The Secret of Raven Point (19 page)

Willard shook his head. “It doesn’t usually take this long.”

“Is there anything else we can do?”

Willard sighed, vigorously rubbed his face, and looked up with ruddy determination. “Let’s meet tonight,” he said, “to discuss our next move.”

“I’ve been reviewing my notes,” said Willard, “and as I read over the transcript from our last session, I am tempted to say the Germans shot him, but the medic found Barnaby’s pistol in his mouth.”

The mess tent was empty but for the ruins of a party: empty green wine bottles and overflowing ashtrays. A large cardboard
drawing of what appeared to be a donkey had been abandoned on the ground, alongside several blindfolds. Juliet lit a candle and sat beside Dr. Willard, who had spread his papers over the yellow crumbs of hardtack.

“Maybe one of the Germans made it across the stream and got hold of his pistol?” she asked, standing to fill the kettle in the corner from a Lister bag. She lit the kerosene stove.

“The Germans would have shot him at a distance with their own guns. And everything in Barnaby’s mental framework suggests a suicide attempt, everything but the fact that he doesn’t recall it.” Willard tapped his pencil on his papers—“We know
who
did it; the question is
why
.”

“Well, is being scared out of his mind an option?” said Juliet. “If he thought he was going to die anyway, it’s not that outrageous.”

“Or,” said Willard, “there
were
no bullets or grenades. No Germans.”

“A hallucination?”

“What are the chances of five Germans firing machine guns at him and not even scratching him? He didn’t have a single wound other than the bullet lodged in his head.” Willard began pawing through his papers. “And it’s odd that he thinks the blue eye shot him. It’s possible, though I can’t know for certain until he’s fully conscious, that we’re looking at a schizophrenic break. A break that perhaps began when he bit into that eye.”

The water came to a boil, and Juliet stood to mix the coffee, letting the spoon clack loudly as she uneasily worked through the possibility of Barnaby’s schizophrenia. What if, after all her waiting and hoping, Barnaby were to regain consciousness and offer up only deranged nonsense?

She set down the cups brusquely. She had foolishly pinned her hopes on a comatose and questionably sound man.

“So what do you do if Barnaby doesn’t get better?”

“I’ll work with him as long as it takes,” said Willard.

“You’re convinced you can make him better?”

“I am,” he said.

His voice wavered, but she wanted to believe him. She sipped at her coffee and studied his face in the candlelight; he seemed lost, lonely. Each day he listened to the pained recollections of men’s most horrific encounters, more intimate and disturbing than a hundred surgical procedures. How did he manage it? How did he fend off the nightmares? The daymares? Were it not for her determination to find out what Barnaby knew about her brother, Juliet would have already quit. But Willard persisted, forging alone, day after day, into the miserable landscapes of other people’s memories. She wondered if anyone else saw it, if others appreciated the selflessness of his work. No, he didn’t cross minefields like Brother Reardon, but he was heroic in his own way. Quietly heroic.

“You know, Dr. Willard, I don’t even know where you’re from.”

He looked taken aback. “That’s because there’s no need for you to know that.”

“
That’s
considered a personal question?”

He smiled. “Well, it certainly isn’t professional.”

“But you asked me where I was from. That day at the lake.”

“I was considering you for this position; it was professionally relevant.”

“How is that relevant?”

Willard scrawled something in his notebook and then began examining his transcript papers one by one and putting them in order.

“I can do that,” said Juliet.

“You can sit right there and drink your delectable army-issue coffee. You’re not my secretary.”

“Well, it would be nice to know
something
about you. Tell me something professional, then.”

Willard closed his notebook and took a sip of coffee, registering
his full repugnance. “Mark my words, this godforsaken coffee is the reason we’re seeing so many mental breakdowns.”

Juliet laughed, and Willard smiled, and a conspiratorial warmth spread between them, as if they were passengers on a train talking into the night while the rest of the compartment slept. “Something professional . . .” Willard nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, since you’ve asked nicely.

“Once upon a time, three years ago, when the war began, I was barely out of medical school. I was one of several doctors commissioned to act as advisors to Dr. Marshall Black Sullivan to write guidelines for the Selective Service Advisory Board. The job was to design questions and descriptions of behavior to ensure the mentally ill were excluded from service. The War Department made it clear: they wanted an army of quality, not quantity. ‘Weed out the mental weaklings,’ they told us. No low-grade morons, psychopaths, eccentrics, emotionally unstable men, sexually perverse, or passive-aggressive men, or even those resentful of discipline. After weeks of meetings, Sullivan announced the guidelines for a psychiatric draftee interview: ‘What do you think about the war?’ ‘Have you suffered a nervous breakdown?’ ‘Do you like girls?’ Sullivan, who, I was quickly learning, was a bit unfit himself, insisted the interviewees be buck naked. I resigned on the spot. Of course, the board followed Sullivan’s guidelines. Any idea how long the average interview actually lasted?”

Juliet wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical but she wanted to show her interest. “Ten minutes?” she offered.

