TIMELY INTERVENTION

 

Rachel Newton

When I look back upon my long and admittedly successful career, few cases come to mind as easily as the case of Lisa. 

It is a case that stands out in its singularity―a case that needed neither my many diplomas nor my significant expertise; a case so intriguing that now, in the recounting of it, I wonder again if any of my success can be attributed to skill. 

**

It was a wretched day when Lisa walked in, exactly on time. I watched as she wiped her feet meticulously on the mat and took great care in placing her sodden umbrella in the stand. I learn far more about my clients from their actions than I do from their words. 

So. Order, precision, discipline. 

Lisa pulled a straight-backed chair away from its place near the coffee table. She moved it three, four paces further away from me, and she sat with a spine so straight I felt a momentary flash of discomfort in my own back. She did not remove her jacket. 

So. A client mounting considerable defense before I had spoken a word―attending against her will, or governed by a great fear. 

I leaned forward. 

“Good morning, Lisa. What brings you here today?” 

In theory this would be my third time hearing her story―the first from my wife, worried about her friend’s granddaughter, and the second from Lisa’s mother. I received both narratives with the suspicion men of my profession must employ, however, and immediately endeavored to forget them. We tint the stories we tell with subconscious color, presenting with confidence what we imagine are objective truths. 

Lisa glanced at me briefly and proceeded to inspect my room. I waited, not breaking my gaze as the mahogany clock on the wall ticked louder than the rain outside. 

“You know why I’m here.” 

“No one can tell your story better than you, Lisa.” 

She glanced at me again, light blue eyes flickering over my face and away to the empty wall behind me. 

“There’s nothing much to tell.” 

A story so unusual, Caroline ensured I would find an availability for Lisa the minute she heard of it. A story so unusual, I did not protest my wife’s reign over my appointment book. 

“Would you prefer I ask you questions?” 

Now she held my eyes. Tick, tick, tick. 

“Name? Lisa Cook. Age? Twenty-two. Family? Two middle-class parents, an accountant older brother, and me. Not a pampered brat―a hardworking university student. Anything else?” 

So. Not a first-timer, quick tongue, attitude. 

“Is there anything else you feel is important for me to know?” 

“No.” 

This time I was the one who let her wait. I saw her assess the books on the shelf and my collection of shot glasses from around the world. Her back touched the chair. 

“My mother may have coerced me to come here. But I don’t have to talk.” 

I inclined my head. 

“True. We can just sit here and wait in silence. Or we can talk about why your mother seems so worried about you.” 

Can sheer will allow us to forget stories we wish to bury? What my memory had refused to discard―this hardworking university student was also once a hard-partying fun lover. Until this year. Friends dropped by the wayside one by one, invitations ignored. 

And the thing that had caught my attention: a self-imposed curfew from seven in the evening. Day after day, week after week, her mother told me, Lisa locked herself in her bedroom and refused to come out all evening. 

“We could talk about the weather, too.” 

I allowed myself a smile. 

“We could. Wind and rain. Wouldn’t that be a waste of our session, though?” 

Lisa sat ramrod straight again. 

“This session? It was wasted as soon as you made the appointment.” 

“How so?” 

She tightened her fingers over the chair’s arms. 

“It must be obvious to you, Professor Black, that I am here against my will, and have no intention of talking to you.” 

“And yet, Lisa. You are here. No one dragged you through that door as far as I could tell, and no one has tied you to that chair. And still you sit here.” 

Lisa tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. 

“Very well, then.” 

We spent the remaining twenty minutes doing a slightly more comprehensive intake than the shortened version Lisa had given me, although that, too, was telling. 

She touched upon her parents (“working, dedicated”), her childhood (“unremarkable”), her brother (“we’re the best of buddies”), her academic successes (“top five of the class”), her hobbies (“skateboarding and hip-hop dancing”), and her university majors and minors (“20th-century history and Germanic languages”) before it was time to conclude. 

Through it all, Lisa had neither relaxed her rigid posture nor allowed me to talk to her about why she was in my office. 

“I’m afraid that’s as far as we’ll go today, Lisa.” 

She stood but did not turn to leave, which gave me permission to ask my last question. 

“Will we be seeing each other next week?” 

That was when it happened. 

She looked at the ticking clock on the wall, and I glanced down at my notes and the red digits of my desk clock. And something went click in my mind. 

“I’d like for you to come in on Thursday evening at seven.” 

She was already shaking her head at the word evening. 

“You know I don’t leave the house in the evenings.” 

“I trust, Lisa, that you’d like to be the girl you were a year ago.” 

She walked toward the stand to remove her umbrella. 

“That, Professor Black, is an impossibility.” 

I waited until she turned to look at me, and I threw down all my cards in a calculated risk. 

“I’ll be waiting for you. Thursday at seven.” 

She pressed her lips together, shook her blond head at me, and clicked the door closed behind her. 

** 

It was with a great sense of disappointment―yet in no way surprise―that the clock struck seven on Thursday evening and the doorbell was silent. I put away some files, reviewed appointments for the following week, and adjusted a pillow on the couch. 

At ten minutes past seven I conceded to losing my gamble. 

It was almost twenty minutes past, as I was about to switch off the lights, when there was a timid knock on the door. 

The dripping umbrella slid into the stand with a thump. Less care taken. 

Lisa chose the same chair but did not move it backwards―progress. She still did not remove her jacket. 

“Sorry I’m late.” Her eyes roved around the room from the clock and back to the books, knuckles white on the armrests, ankles jittery against the chair legs. 

