Where is Jane?

MIN Creative Writing Exposition 2010

November 17, 2010

By: Laura Prager

My father and I stand on Wellfleet's Indian Neck Heights gazing across the bay to Lieutenant's Island.    My mother had taken her camera and disappeared down the rough stairway that leads from the house to the beach.   Less that a minute passes before my father asks me, "Where is Jane?" 

"Mom went down to the beach to take some pictures.  She is worried about possible erosion from last night's storm," I tell him.

"She should not be gone so long," he says.  "Where is she?" 

"Dad, a minute ago she left us and began walking down to the beach to take some pictures.  She is just over the cliff and out of sight." 

"But I can't see her.  How do you know she is down there?" he demands, his voice starting to quaver and betray his anxiety and fear.   "She doesn't need to take any pictures.  We can see the view from right here.  It's the same as it has always been."

"She will be right back," I say.

A few moments pass.

"Where is Jane?" he asks again, as if that question were the only question in the world worth asking.  Yet because it had to be asked at all, there would never be a truly acceptable answer.

It was not always like this.  My child psychiatrist father had been the master of the right question.  He taught me early on that there was no question too small or mundane.  He encouraged me to be curious and unafraid-- to ask the question to which I wanted to know the answer.   Questions were like the curved line that approaches an asymptote but never quite meets it.  The final answer should remain tantalizing and always just out of reach. 

His favorite greeting was, "How are things in Glocca Morra?", a line he lifted from the song  of that name in the Broadway musical, Finian's Rainbow.   He just assumed that everyone, no matter his age, could imagine a world outside the confines of the present where memory and desire lay waiting.  It was his job to help you to tell him about that place.

His questions were not meant to be intrusive; rather they reflected his total absorption in the other person.   The answers to each question, now shared details, become a foundation for the path toward insight and understanding that therapist and patient can travel together. 

This is not to say that some questions of his questions were not insensitive or unwelcome.  Certainly, sometimes we, his children, experienced them as simple meddling or even, particularly in our teenage years, as invasive.  He was fond of asking us to interpret his favorite popular songs.  Driving somewhere with him was often frustrating.    When the Talking Heads blared, he turned the volume up.

"Tell me what the song means," he would ask as he sang along with David Byrne, "'You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house/ You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife.'"¹    I would stammer out an answer about the singer's surprise at finding himself trapped by his choices.  Too young to understand how time can sneak up on you when you're is not looking; too young to appreciate that these might have been questions my father was asking himself.

But in his role as a therapist, he understood the need to strike the necessary balance between curiosity and coercion.  He taught me that a psychiatrist should think carefully before asking a patient with an eating disorder any questions about food.   He particularly admired and often quoted his teacher, Elvin Semrad, M.D., a psychoanalyst renowned for his ability to elicit answers to his questions from psychotic patients, somehow giving them permission to talk about their feelings in a non-psychotic, coherent fashion.  

When I started in my own practice of child psychiatry, I tried to remember what I had learned from my father and shape my own questions accordingly.  Sometimes I still hear his voice in my ear murmuring "What does the song mean?"  I have become well known by my own residents and medical students as the supervisor who can be relied upon to ask three things about a child patient: Where does the patient live? Who has custody?  And the question to which the resident doesn't know the answer.  The first two are pragmatic and predictable; the answer to the third is designed to prompt new questions and, hopefully, guide further enquiry.  
I should have known several years ago that something was amiss.  My father stopped in after work, pulling up to the house in his Buick, dashing in through the rain, forgetting his umbrella in the car.  He had agreed to comment on a complicated play therapy case with a medically ill child that I was writing up for possible publication.  He sat at my kitchen table thumbing through each page.  When he finished, he said, "I like how you chose to use a paper-mâche volcano as a way of helping this child adjust to her colostomy.  Good work."  That was all.  No questions.  I had expected that he would push me further along by asking me to condense, clarify, or elaborate.  I had hoped that he would ask me questions about the patient to which I did not know the answer and, in that way, force me to look at the material in a different light.

Now, as time goes by, my father's seemingly inexhaustible source of questions has been slowly but irrevocably reduced to that singular question, "Where is Jane?"  It is a question that carries with it the love, need, dependence, anger and resentment that fifty years of marriage has wrought.  Jane is the woman he pursued and won, the woman he left and returned to, the woman he loved, admired, and took for granted.   Yet the question of where she is has become rhetorical; a tragic coda to his life's work.  My father would have been the first to remind me that when memory fades, life is never the "same as it ever was."  In the present, "Where is Jane?" has become a mantra, the only possible response, "She will be right back," both a statement of truth and also a lie.

He and I remain watching and waiting.  Jane slowly rounds the bend and climbs the staircase in the sand, coming closer and closer to where we stand on the top of the dune.

"Here she is," my father says triumphantly.

My mother offers a sad smile.  She did not take any pictures, she tells us.  Ironically, my father was correct; there is no need for photographs.   The erosion is plain to see from any vantage point. 

1.  Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime," from Remain in Light, 1980.http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/talking+heads/once+in+a+lifetime_20135070.html(accessed September, 2010).