Thunder and Roses (8 page)

Pellegrini said, “Sanity and maturity are the same thing.”

“Are all children insane?” smiled Miss McCarthy.

“You know what I mean,” said Pellegrini, almost irritably. “Maturity is the condition achieved when sanity exists within an organism at its ontogenetic peak.”

“That’ll hold you,” grinned Robin.

“It won’t hold me,” said Cortlandt. “What do you mean by ‘ontogenetic peak’? The fullest possible development of function and facilities in the animal concerned?”

“That’s right.”

Cortlandt shook his sandy head. “Seems to me I read somewhere that, according to comparative anatomies, among warm-blooded animals, homo sapiens is unique in the fact that physically, he dies of old age before he is fully mature.”

“That’s right,” nodded Dr. Fels. “Just as anatomy comparisons indicate that man should have a period of gestation of eleven months
instead of nine. The law recognizes that one—did you know? Anyhow, in psychiatry we run into immaturity all the time. I might almost say that our job is primarily to mature our patients … man is the only animal which stays kittenish all its life. Maturity to a bull gorilla or a full-grown lion is a very serious thing. The basics become very close—procreation, self-preservation, the hunt. There isn’t time for the playful amusements which preoccupy most of humanity.”

“Ah,” said Robin. “Poetry, then, and music and sculpture—they’re all the results of the same impulses that make a kitten roll a ball of yarn around?”

Fels hesitated. “I—suppose they are, viewed objectively.”

The sandy-haired Cortlandt broke in again. “You just came out with another definition, by implication, Doctor. You said that a psychiatrist’s job is primarily to mature his patients. Maturity, then, would be what a psychiatrist would call adjustment?”

“Or psychic balance, or orgastic potency, or ‘cured,’ ” grinned Robin, “depending on his school.”

Fels nodded. “That would be maturity.”

Miss McCarthy, the pawnbroker’s assistant, had spoken next. “I’m interested,” she said to Pellegrini, “in what you said a moment ago about the onto—uh—that fullest possible development of function and facilities that you were talking about. If it’s true that humans die of old age before they can grow up—then what would one be like if he did fully mature?”

Pellegrini looked startled. The other psychiatrist, Fels, answered. “How can we extrapolate such a thing? It has never happened.”

“Hasn’t it?” asked Robin quietly. No one heard, apparently, but Peg.
What was so different about his face?

Cortlandt said, “That’s quite a thought. In terms of other animals, your fully developed man would be a silent, predatory, cautious, copulating creature to whom life and living was a deadly serious business.”

“No!” said the showgirl unexpectedly and with violence. “You’re turning him into a gorilla instead of a making him something better.”

“Why must he be something better?” asked Robin.

“He would have to be,” said the girl. “I just know it. Maybe he
would be like that if he was just an animal; but a man is more than that. A man’s got something else that—that—” She floundered to a stop, tried again. “I think he would become like—like Christ.”

“Or Leonardo?” mused Cortlandt.

“Well, doctor?” Robin asked Fels.

“Don’t ask me,” said the psychiatrist testily. “You’re out of my field with a thing like this. This is pure fantasy.”

Robin grinned broadly. “Is it, now?”

“It is,” said Fels, and rose. “If you’ll excuse me, it’s getting late, and I have a heavy day tomorrow. Coming, Pellegrini?”

The young doctor half-rose, sat down, blushed, and said, “If you don’t mind, Fels, I’d just as soon—I mean, I’d kind of like to see where this is leading.”

“Into pure fantasy,” reiterated Dr. Fels positively. “Come on.”

“Dr. Fels makes a good point,” said Robin to Pellegrini, not unkindly. “You’d better take his advice.”

Bewildered, not knowing whether he had been asked to leave, torn between his obvious respect for Fels and his desire to pursue the subject, Pellegrini got up and left the table. As he turned away, the elder doctor said to Robin, “You, sir, show an astonishing degree of insight. You should have been a psychologist.”

Robin waved his hand. “I knew you’d understand me, doctor. Good night.”

They all murmured their good-nights. When the psychiatrists were out of earshot, Cortlandt turned to Robin, “Hey,” he said, frowning. “Something happened here that I missed. What was it?”

“Yes,” said Miss McCarthy. “What did he mean by that remark about your insight?”

Robin laughed richly. “Dr. Fels was guarding the young Dr. Pellegrini against evil influences,” he said through his laughter, “and I caught him at it.”

“Evil—what are you talking about?” asked Binnie Morrow.

