The Thanatos Syndrome

I

1. FOR SOME TIME NOW I have noticed that something strange is occurring in our region. I have noticed it both in the patients I have treated and in ordinary encounters with people. At first there were only suspicions. But yesterday my suspicions were confirmed. I was called to the hospital for a consultation and there was an opportunity to make an examination.

It began with little things, certain small clinical changes which I observed. Little things can be important. Even more important is the ability — call it knack, hunch, providence, good luck, whatever — to know what you are looking for and to put two and two together. A great scientist once said that genius consists not in making great discoveries but in seeing the connection between small discoveries.

For example, a physician I once knew — not a famous professor or even a very successful internist, but a natural diagnostician, one of those rare birds who sees things out of the corner of his eye, so to speak, and gets a hunch — was going about his practice in New Orleans. He noticed a couple of little things most of us would have missed. He had two patients in the same neighborhood with moderate fever, enlarged lymph nodes, especially in the inguinal region. One afternoon as he took his leave through the kitchen of a great house in the Garden District — in those days one still made house calls! — the black cook whom he knew muttered something like: “I sho wish he wouldn’t be putting out that poison where the chirren can get holt of it.” Now most physicians would not even listen or, if they did, would not be curious and would leave with a pleasantry to humor old what’s-her-name. But a good physician or a lucky physician might prick up his ears. There was something about that inguinal node—“Poison? Poison for what? Rats?” “I mean rats.” “You got rats?” “I mean. Look here.” There in the garbage can, sure enough, a very dead rat with a drop of blood hanging like a ruby from its nose. The physician went his way, musing. Something nagged at the back of his head. Halfway down St. Charles, click, a connection was made. He parked, went to a pay phone, called the patient’s father. “Did you put out rat poison in your house?” No, he had not. Is Anne okay? “She’ll be fine but get her to Touro for a test.” At the hospital he aspirated the suspicious inguinal node. Most doctors would have diagnosed mononucleosis, made jokes with the young lady about the kissing disease — So you’re just back from Ole Miss, what do you expect, ha ha. He took the specimen to the lab and told the technician to make a smear and stain with carbol-fuchsin. He took one look. There they were, sure enough, the little bipolar dumbbells of Pasteurella pestis. The plague does in fact turn up from time to time in New Orleans, the nation’s largest port. It’s no big deal nowadays, caught in time. A massive shot of antibiotic and Anne went home.

This is not to suggest that I have stumbled onto another black plague. But if I am right, I have stumbled onto something. It is both a good deal more mysterious and perhaps even more ominous. The trouble is, unfortunately for us psychiatrists, that diagnoses in psychiatry are often more difficult — and less treatable. There is seldom a single cause, a little dumbbell bacillus one can point to, or a single magic bullet one can aim at the tiny villain. Believe it or not, psychiatrists still do not know the cause of the commonest of all human diseases, schizophrenia. They still argue about whether the genes are bad, the chemistry is bad, the psychology is bad, whether it’s in the mind or the brain. In fact, they’re still arguing about whether there is such a thing as the mind.

It began with little things. The other day, for example, I was seeing a patient I hadn’t seen for two years. I’ve been away, but that’s another story. She had a certain mannerism, as do we all, which was as uniquely hers as her fingerprints. If she said something in her usual bantering way and I had the good luck to get behind it, make a stab in the same bantering tone and get it right, she had a way of ducking her head and touching the nape of her neck the way women used to do years ago to check hairpins in a bun and, as a slight color rose in her cheek, cut her eyes toward me under lowered lids almost flirtatiously, then nod ironically. “Uh huh,” she’d say with a smile. She monitored her eyes carefully. A look from her was never a casual thing.

An analyst who sees a patient several times a week for two years and who has his eyes and ears open — especially that third ear Reik talks about which hears what is not said — comes to know her, his patient, in some ways better than her husband, who probably hasn’t taken a good look at her for years.

But last week, when I saw her in the hospital, her mannerism was gone. Her eyes were no longer monitored. A curious business. I’d have noticed it even if I were seeing her for the first time. Women are generally careful of their eyes. She simply gazed at me, not boldly, but with a mild, unfocused gaze. She responded readily enough, but in monosyllables and short phrases, and now and then gave a little start as if she had in some sense or other come to herself. Then she’d drift off again.

