Free Other Women by Lisa Alther Page B

starched white cap, the purposeful stride with which she marched down corridors dispensing mercy. It had been terrifying having people’s lives depend on your delivering the right medications at the right intervals. Aping Arlene gave her the illusion she was equal to her job.
    Hannah nodded. “Well, I don’t like it any better than you do. Imagine what it feels like having someone do that to you.” When she was first doing therapy, it freaked her out. A client’s eyes would take on a milk-sated glaze, and he or she would start laughing at all the bad jokes, and repeating her comments from previous sessions as though they were the Ten Commandments. It was a strain to have her every remark scrutinized for hidden meaning, when most of the time she was just goofing off. But she eventually realized she could have propped a dust mop in her chair and the same idolization would have occurred.
    She glanced out the window to the street just as the orange Le Car crept by. Transference run
    amok. On the other hand, Maggie used to point out from time to time, “Face it, my friend: Sometimes you adore being adored. We all do.” And Hannah couldn’t deny it.
    “You sound British or something,” said Caroline.
    Hannah’s clipped accent was reminding her of her mother, who thought that because her father was British, she was entitled to sound like Queen Victoria: “We are not amused … .” She could just barely remember her grandfather, delivering a sermon in his Shaker Heights church when Caroline was four, dressed in a black bathrobe with a huge purple satin bookmark around his neck. Caroline started hiccoughing and couldn’t stop.
    Her mother kept glaring at her. Later she made Caroline apologize to her grandfather. He died a week later. For years Caroline thought his death was her fault for hiccoughing during his sermon.
    “I was born in Australia and moved to London when I was four,” Hannah explained. To disclose things about herself was to open herself up to a real exchange; real exchanges led to caring; each person you cared for was one more you might lose; and there had already been so many. She understood the appeal of Freudian detachment: “Let’s look at why you’re interested in my accent … .” Appealing, but counterif you were trying to downplay transference, which fed WOMEN
    on mystery and remoteness. Caroline had had too much remoteness already.
    “So how did you end up here?” A gray stone statue of a bulbous naked woman sat on the windowsill across from Hannah. Had it been there all along? Caroline hadn’t noticed it before.
    “I married an American during the war.”
    “Oh.” It hadn’t fully sunk in for Caroline that Hannah had a life outside the hour they spent together in this room. She wasn’t crazy about the idea. “My grandfather was from England. He was an Anglican priest.”
    “Really? Where in England?”
    “Dartmouth.”
    Hannah pictured the lovely little town, on hills around a harbor, the closest England could come to the Mediterranean. She’d gone there once with her grandparents. They marched along the cliffs above the harbor, her grandmother leading, an ocean liner flanked by two tugboats. They ended up at an inn on a narrow twisting road, where they had a wonderful cream tea with fresh strawberries.
    “But your accent is Boston Irish,
    isn’t it?” asked Hannah.
    “My father is Irish. Our neighborhood was mostly Irish. My mother must have felt like a missionary among the heathen. She used to make fun of our accents. “Good mawning,” she’d say when we came down to breakfast. She’d make us repeat “heart’ and “bar” time after time until we got them right. My brother Howard didn’t speak at all for about four months when he was five. It was wonderful. Except that he hasn’t shut up since …”
    Hannah was watching and listening closely. Caroline was smiling, but what she was saying wasn’t funny.
    “dis
    . . we used to have this parrot named Cracker, and