Death at Charity's Point (17 page)

“No, I don’t want to spar, either. I’m trying to explain to you that George—like you and me—had an inherent predisposition to take his own life. It’s there, in everyone. As I said, to some degree. You never know to what degree, until, well…”

“I see,” I said. “But he came to you. To be more assertive, you said.”

“Okay,” said Wertz, sighing. “George had several conflicts in his life. Again, Mr. Coyne, you have to understand that we’re not talking about an abnormal person here. George Gresham’s conflicts were ones everyone has. His hadn’t worked themselves out as comfortably for him as other people’s do. But he was a good candidate for A.C.R. He could have been helped. He
was
being helped.”

“Conflicts, you said.”

“Yes.” He patted the creases on his jeans. “He exhibited the classical Oedipal conflict, for one thing. There was a woman in his life—or on his mind, anyway—and he had, from all I inferred, a dominant mother—do you understand the Oedipal conflict, Mr. Coyne?”

“You want to screw your mother, but you know it’s taboo.”

He smiled. “Exactly. And when you, er, want to screw another woman, it can be a way of displacing that primal instinct, and your unconscious mind induces guilt. Which manifests itself, of course, in a sort of paralysis. Sometimes it’s the inability to perform sexually. Impotence. Premature ejaculation. Sometimes the patient is unable even to approach the object of his feelings. That seemed to be George’s case. He felt the need to become more assertive, to speak to this woman, to approach her.”

“Did he tell you who this woman was?”

“No. Of course not. That would have been absolutely irrelevant. Even counterproductive. My treatment focuses on the patient. I would assume the woman had characteristics like his mother. Probably not a young woman. I would imagine she was distant, aloof, strong, aggressive. Certainly in George’s mind she was, anyway.”

“You said earlier he had several conflicts. Were there others? Besides this sex thing for his mother, I mean?”

“Nothing extraordinary. I would gather that his younger brother was an important factor in his life—a source of attraction and admiration, but also jealousy. Typical sibling rivalry. Again centering on the mother. And, of course, there was his father.”

“Yes,” I said. “Dudley. He committed suicide. Isn’t that significant?”

“Surely. It’s significant.”

“Meaning, he’d be more likely…”

“Meaning, Mr. Coyne, that a boy admires and wants to emulate his father, because his father has succeeded in seducing his mother, you see. They’re rivals, but the identity is powerful.”

“So it’s not simply…”

“None of this is simple. It’s complicated.”

I nodded. “What about Win? That was George’s brother. How did he fit into all this? I mean, Win is dead.”

“Only as I told you. Remember, my therapy does not require extensive dredging up of the past. George seemed quite fixated on his brother—his dead brother. This was somehow mixed up with the woman—and, of course, his mother. George directed considerable rage at his brother.”

“Are you saying George didn’t accept that his brother was dead?”

“No, I don’t think that was it. It was an unconscious process, part of the old repertoire we had to condition away. That feeling that he was competing with his dead brother for his mother’s love, as personified by this other woman.”

I tried to understand all of this. I found a neat internal logic to it all, but I couldn’t identify the place where it attached to the world where real people move. Psychology, in its presumption to comprehend the unconscious mind—indeed, even to postulate the dominance of the unconscious—immediately precludes rational criticism. “It’s unconscious,” the shrinks say. “Naturally you don’t understand it. You
do
want to fuck your mother, of course, and you
do
want to murder your father, and it
does
fill you with guilt and self-loathing. So much guilt, in fact, that you have erected defense mechanisms to protect yourself from yourself by hiding it from your unconscious mind. It’s there.
We
see it. We trained experts. But you can’t expect to. Your defense mechanisms won’t let you.”

It seemed like a lot of mumbo-jumbo. Except, somehow, it seemed to work.

“I guess I understand,” I said to Dr. Wertz. “Tell me. Why did he terminate with you?”

Dr. Wertz thought for a moment. “He missed an appointment,” he began slowly. “Back in January. He had been seeing me every other Tuesday afternoon—after his classes had ended for the day. September through January—the program would have been finished in June. That’s what I had promised him. So he had nine sessions, I believe. Nine out of the twenty. Anyhow, when he missed the January appointment and didn’t call, I called him. To reschedule, you know. All he would tell me was that A.C.R. had become irrelevant for him. He had something else he had to devote himself to. I tried to persuade him to finish. I couldn’t budge him.” Wertz flapped his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“You said he had something else. Meaning, he was no longer interested in the woman? Is that what you inferred?”