To summarize her history in a word or two: She was a New Englander, a Bennington graduate, a shy but assured person who married a high-born, freewheeling Louisiana Creole whom she met at Amherst, a high-roller later in oil leases and real estate. So here she found herself, set down in this spanking new Sunbelt exurb, in a new “plantation-style” house, in a new country club, next to number-six fairway. All at once she became afraid. She was afraid of people, places, things, dogs, the car; afraid to go out of her house, afraid of nothing at all. There are names for her disorder, of course — agoraphobia, free-floating anxiety — but they don’t help much. What to do with herself? She did some painting, not very good, of swamps, cypresses, bayous, Spanish moss, egrets, and such. I thought of her as a housebound Emily Dickinson, but when I saw her on the couch in my office — she had made the supreme effort, gotten in her car, and driven to town — she looked more like Christina in Wyeth’s painting, facing the window, back turned to me, hip making an angle, thin arm raised in a gesture of longing, a yearning toward — toward what?

In her case, the yearning was simple, deceptively simple. If only she could be back at her grandmother’s farm in Vermont, where as a young girl she had been happy.

She had a recurring dream. Hardly a session went by without her mentioning it. It was worth working on. She was in the cellar of her grandmother’s farmhouse, where there was a certain smell which she associated with the “winter apples” stored there and a view through the high dusty windows of the green hills. Though she was always alone in the dream, there was the conviction that she was waiting for something. For what? A visitor. A visitor was coming and would tell her a secret. It was something to work with. What was she, her visitor-self, trying to tell her solitary cellar-bound self? What part of herself was the deep winter-apple-bound self? What part of herself was the deep winter-apple-smelling cellar? The green hills? She was not sure, but she felt better. She was able to leave the house, not to take up golf or bridge with the country-club ladies, but to go abroad to paint, to meadows and bayous. Her painting got better. Her egrets began to look less like Audubon’s elegant dead birds than like ghosts in the swamp.

I contrived that it crossed her mind that her terror might not be altogether bad. What if it might be trying to tell her something, like the mysterious visitor in her dream? I seldom give anxious people drugs. If you do, they may feel better for a while, but they’ll never find out what the terror is trying to tell them. At any rate, it set her wondering and made her life more tolerable. She wasn’t afraid of being afraid. We were getting somewhere.

Now here she is two years later, back in the hospital, again facing the window. But no yearning Christina she. More like a satisfied Duchess of Alba, full round arm lying along sumptuous curve of hip.

“Mickey,” I said.

She turned to face me with a fond, unsurprised gaze, eyes not quite focused, not quite converging.

“Well well well,” said Mickey. “My old pal Doc.”

Never, not in a state of terror or out of it, would she have called me that. She was one of the few patients who called me Tom.

“You’re looking very well, Mickey.”

I must have been leaning toward her, for my hand was propped on the edge of her bed. Her arm fell on my hand, the warm ventral flesh of her forearm imprisoning my fingers.

“Well, yes.” She lay back, settling her body, giving the effect somehow of straddling a little under the covers.

I remember registering disappointment. The flatness of her gaze gave the effect one senses in some women who have given up on the mystery of themselves and taken somebody else’s advice: Be bold, be assertive.

“Old Doc.” Her chin settled into her full throat, luxuriating. “You really did it, didn’t you?”

“Did what?”

“Blew it.”

“You mean—”

“Do you think people don’t know where you’ve been for two years?”

It is not necessary to reply. She has already drifted, eyes unconverged, gazing past me.

“Mickey, did you want this consultation, or was it Dr. Comeaux’s idea?”

“Old Doc.” My fingers are still imprisoned under her arm. “I was always on your side. I defended you.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m just fine, Doc.”

“You mean you didn’t send for me?”

“Mickey’s glad to see you, Doc. Come by me.”

“I’m by you.” Come by me. That’s Louisiana talk, not New England. “If you’re feeling fine, Mickey, what are you doing here?” I look at her chart. She’s not on medication.

“I got it all, Doc. Did you know I was a rich bitch?”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“Did you know Durel and I own the biggest hunter-jumper ranch in the parish?”

“Yes, I knew that. Then why—”

“We got it made. You want to know the name?”

“The name?”

“Bar-in-Circle Ranch.” She released my hand and showed me the bar and circle with her fingers. She winked at me, like a schoolchild who’s just learned a dirty joke. “You like that?”

