IJ study archive

Scene 182: ada ninth step pat

Scene
182
Pages
960–964
When
?/20 Nov YDAU (2009) — during Gately's St. Elizabeth's stay ('up at Saint Elizabeth's off and on for three days')
Where
Pat Montesian's office, Ennet Housein: Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex › Ennet House Drug & Alcohol Recovery House
POV
3rd person, close on Pat

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Open questions this scene bears on

Endnotes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 7)

Summary

The unnamed A.D.A. of the toothbrush-Polaroid revenge — "one of the most powerful and remorseless constables in three counties" — sits rumpled in Pat Montesian's office, rotating his Stetson, and confesses that he is in Phob-Comp-Anon (12-Step for codependents of phobics/compulsives, via the Choices facility, n.383), working the Ninth Step over his wife Tooty's dental-hygiene torment and his own years of biding-his-time hatred of Gately. He has already, secretly, tossed the file on the "Canadian assault" — Gately will two-step out of prosecution entirely, a fact Pat must tell no one, and which Gately himself can be left to "simmer on" — but the harder half remains: he must walk into the hospital room, extend his hand, and ask the man he believes evil for forgiveness for his own failure to forgive. He has sat outside the room for hours saying the Serenity Prayer and cannot go in. Pat, "cool steel" professionally and an AA longtimer, receives it all in active-listening formulas; the mismatched socks under his hiked pantcuffs speak to her heart more than anything else. He hasn't been willing. "Yet. I wish to emphasize yet."

