Chapter 11 1

The next morning, early, my eyes opened suddenly,and I leaped in a sweat from my bed with a terrible feeling that Rennie was dead. I called the Morgans at once, and could scarcely believe it when Rennie herself answered the telephone.

"I'm sorry I woke you up, Rennie. God, I was afraid you'd shot yourself or something already."

"No," she said.

"Listen," I begged. "Promise me you'll wait awhile, will you?"

"I can't promise anything, Jake."

"You've got to, damn it!"

"Why?"

"Well, if for no other reason, because I love you." This, I fear, was not true, at least in the sense that any meaningless proposition is not true, if not false either. I'm not sure whether I knew what I was saying when I told Joe I loved Rennie, but at any rate I couldn't see any meaning in the statement now.

"So does Joe," Rennie said pointedly.

"Yes, all right, let's say he loves you more than I could ever love anybody. He loves you so much he's willing to let you shoot yourself, and I love you so little that I'm not."

To my surprise Rennie hung up. I immediately dialed her number again. This time Joe answered.

"Rennie doesn't want to talk to you," he said. "That was a stupid thing you said a minute ago -- stupid or malicious."

"I'm sorry. Listen, Joe, do you think she'll commit suicide?"

"How the hell do I know?"

"Will you stay home with her today and see that she doesn't? Just today?"

"Of course not. For one thing, I can't think of anything more likely to make her do it tomorrow."

"Then youdon't want her to, do you?"

"That's beside the point."

"Just today, Joe! Look, I might be able to get hold of somebody for her if you won't let her do anything today."

"Do you know an abortionist? Why didn't you say so last night?"

"I'm not sure. I don't know any myself, but I know several guys in Baltimore who might know of one. I'm going to call them now. For Christ's sake make her promise to sit still till I see."

"Rennie doesn't take orders from me."

"She will, and you know it. Tell her I know a doctor but I've got to call him to make arrangements."

"We don't operate that way."

"Just today, Joe!"

"Hold on," he said. "Rennie?" I heard him call to her. "Did you intend to kill yourself today?"

I heard Rennie ask why I wanted to know.

"Horner says some of his Baltimore friends might know of an abortionist," Joe said. I was furious that he told her the truth. "He's going to call them and see."

Rennie said something that I couldn't make out.

"She says she doesn't want to talk about anything," Joe said.

"Look, Joe, I'll call around. Maybe it won't even be necessary to have an abortion. I'll try to get hold of some Ergotrate. That ought to do it. Tell Rennie I'll stop out there today or tonight and either bring the Ergotrate with me or else have something definite arranged."

"Yeah, I'll tell her," Joe said, and hung up.

Now it wasn't quite true -- in fact it wasn't at all true -- that I had friends in Baltimore who might know abortionists, for I had no friends in Baltimore or anywhere else. What I did next was telephone every doctor in Wicomico, in alphabetical order. To the first one I said, "Hello. My name is Henry Dempsey. We're new in town and we don't have any regular doctor. Say, listen, my wife's in a terrible predicament: we have two kids already, and she thinks she's pregnant again. She's not a healthy girl -- physically okay, you know, but notpsychologically healthy. In fact she's under psychiatric care right now. I frankly don't think she could stand the strain of another pregnancy."

"Really?" said the doctor, not terribly impressed. "Who's her psychiatrist?"

"You might not know him," I said. "He's in White Plains, New York, where we used to live. His name's Banks -- Dr. Joseph Banks."

"Does your wife commute to White Plains for treatment?" the doctor asked innocently.

"We just moved, sir, as I said, and we haven't been able to find another psychiatrist yet."

"Well, I'm sorry; that's out of my line."

"I know, sir; I didn't mean that. I'm afraid my wife might commit suicide or something any time over this pregnancy, before I can get her to another psychiatrist. She's in a terrible state. Frankly, I was wondering if you wouldn't prescribe Ergotrate or something for her. I know it's out of line, but this is a desperate case. In a year, two years, she could very well be well adjusted enough to have all the kids we want -- we don't want alarge family, but we'd like to have three or four. A pregnancy now will ruin all the progress she's made so far. It'll mess her up completely."

"I'm very sorry, Mr. Dempsey," the doctor said coldly. "I can't do that."

"Please, Doctor! This is desperate! I'm not asking you to go outside the law. I'll get a sworn affidavit from Dr. Banks in White Plains. Will that be okay? He'll take all the responsibility."

"No, Mr. Dempsey. I couldn't possibly do it. I appreciate your dilemma, but my hands are tied."

"Doesn't the law allow you to take measures when the woman's life is in danger from the pregnancy?"

"It's not what the law says, I'm afraid: it's what the people in townthink the law says, and frankly the people around here are as opposed to abortions as I am, whether they're done by drugs or surgery. Besides, if your wife's trouble is mental, it's not that clearly a matter of life or death."

"It is! Dr. Banks will tell you so!"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Dempsey. Good-by."

