Letters (20 page)

“Why alphabetical priority, Horner?” the Doctor asked you at your Annual Interview in the Progress and Advice Room. This was March 17th last, eighteenth anniversary of your First Such Session, and of other things. “When you used to be Unable to Make Choices, I gave you
three
principles to apply. Perhaps you have Forgotten.”

He knows you have Forgotten Nothing of those semesters in Wicomico. You Repeated the principles of Sinistrality and Antecedence: if alternatives are side by side, choose the one on the left; if they’re consecutive in time, choose the earlier; if neither of these applies, choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter of the alphabet.

“But I’d often Have Trouble Choosing which principle to Use,” you Told him. “In the order you first gave them to me—Sinistrality, Antecedence, Alphabetical Priority—Sinistrality is farthest left and earliest read, but not alphabetically prior. If I Put Antecedence first, it’s both antecedent and sinistral but ditto. Then when I Started my Hornbook and Got in the Habit of Listing Things Alphabetically, I Remarked that in the series Alphabetical Priority, Antecedence, Sinistrality, Alphabetical Priority is alphabetically prior, as well as both antecedent and sinistral. So that’s the one I Use.”

“Jacob Horner: you are a Fool.”

Knee to knee in the Progress and Advice Room, you both Regarded your Cigars.

“You are Forty-Six,” the Doctor said.

“As of yesterday.”

“Though we speak here only once a year now, and you are Virtually in Charge of Administering the Farm since Mrs. Dockey’s death, you Still Regard yourself as My Patient?”

You Smiled Ruefully. “I’m Afraid So.”

“I’m Afraid So,”
the Doctor mocked. “You have Made No Progress in eighteen years, Horner. You are the Same Vacuum I picked up in Baltimore in 1951, except that you have Gotten Older, and it Took you longer than most of us to Do That. You will Be Here till you Die.”

You Did Not Respond.

“Mrs. Dockey predicted as much in ’53,” the Doctor went on. “Also, that your Guilt in the matter of Mrs. Morgan’s death was not suicidal, except figuratively. She predicted a long life for you, without content.”

“You must miss Mrs. Dockey,” you Ventured Sympathetically.

The Doctor considered. “A serviceable old twat. Very convenient for me in those days.” He paused. “But I miss no one.”

The subject of sexuality thus raised, there ensued an apparent digression from your Interview Proper to review those of the patients who were on Heterosexual Therapy. Tombo X, as a rule, services female patients under 40 whose schedules include this therapy, unless they require a Father Surrogate like the Doctor himself or unless miscegenation is judged antitherapeutic, in which cases either you or Monsieur Casteene accommodates them, depending. Your Own Services have proved most effective with elder women, in particular those pleasant Protestant widows who get through their summers at the old Chautauqua Institution, rocking with their silver-haired sorority on the wickered porches of the Athenaeum, but who tend to immobility in the dreary Great Lakes winters, which they have insufficient means to flee. Once convinced (by articles in the
Reader’s Digest
on Swinging Senior Citizens and the New Gerontology) that there is nothing amiss in the stirrings of their bereft and sluggish blood, they take pleasure in the tonic of decorous fornication. And generally they experience less guilt and enjoy more remobilization with you than with a partner coeval to their late lamenteds.

You have Lapsed into Writing. Stop.

But Tombo X had announced that he could no longer get it up for Pocahontas—a hard-edged, fortyish WASP divorcee from Maryland who he declared would unman a regiment of rapists. His recommendation was that either a troop of motorcycle toughs be engaged to sodomize her out of her mind, or she be introduced to her latent lesbianism on the pretext of appealing for her help with Bibi, a nymphomaniac, alcoholic ex-movie starlet also among our problem patients. But the Doctor rejected the former course as antitherapeutic to everyone concerned except Tombo himself, always inclined to retaliation; the second as likely to raise more difficulties than it resolved. Sexuality, he feels, is not at the center of Pocahontas’s immobility problem. What she needs for the present, in his opinion, is more testicles for her collection: when she has made aggressive conquest of and scornfully rejected all three male authority figures on the staff, perhaps a genuine program of therapies might be devised for her. Until then, since with refractory penises there is no reasoning, you will Replace Tombo X as her Mobilizer—always Bearing in Mind that women of Pocahontas’s age and circumstances approach heterosexual connection with more than normal ambivalence, which fact makes Undue Aggressiveness or Passivity equally antitherapeutic. A male patient of your Approximate Character (i.e., Submissive but not Immobile) would be better grist for her mill than any staff member. So to speak. As we have none present, and you Are by your Own Acknowledgment still a Low-Grade but Ongoing Therapee, you’re It. Enjoy yourself: those late-liberated, premenopausal WASPs can be in handsome condition and kicky in the bed when they keep their stingers in. But do not for a moment Let your Guard Down: they have hearts of ice and, unlike bees, can sting more than once.

