House of Bathory(3)

Betsy was desperate to get outside. The warmth of autumn did not linger in the Colorado Rockies. Snow was in the five-day forecast.

There was just this one patient—Daisy—to see before she could close her laptop and head out into the last of the sunshine. Hurry up, damn it!

Still another quarter of an hour. She opened her e-mail and read her mother’s brief message again.

BRATISLAVA AND THE SLOVAK COUNTRYSIDE NEVER CEASE TO ENCHANT ME. I GO TO VISIT CACHTICE CASTLE TOMORROW, HOME OF THE INFAMOUS COUNTESS BATHORY.

I WILL SEND YOU A POSTCARD, DARLING.

Betsy closed her eyes. She stifled a sob, biting her fist. How could her mother be so nonchalant, so callous? Enchant her? It was not a decade ago that Betsy’s father had died in a car accident in Slovakia. How could her mother bear to go back?

Enchanting? What the fuck was wrong with her mother?

Betsy drew a breath. Her mother, a historian and professor, had loved Eastern Europe long before she married the handsome Slovak-born Jungian psychiatrist. No doubt the Bratislava she spoke of was the Bratislava of seventeenth-century Habsburg Hungary, the heart of her research. The death of Betsy’s father had not stained that image. Dr. Grace Path’s eyes and ears would not see her husband’s blood streaking the rocky ground. His widow would see only the Court of Matthias II, Holy Roman Emperor.

Grace’s research was what she had left. Who was Betsy to deny her that?

There was a knock on the door and then the sound of retreating steps. Through the window, Betsy could see a well-dressed, shapely woman in her midforties—only a few years older than Betsy herself. Jane Hart, Daisy’s mother. And her coming to the door—even if only to knock—was a significant event. In the weeks Daisy had been coming to Carbondale, Jane had never visited the office, as if afraid of some kind of contamination. She would drop her daughter off, then pick her up again when the session was finished, never leaving her car. She’s afraid of infection, thought Betsy. As if she’d pick up a mental illness by crossing the threshold.

Betsy quietly moved closer to the window to listen in as Jane argued fiercely with her daughter. Discourse between a mother and a patient was a powerful tool in analysis. Besides, this was the first time she had ever heard her patient speak more than monosyllables. Daisy fingered a gold cross around her neck as she shook her head stubbornly.

“I don’t need to see a shrink,” she said. “I’m not crazy. I’m tired of this shit!”

“I’m not saying you’re crazy. But you have a problem, and it’s damned lucky you didn’t choke to death last weekend.”

“Would that have made you happy?”

Jane ignored that. “And look how you’re dressed! And that crap on your lips. It looks like smeared chocolate.”

Daisy tossed her jet-black hair in defiance, the scowl on her matte-black lips setting deep creases in her white makeup.

“You think I should wear some kind of peachy-fake, come-fuck-me lipstick like yours?”

Jane’s body went rigid, her hands curled into bony fists.

“I’m calling your father,” she snapped. She pulled a ruby-red cell phone from her purse.

“Dad has nothing to do with this!”

Betsy noticed the crack in the girl’s voice, registering a jolt of fear.

Her mother pressed speed dial. “I want him to know exactly how you are behaving.”

Daisy snatched the phone from her mother’s hand and threw it into the street. “Fuck it, Mother. I’ll go, OK? Just leave Dad out of this!”

The girl stalked toward the front door, leaving her mother to scramble after the phone and then follow.





“Bitch!” Daisy muttered.

Betsy straightened the papers on her desk and prepared to greet her patient.





“Betsy,” began Jane, brushing past her daughter into the little Victorian house, “things have gotten worse, not better since Daisy started with you!”

Betsy did not answer at once. She caught Daisy, still poised on the threshold—not in, not out, that was Daisy all right—watching from the corner of her eye. Now that her analyst was the object of Daisy’s mother’s anger, she was worthy of interest.

“How are you helping her?” Jane demanded. “And look at all the papers and clutter in your office! I don’t get the impression you are professional—”

“How have things gotten worse?” Betsy finally said, answering Jane’s question with one of her own.

Betsy watched mother and daughter stare at each other, fury in their eyes. Neither one of them blinked.

“What happened?” Betsy asked.

Again neither answered. The autumn air was suddenly filled with an animated conversation in Spanish from the Mexican grocery next door to the office.