Letters

“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?”