August

Judith Rossner

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781476774817
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

From the New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar— the story of two women, a psychoanalyst and her patient who help each other through very different periods in their lives. When Dawn Henley, the beautiful, talented Barnard College freshman steps into psychoanalyst Dr. Lulu Shinefeld's office, she's immediately intrigued. What could have driven this girl to such extreme levels of depression? Over the course of five years, Dawn's bizarre and tortured childhood is drawn out, and both women are inevitably changed.

1

DR. LULU SHINEFELD opened the door to her waiting room and said hello to the girl who was scheduled for a consultation. The girl, whose name was Dawn Henley, nodded coolly.

“Would you like to come into the office?” Dr. Shinefeld asked.

Dawn Henley stood. She was tall, even taller than Dr. Shinefeld, and quite beautiful, with dark brown, almond-shaped eyes, a startling, almost olive complexion, and honey blond hair cropped to shoulder length along a straight and severe line. It was July. Dawn wore white cotton pants, a white T-shirt, and sandals, but she might have had on a ball gown for the grace with which she preceded the doctor into the office, sank into the chair facing the doctor’s, and inspected her surroundings.

The waiting room was nondescript, but the furnishings in the office were attractive, if spare. The walls were white; the couch, brown; the two chairs were covered in a splendid cherry red wool. A kilim rug with predominating colors of brown, teal blue, and red covered a portion of the wood floor. Aside from the rug, the artwork in the room consisted of a semi-abstract painting, in which shapes suggestive of humans seemed to be posing for what could have been an old-fashioned family photograph, and a small sculpture resting on the table at the foot of the couch that was reminiscent of one of Henry Moore’s primordial shapes, an egg embraced by some delicious, unidentifiable object. On the doctor’s desk stood a slender blue vase that held three purple irises. Through an open door near the windows, it was possible to see another, smaller room with a thick brown carpet. Visible in this room were a bookcase containing various primary toys, a large dollhouse and a couple of yellow plastic beanbag chairs.

Dawn’s eyes came to rest on the doctor.

No adolescent unease here. No suspicious glances or shifting in the seat. The girl’s expression was neutral.

“So,” Dr. Shinefeld said with a smile, “let me think of what you’ve told me. I know that you’re eighteen years old, that your home is in Vermont but you’ve been going to boarding school in Westchester, and that you’re entering Barnard College in September.”

Dawn nodded.

From her canvas shoulder bag, which she’d placed on the floor, she extracted a small cassette recorder, which she turned on, then held on her lap.

“Do you want to tape our conversation?” the doctor asked.

“It seems like a good idea, don’t you think?”

“Why’s that?”

“Well,” Dawn said coolly, “then one can be clear later about what was said . . . and anyway, if something should happen to one of us . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, then, everything wouldn’t be lost.”

When the doctor didn’t reply, Dawn turned on the recorder.

“What is it?” she asked in response to a flicker of expression on the doctor’s face. “You don’t mind this, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Shinefeld said. “I’m certainly not accustomed to it.”

“Well,” Dawn said calmly, “if it really bothers you, I’ll turn it off. But see if you can’t get used to it.”

Dr. Shinefeld was disconcerted. While many patients attempted to control sessions from the moment they entered the room, the recorder added a new dimension. Anyway, control in that sense might not even be what Dawn was after.

“All right,” the doctor said. “Well, then . . . perhaps you’d like to tell me why you’re here.”

“I have no reason,” Dawn said without animosity. “That is, while I don’t mind being here, I wouldn’t have chosen to see another analyst if Vera . . . my mother . . . hadn’t asked me to.”

“Why do you think she asked?”

“It’s actually quite clear why she asked. I had an automobile accident in which I nearly killed myself. That had happened to me once before. I mean, it was a bicycle that time. I was thirteen, but I went into a car in such a way that I really had to take full responsibility for what happened. My neck was broken, and one arm and leg. As soon as I could move around again Vera sent me to an analyst. Dr. Leif Seaver. I know you must know him, since he gave me your name. As I told you on the phone.”