“I’m glad you decided to come.” 

Pale lips on a pale face. 

“Don’t think I’m going to be one of your success stories, Professor Black. I’m here because my parents taught me to keep to my commitments.” 

I smiled and shook my head. 

“What, no?” 

“I don’t think that’s why you decided to come, Lisa. You made it clear that you had no intention of keeping this appointment. You didn’t commit to anything. You could have called to ensure I wouldn’t think you were coming or just not showed up. And again, here you are.” 

She shifted, resting an ankle across the other knee, and fiddled with something on her shoe. 

A sigh. 

“Here I am.” 

I looked at the time. It was of utmost importance to me to keep Lisa in my office and engaged in conversation. I had to tread carefully. 

“Is there anything you would like to discuss?” 

She glared at me. 

“No, I’ll just sit here and decorate the landscape.” 

So. Anxiety, fear, anger. Sarcasm. 

I chuckled. 

“Interesting way of putting it. You said you’re studying Germanic language and literature. Do you do any writing of your own?” 

“No.” 

“Beyond papers you have to work on, you mean.” 

“Yes.” 

Lisa pulled at a piece of loose elastic on her shoe. Thwap. Thwap. 

“Do you do a lot of reading? I noticed you looking at my bookshelves last week.” 

“Yeah.” Thwap. 

“Only books in connection to your studies, or recreational reading?” 

“Both.” 

We were getting nowhere, but it was vital to keep the conversation going. Thwap. 

“And what’s with your twentieth-century history studies? Are you working on a thesis?” 

I saw her shudder a second before her leg hit the floor and she pushed herself to standing. 

“This is a waste of time. I shouldn’t have come.” 

Three minutes. It was twenty-five minutes to eight and I needed just three minutes. 

She wrenched the door open and walked out. 

Two minutes. 

One should never give up hope when there’s an umbrella in the stand and it’s pouring outside. A drizzle and I may have lost. 

That timid knock. 

“Come in!” 

Lisa ran her hand through her hair. 

“I, uh…” 

“Forgot your umbrella. I noticed. Can I ask you one last question, Lisa?” 

She hesitated at the door, then shrugged wearily. I tilted my head toward the chair she had just vacated. She perched right at the edge, a bird poised for flight. 

Less than a minute. 

“So. Which is it, Lisa?” 

She drew her eyebrows together. Looked at me, puzzled. 

“Which is what?” 

Now. 

“Which is it, Lisa?” I spun my digital clock around so it was facing her. 

Softly. “Which is it―Anschluss? Kristallnacht?” 

19:38 

The color drained away so rapidly, for a minute I thought Lisa would faint. 

“Y-you. Can’t.” 

I poured her a cup of water and waited. Her hands shook so badly, it was a miracle most of the water ended up down her throat. 

“What do you know?” she whispered. 

I told Lisa about how the pieces fit―history and Germanic language and a digital clock that made me think. 

“That’s all I know, Lisa. It was a lucky guess. Now it’s your turn to tell me what’s so horrifying about the Second World War that you can’t function, half a century later.” 

It was a nasty story, but not an uncommon one. Doing research, Lisa had come across some family history that she wished she had never uncovered. A grandfather, now dead. Her grandfather, a Nazi. 

She covered her face, trembling. “I can’t sleep for guilt, Professor. During the day I push through, but then the clocks move toward evening and I can’t stand myself anymore. I can’t see people, enjoy life, knowing what my grandfather did.” 

“Lisa. What your grandfather did has no import on who or what you are, you know.” 

“Have you ever heard of collective guilt?” 

I waited until Lisa looked at me, and I spoke firmly. 

“What if I absolve you of your guilt? What if I forgive you completely?” 

“You? What do you mean?” 

“What if I tell you, Lisa, that I was born in postwar Vienna to Holocaust-survivor parents? Wouldn’t that give me the right to forgive you?” 

She thought for a moment. 

“But your name. John Black?” 

“Easy enough for Jonathan to become Jon. Easier still to spell it with an h. And you know German―Schwartz becomes Black, and I have a perfectly generic name.” 

She stood up and put the cup down on my desk. 

“Jonathan Schwartz?” 

I nodded. 

“What’s the ‘P.’ for, then?” 

She was observant, Lisa. The nameplate on my door. 

“Middle letter looks more respectable, don’t you think?” 

She walked toward the window. She stared out for a few minutes while I prayed until she turned around. 

“So you’re telling me that if I believe in collective guilt, I have to accept the idea of collective forgiveness?” 

I didn’t answer her rhetorical question, but we sat there in a holding silence as a healing process unfolded. 

** 

I waited a couple of weeks before hanging my certificates back on the wall. 

Just as a precaution, although I already knew in my heart that Lisa would never find reason to come into my office again. 

As I admired the new frames Caroline had ordered for the wall of diplomas we had dismantled just four weeks earlier, I thought about how much of a therapeutic journey comes down to timing. 

I pondered my teen obsession with man’s search for meaning, a fascination with world leaders, the Third Reich, and all the roads I had taken that had shaped me into who I was at the moment when Lisa walked in. 

Lisa, who had needed neither skill nor years of experience, but a specific moment in time. 

And a refraction of the truth. 

Harvard Department of Psychology. That one, in the center of the wall, right behind my chair. 

Yale Department of Psychology, to the left. 

Bachelor’s, master’s, and PhDs. 

Cherished letters from Viktor Frankl. Roger Brown. Solomon Asch. 

And more, my name emblazoned on every single one. 

John Paul Black.