Free Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe Page B

international psychoanalytic meeting in Florence. Did Dr. H. identify with God and that outstretched arm?
    Absolutely not.
    On rare occasions only.
    Dr. H. knew that his patient did not know his own mind, that is the way it was with patients.
    Lourdes had sat through every day of the trial. She stared at the jury, memorizing all their faces. She did not insist as the lawyer did that her son was innocent, but she hugged him in front of the reporters so they would know that this man was not an outlaw but someone’s beloved child. Of course he was also an outlaw, an anti-Robin Hood, who had robbed the poor to serve the rich.
    Do you ever think, asked Dr. H., that Ivan and his troubles gave Lourdes lung cancer?
    No, said Mike Wilson, of course not. But then he said into the waiting silence, It may have made her vulnerable, broken some resistance, made her not want to breathe.
    And one day he said to Dr. H., Maybe it was Lourdes’ fault. Maybe she loved him too much and spoiled him, so he thought he could get away with anything. She thought he was perfect. He probably believed her. There was a hint of a whine in Mike Wilson’s voice.
    Did you say that to her? asked Dr. H.
    No, said Mike Wilson.
    But there it was in the room, the son and the father, and the eternal Oedipus that must be endured for all to survive with 20/20 vision. Dr. H. heard it as if a gong had struck on a mountaintop and the echo slowly drifted down into the valley below. The father, a mere mortal, had sometimes been jealous of his son, in the way that fathers and sons have wrestled from the beginning of time. There was in Ivan’s flight some fragment of victory for the journalist who was himself away from his hearth for many months, leaving the mother and the son to themselves. It would take a long time and multiple gentle hints before Mike Wilson might see this himself, but Dr. H. would try in time, because he believed it was true and truth was the antibiotic of the mind.
    We were in Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital waiting for her name to be called. We were in a beautiful room with a view of the river outside. I went to get a Coke from the machine in the hall and when I came back Lourdes said, I’m done and I said all right. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Mike Wilson looked at Dr. H. He was ready to catch any expression on his face that might tell him if he had been negligent, ignorant, selfish. He had of course been all those things. Did Dr. H. think he was a dishonorable man?
    If he did it didn’t show on his face.
    Why should he care what Dr. H. thought of him? He shouldn’t. But he did. He was tied to Dr. H. who was insisting he live, who wanted him to live, and so he would live for a while, because Dr. H. was trying so hard to keep him above ground, where Mike Wilson had to admit the possibilities were not all bad, at least not yet.
    And then Dr. H. announced that he was taking a vacation in early April. There would be missed appointments. Money saved, thought Mike Wilson, although he would have preferred it if Dr. H. had remained in his office. Of course he knew that Dr. H. had a life of his own, maybe a family with children, but it still seemed wrong of him, to so easily take a vacation. He himself did not want to go anywhere. Where would he go, a man alone.
    The air became warmer, there were some buds on the trees in the park, there were lilacs in the buckets at the markets on Broadway. There were more skateboards on the streets. The restaurants were putting tables and chairs on the sidewalks.
    Dr. H., his wife and son and daughter went to Belize. The palm trees were everywhere. The houses were pink and blue and along the road from the airport to their hotel on the shore, noses pressed against flimsy fences, donkeys watched the cars go by.
    In the hotel lobby as they were checking in, Dr. H. saw the sign for a flat-bottom fishing trip, a photo of a huge tarpon decorated the poster, a four-hour trip, leaving at 6