“Know what you mean,” I said. “I trained at Western Peds.”
“Really?” she said. “I did my training at County but rotated through W.P. Do you know Ruben Eagle?”
“I know him well.”
We exchanged names, places, other petty commonalities, then Hannah Gold’s face turned grave. “The second time I saw Erna was a lot more alarming. It was at night. She burst in here just as I was closing up. The staff had gone home and I was turning off the lights and the door opened and there she was, waving her hands, really out of sorts. Then her eyes got a panicked look and she reached out.”
She shuddered. “She wanted physical comfort. I’m afraid I stepped away from her. She was a big woman, my reflexive response was fear. She gave me this look, just collapsed on the floor in tears. I eased her to her feet, brought her back to my office. She was muscularly rigid and babbling incoherently. I’m not a psychiatrist, I didn’t want to fool with Thorazine or anything else heavy. Calling Emergency Services would have been a betrayal—I no longer felt threatened. She was pathetic, not dangerous.”
She closed the chart. “I gave her an IM injection of Valium and some herb tea, sat there with her for—had to be almost an hour. Finally, she calmed down. If she hadn’t, I would have called the EMTs.”
“Any idea what had upset her?”
“She wouldn’t say. Got extremely quiet—almost mute. Then she apologized for bothering me and insisted on leaving.”
“Almost mute?”
“She answered simple yes-or-no questions about nonthreatening topics. But nothing about what had brought her to the office or her physical problems. I wanted to check her out physically, but she’d have none of that. Yet, she kept apologizing—lucid enough to know she’d been inappropriate. I suggested she return to Dove House. She said that was a dandy idea. Those were her exact words. ‘That’s a dandy idea, Dr. Gold!’ When she said it she was almost . . . perky. She’d do that, turn cheerful without warning. But it was an upsetting cheerfulness—overwrought. Using phrases that were . . . too refined for the context.”
“The people at Dove House felt she’d been well educated.”
Hannah Gold thought about that. “Or faking it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you seen psychotics do that? They latch on to phrases and spit them back—like autistic children?”
“Was that your sense of Erna?”
She compressed her lips. “I really can’t claim to have a sense of her.” The down-slanted eyes narrowed. “Do you have any idea who did this to her?”
“It could be someone she trusted. Someone who used her.”
“Sexually?”
“Was she sexually active?”
“Not in the classic sense,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She licked her lips. “When I examined her, her vaginal area was raw, and she had body lice and old scars—fibrosed lesions. Those are things you expect in a street person. But then I did a pelvic and couldn’t believe what I found. Her hymen was intact. She was still a virgin. Women on the street get used in the worst ways imaginable. Erna was a big woman, but a violent man—a group of men—could’ve subdued her. I find the fact that she was never entered remarkable.”
Unless her companion had no interest in heterosexual intercourse.
“Her genital area was raw,” I said. “She could’ve been assaulted without being penetrated.”
“No,” she said, “this was more like poor hygiene. There were no lacerations, no trauma of any sort. And she didn’t get upset when I checked her out. Just the opposite. Stoic. As if she was totally cut off from that part of her.”
I said, “When she was lucid—refined—what did she talk about?”
“The first time she was here I got her to talk about things she liked, and she started going on about art. How it was the best thing in the world. How artists were gods. She could name painters—French, Flemish, artists I’ve never heard of. For all I know, she made them up. But they sounded authentic.”
“Did she ever mention friends or family?”
“I tried to ask her about her parents, where she was from, where she went to school. She didn’t want to talk about that. The only thing she admitted to was a cousin. A really smart cousin. He liked art, too. She seemed to be proud of that. But that’s all she’d say about him.”