I was accepted at the Sandry Clinic as a research psychologist to coordinate and oversee the various research projects among the staff, as well as to continue my own research work with elective mutism. There were seven staff. Five, including the director, Dr. Rosenthal, were established child psychiatrists. They had founded the clinic together several years before and overseen the conversion of the elegant old building into a series of quality offices and therapy rooms.
I liked the Sandry Clinic very much. My colleagues were creative people, all lively and articulate, who worked well together as a team. The pinnacle among us in more ways than one was our director. Dr. Rosenthal was a giant of a man physically, standing over six and a half feet tall, with a giant-sized intellect to match. He had about him that charisma powerful men seem to have, which make them handsome whatever their actual physical characteristics. I was in awe of him much of my first year there. Although born and bred in America, he had a European formality about him. For instance, he never called any of us by our first names. “Doctor” was his usual method of catching someone’s attention, but as I didn’t merit that, I remained steadfastly Miss Hayden. This gave him a certain aura of unapproachability, which, combined with his formidable intellectual reputation, kept me shy around him. Nonetheless, I came to know him as a gentle man, firm but kind with his staff in much the same way he was with the children he worked with, and always, always fair.
Life at the clinic was luxurious compared to what I had become accustomed to while teaching in the state school system. We had wonderful facilities, including a large, sunny therapy room full of things I would have killed for when in special education, such as a five-foot-tall doll’s house, complete with extended doll family, a pony-sized wooden rocking horse, an indoor sandbox and a water tray.
Similar luxury applied to my workload. Children were parceled out to me for therapy mostly by virtue of their language or lack of it, but I was also allowed a generous amount of time to work on the research projects or to consult with colleagues. Not completely comfortable with the fifty-minute “psychiatric hour,” I was given the freedom of seeing my own clients two or three times a week, if I preferred that to the more traditional one session or of seeing them in their own settings, rather than at the clinic.
The only fly in the ointment from my point of view was that the majority of my colleagues were committed Freudians, which boxed in their views as tightly as behaviorism had with my education colleagues. And there I was, the atheist admitted to the monastery. To me, there is no single framework upon which we can hang all interpretations of human behavior. We create theories as a way of ordering the chaos sufficiently to have a chance of effecting change, but it is we, the practitioners, who have created this order, because it is we who need it. Any given theory, to my way of thinking, simply provides one route to interpretation and, like climbing the proverbial mountain, there are many other paths one could take.
I could cope with this disparity most of the time, as the general ethos of the clinic did not demand I practice as my colleagues did, and given that I was not qualified in psychiatry, they didn’t expect me to. Indeed, it was my varied point of view, I suspect, that had attracted Dr. Rosenthal. Nonetheless, I found myself having to do a lot of tongue-biting.
Not being a full-fledged psychiatrist, I didn’t merit one of the offices up front. Instead, I shared an oversized closet in the back of the building with Jeff Tomlinson.
Jeff, already a doctor, was in his last year of training as a child psychologist. He was one of those individuals so intellectually gifted that it is taken for granted. No modesty with him. He was brilliant and he knew he was brilliant, and he knew everyone else knew. “Does Superman fly?” he would say casually whenever I evidenced amazement at some mental feat, but he was so ingenuous when he said it that one never minded. Too much.
Unfortunately, Jeff might as well have been Freud’s grandson. Indeed, he might as well have been Freud himself, for all his ability to quote what the old master said. With a near photographic memory, Jeff could bludgeon me into silence with word-for-word regurgitation of endless cases the old boy had worked on. It became a game with us after a while, to see who could outdebate the other.
Truth was, I loved Jeff. We were the youngest members of staff by quite some years, if not decades, and ours was like a sibling relationship there among the grown-ups. The other psychiatrists all had magnificent offices up front with cornices and fireplaces, carpets and leather couches. In the back of the building Jeff and I shared a windowless closet of an office, which had once housed another psychologist’s research animals and still smelled. Here we had festooned the walls with posters, cartoons and matching Pink Panther nameplates. And here we worked, fought and shared our problems.
What saved Jeff from certain annihilation for his Freudian idiocy was an extraordinary sense of humor. He had a particular gift for funny voices and mimicry, which he displayed with the aplomb of a stand-up comic. As a consequence, the inanimate objects in our office—the filing cabinet, the desks, the radiator—were all inclined to join unexpectedly into conversations, each with its own weird little Robin Williams-type voice. The kids, of course, adored this when they heard it, but it even worked on me. It was difficult to get angry with a guy who had the furniture on his side.
All in all, I was pleased with this career move away from special education. It still felt funny to dress for work in wool skirts and dangly jewelry, to know that I could leave my long hair unbound because no one was likely to try and pull it out of my head; and, indeed, I found I missed my jeans and track shoes too much and was back in them after the first few months. But I fully enjoyed the ample resources and stimulating colleagues and felt that for the moment, at least, this had been the right move.
Sheila was three months short of her fourteenth birthday when I finally located her. I hadn’t seen her in seven years—half her lifetime past—and other than the poem I’d received through the mail two years earlier, I hadn’t heard from her in five. I found her back with her father, living in an outlying suburb of Broadview. After a telephone conversation with her father, I asked if I could visit.
They were living in a duplex, a brown-colored building with peeling paint, in a run-down area where the yards were littered with car bodies and rusting appliances; however, compared to Sheila’s home in the migrant camp, this was luxurious.
I knocked at the door. A long moment passed with no sound beyond the door and I found to my surprise that my knees were shaky. All the ghosts of long ago came crowding in around me as I waited on the doorstep and I could hear them so clearly. A child’s laughter echoed, shouting, squealing, the sounds of a classroom, and then the dark, blowy silence I remembered experiencing as I had stood on the doorstep of Sheila’s tar-paper shack in the migrant camp. Then, back to the present. Footsteps came toward the door and it opened.
I don’t think I would have recognized Sheila’s father if I hadn’t assumed it would be he opening the door. He had changed dramatically in seven years. The dumpy, overweight boozer I recollected was not there. Instead, the man opening the door was slim and athletic-looking and, most startling to me, young. I had been in my early twenties when I had last seen him and I had always regarded him as being in my parents’ generation. Now, with shock, I realized he was, in fact, not much older than I was.
“Mr. Renstad?” I asked tentatively.
He nodded.
“I’m Torey Hayden.”
He smiled in a genuinely welcoming fashion and held the door open. “Come in. Sheila’s not here at the moment. She’s just run over to the store for some milk, but she’ll be back in a few minutes.” He opened the door to let me into the living room. It was small, with a television, a well-worn brown sofa and two old-fashioned armchairs. Indeed, the whole room had a sort of brownish quality