”
I said nothing, experiencing a mounting wave of pity for this lost boy we had conjured up before us.
“Of course, one’s first reaction was to assume this was a reference to what Al’s father thought of him,” Dr. Masterson explained, cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief. “Harsh, mocking references to young Al’s effeminate traits, his fragility. But it was more than that.”
Slipping his glasses back on, he looked steadily at me. “Are you aware of Al’s color associations?”
“Remotely.”
“Pansy is also a color.”
“Yes. A very deep violet,” I agreed.
“It is what you get if you blend the blue of depression with the red of rage. The color of bruises, the color of pain. Al’s color. It is the color he said radiated from his soul.”
“It is a passionate color,” I said. “Very intense.”
“Al Hunt was a very intense young man, Dr. Scarpetta. Are you aware that he believed he was clairvoyant?”
“Not exactly,” I replied uneasily.
“His magical thinking included clairvoyance, telepathy, superstitiousness. Needless to say, these characteristics became much more pronounced during times of extreme stress, when he believed he had the ability to read other people’s minds.”
“Could he?”
“He was very intuitive.”
His lighter was out again. “I have to say there was often validity in his perceptions, and this was one of his problems. He sensed what others thought or felt and sometimes seemed to possess an inexplicable a priori knowledge of what they would do or what they had already done. The difficulty came, as I briefly mentioned during our telephone conversation, in that Al would project, run too far with his perceptions. He would lose himself in others, become agitated, paranoid, in part because his ego was so weak. Like water, he tended to take the shape of whatever he filled. To use a cliche, he personalized the universe.”
“A dangerous way to be,” I observed.
“To say the least. He’s dead.”
“You’re saying he considered himself empathic?”
“Definitely.”
“That strikes me as inconsistent with his diagnosis,” I said. “People with borderline personality disorders generally feel nothing for others.”
“Ah, but this was part of his magical thinking, Dr. Scarpetta. Al blamed his social and occupational dysfunction on what he believed was his overwhelming em-pathy for others. He truly believed he sensed and even experienced other people’s pain, that he knew their minds, as I’ve already mentioned. In fact, Al Hunt was socially isolated.”
“The staff at Metropolitan Hospital described him as having a very good bedside manner when he worked there as a nurse,” I pointed out.
“Unsurprisingly,” Dr. Masterson countered. “He was a nurse in the ER. He would never have survived in a long-term care unit. Al could be very attentive providing he didn’t have to get close to anyone, providing he wasn’t forced to truly relate to that person.”
“Explaining why he could get his master’s degree but then be unable to function in the setting of a psychotherapy practice,” I conjectured.
“Exactly.”
“What about his relationship with his father?”
“It was dysfunctional, abusive,” he replied. “Mr. Hunt is a hard, overbearing man. His idea of raising a son was to beat him into manhood. Al simply did not have the emotional makeup to withstand the bullying, the manhandling, the mental boot camp that was supposed to prepare him for life. It sent him fleeing to his mother’s camp, where his image of himself became increasingly confused. I’m sure it comes as no surprise to you, Dr. Scarpetta, that many homosexual males are the sons of big brutes who drive pickups with gun racks and Confederate flag bumper stickers.”
Marino came to mind. I knew he had a grown son. It had never occurred to me before this moment that Marino never talked about this only son, who lived out west somewhere.
I asked, “Are you suggesting that Al was homosexual?”
“I’m suggesting he was too insecure, his feelings of inadequacy too great, for him to respond to anyone, for him to form intimate relationships of any nature. To my knowledge, he never had a homosexual encounter.”
His face was unreadable as he gazed over my head and sucked on his pipe.
“What happened in psychodrama that day, Dr. Masterson? What was the small miracle you mentioned? His imitation of a pansy? Was that it?”