Pharmakon (4 page)

“Did you administer it, or the shaman?”

“I did.”

“Was the lieutenant aware that it came from a witch doctor? Cognizant of any mystic connection or magical powers the natives attributed to what you were prescribing him?”

“None other than that we were fond of one another. Soldiers in the middle of nowhere have almost religious faith in doctors.”

“Especially pretty doctors.” Friedrich wasn’t flirting; he was just being a good clinician.

“That, too. Anyway, a few hours after I administered the first dose, he experienced mild hallucinations. I had no idea of the strength of the stuff, so I followed the shaman’s instructions; I gave it to him twice a day. Before the week was up he was able to talk openly about what had happened. He told me how they had to play soccer with a Dutch officer’s head, and about sex acts he had to perform with the guards, horrible stuff. The interesting thing was, after a week or so, it didn’t upset him in the slightest to discuss the degradation in detail. As a psychiatrist, all I can tell you is, he seemed totally at peace with the idea that he had done these things to stay alive. He spoke about them almost as if they had happened to someone else. Now that he was free, he was a different person, and there was no need to be ashamed.”

Friedrich was so excited about the possibilities of what he was hearing, he didn’t notice that Dr. Winton had tears in her eyes. “Have you ever thought about testing these kwina leaves, isolating the psychoactive ingredients, see if they work on patients here? I mean, a drug that could put people back together again emotionally after life has dismantled them. . . . A pill for depression, something that actually works?”

“Yes, I’ve thought about it.” Dr. Winton had thought about her lieutenant, but not about what Friedrich was suggesting.

“Well, not to be blunt, but what are you waiting for?”

“The Institute of Human Relations is having enough trouble getting used to a female psychiatrist. I think it might be pushing them to accept a woman witch doctor.”

“We could work on it together. You’ve worked with drugs. I read your paper on administering hypnotics. Sodium amytal. I did my dissertation on psychological testing. During the war, I worked for the Army. . . .”

She held up her hand. “To begin with,
gai kau dong
is made with kwina, and kwina only grows in New Guinea and we’re in New Haven.”

“I’m way ahead of you.” Friedrich flipped opened his suitcase like a Fuller Brush man. It was filled with the waxy pale green serrated leaves of the kwina. Dr. Winton picked up one that had fallen to the floor. It smelled of rot.

“Where did you get this? The botany department doesn’t even have . . .”

“I helped out a botanist at the University of Illinois who had a schizophrenic daughter. He knew someone who was doing field work in New Guinea.”

“But how did you get it here?”

“Friends in low places. I did some testing of pilots at a flight school.”

“What kind of testing?”

“Personality, aptitude, ability to perform under stress . . .” Friedrich didn’t like her, but suddenly, he did trust her. “They were trying to figure out who were the best guys for suicide missions. I didn’t know that until after the war.”

“Would that have made a difference to you, Dr. Friedrich?”

“I probably would have failed a few more.”

Friedrich thought about that for a few heartbeats, then pushed on. “Anyway, the chicken colonel in charge of the project owed me. He’s stationed in the Philippines. Flies all over. I sent him a telegram about The Way Home. He checked it out, and now I have four two-bushel sacks of it in my garage. And best of all, I have one of these . . .” He handed her a small snapshot of a Bagadong shaman standing next to a hip-high wooden figure.

“You brought a shaman to New Haven?” Dr. Winton was looking at him as if he was wearing women’s underwear again.

“No, but the colonel brought me one of the wooden jugs they ferment it in. We have to duplicate the procedure; this way we can get a yeast culture from the residue inside the jug. Of course, there’s the possibility it’s something in the local water, but I don’t think so. At least it gets us started.” Friedrich had the enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old farm boy entering his prize pig in a 4-H contest.

“Why me?” She looked at him like she suspected someone at IHR had put Friedrich up to this. “Surely you know other psychiatrists, more experienced and influential.”

“Yes, but I came to you first because I couldn’t think of anyone else with more to prove.”

“You want to work with me because I’m a woman psychiatrist.”

“That, and you gave me the idea. I just thought I should give you a chance to share in the credit.”

“As optimistic and opportunistic as you are fair.”

“I’m an old-fashioned guy. What do you say to my proposal?”

“I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re proposing.”

“Partnership. Want to see if it works?” Friedrich held out his hand. When she didn’t shake it, it occurred to him to ask, “What happened to your friend, the English lieutenant you gave it to?”

“He died.” She said it like she blamed the lieutenant for running out on her.

“Because of the stuff?”

“It was in a bombing.”

“I’m sorry.” Friedrich was anything but.

Bunny Winton had told Will Friedrich, “Let me think about it for a few days and get back to you.” But as soon as he left the office, she knew her answer would be “no.” She had struggled too long to be taken seriously at the med school to risk having her name linked to a study based on oceanic folk medicine, especially one inspired by anecdotal evidence culled from her efforts to save the life of a patient she had lost her virginity to.

Bunny did not want to think about The Way Home, and she resented Friedrich for barging in on her with the disappointments of her past, though she did recognize she felt a vaguely therapeutic release talking about it to someone other than her own analyst. After she saw the last of her patients that day, she sat down at her typewriter and wrote him a short note,

Dear Dr. Friedrich,
   After careful consideration, I have decided not to take part in your research project. The story I told you about my experience with
gaikau dong
was relayed in confidence, and I trust it will remain so. I wish you the best of luck.
Sincerely,
Dr. T. L. Winton.

