The Thanatos Syndrome

head. You don’t even pay attention to folks when they talking to you. How you act in your office? Psychiatrists are supposed to be sensitive to the emotional needs of their patients, aren’t they?”
    â€œThat’s true.”
    Chandra’s speech is a strange mixture of black Louisiana country and Indiana anchorperson. It’s because she was brought up by Hudeen when her super middle-class mother was going to college, and then took courses at Loyola in standard U.S. TV speech. She sounds like Jane Pauley fresh out of a cotton patch.
    â€œDoc, you know what you do?”
    â€œNo, what do I do?”
    â€œYou walk around like this, hands in your pockets, your eyes rolled back in your head like this. Somebody asks you something and you don’t even ack like you hear. You just nod like this.” Chandra has gotten up and is walking around, eyes rolled back. Hudeen is making deprecating sounds but is laughing despite herself. Tommy and Margaret laugh outright. I have to laugh too. Note that she says asks —with effort—not aks. But then says ack.
    â€œNo, Doc, I’m kidding. I know you’re a highly trained psychiatrist, the best around here. I know some of your patients and what you’ve done for them. I know you’re people-oriented in your practice.”
    People-oriented! Only from an Indiana anchorperson.
    Ed Dupre, a proctologist colleague, heard Chandra talk pert to me one day when we came in for a drink after fishing.
    â€œYou know what I would do if she worked for me and talked to me like that?”
    â€œI think I do.”
    â€œI would lay one right upside her head.”
    â€œI know you would.”
    Once when she was particularly sassy with me and my short-comings—though by then I knew it wasn’t sass, it was directness—I told her as directly, “Chandra, you know what you ought to do?”
    â€œNo, what I ought to do?” she asked quickly, frowning.
    â€œYou ought to go to charm school.”
    â€œWhat you talking about, charm school?” She looked at me sharply, thinking at first I’m getting even, sassing her back, then seeing that maybe I’m not.
    â€œNo, I’m serious. You’re a very smart professional woman but you lack certain social skills.” I can get away with saying that but not “bad manners.” “You have to have these skills to get ahead in your profession. You can’t walk into a studio and talk to a program director or producer, white or black, the way you talk to me.”
    â€œUhmmhmm!”—fervent noises of agreement from Hudeen. “What it is, this charm school?” Chandra wanted to know. She knew I was leveling.
    I told her. She listened. Of course there are such places where you go to get coached for job interviews, how to walk, sit, carry on a conversation, eat.
    â€œChandra”—I told her to get away from the old black-white business—“it’s the current equivalent of the old finishing school.”
    â€œFinished is right,” she said, but she was eyeing me shrewdly. “No kidding?”
    â€œNo kidding.”
    Thoughtfully she spooned stuff into Margaret—and went to charm school, and got a job—for a while.
    Who knows? She might make it yet. As the Howard Cosell of anchorpersons.
    â€œTell Miss Ellen I’ll be downstairs,” I tell Hudeen.
    â€œShe be down!” cries Hudeen softly, inattentively.
    â€œChandra,” I say, “where is St. Louis?”
    â€œWhat you talking about, where is St. Louis!” cries Chandra, eyeing me suspiciously.
    â€œTell Doctor where is St. Louis!” says Hudeen, hardly listening.
    â€œSt. Louis is on the Mississippi River between Chicago and New Orleans,” says Margaret, my daughter, Miss Priss, smartest girl in class, first to put up her hand.
    â€œRight,” I say.
    They’re all right.
    â€œMy other daughter, she live in Detroit,” says Hudeen to the TV.
    Two strange thoughts occur to me in the ten seconds it takes to spiral down the iron staircase.
    One: how strange it is that we love our children and can’t stand them or they us. Love them? Yes, for true. Think of the worst thing that could happen to you. It is that something should happen to your little son or daughter, he get hurt or killed or die of leukemia; that she be raped, kidnapped, get hooked on drugs. This is past bearing. Can’t stand them? Right. When