You Pled Disqualification on the grounds of a Slight Prior Acquaintance, in college days, with Pocahontas’s ex-husband, the writer Ambrose Mensch.

“Do not Bother me with History,” the Doctor said. But troubled himself to inquire whether Pocahontas had been on the scene in those days.

“No. As a matter of fact, I Believe Mensch’s mistress back then was the Mack girl. The one we’re calling Bibi.”

“Incroyable. Both here at the same time. Do they know?”

So far as you Knew, you Reported, Marsha Mensch and Bea Golden (née Jeannine Mack of Maryland) were unacquainted with each other and with their historical nexus. You Did Not Bother to Add (the Doctor being uninterested on principle in case histories) that the middle-aged scholarly English gentlewoman who had been brought to the Farm from Toronto in 1967 by Monsieur Casteene to have a remobilizing operation under the nom de guerre of Lady Russex might also by this time be a friend of Ambrose Mensch’s, since she went from here to a visiting professorship at Marshyhope College in Maryland, where Mensch would be her colleague. The
real
connection between the three is not your Former Acquaintance anyhow, but the late philanthropist Harrison Mack: father of Bibi, family friend of “Lady Russex,” patron of both Marshyhope College and the Remobilization Farm, and thus indirect employer of Ambrose Mensch as well as yourself and, for that matter, of our former patient J. B. Bray of Lily Dale. Father too, finally, of the radical Drew Mack, whose activities are responsible for the Farm’s becoming—in your Private Opinion and apparently unknown to the Doctor but not to Tombo X—an underground remobilization center of a quite different sort, of which our debonair, anything-but-immobilized M. Casteene is the unacknowledged director. By rejecting history, the Doctor spares himself much bemusement at such pretty interlacings.

But Stay: this is Writing.

“And you are No Longer in Correspondence with the husband?”

Had not Been in Correspondence with anyone save yourself, you Admitted, since 10/27/53.

“Then there is no reason to fear a replay of the Morgan fiasco,” the Doctor concluded, “which is what you are Thinking of. In any case, you Can No Longer Impregnate; nor can Pocahontas, being divorced, achieve adultery. If it doesn’t work out, Set her up with one of our straighter-looking draft dodgers.”

In his latter years, especially since our removal from west New York to Ontario, the Doctor has become something of a chauvinist in the original sense, and espouses a hawkish line on U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. He takes professional umbrage at what he calls the misuse of the precious word
movement
for an antiwar program whose chief tactic is obstruction by sit-in and going limp. Even the black civil rights movement, earlier in the decade, he would dignify by that term only in its marching, not its sitting, aspect, and he would not sing “We Shall Overcome” except at double its torpid tempo. For the young draft resisters who flock across the Peace Bridge from the States, he has only contempt. There are a number of them among the patients; very few, in your Opinion, suffer from clinical immobility. The Doctor agrees, and dismisses them as “kinetic hypochondriacs”; but they are here for another reason.

“What do the numbers 64502 and 79673 suggest to you, Horner?” In the Progress and Advice Room you can Cross your Legs Comfortably in neither the “masculine” nor the “feminine” manner.

“The second is a postal zip code,” you Hazarded. “Somewhere in Texas. Near Abilene? The first is the population of Clifton, New Jersey, in the 1950 census, give or take a dozen. By 1960 it was up over 82,000.”

“Horner.”

You Sighed. “Zip code and 1960 population, respectively, of a small city in northwestern Missouri.”

“Named for the
first
great cuckold in the Christian tradition. Do you Have him in your Hornbook?”

You Nodded: “After Jason and before Karenin, Alexis. As a saint, he could I Suppose be in the S’s, with Shahryar of
The Thousand and One Nights.”

“Or in the
M
’s? With Menelaus?”

“And Harrison Mack and Malatesta,” you Added Hurriedly. “That’s Francesca da Rimini’s husband Giovanni Malatesta, not her lover Paolo Malatesta. And Isolde’s husband King Mark. And Atalanta’s husband Melanion, a.k.a. Hippomenes, that either Ares or Meleager cuckolded, I Forget which. Also Minos of Crete. But I put Mary’s husband with the
J
’s: Alphabetical Priority.”