I tried the same story on the other doctors whom I found listed in the telephone book -- those who would speak to me at all -- only I located my mythical psychiatrist in Philadelphia instead of White Plains, in case I had to drive up there to get the proper postmark on a fake letter. Also, after consulting the Philadelphia directory in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel, I changed the psychiatrist's name from Joseph C. Banks to Harry L. Siegrist, the name of a bona fide psychiatric practitioner whom I picked at random from the book. But all the doctors turned me down. My nerve began to flag: so predisposed am I to obeying laws, and so much do I fear, as a rule, the bad opinion even of people whom I neither know nor care about, that it was all I could do to muster courage enough to tell my elaborate fiction just once, and with each refusal it became harder to repeat. The effort was demoralizing.

Doctor #7, to my inexpressible relief, seemed not quite so unreceptive to my story. His name was Morton Welleck, and he sounded like a younger man than his colleagues.

"Now, Mr. Dempsey," he said, when I'd finished my piece, "you realize that any doctor who agrees to help your wife is assuming considerable responsibility, don't you?"

"Indeed I do, Dr. Welleck. If there's any way for me to legally assume all the responsibility, I'll do it gladly."

"But unhappily there isn't. I sympathize with your problem, though, and the law does provide that where there's clear danger to the patient's life, certain measures can be taken at the physician's discretion. You admit that Mrs. Dempsey is in good physical condition, so the question is whether her psychological condition is as serious as you believe it is. That would be a difficult thing to prove if anybody wanted to make an issue out of it, and I may as well tell you that certain of my older colleagues in Wicomico would jump at the chance to make an issue out of a thing like this. Frankly, I'm hardly the martyr type."

But I saw the shadow of a chance in Dr. Welleck's tone.

"Wouldn't a sworn affidavit from Dr. Siegrist do the trick?" I pleaded. "He'd be glad to provide one."

"It might," Dr. Welleck admitted. "Of course, I'd have to examine Mrs. Dempsey myself, if only to make sure she's pregnant!" We both laughed, I more tightly than he. "And I'd want to ask her a few questions, you know, even though I'm not a psychiatrist."

"Certainly," I agreed. "I'll have her come right down to your office." I hoped fervently that Dr. Welleck was new in town.

"Do that," he said, "and have Dr. Siegrist call me from Philadelphia, would you? We can decide whether it's advisable to get the affidavit or not, and he can explain Mrs. Dempsey's problem in more detail."

The prospect of driving to Philadelphia at once and impersonating a psychiatrist appalled me, but it seemed my only hope.

"All right," I agreed, "I'll telephone him as soon as I can and have him call you."

"That will be fine," Dr. Welleck said. He paused a moment. "You realize, Mr. Dempsey, that I can't promise anything. Like a lot of small towns, Wicomico is dead set against frustrating Mother Nature. Mainly, I'll admit, it's the older doctors here who are responsible for this sentiment: I doubt there's been a legal abortion here for years and years. Professional ethics aside, they're a collection of old sticks-in-the-mud. If they and some of the religious groups in town got wind of anything like this they'd crucify the poor fellow who did it. We can't always be as liberal as some of us might like to be."

"I understand perfectly, Doctor, but this really is a matter of life or death, I'm afraid."

"Well. We'll see what we can do."

Dr. Welleck's manner gave me some confidence that he could be swindled. For one thing, he talked too much: three of the doctors I'd called had refused to discuss anything at all over the telephone, and none of the others had been anything like so garrulous as young Dr. Welleck. Also, from the nature of the conversation I gathered that he was finding it difficult to compete with the older practitioners, perhaps because he was new in town. Any professional man who would criticize his colleagues to a perfect stranger on the telephone was, I guessed, a man with whom arrangements could be made.

But Philadelphia! To fake a letter was one thing -- I could be anybody in a letter -- but I found it almost insuperably difficult to be even Henry Dempsey on the telephone: how could I be Dr. Harry L. Siegrist? There was no time to waste; already it was ten o'clock, and Philadelphia is two and a half hours from Wicomico. Luckily it was Saturday -- I had no classes to teach, but the college library was open. I drove out there at once, borrowed the first textbook on abnormal psychology that I could find, and set out for Philadelphia without delay. I'd gone no more than ten miles before I realized that if an affadavit had to be mailed from Philadelphia, it would certainly have to be a typewritten document, and I'd never be able to find a typewriter in a strange city. Back home I went, breaking the speed limits, and rushed up to my room. It was after eleven when I got there.

To whom it may concern,I wrote, scratching desperately for sentences:Susan Bates Dempsey, age twenty-eight, wife of Henry J. Dempsey of Wicomico, Maryland, was a patient of mine between August 3, 1951, and June 17, 1953, shortly after which time Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey left Philadelphia to live in Wicomico. Mrs. Dempsey became my patient on the advice of her husband and her physician, Dr. Edward R. Rice of this city, after suffering frequent periods of acute despondency. During two of these periods she threatened to take her own life, and once even slashed her wrists with a kitchen knife. Examination indicated that Mrs. Dempsey had pronounced manic-depressive tendencies, the more dangerous because during her most acute depressions her two young sons often became the objects of her hostility, although at other times she was a competent, even a superior, mother. Mrs. Dempsey suffered markedly from the fear that she might lose her husband's affections: in her depressive states she was inclined to believe that the birth of her sons had detracted from her beauty, and this belief tended to focus her resentment upon her children. However, because she felt only hostility and not persecution, and because her periods of despondency alternated with periods of intense exuberance, even jubilation, my diagnosis was subacute manic-depressive psychosis rather than paranoia.