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Once again. Aunt Agnes's eyes followed me like a searchlight until I was out of the room. I led Dr. Price out the rear door and walked with him toward one of my father's famous paths.
It was an unusually warm fall day with a few clouds looking like small dabs of whipped cream on blue icing. The breeze was gentle, barely lifting the leaves or stirring the grass. This was hardly a day for bereavement. I thought. It was more of a day to celebrate life,
"Your father was very proud of your college work the first year. Willow," Dr. Price said. He smiled. "I remember him telling me, 'I wasn't on the dean's list the first semester of college. I guess I can't call her a chip off the old block.' "
"How could he. anyway. Dr. Price? I am an adopted child. aren't I?" I asked pointedly, my eyes fixed on his.
He shifted his gaze guiltily away, pretending interest in the flight of a sparrow.
"Right?" I pursued.
"Your father wouldn't have treated you any differently had you not been," he said. "Believe me."
"Oh. I believe you. Dr. Price, but perhaps that was because I really wasn't some orphan, some stranger, someone not of his blood," I said.
He looked at me, his face freezing, his eyelids holding wide.
"Let's sit for a while." I suggested, pausing at one of the stone benches.
He looked back at the house and then sat beside me. We were both quiet for a long moment. The sparrow he had been watching perched itself on the fountain in front of us, strutted about, and then looked at us curiously. Something else caught its interest, and it was off again,
"How did you find out?" Dr. Price asked finally. He told me," I said.
He turned sharply. He told you? But he vowed to me he never would."
"While he was alive, perhaps, but he told me after he died," I said.
"I don't understand," Dr. Price said, shaking his head. "He left me his diary."
"Diary? Claude kept a personal diary? How extraordinary," he said.
"You've known from the beginning, haven't you?" I asked him.
"Well, maybe not from the very beginning. I don't know what he wrote, but from what he described, it wasn't exactly an instantaneous thing. Of course, no one knew anything, although we had a nurse back then. Mrs. Gordon, Nadine Gordon, who had deep enough suspicions to question some of the therapy. Actually. I think she had a crush on your father herself. She left about five months before you were born. She gave no reason, just her notice, and as far as I knew, neither your father nor anyone else at the clinic has ever heard from her.
"Look," he continued, "I'm not going to say it didn't border on unethical and certainly
unprofessional. If it had involved anyone else but your father, I wouldn't say 'border.' I would say flatly that's what it was, and if the physician was under me, he would have been fired on the spot. but.. ."
But what, Dr. Price?"
"But I do believe your father made every effort for it not to happen the way it did. He even tried moving her to my patient load, but she began to regress badly, and we made the medical decision to shift her back to him. I might add they were both equally unhappy. anyway. The doctor was taking on the symptoms of the patient."
"What were her symptoms. Dr Price?"
He raised his eyebrows. "Now. Willow, you know what patient-doctor confidentiality means."
"But this is different. We're talking about the woman who was my real mother," I pointed out.
"Only biologically. You had no relationship with her, and it was a long time ago. She has a new life. It wouldn't be right to dig up her past, now, would it?"
I stared at him and then turned away. "I don't know if you knew much about my childhood here, Dr. Price." I said, looking out at the sprawling lawn and woods in the distance. "My adoptive mother didn't know I was really my father's child, but she knew I was born in the clinic and that my biological mother, as you call her, was a patient in that clinic. I grew up with her waiting for me to act out, have a breakdown, dance naked in the streets. whatever. Every child has imaginary friends, but she interpreted it as the beginning of schizophrenia. If I cried. I was paranoid; if I was shy, I was depressed; on and on until..."
"Until what?"
"Until I began to wonder about myself. I know that there are some forms of mental illness that can be inherited. I have a right to know why my biological mother was in the clinic. What was her diagnosis, her prognosis? How is she doing now? Is she in a clinic somewhere else, for example?"
He leaned forward and stared at the ground. "I haven't looked at her file f