“Hum. Inasmuch as the late Rennie Morgan was not Jewish, I presume her husband had her body routinely embalmed, unless he was afraid the undertaker might spread the abortion story. But that would have been uncharacteristically irrational of him, since the county coroner had the facts already. Embalmed or not, that body that you Took such antitherapeutic pleasure in, Horner: do you Know what it looks like now, sixteen years after burial?” You Controlled yourself.

“I don’t either,” the Doctor admitted. “Nor want to. Let her rot in peace. I suppose the Freudians would say that
our
‘Saint Joseph’ became a historian to sublimate his basic necrophilia. It seems as likely to me that necrophilia is an occupational hazard of historians.”

“My Own Guess,” you Offered Quietly, “is that Joe loved his wife very deeply—”

“He should have buried her as deeply.”

“—and never got over her death.”

“What is he here for? Is he really whacked out, or is that his cover for something else?”

You Could Not Resist Inquiring With Some Amusement why the Doctor should worry, the statute having long since run on prosecution for manslaughter and illegal abortion in Rennie’s case. He replied testily that “Saint Joseph” needed no waiver of the statute of limitations to pull a gun and take belated revenge for the loss of his wife, if he was truly deranged. Or, if his condition was feigned, to make difficulties for the Farm with provincial authorities.

“Last and least,” he added, “his arrival here has set back your Own Case about fifteen years, by my reckoning, and that is ostensibly what we are here to talk about. Believe it or not, Horner, there are people who
enjoy their lives.
I am one of them. The Farm is a going concern. We have had less trouble in Fort Erie than anywhere in the States. I have made a few good investments. In two or three years I shall retire in moderate comfort to Switzerland or St. Croix, and you and my son may do what you please with these feebs and freaks. Till then, your Welfare is not unrelated to my own. Are you Quite Sure that this fellow is Morgan in the first place?”

No question, unfortunately, you Declared—though he had obviously changed in appearance and, to some extent, in attitude: his profession that he was Joseph Morgan “only in a sense” was a taunt. You were then Able to Discomfit the Doctor with a Quick Review of “Saint Joseph’s” history: J. Patterson Morgan, born 1923 in Boston, descendant of the Baltimore Pattersons of whom the best-known wed Napoleon’s brother in 1803; served in the navy after high school, in World War II; A.B. in philosophy from Columbia in 1949, courtesy of the G.I. Bill; M.A. in history, 1950, same school, where he met and married Renée MacMahon of Wicomico, Maryland; two children, sons, born 1950 and 1951; Ph.D. work in American history at Johns Hopkins, 1950-52: degree never completed. Thesis subject: The Saving Roles of Innocence and Energy in U.S. Political and Economic History. Dissertation abandoned after death of wife. Assistant professorship of history, Wicomico Teachers College, Maryland, 1952-53, where you First Met and Became Fatally Involved with him and Mrs. M. Resignation requested by WTC President John Schott 10/27/53, to mitigate scandal of Rennie’s death.

Thus much from your Personal Knowledge, from which too you Attested Morgan’s invincible and innocent (but not ingenuous) rationalism, his intellectual and physical energy, his unsanctimonious uprightness of character and brisk Yankee cheerfulness, his intense (and oppressive, and ultimately disastrous) devotion to his wife, her spiritual-intellectual welfare, the purity and clarity of their relation.

“Assez, assez, Horner, for God’s sake.”

The rest you Had chiefly at second hand from Monsieur Casteene, who seemed as always to know everything—and who, not impossibly, played some unacknowledged role in Morgan’s appearance at the Farm. At very least they were professionally acquainted, after a fashion: Casteene himself claimed descent from a line of French-Canadian intrigants concerning whom Morgan once wrote an article—one of a number of terse, seminal sketches mined from his abandoned dissertation, published in historical journals, and much admired by your Informant as well as by the profession. You were Not yourself Acquainted with these publications, but Accepted as Plausible Casteene’s observation that their subjects were chiefly two—great imposturing schemers such as Henry Burlingame III and the Comte de Crillon; and historically important forgeries, like the Lakanal Packet and the Henry Letters—no doubt because the circumstances of his bereavement (whereof Casteene pretends to know nothing) overwhelmed their author with the power of the irrational, the inarticulate, the intuitively guileful and disingenuous, the coolly corrupt.