“Oh, it was no inference. He told me. Research. He would be needing all his free time to travel to Boston, he said. An important research project which, he said, couldn’t wait. I suggested we find another time to meet, but he just said he wasn’t interested in the program any more.”

“Interesting.” I nodded, feeling very much as if I were the psychoanalyst and Leonard Wertz the patient on my couch.

“Of course,” he continued—free-associating, it struck me—“it’s all perfectly understandable. George was a historian, a cerebral man, a scholar. History was his first love. Before any woman, I’m certain. History was George Gresham’s defense mechanism, you see. He knew it himself. Truth and justice, he always said, came before love and passion. So George’s first passion, his first love, was history. This woman, this intrusion, you might say, into his concept of himself, his world view, had to be reckoned with, reconciled, so to speak. I think that’s what he was telling me when he terminated. That he had reconciled her, found his place for her in his life, and he was then prepared to return to his real love.”

“A neat theory,” I said. “Makes sense, I guess. Tell me something. What was the date of his last appointment with you?”

He flipped through an appointment book that was on the coffee table. “Here we are. Tuesday, January 13, at four o’clock. George Gresham. The twenty-seventh was the one he missed. The last time I saw him was the thirteenth.” He looked up at me. “Is that important?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged.

Dr. Wertz was studying me. “Have I helped you?”

I spread my hands. “I don’t know,” I repeated. “To tell you the truth, I just don’t know what to make of it all.” I frowned. “Dr. Wertz, were you aware of George’s having any enemies? Anyone who didn’t like him, or was competing with him, or whom he didn’t like?”

He ran his hand over his bald head. “Enemies,” he repeated. “No, none beyond the usual ones, I think.”

“What do you mean, ‘the usual ones’?”

“Only his father. And, of course, his brother.”

“But they are both dead.”

“As I tried to explain to you, Mr. Coyne, in his mind—his unconscious mind, that is—they still lived.”

I pondered this for a moment, then nodded and stood. I thanked Leonard Wertz, M.D., shook his sausage fingers, and walked back out through the waiting room. His stocky little secretary with the dimpled knees smiled brightly at me. I leaned close to her ear and whispered, “Your panties are a very saucy shade of lavender, my dear.”

She didn’t blush. In fact, she smiled wickedly, tilting her chin up and touching her throat with her fingertips, as much as to say, “I know. And what would you like to do about it, big fella?”

Her reaction startled me. Then it occurred to me that the graduates of Leonard Wertz’s Assertiveness Conditioning and Reinforcement program probably walked through that door making similar comments to her all the time—testing out their new-found assertiveness.

Look at what I’d accomplished in only one session. I, clearly, was a quick study.

F
LORENCE GRESHAM’S HOME IN
Beverly Farms is nestled among those of descendants of the Cabots, Lowells, Saltonstalls, and several other moneyed, old Massachusetts clans. It’s less than a fifteen-minute drive from Leonard Wertz’s office in Danvers. I decided to take a chance that she’d be home on Monday morning, see how she was making out, pick up the magazine article we had discussed, and, in general, keep my fences in good repair. House calls. Part of the service rendered by Brady L. Coyne, Inc.

The Gresham estate in Beverly Farms is not visible from the road. A high brick wall surrounds it. The sturdy iron gate that admits visitors opens electronically.

I pulled the front bumper of my BMW up to the gate and stepped out, leaving the motor running. Built into a brick pillar to which the high gate was hinged was a metal box painted flat black. Inside the box was a telephone. I opened the box, put the phone to my ear, and pressed the button beneath the phone hook.

“Who is there, please?” came a man’s voice.

“Brady Coyne, John. Mrs. Gresham available?”

“One moment, please, Mr. Coyne.”

I waited for a couple of minutes before John’s voice said, “Mrs. Gresham will see you, sir. Please come in.”