What to notice

A duet for flood and valve: the A.D.A. pours, and Pat's entire response is measured in facial millimeters the narration itemizes like infractions — "A tiny spiritual slip" of a patronizing smile, "one slightly flared nostril", "a very slightly puzzled forehead" — while her spoken lines stay pure active-listening boilerplate; the scene gives you the counselor's craft from inside the counselor. His speech, meanwhile, keeps tearing on the dash: "I blamed the—I've harbored a resentment", "the b—the man I've blamed in my heart", "that rotten—no, evil" — each aborted epithet is the amend and the resentment fighting for the same clause, the hatred surviving inside the very sentences that renounce it. The props do the emotional narration he won't allow his voice: the Stetson rotates brim-wise in his lap, reverses direction exactly when the Ninth Step comes up, and ends "almost spinning" between his calves — a tachometer for a man holding his tone level. And the narrator keeps one satiric eyebrow raised the whole time — the "odd defecatory posture" of male earnest sharing, an epileptic dog having "a very small loud-noise seizure" at his stifled rage — which is why, when sincerity finally lands, it has to land below the speech altogether, in the socks.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 960: the gone crease and slept-in Cardin coat; "You said you weren't here professionally"; the Stetson rotating brim-wise in his lap; Pat as steel for the House, "a shattered husk of a wreck" at home.
  • pp. 960-961: the disclosure — sponsor, Choices (n.383), Phob-Comp-Anon, "a day at a time to the best of my ability"; "It's Tooty... rather, me, and my enmeshment-issues with Tooty's... condition" — hidden car keys, cut-off dentist credit, wastebaskets checked five times an hour for brush-wrappers.
  • p. 961: "I'm working Nine, now"; Pat's "tiny spiritual slip" of a patronizing smile ("I have a nodding acquaintance with Nine myself"); the remorseless eyebrows reversed into "a little peaked roof of pathos."
  • pp. 961-962: the name — "A Mr. Gately"; Pat's exaggerated trying-to-place-the-name face and one flared nostril; he wants nothing from her on him; it's Gately he's been at St. Elizabeth's to see; "this remains within these walls, as if it were my anonymity."
  • p. 962: the resentment confessed — Gately's picture on the Priority-board "with the pictures of far more objectively important threats to the public weal"; "My last chance went federal and then fizzled"; the Canadian-assault opening ("the alleged firearm, the witnesses who can't depose because of their own exposure"); Tooty's peroxide-white lips and tattered enamel; the clamped-hand noise that gives Pat the howlers.
  • pp. 962-963: the file already tossed — Gately "going to two-step out of at the very least a probation-violation and prosecution on all his old highly convictable charges"; the shoe-pounding rage that gives one of Pat's dogs a small loud-noise seizure.
  • p. 963: the amend's logic — "ask the man's forgiveness for my own failure to forgive... I can't detach with love from Tooty's phobic compulsion until I've forgiven the b—the man I've blamed in my heart"; and the cover story: he can't say the file's tossed, Gately can simmer; Pat sworn to silence again.
  • pp. 963-964: "But listen. I can't do it. Cannot." — hours outside the room with the Serenity Prayer, then home to pry Tooty off the sink; "that son of a bitch is evil and deserves to be removed from the community" inside the very sentence about asking his forgiveness; "It's my own side of the street I need to clean."
  • p. 964: the mismatched socks; the NoCoat LinguaScraper detail (Tooty at her tongue till it bled); "I don't expect help or counsel... I believe I have no choice. But I can't do it." — "Willing, maybe." — "Haven't yet been willing. Yet. I wish to emphasize yet."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: the 12-Step apparatus colonizing even the prosecutor's office — sponsor, Steps Four/Eight/Nine, detach-with-love, side-of-the-street — and shown working exactly as advertised: not by making the man good but by making his hatred unaffordable; Pat's professional anonymity-keeping is the program's ethics as statecraft.
  • Irony and Sincerity: "It's so damnably ironic" is his own word — the revenge engine (the Priority-board, the federal fizzle) dismantled by a Florida-facility splinter-group's clichés; the scene plays the comedy absolutely straight, and the sincerity lands in the socks, not the speech.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • The "Canadian assault" file he tosses is the Lenz/Nuck firefight (pp. 601-619) that put Gately in St. Elizabeth's; this scene quietly resolves the Walpole dread that has structured Gately's entire hospital arc (scenes 161, 166, 169; cf. 185) — Gately will never know why nothing moves forward.
  • The Sheriff's car idling outside Ennet House the same day (scene 180) is the visible law; this scene is the invisible one standing down.
  • Mikey's refused apology in scene 181, immediately preceding, is the same Ninth Step attempted from the other end of Boston's class scale — a deliberate diptych.
  • Pays off the toothbrush-Polaroid backstory of scene 016 (pp. 55-56): Tooty's "oral-dental-hygienic-violation issues" are the prank's lifelong wake; "my last chance went federal and then fizzled" is almost certainly the DuPlessis investigation (an inference — the connection is never printed).

Forward

  • Direct dovetail with scene 185: in his fever Gately imagines "the A.D.A. with his hat off earnestly praying Gately would live so he could send him to M.D.C.-Walpole" and then "saw the A.D.A. with his head bowed and his hat against his chest" (pp. 973-974) — the man really is sitting outside the room; Gately reads the posture and inverts the motive.
  • Wallace's Pietsch correspondence ("We know exactly what's happening to Gately by end") leans on this scene; see The Ending: State of the Debate.

Notable passages (5)
  • p. 960: "You're just down the hill from the hospital... Perhaps I need simply to share this, to work up the nerve." — the constable using share unironically; the novel's widest 12-Step reach.
  • p. 962: "The kid's picture's been up on my Priority-board with the pictures of far more objectively important threats to the public weal. I've been biding my time, waiting to get him." — the engine of half the Gately plot, confessed.
  • p. 963: "I have to... ask the man's forgiveness for my own failure to forgive." — the Ninth Step's recursive geometry; anchor passage for addiction-recovery.
  • p. 964: "The mismatched socks spoke to Pat's heart more than anything else." — sincerity carried by the body while the speech still calls Gately evil.
  • p. 964: "Haven't yet been willing. Yet. I wish to emphasize yet." — the scene's exit line; willingness as the program's true unit of progress.

What links here Timeline events here (6) · Connected from (4) · Cited as evidence by (1) · Passages quoted here (26) · Motifs (1)

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