I had dreamed of being an artist, too, but when the time came for me to select my life's work, I chose medicine, and I knew from the beginning it would be psychiatry, which for me was both a healing profession and the ultimate science of human experience; in fact, I'd also applied to art schools after college, and to my pleasure had been accepted at two rather good ones. I'd like to be able to say it was an agonized decision, that the artist in me rebelled against medicine. In reality, I felt that I could not make a serious
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enough social contribution as a painter, and I secretly dreaded the drift and struggle to make a living that that way of life might entail. Psychiatry would be a direct path to serving a suffering world while I would continue to paint on my own, and it would be enough, I thought, to know I could have been a career artist.
My parents reflected deeply on my choice of specialty, as I could tell when I mentioned it to them in one of our weekend telephone conversations. There was a pause on their end while they digested what I had laid out for myself and why I might have selected it. Then my mother observed calmly that everyone needs someone to talk to, which was her way of quite rightly connecting their ministry and mine, and my father observed that there are many ways to drive out demons.
Actually, my father does not believe in demons; they don't figure in his modern and progressive calling. He likes to refer sarcastically to them, even now in his very old age, and to read about them, shaking his head, in the works of early New England preachers such as Jonathan Edwards, or in those of the medieval theologians who also fascinate him. He is like a reader of horror fiction: he reads them because they upset him. When he refers to "demons" and "hellfire" and "sin," he means these things ironically, with a disgusted fascination; the parishioners who still come to his study in our old house (he will never fully retire) receive instead a profoundly forgiving picture of their own torments. He concedes that although he deals in souls and I deal in diagnoses, environmental factors, behavioral outcomes, DNA, we are striving for the same end: the end of misery.
After my mother became a minister as well, our household was a busy one, and I found plenty of time to escape on my own, shaking off my occasional malaise with the distraction of books and explorations in the park at the end of our street, where I sat reading under a tree, or sketching scenes of mountains and deserts I
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had certainly never seen myself. The books I liked best were either adventures at sea or adventures in invention and research. I found as many children's biographies as I could--on Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Eli Whitney, and others -- and later discovered the adventure of medical research: that of Jonas Salk and polio, for example. I was not an energetic child, but I dreamed about doing something courageous. I dreamed of saving lives, of stepping forward at the right moment with some lifesaving revelation. Even now, I never read an article in a scientific journal without a version of that feeling: the thrill of vicarious discovery and the twinge of envy for the discoverer.
I can't say that this desire to be a saver of lives was the great theme of my childhood, although, as it turns out, that would make a neat story. In fact, I had no vocation, and those biographies for children had become a memory by the time I was in high school, where I did my homework well but without unusual enthusiasm, read extra Dickens and Melville with considerably more pleasure, took art classes, ran cross-country with no distinction, and lost my virginity with a sigh of relief my junior year to a more experienced girl, a senior, who told me she'd always liked the back of my head in class.
My parents did rise to some distinction themselves in our town, defending and successfully rehabilitating a homeless man who'd wandered in from Boston to take up shelter in our parks. They traveled to the local prison to give talks together, and they prevented a house nearly as old as ours (1691 -- ours was 1686) from being torn down for a supermarket lot. They came to my track meets and chaperoned my proms and invited my friends for ecumenical pizza parties and officiated at the memorial services of their friends who died young. There were no funerals in their creed, no propped-open coffins, no bodies to pray over, so that I didn't touch a cadaver until medical school and I didn't see a dead person I knew personally until I was holding my mother's hand-- her perfectly limp, still-warm hand.
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But years before my mother died, and while I was still in school, I made the friend I mentioned before, who gave me the greatest case of my career, if we're going to relent and put it that way. John Garcia was one of several male friends from my twenties--college friends with whom I studied for biology quizzes and history exams or threw a football around on Saturday afternoons, and who are now balding, other men I knew in medical school by their quick steps and flying white jackets in labs and lectures or later in the throes of awkward patient interactions. We were all getting a little gray by the time of John's phone call, a little sloped around the middle or else valiantly leaner in our attempts to combat sloping--I was already grateful to myself for my lifelong running habit, which had kept me more or less lean, even strong. And to fate for the fact that my hair was still thick and as much brown as silver, and that women still glanced my way on the street. But I was indisputably one of them, my cohort of middle-aged friends.
So when John called to ask me his favor that Tuesday, of course I said yes. When he told me about Robert Oliver, I was interested, but I was also interested in my lunch, my chance to stretch my legs and shake off the morning. We are never really alert to our destinies, are we? That's how my father would put it, in his study in Connecticut. And by the end of the day, when my meeting was over and the hail had changed to a fine drizzle and the squirrels were running along the backyard wall and leaping over the urns, I had almost stopped thinking about John's call.
