Author: Mary P. Carroll

Mending Heads

Dr. Benjamin Natheniel turned the envelope over and studied the scribbled return address. She had not been sure. If she had been sure, she would have written before she traveled overseas. He slipped the note out of the envelope and read it again. She had a stopover in Boston on her return from Yugoslavia and would like to take a taxi out to Brookline for a visit with him. It was not unusual for Dr. Natheniel to hear from former students. They telephoned while changing planes at Logan Airport, showed up at his lectures in their cities, and drove across country on impulse to see an old friend. The tie between a psychoanalyst and his students was a strong one.
Dr. Natheniel returned the note to its envelope and slipped the envelope into the “Incoming” box on his desk. He leaned back in the leather chair he had sat in for fifty-five years listening to the struggles of others and teaching upcoming generations how to help the wounded. He had not expected to hear from one of them. It had not been a good ending.
He sat there thinking until he heard the taxi turn into the driveway. He stood up and shuffled to the attic window. He watched her pay the driver and then look around his front yard. Her eyes settled on the “For Sale” sign on the lawn. He was retiring to his home on Martha’s Vineyard. His son, Edward, who had taken over Dr. Natheniel’s practice, preferred to see patients in his Copley Square office and teach in university classrooms. The days of sharing your home with those you helped and students you taught were long gone. Dr. Natheniel stepped behind the drape as she looked up at his attic window. She was the age he had been the year they worked together in the sixties. Still pretty and sad, Dr. Natheniel thought. He brushed his fingers through his bushy white hair wondering if she would still joke that he looked like the novelist Norman Mailer. Her footsteps sounded on the staircase leading to his attic office.
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Dr. Natheniel muttered. He squared his shoulders and opened his office door. He waited until she reached the top stair and then said,
“Nice to see you.”
There was a quick moment in which they both recognized how much older they were and then the mysterious return to the way they had been when they last were together. He had seen that moment in other returning students; felt it in himself. A reaching behind the years they had not shared for the old connection, and then a drive to bring the tie into the present. 
Dr. Natheniel extended a hand. She took it with her crippled right hand. Dr. Natheniel slipped his hand away from the purple bruising on her fingers. 
“Come in. Coffee?”
“Yes.” She stepped into the office.
He watched her survey the room while he fixed the coffee. Her eyes bypassed the analytic couch and paused at the alcove where Dr. Natheniel had conducted his student seminars after his patient sessions had been completed for the day. Even after he secured a Harvard teaching position, Dr. Natheniel preferred to hold student seminars in his home. Often the students stayed until two or three o’clock in the morning discussing their own patients, arguing about knowledge of the mind in text books, and absorbing the new ways of helping Dr. Natheniel brought to them. In the sixties, he had taken psychiatry out of academia and medical offices and into the streets. They had gone with him into the massive mental hospitals, the police stations, the schools, welfare offices, and politics. They would change the system, make the wisdom of psychiatry accessible to everyone, instead of preserving it for those who could pay for sanity. They would eradicate old prejudices. Even after Kennedy died the excitement continued.

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