Dr. Whitman (Story Seven, in: "Voices out of Saigon")

Dr. Whitman
(Story Seven)

Part One of Two Parts

(From the Journal notes of Dr. Whitman)

I will have to try to tell about why Cassandra Hightower (daughter to Betty Hightower), and daughter of Jason Hightower, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, came to our Free-Standing Hospital, here in Prescott, Wisconsin, that Fall day in 1975. I mean, actually try to put it in this report, as clear as I can, and perhaps try to bridge the gap between the Hightower family and the Abernathy family, for both sisters are connected to Cassandra’s instability, her frozen anger that has put her into a state of disassociation with whom ever she has contact with, even her Senior Counselor I assigned to her, Don Hooker, I will use his words in much of he report.
Her father, Jason Hightower, cannot make anything out of it, why Cassandra is in such a state, a catatonic state. Talk therapy didn’t work for three weeks, tools of the counselor. He even had to have two guards by her, one inside her room, the other sitting outside her room in fear she’d take her life, like her mother’s sister did, Caroline Abernathy. It is—unfortunate, but true, that we find only in literature that the problems of the mind get solved easily over a paradoxical situation, as Cassandra’s mind navigated to. The human mind can be juxtapose only so long by or into the vortex of trauma then it shuts down, it is a survival technique.
This was the premise the Senior Counselor and I worked with: we needed to unthaw the mind, and give it reason, try to free it from its frozen anger; it was anger keeping it where it was. We had to make it wholesome again, tell it to let go, and go forward.

Mr. Hightower came in a wheelchair to the hospital, I think he should not have come at all. She could have been sent on alone, and he came with a young lady by the name of Linda Macaulay, Cassandra’s girlfriend, they both really wanted to see him, and she wheeled the wheelchair through the doors of the hospital. I still don’t believe he ever understood the real problem with his daughter, oh perhaps the situation, but that is always the surface, the face of it, not the wound, that is the real problem, and it is under the surface, under the flesh, deep in the mind, in this case.
She slept in that chair in her bedroom many of nights, the nights he didn’t he stayed in a local hotel, with that Macaulay girl. No one could keep him from affirming the fact, she was not as ill as she really was, thinking she was putting on an act at times, actually I think he was gambling wither her prognoses. To a court and jury, he would have been guilty of intrusion, but we tried to accommodate him, and at times he seemed to be the patient; I think at times also, he wanted to enter a plea of mental incompetence on my helper, the Senor Counselor.
It all started of course, after the killing of her mother, Mrs. Betty Hightower, when she was brought to the hospital, she could not even remember her mother’s name. She couldn’t name the victim, even after Hooker made many suggestions and prompting to the mother’s name, she didn’t look alive, but of course was alive, just staring at and into nothingness.
Mr. Hightower never denied she did not need help, it was his insistence, we were not helping her properly, he was eager to have her put back together, as she once was: sympathetic for her present condition, I don’t know, I could not make heads or tails out of his flat emotions, because he refused to listen most of the times to our so called hypothesize analysis, he figured she was using this opportunity to get away from him and his logic, I told him, she was at that, escaping, hitherto at the hospital, and between him and the living world outside of his house, where his mother had died, and all the trouble with the Abernathy family, she was escaping it all.
Ponder he did, and became emerged in his daughters treatment, it would seem to me, knowing all the facts of the family, all the way back to the death of Langdon Abernathy, and his mother Caroline, and her sister Betty, one by disease, the other two by suicide, and raping and stabbing, it would seem to me, this almost innocent mind, uncultivated in such violent actions, once impenetrable, became penetrated over an 18-month or so, period, perhaps it goes back three years, but the snake that infected her mind with the final bite, was her mother dying in Saigon, and her imagination playing the horror of it out on a daily bases. Call it a tale untold, for the very fact she only knew the results, not how her mother had to endure, and that, yes I believe that was the final bit of the snake, a fiercely solitary bite in the mind, loaded with venom.

But they were gone on the day we decided to give her electric shock to bring her out of her frozen state, that Linda girl, had come in to take her out to the river and walk with her, we felt it was ok, and Mr. Hightower knew if he demanded her to be released, we might not do it, and thus, she and he and the Macaulay girl are back in North Carolina I suppose.
I have simple notified the authorities, and sent a telegram to the family that we would not be responsible for whatever occurs at this juncture with Cassandra Hightower. In my own feelings, which I hate to express, for I want to be open minded, and professional, but I feel this family, has outlasted so much corruption and injustice, and Cassandra is the last link, and is afraid, he father that is, afraid, she will vanish, completely false, but to his mind true: that she will inscrutable vanish if taken out of his sight for very long. In short, I told him in the message to watch her carefully, sometimes, the need for escape is so strong because the way through the door to recover seems undoable, and she might resort to harsh measures.