For the first time a hint of feeling showed through Dawn’s extraordinary façade.

The doctor nodded.

“I saw Dr. Seaver for four years,” Dawn said. “Until the beginning of June, when I also graduated from high school. He was . . . extremely helpful to me.”

This last had an almost rote quality. The doctor waited.

“Then, a couple of weeks ago . . . I had another accident. I was driving the car this time. I was in Vermont, near Marbury. Where Vera is. Where I grew up. Anyway, I fell asleep at the wheel. It would’ve been the end except the boy who was with me grabbed the wheel, so we went into some bushes instead of a tree.” She smiled. “He thinks he’s in love with me. You’d think if someone nearly killed you, you’d never want to see her again . . .” Her tone had grown abstract. “A few people think they’re in love with me.”

“Both times you said think they’re in love,” Dr. Shinefeld pointed out. “Is that different from being in love?”

“No,” Dawn said. “Not really. I guess. I mean, if you think you’re in love, then you’re in love. Anyway, who can say you’re not?”

“Have you ever thought you were in love?” the doctor asked.

“Oh, yes,” the girl said without hesitation. “I was in love with Dr. Seaver.”

“What was the difference in the way you felt about Dr. Seaver and the way these boys feel about you?”

“That’s easy,” Dawn said. “They’re in love with the way I look. I have the kind of looks you’re supposed to have in this country. Blond hair, long legs, all that junk. None of it has anything to do with me, with who I am. If I showed any of them what’s inside my head they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. Dr. Seaver — Dr. Seaver didn’t care what I looked like. He barely looked at me when I talked to him. I remember that right from the start. Nothing I said ever surprised him because he didn’t even see the Outside Me. And I didn’t care what he looked like. I knew some people would think he was ugly, sort of knotty looking, and with that funny little hunch to his back so at first when you see him you think he’s just sort of scrunched over on purpose. I didn’t care about any of that.”

There were tears in Dawn’s eyes. She didn’t bother to wipe them.

“Why do you think you had the accident?”

“Because he left me.”

“You finished the analysis?”

“He thought I was finished. I was sort of okay. He didn’t understand I could only do all the things I was doing because I had him.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“I tried to, but I must’ve not said it right because I can’t believe he would have done it if I had. I was in a trance a lot of the time. Maybe that sounds crazy, but it’s true. From the day he started to talk about ending, I was in a sort of trance . . . The same thing happened after the first accident. For a few minutes I was so numb, I didn’t even know anything was broken. They said I was in shock. Well, this was the same sort of thing, where I didn’t exactly feel what was happening, only it lasted for months and months instead of for minutes.”

Dr. Shinefeld was silent. She was already deciding to find the time to see Dawn if the girl wished. Her history even before Seaver was fascinating, from what Vera Henley had told her on the phone. Seaver himself was an interesting man; his reputation, most particularly as a diagnostician, was superb.

“Why do you think you had the first accident?” the doctor asked.

“Because my parents got divorced. I imagine you know about my parents.”

“My conversation with your mother wasn’t very long. I’d prefer that you tell me whatever you think I should know.”

Dawn smiled. “Well, there’s a lot, and it’s pretty crazy. At least most people would think so. I grew up taking it for granted.”

Vera Henley wasn’t Dawn’s natural mother, but her aunt. Her mother had committed suicide when Dawn was six months old and her father had drowned the following year when his sailboat capsized in a storm off the northern Massachusetts coast. Dawn had no memory of either of her two unfortunate parents. When she spoke of her parents she meant Vera and — well, Vera was actually a lifelong lesbian who had lived, since before Dawn’s birth, in what was essentially a marriage with another woman, Tony (Antonia) Lubovitz. Vera and Tony were who Dawn meant when she talked about her parents, and it was their “divorce” that had been the precipitating factor in her first accident.

