Mount Misery, English edition

1

WASPs, I d discovered in my month of being a shrink, are notoriously hard to read. Their body language borders on mute, and their language itself is oblique, like those masters of obliqueness the English who, I had learned in my three years at Oxford, when they say Yes, actually mean No, and when they say No, actually, may mean anything.

Now, try as I might, coming at him from various different interviewing angles, much as my father the dentist would come at a recalcitrant tooth, Cherokee Putnam remained a mystery. It was six-thirty in the morning. I was bone-tired, having been on call at the hospital all night long. Cherokee had appeared at the admissions unit without calling in advance, and had paged the Doctor on Call me. He said he wasn t at all sure he needed admission, but he hadn t been able to sleep and had to talk to someone about a delicate matter, in confidence. The closest I had come to reading any feeling in him was when he told me how, at a dinner party at home recently, he d gotten so furious at his wife Lily that he d actually done the unheard of: picked up his linen napkin and thrown it down onto the tablecloth beside his plate.

To my probings, he denied that he was depressed. He denied suicide attempts, suicide gestures, suicidal ideation, and showed no signs of being crazy. He seemed like just the kind of guy the word normal was made for.

He looked normal enough. He was my age thirty-two my height and build six-three and slightly fallen from slender. But while I was a lapsed Jew, he was a cornered WASP, in buttoned-down pink shirt and pressed khaki pants, with an excellent blade nose and blue eyes, a charming mole on one boyish cheek, and strawberry-blond hair combed back and parted off center. Tan and handsome, he looked like the young Robert Redford. He was rich, the father of two young girls Hope and Kissy and he admitted sheepishly to being a lawyer. A Yale graduate, he d made a small fortune working for Disney in

Samuel Shem (Stephen Bergman, M.D.) graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College and earned a Ph.D. in physiology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He graduated from Harvard Medical School. He is the author of the novels The House of God and Fine and seven plays, including, with Janet Surrey, Bill W. and Dr. Bob. He is on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and the Stone Center, Wellesley College. He lives with his wife and five-year-old daughter near Boston.