Summary:

In the beginning of Ann Darby's lovely and enigmatic short story, "Pity My Simplicity," Dr. Peary, whose medical degree came from "The Franklin School of Eclectic Medicine and Surgery" (3), is trying to deliver Orla Hay's sixth baby, a breech presentation. The doctor is weary and perhaps under-trained, but he is vigilant. Orla's sister asks if she might take over trying to tug out the baby. When the doctor glances at the sister's hands--"Fever-breeders, he's sure, and he won't be blamed for fever"--he says no, he'll manage (4). He does manage, and when the child is "wailing a syncopated, newborn wail" the doctor is undone (5). He weeps, hoping his tears will be mistaken for sweat.

In prose that is atmospheric and evocative, Darby brings us into scene after scene as Dr. Peary's evening unfolds: the delivery, then home to his child and his wife, who tells him, only after he eats his dinner, that Alma Pine down the road "isn't 'faring' well" (8). Just as Orla and her sister expected the doctor to save the baby, both Alma Pine's husband John and Dr. Peary's wife expect him to figure out what's wrong with Alma. "And you waited to tell me?" Peary asks his wife (9).

In the final and longest scene in the story, Peary hurries to attend to Alma, a woman dying of tetanus. About to enter her room, Peary laments that he's never grown "callous to this moment," the second when he enters the lives of his patients (12). He walks in to find Alma writhing in her bed and her husband glowering nearby. "Quiet! Look what you've done," the husband accuses (12). The doctor nods, accepting guilt.

Later, he thinks, he will write in her chart words that describe her state but cannot cure. At the story's end, he gives Alma "the morphia, the one centigramme dose he always carries with him" (14). As he gives Alma this dose, he never looks at her husband, "which is fine because John Pine cannot bear to look at him" (14).

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Summary:

Felix Krull begins his "confessions" at the beginning, with his family background and infancy. He comes from an upper class family in the Rhine Valley; his father owned a small manufacturing concern; he has an older sister named Olympia. Felix writes about his childhood love of fantasy, as exemplified by his love of dressing-up in costumes at home and his passion for the theater. He detested school, however, because it was so unremittingly boring.

Felix first practiced the art of deception by forging his father's penmanship on notes excusing him from school because of sickness. Later, he graduated to "performing" the illness by being able to fool his mother with imaginary symptoms. In fact, he was so good at "performing" that he was actually able to create the symptoms in himself (e.g. nausea and vomiting), and in so doing, "I had improved upon nature, realized a dream . . . " When the doctor arrived to examine Felix, the doctor initially assumed that it was a phony case (just being "school-sick"), but Felix was able to convince the doctor as well, or at least force enough doubt that he went along with the ruse.

Among the adolescent episodes that Felix confesses is his first theft (of chocolates from a sweet shop) and his first sexual experience (with a much older housemaid). He cites the latter event in the context of explaining how his "great joy" over sensual experience is so much greater than that of the common person.

Felix Krull's confessions end with the family's bankruptcy and loss of their sparkling wine factory, and his father's suicide some months later: "I stood beside the earthly husk of my progenitor, now growing cold, with my hand over my eyes, and paid him the abundant tribute of my tears."

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Summary:

Set in 1894 and based on a history of the logging projects among the California sequoias, this is a story of Francie, whose sister died in an accident six years earlier. She chafes under her parents' excessive protectiveness since Carrie's death. She loves the woods, and longs to do something to keep the loggers from cutting down the ancient sequoias, especially the oldest and largest, a tree over 2500 years old. Through a little sleuthing based on her sister's diary, she finds out that the property on which the ancient tree sits actually belongs to an old hermit, not to the logging company.

In an effort to get the company to stop before cutting the oldest tree, she rides the dangerous log flume into town to alert the one journalist she knows will support her cause. They arrive in time to save that tree and some of the others, and, perhaps as importantly to Francie, her mother and father begin to see her not only in terms of their loss of Carrie, but as a young woman independently interesting, daring, and very much alive.

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Miracle McCloy received her name because, as she's been told many times, she was pulled from the body of her mother shortly after her mother was run over and killed by a bus. Raised largely by her grandmother with her depressed and dysfunctional father nearby, she has learned a great deal about séances, contacting the dead, reading auras, and paying attention to energy fields. But she doesn't know much about how to locate her own confused feelings about her parents, her identity, and her relationships with "normal" kids at school who see her has some kind of freak.

She perpetuates this image by casting "spells" to help fellow students connect with boyfriends. But after her father disappears, and her grandfather's house is destroyed in a tornado, she lapses into mental illness and burns herself badly trying to "melt" as she believes her father did by dancing among flaming candles. She is taken to an institution where an astute therapist and an aunt who realizes how much Miracle needed her combine their efforts to help her recover a sense of who she is--a dancer, a strongly intuitive, intelligent girl with an interesting history and a promising life to live, liberated from the obsessions of a superstitious grandmother and mentally ill father.

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This is a collection of humane and humorous stories by psychiatrist Ronald Pies. Many of them portray snippets of Jewish-American family life; others feature Pies's alter egos, young psychiatrists named Applebaum; or Ackerman, or Alterman; still others introduce a number of wonderful geriatric characters the reader is unlikely to forget.

In the title story, an elderly man lies in the hospital and remembers how he inserted snippets of pornography into his business partner's tefillin nearly 40 years earlier, just to spite his holier-than-thou partner, who had evicted his Playboy magazines from the premises. "Mandelbaum's Passion" is the story of an elderly professor whose daughter wants to put him into a nursing home. He, on the other hand, focuses his energy on anticipating the twice-weekly visits of Luz, his 26-year-old Hispanic visiting nurse.

