Seventy-Four
IN THE MODERN world, meaning this one, someone like Jed Frazier would surely be called a concierge doctor.
But that’s not him and not Cross Rivers, where he’s just a family doctor out of another time, the kind of family doctor who still considers making a house call the most natural thing in the world, even at this time of night.
He’s well into his seventies by now, a hunched-over six-three or so, white hair, craggy features, big hands starting to lose their battle against arthritis, still smelling like the inside of an ashtray, as if the surgeon general has been bullshitting everybody from the start about smoking.
He’s been seated for several minutes next to Taylor McCarter Webb on her living room sofa, where Taylor has been doing most of the talking.
“I was on my way into the kitchen to get a bedtime glass of water,” she says, “not that I’m doing much sleeping lately.
And all of a sudden, I started to get dizzy, so dizzy that I had to sit down because I was afraid I was going to fall down.
Then my vision started to get blurry, and I thought it might be the dizziness. But then everything was just gone.”
I sit there across from them and can clearly hear how difficult it is for her to hold herself together as much as I can see it. Along with the fear I can see in eyes not seeing anything right now.
She pauses and says, “I realized my phone was on the table, and called Silas.”
She’s still trying to tough her way through. She’s been trying to do that for the past week since Burt died. But her voice is starting to crack now, just slightly. And so is she. I want to do something for her, find some way to help, but have no idea what that might be.
“You’re going to get through this,” Dr. Frazier says in that soothing way he’s always had.
“I just went blind!” she snaps. “How could something like this happen? One minute I could see and the next I couldn’t.”
He takes one last look at her eyes with his medical penlight, then sticks it in the pocket of his shirt.
“I’m almost certain it’s hysterical blindness,” he says. “Or conversion hysteria, another way of describing it.”
“Well, I sure wasn’t hysterical until I couldn’t see,” Taylor says.
“The condition can be brought about by a stressful event or emotional trauma,” Dr. Frazier says. “Sometimes physical trauma. But apart from the physical part, Taylor, you seem to pretty well check the other boxes.”
“So you’ve seen something like this before?” I ask.
“A few times over the past forty years,” he says. “But not many.”
“How long does it last?” I ask Jed Frazier.
“In my experience with this condition, which I admit is pretty limited,” he says, “it usually only lasts for a couple of days, at most.”
“But you don’t know for sure,” Taylor says, shaking her head.
“I don’t.”
“So it could be permanent?” Taylor says.
“I’ve never known it to be,” he says.
“But it could be.”
“Taylor,” he says, reaching over and taking her hand. “Can I promise you it’s not going to last? Doctors don’t make promises like that. But can I tell you with my own educated opinion that it won’t last? That I can do.”
Taylor is staring straight ahead, the same as she’d been when I’d found her at the kitchen table. She just looks angrier now.
“So what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” she asks him. “While I wait for my eyesight to come back.” She pauses. “Or not.”
“I could prescribe some mild antidepressants,” he says.
“Not happening.”
“Or you could see somebody.”
“So I can talk to a shrink about my feelings?” she says. “I know you’re just trying to help, Dr. Frazier. But no thanks.”
She puts her head back and finally closes her eyes, which for me is almost a relief.
“I’d be happy if I didn’t have to say another goddamn thing about what happened to my husband.”
Jed Frazier smiles at her now, maybe because he knows she can’t see him. He is a good, kind man, a lot like my father, the kind who could remain calm and rock steady in a hurricane.
“Have you been living here alone since Burt died?”
“Yes.”
“Is there somebody you could call until this does pass?” Dr. Frazier asks.
I say, “She already did.”