This was where life became confusing, because while Dawn had just referred to Vera as her mother, she had actually called Vera Daddy during their first years together. Tony was the feminine of the two women, wore makeup, jewelry and skirts, although it was also Tony who left each morning to work as chairman of the mathematics department in a Vermont high school three towns away. Vera didn’t work and had never made any pretense at being other than who she was. Although (Dawn smiled shyly) this was New England they were talking about, and her aunt obviously hadn’t gone around town proclaiming that she wasn’t just a rather athletic old maid. Not that anyone would ask. One of the reasons Dawn loved Marbury was that really, whoever you were was all right as long as you followed the rules for public behavior. Upon coming to live with Vera, Tony had taken the name Henley, and the two women were assumed to be relatives. Dawn herself had never thought about the matter of their sexuality until she was in analysis with Dr. Seaver. Like a lot of other kids she knew, she’d rather taken it for granted that her parents, who shared a bedroom, had no sex life to speak of.

None of the children had ever questioned Dawn about her household, although at the beginning of school there had been nomenclature problems with the teacher. In the previous year, Vera, anticipating some such problems, had tried to train Dawn away from Daddy and toward Aunt Vera. What had remained with Dawn was that she was to call Daddy Aunt Vera when she was talking to other people. In first grade (Vera hadn’t sent her to the optional kindergarten) Dawn had begun to read, learning from the primer that Daddy went to work and Mommy stayed home and took care of the children. The book was quite clear on this. Daddy might leave for a variety of places — bank, office, store, etc., but Mommy’s work was done at home. It would not have occurred to Dawn’s friends to support her claim that the opposite was true in her home because that would have involved arguing with the teacher, but as it turned out, their support would have been useless. Dawn explained to the teacher that it was her daddy who stayed home and her mommy, Tony, who went to work. The teacher’s task became clear. The child had suffered some elementary confusion and would have to be straightened out with drills. The drills were not done in a punitive manner, and by the time Parents’ Day arrived, Dawn was calling Vera Mommy and Tony Daddy — in school. By the time she had acquired the conceptual vocabulary that would have enabled her to explain to her teacher that both her mommy and daddy were women, the class was absorbed in Vasco da Gama and the multiplication tables and no explanations were called for.

Dawn seldom invited other children to her home. The few who lived nearby remained her friends throughout eighth grade, but she rarely sought them out. After a full day at school she wanted only to return to the bosom of her family. The long New England winters that horrified so many people represented love and warmth to Dawn Henley.

The walk from school was about half a mile, and Dawn would make it with the other children unless they dawdled, in which case she would break away from them in her eagerness. Sometimes she and Tony, who would be driving from three towns away, reached home at the same time and raced, giggling, for the door. Dawn still recalled with pleasure arriving once before Tony’s car was in sight, hiding behind a bush, then dashing to the front door just in time to beat Tony up the steps.

Afternoons were occupied with homework, sewing, baking. Tony gave Dawn piano lessons. In the evening they read, knitted and played cards, chess, and checkers. The television was in a little room of its own. No one watched it very much.

Dawn supposed the most important thing to say about Vera and Tony was that for all she’d learned of their problems, she adored them both and felt they’d given her much more than average parents gave their children, in time alone. In her analysis with Dr. Seaver, she had come to see that there were periods in her life when, like any child, she’d wished for one of her parents to “disappear” so that she could have the other to herself. That was, as Dr. Shinefeld must already know, why she’d had the accident when they separated; it was guilt over getting that old wish, for she still had them both but they didn’t have each other anymore. With Dr. Seaver she’d understood that loving them both so much hadn’t balanced out her jealous, hostile feelings but had tended to make them more intense, harder to bear.

They had been an extraordinary couple. What one lacked, the other possessed in abundance. Vera was your prototypical New England WASP patriarch — large and strong, with features almost identical to those of her brother and their father. What she lacked in warmth (the cuddling of little Dawn was left to Tony) Vera made up in strength, bravery and a broad range of talents. Aside from being a superb skier and horsewoman, she knew more about animals than most veterinarians, and she could fix, or build, for that matter, almost anything in the house. She was an excellent cook and a nearly miraculous gardener.

Tony was dark, pretty and plump. Her grandparents had emigrated ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Copyright