Bishops Ploy
(Part two, to Dr. Whitman)

So that was that, the good Doctor and Senior Counselor could do no more, nothing to help Cassandra, left it alone, feeling it was better that way, better for the hospital, for the father, not sure about Cassandra—if it was for the better, but it would have been a long court ordeal, and she was not the only one in need at the hospital, so the doctor would tell Mr. Hooker, and he was right when he sent the letter to Mr. Hightower, that he felt helpless in helping his daughter with his daily presence, and trying to have her brought back to the hospital. Hence, he felt he had to let go, and he let go.

It was the Christmas season, the first of December, of 1976; Linda Macaulay took Mr. Hightower shopping in Fayetteville, Linda had taken a liking for the old man, whom was really only fifty-six years old, and had the money from selling of the plantation that had belong to the Abernathy family, he had sold it for a handsome price, and she, Linda now was twenty-one. They shared the same bedroom, and she bought what she wanted.
Linda was the optimist, always telling Jason his daughter would be fine now that she was home, even though this Christmas season she was left alone a lot. And the good doctor was right about the evil that plagues a sick mind. Right about evil that it will creep into the mind, easy or not easy, and she thinking about the one thing Dr. Whitman warned them about. Jason Hightower did not plan ahead either, he just had unbounded faith that she would be ok, and Linda reinforced it.
The on looker, unprofessional bystanders, perhaps might have said, and a few did say, the two: Linda and Jason simple left Cassandra, to suffer, and knew themselves little about suffering, like somebody unconscious to the real facts, she was breathing, and sleeping, but they did the see the grief, just grief for the sake of grief. This is what the neighbors were saying, not sure if it soaked into the ears of Linda and Jason, but they must had got some of that information into their heads, impossible not to.
Anyhow, they even stopped speaking to her, thinking Cassandra, she wanted to be alone, because she seldom moved, and then on Christmas Day they heard a shot…Jason and Linda—along with a few neighbors (who now were saying “I told you so”).
Jason and Linda were cooking the turkey in the kitchen when the shot was fired, he knew the sound of the gun, it was Caroline’s gun, Betty brought it home from the Abernathy plantation before she went to Saigon. It was a Smith and Wesson, 38-Special, he shot it himself in the backyard trying to scare the squirrels.
“The foolish girl,” said Jason to Linda, looking up at the ceiling, as if the bedroom was under the kitchen, and it wasn’t, and told Linda to hurry on up stairs to see what had happened, as he sat in his wheelchair in computation, working out what had just taken place; indeed, was she capable of such an act, this filled his mind, this scarcely could have matched his imagination.
Jason made his way into the small elevator to the top of the stairs, thinking if he could save her, he’d try, maybe she wasn’t dead.
When he looked the archway, into the bedroom his daughter was sitting up on the bed—erect the gun still in her hand, right hand, Linda standing by the doorway, Cassandra had put the four-inch barrow of the gun into her mouth, and pulled the hammer back, and then the trigger, it blew the side of her face off, her teeth were showing, and gums, flesh hanging like threads all the way down from her lower eyelid on the right side of her face onto the bone of her jaw.
Linda thought: how painful and shameful all this was, too unpleasant, too blunt for her to endure, she got nausea, almost fainted, looked at Jason Hightower, his money looked good, but now what. Her hands gripped the wheelchair, motionless she stood by Jason, “Pretend,” said Jason, “that she looks ok, I fear she’ll kill herself if she looks in a mirror.”
“No thanks, Mr. Hightower, I’m leaving, I can’t take this from here out you’re on your own.” And she meant it. And she meant it, as Jason seemingly accepted it, or so it seemed as anticlimax, to a father who tried his best to protect his daughter.
“Go then,” said Jason, “Never mind me, I survived before too, didn’t I.”
Linda looked at him as she left, it was a rhetorical statement-question to her, she never answered it, she just stood a moment, stared at what, and whom she had slept with, grabbed and left, although she didn’t leave without taking her new watch, and peal ring, and a thousand dollars worth of new cloths.
Jason mumbled to himself: ‘How do you know what to do, or should not do? I’m just a human being, left home in a wheelchair, dependent on people; how do you know, everyone is suppose to be here, but no one is, just me, tonight there will be nothing else to do…” and he looked over at Cassandra, and grabbed her sleeping pills, took them all, almost a bottle full, went to sleep, right there, right in his wheelchair and never woke up to hear the second shout of the gun go off.