Robin said patiently, “Do you remember what Fels said a while back—that the business of psychiatry is to mature its patients? He’s right, you know. A psychiatrist regards emotional balance and maturity as almost the same thing. And a patient who has achieved that
kind of balance is one whose inner conflicts are under control. These inner conflicts aren’t just born into a person. A clubfoot or a blind eye or a yearning for a womb with a view produce no conflicts
except in terms of other people;
the thing called society. So—” he spread his heavy hands—“what modern psychiatry strives to do is to mature its patients, not in ontogenetic terms, not on an individualized psychosomatic basis, but purely and necessarily in terms of society, which is in itself illogical, unfunctional, and immature.”

“That makes sense,” said Cortlandt. “Society as a whole gets away with things which are prohibited in any well-run kindergarten, in the violence, greed, injustice, and stupidity departments. We have to wear clothes when the weather’s too hot for it; we have to wear the wrong kind of clothes when the weather’s too cold. We can be excused of any crime if we do it on a large enough scale. We—but why go on? What was Fels protecting Pellegrini from?”

“Any further consideration of maturity in terms of the individual, completely disregarding society. When we started considering the end-product, the extrapolated curve on the graph, we were considering an end which negates everything that modern psychiatry is and is trying to do. So Fels called it fantasy and cleared out.”

“You mean he didn’t want Pellegrini’s fresh young convictions in the worth of psychiatry upset,” said Miss McCarthy sardonically.

“But—” Binnie Morrow’s voice was anxious—“you mean that psychiatry and analysis are worthless?”

“No!” Robin exploded. “I didn’t say that! The psychos are doing a noble job, considering what they’re up against. The fact remains that their chief occupation is in fitting individuals to a smooth survival in a monstrous environment. Fels realizes that very clearly. I don’t think Pellegrini does, yet. He will when he’s been practicing for as long as Fels. But Fels is right; when a youngster has gone as far as an internship there’s no point in shaking him to his roots. Not until he has been practicing long enough to learn the objectivity of competence.”

Cortlandt whistled. “I see what Fels meant by your insight.”

“Cut it out,” smiled Robin. “Let’s get back to maturity, just to sum up. Then I have a date with one Morpheus.… Binnie, you said
that there’s more to a man than his physiology. What’s your idea on what a fully developed, truly mature man would be?”

“What I said before,” murmured the girl. “Like Christ. Someone who would understand everything, and do what he could for people.”

“Cortlandt?”

The salesman shifted his feet. “I don’t know. Maybe Binnie’s right. Maybe it would be like the grim gorilla, too.” He wet his lips. “Maybe both. An extension of the basic urges—hunger and sex and self-preservation, but carried so far that in self-preservation he might try to save humanity purely to keep it from killing him off when everything went to blazes.”

“That’s interesting,” said Robin. “Miss McCarthy?”

“I think,” she said slowly, “that he would be something quite beyond our understanding. I think that physically he would be superb—not muscle-bound, no; but balanced and almost impervious to diseases, with the kind of reflexes which would make him almost invulnerable to any physical accident. But the big difference would be in the mind, and I can’t describe that. He couldn’t describe it himself. If he tried, he would be like a teacher—a really good teacher—trying to teach algebra to a class of well-trained, unusually intelligent—chimpanzees.”

“Superman!” said Robin. “Miss Effingwell?”

He looked directly at Peg, who, just in time, checked herself from looking behind her to see whom he was talking to. “M-me?” she squeaked stupidly. “I really don’t know, Ro—uh, Freddy. I think Miss McCarthy has the right idea. What do you think?”

Laughing, Robin rose and tossed a bill on the table. “It would be a man with such profound understanding that he could define maturity in a sentence. A simple sentence. He wouldn’t be asking other people what they thought. Good night, chillun. Going my way, Miss Effingwell?”

Peg nodded mutely.

“We wus robbed!” Cortlandt called after them. “You have an answer tucked away in your insight, Freddy!”

“Sure I have,” winked Robin, “and I’m taking it outsight with me!”

Followed by reverent groans, Robin and Peg departed.

Out on the street, Robin squeezed her upper arm and said, “Hello, Peg.…” When he spoke quietly, his voice was almost the same as the one she remembered.

She said, “Oh, Robin—”

“How long have you been looking for me?”

“Three months. Ever since you—”

“Yes. Why?”

“I wanted to know how you were. I wanted to know what was happening to you. Your glands—”

“I can assume your clinical interest. That’s not what I meant by
why
. So—why?”

