Why the Psychiatrist Laughed
BY Karl Jirgens
Nabokov’s grandmaster in The Defense features a young man for whom the whole universe has turned black, and in the blackness only one thing remains brilliantly lit. Chess. This epiphany occurs at a crucial moment. The young man in Nabokov’s story is named Luzhin. Luzhin’s aunt has been flirting with his father. His mother has fled the room in tears, and in the study the aunt first shows Luzhin how to play chess—“and this is how one piece eats another, as if pushing it out and taking its place.” Luzhin’s chess-playing is both therapy and sublimation. He is drawn to the attractive aunt, and his jealousy of his father runs free on the board. His father not only has his mother, but he has captured the aunt as well. In chess there are two roads, but only one that cannot exist, if one evades the “not to be.”
He laughed. At first I wasn’t even sure if it was a laugh, but, looking then, it was clear, except that he didn’t mean it to be so obvious, he stifled it, he covered it by bending his face down, so his face couldn’t be seen, so we couldn’t see him laughing, I’m sure it was a laugh, it was so sudden, impromptu, based on what I saw. My uncle Claudius saw it too, but my uncle thinks he is dead, or as good as dead. My uncle was in the same room at the time, but some things don’t register with him, my uncle I mean, some things just pass by, float over, go in one ear, out the other, don’t register on his brain. My uncle has no children of his own. He got married late in life. His brain is the thing, his brain is having trouble registering things, it might be hereditary, they say. But the psychiatrist doesn’t say much, is noncommittal, feels us out, feels out my uncle, asks questions, seeks answers, but offers neither really, except to say, “You will feel better soon. Sooner or later, everybody gets better. You will get better.”
I know why the psychiatrist laughed. I know. I can tell you why, but it was out of character for him to do so, I think. I didn’t know it then, but I have been there one time since, and I was only there one time before he laughed, and that was the only time he laughed. Perhaps he covers up well, I think. Perhaps. But it was so spontaneous, an explosion that he had to duck to cover. The room was small, the room had a piano for glee-club meetings, the music sheet on the piano was for “Lili Marlene,” “underneath the barracks lamp, my own Lili Marlene.” Ironic, I thought, my uncle, who was in the war, used to sing that song, but both sides sang that song, not that unusual, yet it was a connection, a hinge I guess. My uncle never smiled when the laugh came, nor, oddly, did I. I was quite serious at the time, explaining my uncle’s shyness, his inability to communicate with authority figures, the nurses for example, his shaver, and the shaver cord, and how there was anxiety on the ward, and among the nurses, male and female nurses, how there was anxiety about cords, and belts and so on, and how my uncle said this to me himself, how my uncle was permitted to keep his belt, because he was not considered to be a “risk” as far as that sort of thing was concerned, but that sort of thing remained unnamed, it was never spoken out loud, but it was understood, understood by all.
The pain on the ward was palpable, the edges of minds unravelled, dragged word-threads across the lunch tables, dragged the unpalatable across lunchroom tables. “I don’t know if I can make this fork go into my mouth,” he said. The fork poised, macaroni Alfredo speared upon the tines. “I find that I am too nervous about the fork when it is near my head.” I am sitting with my uncle at the lunch table, he is eating, trying to eat the macaroni, and soup, and a sandwich; he has always had a good appetite. I am eating a sandwich I bought in the cafeteria before the interview with the doctor, I had to delay my return to Toronto so I could meet with the psychiatrist and my uncle so we could have a “family chat,” a talk about my uncle’s progress, or lack thereof, about the different medications, about my uncle’s nervousness, depression, palsy, inability to deal with authority figures, inability to speak English fluently. The lunch was to happen at noon, and the doctor was supposed to see my uncle before lunch, and I had left a message at the nurses’ station that I was in town, my journey there took me four hours, it would be good if I could meet with the doctor and my uncle together - the last time we met had been three weeks ago. He was worried they would take away his shaver cord. He was not a “risk,” he just wanted to shave.
My uncle was a chess master, and he used to tell me the story about the Creole player Paul Morphy, who was of French and Spanish-Irish descent, born in New Orleans in 1837. At age 12, while blindfolded, he beat his uncle who was then champ of New Orleans. Soon after, he defeated two international grandmasters, Rousseau and Loewenthal. After winning a championship in Paris, he cracked. Home again in New Orleans, he became deluded. When he met the reigning English champ, Howard Staunton, there were charges that Morphy was a “money-grubbing professional,” a charge he took to heart. He retired from the game, saying, “Chess should not be indulged in to the detriment of other and more serious avocations.” I am not sure why my uncle chose to recount this tale in the past, but he never mentioned it at the hospital. He didn’t want to talk much anymore, and he stopped playing chess. Not long after his return to New Orleans, Morphy attempted a career as a lawyer, but was taken only half-seriously because of his fame in chess. He fell in love with a beautiful woman who, he confided to a friend, had rejected him and would not marry “a mere chess player.” She walked out on him. He developed paranoid delusions; the mere mention of chess would irritate him. Asked if he could be included in a book on famous Louisianians, he informed the biographer that his father, Judge Alonso Morphy, had left him $146,162.54 while he himself followed no profession. For nearly 20 years, at the stroke of noon, he would dress up smartly and promenade along the streets. If a pretty woman came by, he would stop and stare, sometimes at her feet, without uttering a syllable.
Today, they asked me to take my uncle for a walk, but the best he could manage was a shuffle in slippered feet up and down the stone floor of the ward. As I held my uncle’s arm, I thought of Morphy, and how for the remainder of his time he would sequester himself in his house. At times, he would emerge onto the porch and rave: “Il plantera la bannière de Castile sur les murs de Madrid au cri de Ville gagnée, et le petit roi s’en ira tout penaud!” He became a recluse and permitted only his mother and sister to visit him. Delusions haunted him. He believed that one of his close friends was trying to destroy his clothes and kill him. One day he called at his friend’s office and carried out a sexual attack. I am thinking hereditary genes, my own end game, thinking about the fact that my uncle doesn’t want to take his meds. I know the psychiatrist laughed because my uncle was not a “risk” when he expressed concern about keeping the cord on his electric shaver. Morphy believed that people were trying to poison him, and finally, at age 47, he caught a chill and died. According to some accounts, he died in a bathtub surrounded by candles and dozens of women’s shoes.