Dr. Otto Hertzmann in "Show Us Where God Is" is a retired analytic psychiatrist who lives with his sister. When a young admirer comes to visit, the sister introduces him to Davie, Hertzmann's severely retarded son who, when asked to "show us where God is," grins widely and points to the ceiling. Max Dershman, found dead in his room "stinking of cheap cigars and surrounded by Playboy centerfolds," is another such character. He falls head over heels in love with Riva Greenberg, the nursing home social worker, and leaves her a love letter when he dies ("A Medical Diptych"). In "Sophie Fein Goldberg Stein" the title character insists on always being addressed by her full name--at least, that is, until the nursing home psychiatrist is willing to sit down and listen to the full story of her life.

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Summary:

Fifteen selections--short stories, essays, and memoir--make up this collection. Two stories are notable: The Whistlers' Room and Atrium: October 2001 (see annotations). The title story is a translation and retelling of an obscure German tale published 75 years ago. Set in a military hospital in Germany during World War I, four soldiers share a common wound--throat injuries and laryngeal damage necessitating a tracheostomy for each man. This remarkable quartet of patients forges a fellowship of the maimed.

"Atrium: October 2001" describes the random meeting between a physician and a terminally ill teenager in the hospital atrium. The subject of death dominates their discussion. "Parable" chronicles an elderly doctor's efforts to comfort a dying man, and in the process, ease both their suffering.

Excerpts from Selzer's diary reveal much about the character of the author as well as the characters in his life. He also reminisces about growing up in Troy, New York. Approximately one-quarter of the book is devoted to Selzer's musings on works of art (sculpture and painting). Lighter fare includes a discussion of life behind the podium, a description of his home, and a new ending for A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

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The narrative of Pilgrim and his psychiatrist, Carl G. Jung, begins with Pilgrim's most recent unsuccessful attempt to kill himself. The surrealistic nature of the tale begins with this mysterious inability of the title character to exit life--a life self-proclaimed to have covered multiple incarnations over millennia each of which he has memory. His friend and his servants take him to Zurich to the renowned psychiatrist's clinic for institutionalization and therapy. Enter Dr. Jung, whose personal and professional life assumes a dominant role in the narrative.

As the story progresses, the reader learns from Pilgrim's journals the interstices of his seemingly endless voyage. While Pilgrim's tale--real or imagined--is progressively revealed, the immediate lives of the Jungs are explored in increasing depth. Layer upon layer of development of plot, past and present, is peeled away until Pilgrim escapes his prison and Jung's emotional chaos is exposed.

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The story begins soon after the narrator has moved his elderly mother into Cherry Orchard, an "independent living" facility near his home in Providence, Rhode Island. Because of progressive dementia, she was no longer able to maintain her own home in New Jersey, or her relationship with Warren, her boyfriend of 20 years, with whom she spent part of each year in Florida. Thus, the narrator and his sister arranged for her move to an apartment in the exclusive Cherry Orchard, where her symptoms of Alzheimer's disease had to be hidden in order to ensure her eligibility.

The mother and son have never been close, especially after the boy's father died during his early adolescence. She was a pleasant, but distant parent, more interested in her own social and cultural affairs than in taking care of her children. The narrator is 34 years old now, married, with his own son. He has little emotional attachment to this woman who is slowing losing her mind, yet now he feels duty-bound to visit her at least weekly at Cherry Orchard.

The mother has almost entirely lost her short-term memory, yet at first blush seems surprisingly intact because of her ability to cover-up with social skills. She writes notes to herself. The texture of her life unravels. She begins to wander. Other residents complain. Occasionally a glimmer of insight appears, but quickly dies. Fighting his inclinations every step of the way, the narrator provides ever increasing physical and emotional support, while at the same time gaining a deeper understanding of how his mother was (and is). In the end nothing is changed--the mother spirals slowly downward. But in another sense everything has changed. The narrator concludes, "I had taken her in so that I could understand why I had agreed to take her. I would do it again."

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Boyle drives out to the cottage to visit Joady, who is dying of cancer. Dinny and Joady are two elderly brothers who live together. "In all his years Joady had never slept away from the cottage," until recently when he went to the hospital and had an operation. Boyle and Dinny speak about how, a week earlier, they had been stopped by police in a helicopter as they were driving to the hospital to visit Joady--this was the day after an IRA bombing in which five people lost their lives. When they reached the hospital, they spoke to the surgeon who told them that Joady was terminal. By this time (back at the cottage), Joady knows that he is dying. However, he follows his normal routine, apparently unchanged, while Dinny is sullen, distracted, and complaining.

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The narrator, a schoolteacher substituting in a "stagnant, godforsaken little place" in the west of Ireland, meets an old woman that everyone in town calls "The Creature." She decides to visit The Creature and listens to her story, eventually becoming a regular weekly visitor at her hut.

The Creature is a widow who has two children: a daughter who lives in Canada and a married son who lives a few miles away on a farm The Creature used to own. Her husband had been killed, a victim of The Troubles two years after they were married. Thus, she had to raise the children alone.

Originally her farm was relatively prosperous, but the animals had all developed hoof-and-mouth disease and died. Nonetheless, she managed to keep body and soul together and to send the children away to school. Her son returned from the city after marrying a woman who despised The Creature. He and his wife had moved into the farm, but the young couple argued every night about money and the mother's presence, so The Creature signed the farm over to her son and moved away. That was 17 years ago; he had never visited her since.

The narrator goes to the farm, meets the son (by this time a passive and depressed middle aged man), and arranges for him to visit his mother. He does this, but the visit goes poorly. The narrator finally realizes that she has actually removed the last little glimmer of hope the old woman had; before seeing her son again, she could always hope that someday the two would be reunited, but after he visits, she realizes that he doesn't care about her and will probably never come back.

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