Stella Bain by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online

hands on top of it. “I didn’t mean—” she says.
    Dr. Bridge stares at her face. “You didn’t mean to show it to me?”
    “I didn’t mean to draw it. I didn’t intend for anyone to see it.”
    She begins to crumple the drawing, but he stops her hands. “Please, may I?”
    She allows him to take the sketch from her.
    A man on a bed, rumpled sheets covering his face. He is half undressed, and there seems to have been a struggle. A lamp is knocked over, and a mirror is broken.
    “This makes me sick to look at,” Stella confesses.
    “Is the man dead?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Dr. Bridge shifts his position so that he can see Stella’s face. “This can’t be the same man as in the previous drawing.”
    “No.”
    “Is this man at the heart of your guilt and dread?”
    “I don’t know,” she says. She has no idea what caused her to make this drawing. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”
    Dr. Bridge lays a hand on her shoulder. Gradually, she begins to feel calmer. “It’s only a drawing, Miss Bain. Stella. It can’t hurt you.”
    “But it does.”
    “Then we will leave this. We’ll have to look at these drawings again, but I think not now.”

A t their next meeting, in late November, Dr. Bridge begins by talking of her sketches. “Your drawings may be your best links to the past. The difficulty with them is that they can resemble a thing that happened in real life, or they can be an invention of the mind.”
    “How will I ever know?” Stella asks.
    “Well, you may not, and perhaps I won’t, either. It’s not simply the drawings themselves but the way they make you feel that might give us clues. The brain reacts in mysterious ways. As a cranial surgeon, I have had patients come through surgery entirely normal, yet on closer inspection I find that a man cannot identify individual letters on a page. Or that another is unreasonably angry, presenting a very different personality from the one he had before surgery. Or that yet another cannot actually speak his own name, though he can write it. These patients would seem to be fine otherwise.”
    A squall of rain sweeps across the glass dome, and Stella glances up. Nervously, she tucks her handkerchief farther into the cuff of her tea-colored dress. If she were not concerned about her money running out, she would buy material and sew another dress for herself.
    “Is there any possibility that either of the two men in the drawings is the person you seek at the Admiralty?”
    Stella’s forehead is dotted with perspiration. “I don’t know. My search for someone at the Admiralty feels entirely urgent. It’s something I must do, not something I necessarily wish to do. It’s complicated, isn’t it?”
    “Yes.”
    She rises and glides to the top of the stairs and stretches her arms behind her. For a bizarre moment, she thinks she might throw herself down the steps. She takes hold of the newel post and turns.
    “So far you’ve been asking questions,” she says. “And I’ve been trying to answer them.”
    “Yes, that’s true. But as we progress, I hope that it will be you who will be doing most of the talking. The purest form of analysis, according to Sigmund Freud, is one in which the physician speaks not at all. You’re familiar with Dr. Freud?”
    “No.”
    “He is an Austrian neurologist who has developed a new theory of psychological treatment. But I believe Freud is talking about deep-seated neuroses and a period of many months, if not years, of therapy. We don’t have that kind of time. You have a much more pressing concern if you are to live your life as a fully conscious being.”
    “I can’t imagine what kind of life that would be,” she says. “I feel as though I’m floating in a world in which I have no part. It’s an extraordinary sensation, as if this were merely a dream, and at any moment I might wake up.” She pauses. “What does Lily think of this? Of what we are doing? Of my continued presence in your house?”
    Dr.