Later, after I'd walked quickly home from my office and shaken out my coat in my own foyer--this was before I was married, so no one greeted me at the door and there was no sweet-smelling blouse from the workday slung over the foot of the bed--after I'd left the streaming umbrella to dry and washed my hands and made a salmon sandwich on toast and gone into my studio to pick up the paintbrush--then, with the thin, smooth wood between my fingers, I remembered my patient-to-be, a painter who had
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brandished a knife instead. I put on my favorite music, the Franck Violin Sonata in A Major, and forgot about him on purpose. The day had been long and a little empty, until I began to fill it with color. But the next day always comes, unless we actually die, and the next day I met Robert Oliver.
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CHAPTER 3 Marlow
He stood by the window of his new room, looking out of it, hands dangling at his sides. He turned as I came in. My new patient was an inch or two over six feet, powerfully built, and when he faced you head-on he stooped a little, like a charging bull. His arms and shoulders were full of barely restrained strength, his expression dogged, self-assertive. His skin was lined, tanned; his hair was almost black and very thick, touched with silver, breaking in waves off his head, and it stood out farther on one side than the other, as if he rumpled it often. He was dressed in baggy pants of olive corduroy, a yellow cotton shirt, and a corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows. He wore heavy brown leather shoes.
Robert's clothes were stained with oil paint, smudges of alizarin, cerulean, yellow ocher--colors vivid against that determined drabness. He had paint under his fingernails. He stood restlessly, shifting from foot to foot or crossing his arms, exposing the elbow patches. Two different women later told me that Robert Oliver was the most graceful man they had ever met, which makes me wonder what women notice that I don't. On the windowsill behind him lay a packet of fragile-looking papers; I thought these must be the "old letters" John Garcia had referred to. As I came toward him, Robert glanced directly at me--this was not the last time I was to feel that we were in the ring together--and his eyes were momentarily bright and expressive, a deep gold-green, and rather bloodshot. Then his face closed angrily; he turned his head aw
ay.
I introduced myself and offered my hand. "How are you feeling today, Mr. Oliver?"
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After a moment he shook hands firmly in return but said nothing and seemed to slip into languor and resentment, folding his arms and leaning against the windowsill.
"Welcome to Goldengrove. I'm glad to have the chance to meet you."
He met my gaze but still said nothing.
I sat down in the armchair in the corner and watched him for a few minutes before speaking again. "I read your file from Dr. Garcia's office just now. I understand you had a very difficult day last week, and that's what brought you to the hospital."
At this he gave a curious smile and spoke for the first time. "Yes," he said. "I had a difficult day."
I had achieved my first goal: he was talking. I composed myself so I wouldn't show any pleasure or surprise.
"Do you remember what happened?"
He still looked directly at me, but his face registered no emotion. It was a strange face, just balanced between the rough and the elegant, a face of striking bone structure, the nose long but also broad. "A little."
"Would you care to tell me about it? I'm here to help you, first by listening."
He said nothing.
I repeated, "Would you like to tell me a little about it?" Still he was silent, so I tried another tack. "Did you know that what you attempted to do the other day was reported in the papers? I didn't see the article myself, at the time, but someone's just given me a clipping. You made page four."
He looked away.
I persisted. "The headline was something like this--Artist Attacks Painting in National Gallery.'"
He laughed suddenly, a surprisingly sweet sound. "That's accurate, in a way. But I didn't touch it."
"The guard seized you first, right?"
He nodded.
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"And you fought back. Did you resent being pulled away from the painting?"
This time a new expression came over his face: it was grim, and he bit the corner of his lip. "Yes."
"It was a painting of a woman, wasn't it? How did you feel when you attacked her?" I asked as suddenly as I could. "What made you feel like doing that?"
His response was equally sudden. He shook himself, as if trying to throw off the mild tranquilizer he was still on, and squared his shoulders. He seemed even more commanding in that moment, and I saw that he could have been quite intimidating if violent.
"I did it for her."
"For the woman herself? Did you want to protect her?" He was silent.
I tried again. "Do you mean you felt she somehow wanted to be attacked?"
He looked down then and sighed as if it hurt him even to exhale. "No. You don't understand. I wasn't attacking her. I did it for the woman I loved."
"For someone else? Your wife?"
"You can think whatever you like."
I kept my gaze fixed on him. "Did you feel you were doing it for your wife? Your ex-wife?"
"You can talk with her," he said, as if he didn't care one way or the other. "You can even talk with Mary if you want. You can look at the pictures if you want. I don't care. You can talk to anybody you want."
"Who is Mary?" I asked. It was not his ex-wife's name. I waited a little, but he was silent. "Are the pictures you mentioned pictures of her? Or do you mean the painting at the National Gallery?"
He stood in utter silence before me, gazing somewhere over my head.
I waited; I can wait like a rock when I need to. After three or four minutes, I observed placidly, "You know, I'm a painter myself." I
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don't often comment about myself, of course, and certainly not in an initial session, but I thought it was worth the small risk.
He flashed me a look that could have been either interest or contempt, and then he lay down on the bed, stretched out full length on his back with his shoes on the bedspread and his arms behind his head, gazing upward as if at open sky.
"I am sure only something very difficult could have compelled you to attack a painting." That was another risk, but it, too, seemed worth taking.