She said nothing. He shrugged. “I know. I just wanted to hear you say it. No—” he said hastily, “don’t say it now. I was playing with you. I’m sorry.”

The “I’m sorry,” was an echo, too. “Where are we going?”

“That depends,” said Robin. “We’ll talk first.”

He led the way across Washington Square South and up wandering West Fourth Street. Around the corner of Barrow Street was a dimly lit restaurant, once a stable, with flagstone flooring and field-stone walls. The tables were candlelit, the candles set in multicolored holders made of the drippings of the countless candles which had glimmered there before. A speaker, high up, murmured classical music. They found a table and Robin ordered sherry. The sound of his voice brought sharply to her their silence with each other; she had never been silent with Robin before. She felt a togetherness, a sharing, which was a new thing; he was not so evident to her as
they
were, listening to the music and watching the tilt and twist of reflected candle flames in the meniscus of their wine.

When the music permitted, and a little after, she asked, “Where have you been?”

“Nowhere. Right here in New York. And in the back room of my Westchester place. Sandy Hook, for a while. You know—around.”

“Why have you been hiding?”

He looked quickly at her and away. “Have I changed?”

“You certainly have.”

“A lot,” he agreed. “And I knew it. I didn’t want anyone else to know it. I didn’t want anyone to watch it happen. It’s happened fast. It’s happening fast. I—I don’t know where it’s going.”

“Have you been sick?”

“Oh, no—well, some aches in my hands and face and feet, and vertigo once in a while. Otherwise I’ve never been better.”

Peg frowned. “Aches … what have you been doing?”

“Oh—a little writing. A lot of reading. I holed up in Westchester with all the books I could think of that I’d ever wanted to read. I got right out of myself for a while. Not for long, though.”

“What happened?”

“It was strange … I got bored. I got so that a paragraph would tell me an author’s style, a page would give me the plot … maybe if I could have become interested in mathematics or something it would have been different. I was suddenly cursed with a thing you might call hyper-understanding. It made me quit working altogether. There was no challenge in anything. I could do anything I wanted to do. I knew how to do it well. I didn’t need to publish anything, or even to write it down. I didn’t need approbation. It was pretty bad for a while. I know what failure is like, and the what’s-the-use feeling. This was worse. This was what’s-the-use—it will succeed.”

“I don’t know that I understand that,” said Peg thoughtfully.

“I hope you never do,” he said fervently.

After a pause, she asked, “Then what did you do?”

“What you saw me doing tonight. Starting arguments.”

“On maturity?” Suddenly she snapped her fingers. “But of course! I should have realized. You added nothing to that discussion—you just kept the ball rolling. But why, Robin?”

He rubbed his knuckles. “I’m—very alone, Peg. I’m a little like Stapledon’s Sirius—I’m the only one of my kind. When I reached a stage of boredom at which I had to find some alternative for suicide, I began to look for something I could have in common with other people. It seemed a slim hope. At first glance, there was nothing which interested me which would interest enough different
kinds
of people to make me want their opinions.”

“There’s always sex,” said Peg facetiously.

“Sex!” he said scornfully. “The American public is basically disinterested in sex.”

“
What!
Robin, you’re mad! Why, every magazine cover, every plot of every book and movie, practically, shouts sex. How can you say a thing like that?”

“If the public were really interested,” he smiled, “do you think they’d need all that high-pressure salesmanship? No, Peg; people are most curious about the same thing that has been bothering me; I happen to be in the odd position of having to face it, which is where I differ from most people.”

“Having to face what?”

“Maturity.”

She stared at him. “And that’s what most people are interested in?”

“Certainly. You heard the argument tonight. I’ve started the same one hundreds of times recently. It’s about all I do, these days. I’ve heard it knocked around in bars, in parks, in subways and buses and parish houses. Try it yourself. Bear in mind, though, that not everyone calls it maturity. Some call it self-help, and where their self-help will get them; others call it wishful thinking. Coué was preaching maturity; so were Philip Wylie and the Federation of Atomic Scientists and Fletcher, with his disgusting idea of chewing each mouthful of food a hundred times; Santayana and Immanuel Kant and Thoreau and, in their twisted ways, Dr. Townsend and Schopenhauer and Adolf Hitler and Billy Sunday were striving toward maturity insofar as maturity represents a greater goal for humanity, or a part of it … it’s a sorry mistake to think one part deserves it over the rest.…”