Letters

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?”