He closed his eyes and rolled away from me, as if preparing for a nap. I waited. Then, observing that he wasn't going to speak further, I stood up. "Mr. Oliver, I am here whenever you need me. And you are here so that we can care for you and help you get well again. Please feel free to have the nurse call me. I'll come see you again soon. You can ask for me if you'd simply like a little company--there's no need to talk more until you're ready."
I couldn't have known how thoroughly he would take me at my word. When I visited the next day, the nurse said he hadn't spoken to her all morning, although he had eaten a little breakfast and seemed calm. His silence wasn't reserved for the nurses; he didn't speak to me either--not that day or the next, nor for the following twelve months. During this period his ex-wife did not visit him; in fact, he had no visitors. He continued to display many of the symptoms of clinical depression, with periods of silent agitation and perhaps anxiety.
During most of the time he was with me, I never seriously considered releasing Robert from my care, partly because I could never be completely sure whether or not he was a possible risk to himself and others, and partly because of a feeling of my own that evolved a little at a time and to which I'll admit gradually; I've already confessed that I have my reasons for considering this a private story. In those first weeks, I continued treating him with
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the mood stabilizer John had started him on, and I also continued the antidepressant.
His one previous psychiatric report, which John had sent me, indicated a serious recurrent mood disorder and a trial of lithium--Robert had apparently refused the drug after a few months of treatment, saying it exhausted him. But the report also described a patient frequently functional, holding down a teaching job at a small college, pursuing his artwork, and trying to engage with family and colleagues. I called his former psychiatrist myself, but the fellow was busy and told me little, except to admit that after a certain point he had found Oliver an unmotivated patient. Robert had seen a psychiatrist mainly at his wife's request and had stopped his visits before he and his wife had separated more than a year before. Robert had not had any long-term psychotherapy, nor had he been previously hospitalized. The doctor hadn't even been aware that Robert no longer lived in Greenhill.
Robert now took his medication without protest, in the same resigned way in which he ate--an unusual sign of cooperation in a patient so defiant as to hew to a vow of silence. He ate sparingly, also without apparent interest, and kept himself rigorously clean despite his depression. He did not interact with the other patients in any way, but he did take supervised daily walks inside and outside and sometimes sat in the bigger of the lounges, occupying a chair in a sunny corner.
In his periods of agitation, which at first occurred every day or two, he paced his room, fists clenched, body trembling visibly, face working. I watched him carefully and had my staff do the same. One morning he cracked the mirror in his bathroom with the butt of his fist, although he, didn't injure himself. Sometimes he sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands, jumping up every few minutes to look out the window, then settling again into that attitude of despair. When he was not agitated, he was listless.
The only thing that seemed to interest Robert Oliver was his package of old letters, which he kept close to him and frequently
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opened and read. Often, when I visited him, he had a letter in front of him. And once during the first weeks, I observed before he folded the letter up and put it back into its faded envelope that the pages were covered with regular, elegant handwriting in brown ink. "I've noticed you're often reading the same thing--these letters. Are they antiques?"
He closed his hand over the package and turned away, his face as full of misery as any I'd seen in my years of treating patients. No, I could not discharge him, even if he had stretches of calm that lasted several day
s. Some mornings I invited him to talk to me-- with no result--and some I simply sat with him. Every weekday I asked him how he was doing, and Monday through Friday he looked away from me and out the nearby window.
All this behavior presented a vivid picture of torment, but how could I know what had been the trigger for his breakdown when I couldn't discuss it with him? It occurred to me, among other ideas, that he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in addition to his basic diagnosis; but, if so, what had the trauma been? Or could his own breakdown and arrest in the museum have traumatized him this much by themselves? There was no evidence of a past tragedy in the few records I had at my command, although likely his split with his wife would have been upsetting. I tried gently, whenever it seemed the right moment, to prompt him toward conversation. His silence held, and so did his obsessive and private rereading. One morning I asked him whether he would consider allowing me to look at his letters, in confidence, since they clearly meant a great deal to him. "I promise I wouldn't keep them, of course, or if you let me borrow them, I could have copies made and return them safely to you."
He turned toward me then, and I saw something like curiosity on his face, but he soon grew sullen and brooding again. He collected the letters carefully, without meeting my gaze anymore, and turned away from me on his bed. After a moment, I had no choice but to leave the room.
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CHAPTER 4 Marlow
Entering Robert's room during his second week with us, I observed that he had been drawing in his sketchbook. The drawing was a simple image of a woman's head in three-quarter profile, with curly dark hair roughed in. I recognized at once his extreme facility and expressiveness; these qualities leapt off the page. It's easy to say what makes a sketch weak but harder to explain the coherence and internal vigor that bring it to life. Oliver's drawings were alive, beyond alive. When I asked him whether he was sketching from imagination or drawing a real person, he ignored me more pointedly than ever, closing the book and putting it away. The next time I visited, he was pacing the room, and I could see him clenching and unclenching his jaw.