Letters

Then yesterday morning he stepped into your Office here as calmly as he had once into your Office at Wicomico Teachers to discuss your Seduction of his wife. You had Long Since Given Up your Rocking Chair, the motion of which, in the Doctor’s judgment, was more conducive to than protective against immobility. You Sat in your Stiff Ladderback, Contemplating the empty U page in your Hornbook. The inclusion of Odysseus among the O’s was questionable enough in the first instance: it is only a scurrilous early variant of the myth which holds Penelope to have cuckolded him with all 108 of her suitors, plus nine house servants, Phemius the bard, and Melanthius the goatherd. To cross-enter him as Ulysses Seemed a Cheap Shot. Morgan considered the bare walls and floor of the little space, the curtainless window that overlooked the surging river.

“So this is your Life, Jake.”

Your Voice would not Immediately Come.

“Casteene tells me you’ve been with your Quack Friend ever since Wicomico.”

You Put the Hornbook by. “In 1953,” you Answered Finally, “I Decided to Commit Suicide. And I Did.”

Joe leaned against the wall, arms folded, and sniffed. “Dying’s different from this. Dying is something. This is nothing.” You Waited.

“Sixteen years,” he said. “They seem hardly to have touched you.” He surveyed you. “Early Eisenhower haircut. Sears Permapress worsteds. Inch-wide necktie. And a white shirt.” He bent to look at your Feet beneath the unornamented desk where you Do the Farm’s bookkeeping and correspondence, and your Own Scriptotherapy. “With white socks! And low-cut oxfords! All you Need is a batch of freshman theme papers on your Desk and a red pencil behind your Ear. If Rennie were to walk in here, she’d feel right at home with you.”

You Most Certainly Did Not Answer.

“Whereas with me she’d have very little in common anymore, I suppose, even if she recognized me.” He beamed, not warmly. “The sexual revolution, Jacob! Open marriage! Freedom of abortion constitutionally protected! And the Pill, Jacob! Even high school girls get it these days from their family doctors. It makes our old troubles seem as quaint as Loyalty Oaths and existential Angst, doesn’t it?”

“But Alger Hiss isn’t back in the State Department,” you Answered Levelly. “And Rennie’s still dead. What’s the hippie getup for, Joe?”

He replied as aforequoted, cheerily adding: “Indians are Where It’s At these days, Jacob. Very in on the campuses — which you Wouldn’t Recognize anyhow. No Freshman English requirement! No letter-grades! Rap sessions instead of lectures; open admissions; do-it-yourself doctorates. Maoist cadres instead of cheerleaders; acid trips instead of beer blasts; full parietals in the dorms!”

“So I’ve Heard,” you Dryly Acknowledged. “But I Can’t Imagine you’re into all that.”

“Into all that!” Joe echoed with interest. “So he has been touched by the times, after all.”

“What are you here for, Joe?”

“Bad trip in a Seneca longhouse across the river,” he answered. “Doing peyote and rapping about Indian nationalism with friends of my sons, who’re into an independent study project on the subject. I.S.P.‘s are all the rage now, Jacob! They’d heard of this place from their friends in the Movement.”

“You’re not immobilized.”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly self-propelled there for a while. But you Used to Get Around a bit, too, between your Spells of Bad Weather.”

You Did Not Trouble to correct “bad weather” to no weather. “Here I Am,” you Said Simply.

“There you Are. Wondering whether I’ve come at last to pull out the old Colt.45 and blow your Head off. Remember that scene?”

“I’m Not Responsible for either the book or the movie,” you Felt Moved to Declare for What It Might Be Worth. “I did Write a sort of report in ’55: what we call Scriptotherapy. It got left behind in Pennsylvania when we moved out fast.”

“Responsibility never was your Long Suit,” Joe observed. “Maybe I want to see what a corpse looks like sixteen years after. Maybe I’m moonlighting as a technical consultant for a film about the 1812 War. Maybe Casteene and I are secretly organizing a Second Revolution to coincide with the U.S. Bicentennial. Maybe I just want to scare the shit out of you and your Doctor friend.”

You Waited, Speculating which of those maybes could be said to have alphabetical priority.

“Maybe I want you to Rewrite History. Put a different ending on that report.”

You Waited.

“Why not Historiographical Therapy?”

You Did Not Bother to Mention Cliotherapy, a traditional feature of many patients’ schedules despite the Doctor’s own aversion to etiological analysis.

“We historians are always reinterpreting the past,” Joe went on. “But if history is a trauma, maybe the thing to do is redream it.”

“The thing to do,” declared the Doctor when your Account of this conversation had reached this point, “is keep moving in the daytime and take Demerol at night. Get to the dénouement, Horner: narrative suspense does not interest me. What does he want?”