In the Last Analysis Read Online Free PDF Page B

one of the reasons we insist on charging patients for canceled appointments, even where they appear to have, do have, a perfectly legitimate excuse. People who don’t understand psychiatry are always shocked and think we are moneygrubbers, but the whole mechanism of paying, and even sacrificing to pay for an analysis, is an important part of the therapy.”
    “How did you learn at five of eleven that they had both canceled?”
    “I called the exchange and they told me.”
    “The exchange is the answering service? Do you call them every hour?”
    “Not unless I know there’s been a call.”
    “You mean while you were in there with a patient, the phone rang, and you didn’t answer it?”
    “The phone doesn’t ring; it has a yellow light which flashes on and off instead of a ring. The patient can’t see it from the couch. If I don’t answer after three rings, or three flashes, the exchange answers. Of course, I don’t interrupt patients by answering the phone.”
    “Did you find out who spoke to the exchange to cancel the appointments? Was it a man and a woman, or a man for both, or what?”
    “I thought of that, of course, first thing, but when I got to the exchange someone else was on duty, and they don’t keep any record of the voice they spoke to, merely the message and the time. Doubtless the police will look into it more carefully.”
    Nicola, who had been sitting quietly during this exchange, whirled around to face Kate. “Before you ask another question, let me ask you something. This is the part that sticks in the throats of the police; I know it is, but maybe Emanuel has talked to enough people about it so that they’ll find out it’s probably true, and anyway we’ve met other psychiatrists who do the same things because they feel so shut up.”
    “Nicki, dear,” Kate said, “not to mention your pronouns, I haven’t an idea in the world what you’re talking about.”
    “Of course not; I haven’t asked you the question yet. Here it is: If a patient of Emanuel’s canceled, what would Emanuel do?”
    “Go somewhere. No matter where, just go.”
    “You see,” Nicola said. “Everyone knows that. I’d guessyou’d go down to Brentano’s to browse among the paper books, and my mother, when I asked her that question, decided he’d think of an errand, somewhere, he simply had to do, but the important point is that the police cannot understand that a psychiatrist, who must sit quietly all day listening, relaxes by moving. They think if he wasn’t harboring nefarious plans, he would have stayed nicely in his office like any other sane person, catching up on his correspondence. At his
most
abandoned, they are convinced he would have called up a friend and had lunch downtown with two vodka cocktails first. It’s no good telling them that Emanuel never eats lunch,
certainly
never eats it with anyone else, and in any case is not geared to calling people up for lunch because he’s never, except for a fluke like this—and now that I think of it, it isn’t a fluke, it was planned—free for lunch.”
    “What did you do, Emanuel?” Kate asked.
    “I walked around the reservoir; round and round and round, at a kind of trot.”
    “I know; I’ve seen you; I’ve trotted too.” It had been long ago, before Nicola, when she was still young enough to run just for the hell of it.
    “It was spring; the spring was in my blood.” Kate thought of the chalk inscription. She seemed to have viewed it in another lifetime. She was suddenly dog tired, and felt herself collapse, like one of those cartoon figures she remembered from her childhood who discovered they were sitting on nothing, and then fell to the floor. From the first emotional shock of Detective Stern’s announcement—
She has been murdered
—until this moment, she had allowed no feeling to cluster about the idea of Emanuel’s situation. Particularly, she had excluded from her attention the question of responsibility for this situation.