Willard shook his head. “Three.
Trois. Drei.
And pretty soon one out of four draftees was 4-F, sometimes just for nail biting. Then a group of Harvard physicians claimed they could detect unfit soldiers by physical proportions: something idiotic about wide hips correlating to cowardice. There was an actual formula about, pardon me,
pubic hair
. I guess I should have done something, but I was a novice in the field, a kid
as far as they were concerned; I didn’t think anyone would listen. I went about my hospital work and began studying phobias—I’d had a near-crippling phobia of snakes as a boy and was fascinated by where such things came from. So I began conducting Pentothal interviews with patients who couldn’t understand the roots of their deepest fears—and I had unprecedented success. Then we entered the war, and by the middle of last year the Selective Service board was up the creek. Casualties were into the hundreds of thousands, and the army needed replacements. The idea that one quarter of young American males were mentally unsound finally struck them as absurd, and they fired Sullivan and called me. My team nixed over half the original draft interview questions and arranged for actual psychiatrists to be stationed at the replacement training centers to monitor soldiers. But then another problem came up: too many soldiers in North Africa were getting discharged for ‘constitutional inadequacy’—neuropsychiatric incidents were literally
triple
the number from the Great War. When Patton slapped those soldiers in Sicily, everyone started questioning the whole idea of battle fatigue. The army decided that either the diagnoses were wrong or treatment was inadequate. They wanted ‘maximum utilization’ of the soldiers. So they shipped some doctors—not my team—to evac hospitals. One in Tunisia got seventy-eight percent of psychiatric casualties back to combat duty after forty-eight hours by plunging them in ice baths. A hospital in Tripoli sent ninety-three percent of mental patients back into the lines within a month.”

Willard drew his cup close and stared desolately at the contents.

“I was suspicious as hell of the numbers. In the wrong hands, psychiatry can be more impressionistic than a Monet. I needed to see
firsthand
what was happening. So I demanded to go to Monte Cassino, where the fatigue cases were breaking all records. Those boys were shaking, weeping, banging their heads on the ground. Many couldn’t speak. That’s when I started using Sodium Pentothal again. The first time I made the mistake of doing the interview
in the Recovery Tent, with the nurses and ward men and doctors
watching
. Can you imagine? The patient emerged calm, but the staff was in tears.”

“It’s some gruesome stuff,” said Juliet.

“And yet you’ve handled yourself pretty well.”

“Have I?”

“You strike me as being entirely too hard on yourself, Nurse Dufresne.”

“Like you?” she asked, smiling.

He paused. “Perhaps. . . . Anyway, Monte Cassino was a nightmare, of course. It became clear to me then that any sane, strong man could break down under completely normal combat circumstances. Every break manifested itself differently. And these were breaks that didn’t heal quickly. I rested these men, talked with them, medicated them, fed them with my own hands. I got them to stop shaking and weeping. And when they looked as good as new, I sent them back, just as I was ordered to do. But it didn’t work.”

“They came back?”

“Psychosomatic illness.
You
mentioned it my first day here, remember? Mental illness manifesting itself physically. Did you know that almost eight-five percent of gastrointestinal cases at the front have no organic pathology? You can get rid of the bellyaches, the shaking, the paralysis, the muteness, but that doesn’t mean you’ve cured the illness. You stop the shakes, send the soldier back, but he shows up at the hospital again—suddenly mute.”

“Like Barnaby.”

“Like Barnaby. Because these men don’t have
irrational
phobias. What they’re afraid of is very real. The products of firsthand experience. In some ways, you could say they’re more sane than we are.”

“So why try to cure them if they’ll just get sent back?”

“
That
is the fateful question. The war is here, and the army needs bodies. What do we do? Force the broken ones back in and
hope they’ll end the war faster. Sounds heartless, right? But if I don’t cure the Barnabys and get them back to the front, more men die in the long run. For every torn and tattered man I send back into the lines, there are three more back home I might have spared. There is no ‘right’ in this work, only degrees of ‘less awful.’”

Willard paused, sat back. “The army couldn’t get enough replacements in Italy, so they had me set up a psychiatric hospital here. Now they want psychiatric units in the
field hospitals
so we can send boys back in after forty-eight hours. They don’t understand these ‘cases’ are human beings who are going to suffer mental instability long after this war is over, long after all the generals hang up their uniforms. The human mind didn’t evolve to exist under combat conditions. Now . . .” He turned his empty coffee cup upside down. “You asked for information and you got an hour-long graduate-level lecture. I hope my long-windedness will deter you from future inquiries.”

But Juliet hadn’t minded; it surprised her how intently she had listened and how many more questions she still had. It was a feeling she’d previously associated only with books—a hunger to sink headlong into a subject, a person’s voice. She wanted to keep talking, and yet the lantern was sputtering.

“Everybody else here wants to tell you every little thing about their lives back home the minute you meet them,” she said.

“I suppose my job is trickier than the rest. By its very nature, it’s so personal that I have to enforce other boundaries. I have to be a trusted authority, with a veneer of self-containment, or I don’t think I could do anyone much good.”

“Veneer,” she repeated. “So you do get lonely?”

“Now, that, dear one, is a personal question.”

Willard said it jokingly, but the words
dear one
surprised Juliet; even Willard seemed uncomfortable with his phrasing.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

Finally, Willard leaned into the table and hugged his papers. As he rose he gathered them clumsily to his chest. “Good night, Nurse Dufresne.”

“Good night, Dr. Willard.”

He hurried toward the tent exit, but as he was about to leave, he turned. With an expression of amicable defeat,
he said, “For what it’s worth, I’m from Chicago.”

THE AMBULANCE WAS
heading north, climbing into the pine-and-poplar-covered mountains. Juliet sat beside Dr. Lovelace, who was driving. They’d been ordered forward by Major Decker after the division’s medical clearing company called to say a colonel needed surgery and couldn’t be moved.

As the ambulance navigated the winding roads, Juliet felt a sharp chill; though it was still summer, it felt more like winter here. She pulled a blanket from the back, perforated with cigarette burns, and begrudgingly wrapped it around her shoulders. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees since they had set out, a fact she almost mentioned to Dr. Lovelace, but then thought better of. Since the drive began, a thick silence had divided them. Glenda’s absence loomed uncomfortably in the vehicle;
she
should have been the one riding beside him, assisting him. Lovelace drove quietly, methodically, nothing like the man who had wildly chauffeured everyone to the lake a month earlier; he seemed a cold and saddened version of himself. Juliet wasn’t sure what she could say to him that wouldn’t sound trite.