writing checks with the other.”
I laughed out loud. “You sound very cynical.”
“Well, it took me a while to realize that she was simply fleecing the flock.”
“How so?”
“It’s simple math, really. Fifty dollars a month for the group sessions at the church and a hundred dollars for each one-on-one. Multiply that times the number of patients…” She paused as if performing the calculations in her head. “Well, you do the math!”
I was. By my reckoning, Diane Sturges had to be pulling in at least $160,000 per year, even allowing time out for vacations. “Not much of an incentive to help patients get well and move on, is it?”
“No. And Diane often made me feel as if I wasn’t doing my homework.” Somewhere on Stephanie’s side of the telephone, a teakettle screamed. She must have been talking on a portable phone, because I heard footsteps and the teakettle was choked off in mid-shriek. “I wanted so much to produce something for her that sometimes I’d make things up. But it was never enough. One time when I was being nonproductive, she fell asleep.” Stephanie apologized for the clattering crockery and made herself tea. “It was the same during group. I was beginning to crack under the peer pressure.”
“I felt a lot like that myself when I couldn’t get my Little Girl to talk to me.”
“Tell me about it! On the other hand, if I became rational, she’d sometimes scold me, telling me it was my job to feel, not to think.” Stephanie paused and took a deep breath. “I finally had enough.”
“So what did you do?”
“I told her that just because those other ladies had been abused, didn’t mean that I had. For two years I’d been walking on eggshells, terrified that I’d remember the incident with a capital I at any time. What if it happened while I was driving? Or in the grocery store? Or in church? Or holding my grandbaby? I’d wake up in a cold sweat at four in the morning and ask myself, ‘Stephanie! Are you about to remember?’ ”
“Did you? Remember, I mean.”
“No. Nothing ever came into focus for me, and I finally realized that there had been no incest. None at all. I told Diane I thought everyone in the group was only interested in helping me solve my problems because they were working so hard on trying to solve their own.”
“When did you last see Diane?” I asked, although I already knew what her answer would be from the information in front of me.
“The Tuesday before she died. I tell you, Hannah, when I heard about it on the news, I felt terrible, thinking that I might have been responsible.”
“Responsible? Why on earth?”
“They said a fall from the balcony, so naturally I thought…”
“Suicide?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why suicide?”
“I can’t tell you for sure. It’s just a feeling I had. You should have seen the look on her face when I told her that I’d come to the conclusion that I hadn’t been abused at all. I had expected an argument, but she just sat there quietly, as if I weren’t even there. Then she ended my session twenty minutes early and said she wouldn’t even charge me for it.”
“How odd.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I have to say that you seem fine now. Very confident.”
“It’s ironic really, that I started using the tools she gave me to begin seeing the light.”
Thinking about Georgina, I said, “Some of us didn’t get that far.”
“I know.”
We promised to meet for coffee sometime, but I think we both knew that after we hung up we’d never talk to each other again.
I returned to my folder, wishing that Georgina, like Stephanie, would finally see the light.
Before Mother’s heart attack, I had rummaged through back issues of the Sun until I found Diane Sturges’s obituary. The clipping stared up at me now. Where had she come from? Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1966, she’d moved to Baltimore, but it didn’t say when. In 1983 she graduated from the Garrison Forest school and attended college and graduate school at Johns Hopkins. The obituary said she was survived by her husband, Bradley Sturges, a Washington, D.C., architect, and her father, Dr. Mark Voorhis. Nothing new there. I sat back in my chair and studied Diane’s picture, looking so much like that other woman in the photograph in Dr. Voorhis’s office. Wait a minute! What about a mother? For the first time in many months, I longed for the reference section of the Whitworth & Sullivan library, where I could instantly lay my hands on reference books like the AMA Directory of Physicians whenever I wanted them. I consulted the computer, but the darn book didn’t appear to be online, so I reached for the telephone instead and called the public library on West Street. They didn’t have a copy. I shuffled things around on the desk, searching for the Naval Academy phone book, then called the Naval Academy library. The nice gentleman who answered the reference line apologized profusely and told me they didn’t have the book either. Pooh!
I stared at the monitor for a while, then had a sudden vision of Penny Evans, Whitworth & Sullivan’s workaholic reference librarian, who was probably plowing her way through a pile of reference questions the height of the World Trade Center right then, not that anyone would appreciate it. Want something done, they say? Ask the busiest person you know. That was Penny.
Amazingly, I hadn’t forgotten Whitworth & Sullivan’s telephone number. I was so proud after punching in all the numbers correctly that it was a big letdown to get Penny’s voice mail. “If you’re there, Penny, grab the AMA directory and call me back,” I recorded, then hung up in a grumpy mood.
I rearranged my papers, putting them in a semblance of order, then played a game of computer solitaire. Suits of cards were cascading down the screen in victorious waves when the phone rang.
Penny hadn’t changed a bit. The same chirpy voice. “Hi, Hannah. You can’t imagine how surprised I was to get your call. How the hell are you?”
“Hanging in there, Pen. Just had my reconstructive surgery, so I’m stuck at home and feeling kind of punk.”
“Jeez. My aunt had that done, so I’ve got some idea of how you must feel.”
“Uncomfortable as hell and twice as bored.”
“So, you decided to call me up for entertainment?” She burst into song, a hilarious off-key rendition of “Let Me Entertain You.” When I cheerfully protested she said, “I could use some diversion anyway. Fran’s got me working on the use-tax statistics.”