I hung up the phone and returned to my car. The gates swung silently open and I drove in. In my rearview mirror I saw them ease closed behind me. The tires crunched on the pea-stone driveway, which wound around an artificial pond up to an arched portico on the front of the Georgian mansion where Florence Gresham lived.

John led me to her where she sat at an umbrella’d table in the back garden amid a spectacular wash of blue and yellow late-spring flowers. I took the seat opposite her.

“Coffee, sir?” asked John, with a little bow to me after I sat down.

“No. Thank you,” I said.

I lit a cigarette and spoke to Florence. “How are you?”

Instead of answering me, she thrust a tabloid-sized newspaper across the table toward me. “Look at this,” she said.

It was a copy of the
National Tattler,
a popular scandal sheet which I confess to picking up from time to time along with my frozen dinners at the Stop & Shop. This edition featured on its front page a photograph in a grainy color of a hard-looking, blonde girl under the blaring headline: “Has Deborah Really Kicked the Habit?”

I lifted my eyebrows at Florence.

“Page three,” she said.

I folded over the page. On the third page I saw a photograph of four young men dressed in military camouflage suits and wearing berets, kneeling side by side grinning into the camera. They reminded me of Cap Spender, the resident Nazi at Ruggles. Each of the men in the photo held a short, efficient-looking weapon which I recognized as an Israeli combat gun. The headline for the story read “Survivalists: Preparing for Armageddon.”

The picture was captioned “Young Americans gird for their next battle.”

“The radicals of the Eighties,” I said to Florence. “The new generation of Abbie Hoffmans.”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been reading about them. They think civilization is about to come toppling down around our shoulders. They stockpile provisions and weapons and ammunition. They think the cities are going to collapse and all the people who live there will evacuate to the country. These people are prepared to kill to defend their property. They train their children to shoot strangers. They live on hatred—the Jews, the blacks, Easterners, urbanites, Catholics, whatever. Some of them say it’ll be a Communist takeover. Others think it’ll be a racial thing. They’re organized in military fashion. Very big in the Midwest and West. Scary bunch.”

“You’ve done your homework,” I said, a little puzzled by it. “But I don’t understand…”

Florence extended her finger to the paper spread open in front of me and pointed to the face of one of the armed young men in the photograph.

“That’s Win,” she said.

I looked at her, then at the picture, then back at her. “Win? Your Win?”

She nodded firmly.

“Oh, come on, Florence. Win is dead.”

“That,” she said, jabbing with her finger, “is Winchester Gresham.”

I bent to examine the picture more closely. I had never seen Win Gresham alive, but I had seen pictures of the younger Gresham son. I remembered him as having Florence’s strong features—a long, straight nose, heavy jaw, dark hair, and burning black eyes. The face in the fuzzy photograph I was looking at could have been anybody. The beret was pulled down over his forehead, and he wore a bushy black mustache. His smile showed strong, white teeth. I thought all four men in the picture looked pretty much alike.

I reached across the table and touched Florence’s arm. “Your imagination’s running away with you,” I said. “It’s not like you to indulge yourself in wishful thinking.”

For an answer, Florence handed me a photograph in a heavy frame. I recognized it immediately. It usually sat on the grand piano in Florence’s living room. Win Gresham. He wore his Army uniform. His hair was short under the officer’s cap, and his expression was properly military.

“Yes, I know. That’s Win.”

“Compare them.”

I tried to imagine the young soldier in Florence’s portrait ten years older. I mentally crayoned a black mustache onto the face. I looked at Florence with raised eyebrows.

“It’s the smile,” she said.

“It could…”

“It’s him,” she said.

I studied the photo in the newspaper. I glanced back and forth at the two pictures. There was something about the smile, a kind of cynical lopsidedness, that struck me. And the structure of the faces—the noses, the jawlines, the cheekbones—all bore a vague similarity. I admitted to myself that if I looked for the resemblance, it was indeed there.

But that didn’t mean they were the same person. I told Florence that.

She only smiled. “You haven’t finished your job,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your first job. To find out what happened to Win.”

“I did, Florence. Win died in Vietnam. Don’t torture yourself.” I reached across the table and covered her hands with mine. “You’ve got to accept it. Both of your sons are dead.”