Her decision was signed and neatly folded. Her tongue was tasting the glue on the flap of the envelope when she suddenly stopped and thought about what she was doing. A moment later, she ripped up the letter and put the cover on her typewriter. No, on second thought, she realized it was better that she relay the above to Dr. Friedrich over the phone. She did not want any connection to
gaikau dong
in writing. An eavesdropping psychologist who shows up at your office in a cheap suit with a suitcase full of kwina leaves might be trustworthy, but he was definitely what her uncle called “a loose cannon.” The more Bunny Winton thought about it, the angrier she was that Friedrich had intruded on her life.

Not wanting to put things off, she looked up his phone number and immediately called Friedrich’s office. No answer.

That was Friday. It was Saturday now and Friedrich was out of her mind as she closed her eyes and listened to the last notes of Schubert’s String Quartet in C Major at the recital given by a faculty chamber music group at Branford College. She was by herself. Her husband, Thayer, had stayed home to meet with a naval architect about a new racing yawl. He liked to sail, she liked to listen. The last two notes of the piece were what made it special, supertonic and tonic played forte. The effect they had on her eardrums prompted her to wonder if Schubert knew he was dying when he wrote them. A moment of silence, then applause—she considered the possibility that psychiatrists hear music differently.

Having forgotten to bring her own tea, Bunny had half a glass of sherry, asked after a neurologist’s wife and children, and was putting on her gloves to leave when she realized that the second viola was also head of the psychology department.

Over a foul dip made of onion soup mix and sour cream, Bunny Winton made just enough small talk with Dr. Cunningham about his work so as not to make him curious when she inquired, “Someone at IHR was asking me about your Dr. Friedrich—any thoughts?”

“Unusual mix of things. He’s the only person in the department who can do a standard deviational analysis in his head.”

“So Friedrich’s a numbers guy.”

“He’s more of a seat-of-the-pants kind of fellow. Intuitive. Surprises you with things.”

“How so?”

“Well, it’s really a matter of, you don’t know how he comes to the conclusions he comes to, especially when he’s right.”

“Can you give me a for instance?”

“Well, a female instructor over in the Romance Languages department was receiving obscene phone calls, which were traced back to a pay phone at one of the dorms. The dean came to the psychology department to get our take on how it should be handled. Since there was no way of telling who was making the calls, there was nothing to be done, until a few months later Friedrich came into my office after having lunch with a bunch of students and gave me a name.”

“How’d he get the student to tell him?”

“The student didn’t tell him. It was just a notion Friedrich had, and since he couldn’t back it up with anything, we took no action. A few months later a student was caught in the act, and sure enough, it was the boy Friedrich had told us to take a look at to talk to. And when I asked Friedrich how he figured it out, all the son of a gun said was . . .” Cunningham paused for effect and another glass of sherry, “ ‘he seemed like the kind of boy who’d need to resort to anonymous obscenity with a stranger to make intimate contact.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

When Bunny Winton got into bed that night and turned out the light, her answer was still “no.” She and her husband had separate bedrooms but a shared bathroom was not the limit of their intimacy. They had tried to have a child, especially in the first year of their marriage. Theoretically it was possible she could still conceive.

But Bunny was not thinking about any of this as she lay in the darkness, her hair spread out across her pillow like a scarlet fan. She was thinking about how she had ended up in the bed she was unable to fall asleep in. When she married, right after the war, just out of uniform, it seemed a safe and sensible match to make. Not just because Thayer had so much money she wouldn’t have to worry about his being after hers. At thirty-five, she was old for a bride. She thought she wanted to be safe, to live in a world that was clean and starched and ordered. She wanted to be as far from the jungles of New Guinea and memories of her lieutenant as she could get.

Bunny’s eyes were open now. Still hoping for sleep, she tried to distract herself by thinking about the history of this bed she had inherited. It was made by an eighteenth-century master cabinetmaker by the name of Goddard, constructed of mahogany hauled out of the jungle by slaves. It featured four posters topped with finials shaped like pineapples and a carved scalloped shell on its headboard.

Her great-grandmother and her grandmother and her mother had died in that bed. And so, she guessed, would she. But before it was her turn, she wanted to do more than be the first woman on the staff of the medical school. It was at that moment Bunny Winton, née Rutledge, realized that she missed the jungle—in a way, even missed the war. Not the killing, but the sense that you were fighting for something. She longed to take a risk that would make her feel fully alive.

Without bothering to turn on the lamp on the bedside table, Bunny Winton got out of bed, sat at her desk, and by the light of a crescent moon picked up a fountain pen and wrote the following on a leaf of double-weight gray linen stationery:

Dear Dr. Friedrich,
   After careful consideration, I have decided I am very much interested in researching The Way Home. As to how we might best coordinate our schedules . . .

APRIL 13, 1952

When Will Friedrich got in his car to go home after work that day, he felt better than fine. The Whale had started without his having to lift the hood, a rarity. The forsythia were in bloom, and he had been able to talk a promising tailback on the football team out of shock therapy. The kid had been arrested on his knees in the men’s room of a Greenwich Village bar called the Lily Pad. Will had simply listened to the frightened football player’s confession and said, “I don’t regard homosexuality as a disease and I don’t think shock cures anything.”