“Sure.” I’m reading her chart. “Mickey, it doesn’t seem that things are so fine here. It seems there was an incident at the ranch with a groom, a fire, your prize stallion destroyed in the fire.”

“He was coming on to me,” said Mickey idly.

“According to this, he was a thirteen-year-old boy and the complaint by his parents was that it was you coming on to him.”

She shrugged, but was not really interested enough to argue. Am I mistaken or is there not a sort of horsewoman’s swagger as she moves her legs under the covers? “That stallion was a killer, Doc. Now. How about you?”

“What about me?”

“You know where the ranch is.”

“Yes.”

“And you got your troubles.”

“So?”

“So you come on out by me. Durel likes you too.”

As I listen to her and flip through the chart, something pops into my head. For some reason — perhaps it is her disconnectedness — she reminds me of my daughter as a four-year-old. It is the age when children have caught on to language, do not stick to one subject, are open to any subject, would as soon be asked any question as long as one keeps playing the language game. A child does not need a context like you and me. Mickey LaFaye, like four-year-old Meg, is out of context.

“Mickey, what is today?”

“Monday,” she says, unsurprised. I am right. She gives me the day and the date willingly.

Then it was that I had my wild idea, my piece of luck — perhaps it was part of my own nuttiness — which first put me on the track of this strange business.

“Mickey,” I asked her, “what date will Easter fall on next year?”

Again no surprise, no shifting of gears from one context to another. There is no context. What I do notice is that for a split second her eyes go up into her eyebrows, as if she were reading a printout.

She gives me the date. I wouldn’t know, of course. Later I looked it up. She was right.

She gives me other dates. They were right. I ask her where St. Louis is. She tells me where St. Louis is. Now everybody knows where St. Louis is, but people generally don’t answer the question Where is St. Louis? asked out of the blue, without wanting to know why you ask, unless they are playing Trivial Pursuit.

Then is she an idiot savant, one of those people who don’t have sense enough to come out of the rain but can tell you what is 4,891 times 23,547 by reading off some computer inside their head? I did not know at the time, but I knew later. No, she was not.

I gaze down at her, my arms folded over the chart. What has happened to her? How can she be at once as innocent as a four-year-old and as blowsy as the Duchess of Alba? At the time I had no idea.

“Mickey, what about the dream?”

“Dream?”

“The dream of Vermont, your grandmother’s cellar, the smell of winter apples, the visitor who was coming.”

“The dream.” For a moment she seemed to become her old self, to go deep, search inward. She seemed to reach for something, almost find it. She frowned and shrugged. “Dream of Jeannie, Doc. That’s what Bobby calls me. Jean’s my real name. Jeannie with the light brown hair. You like?”

“Yes. Bobby?”

“Bob Comeaux. Doctor Comeaux, Doc.”

“I know.” I turn to leave.

“Doc.”

“Yes?”

“You call Bobby.”

“I will.”

“Bobby wants something.”

“All right.”

“And what Bobby wants—”

“All right,” I say quickly, suddenly needing to leave. “So I ask Dr. Comeaux and he’ll tell me?”

“Yes.” Her legs thrash enthusiastically.

I leave, knowing very little, not even who called me for a consultation or why. I will ask Dr. Comeaux.

2. A STRANGE CASE, yes, but nothing to write up for the JAMA. Indeed, I couldn’t make head or tail of it at the time, the bizarre business with the boy and the stallion, but mainly the change in Mickey LaFaye. But what physician has not had patients who don’t make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they’re our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

Here’s another mini-case, not even a case but a fifteen-second encounter with an acquaintance even as I left Mickey’s room and started down the hall, musing over the change in Mickey. How much of the change, I was wondering, comes from my two years away and the change in me?

Here’s old Frank Macon, polishing the terrazzo floor. I saw him a week ago, just after I returned. Frank Macon is a seventy-five-year-old black janitor. I have known him for forty years. He used to train bird dogs when there were still quail around here. Then as now he was polishing the terrazzo with a heavy rotary brush. From long practice he was using the machine well, holding back on one handle to give it a centripetal swing until it caromed off the concave angle of the wall to propel itself back by the torque of the brush. I broke his rhythm. He switched off the motor and eyed me. He clapped his hands softly and gave me one of his, a large meaty warm slab, callused but inert.

“Look who’s back!” he cried, casting a muddy eye around and past me. He throws up an arm. “Whoa!”

“How you doing, Frank!”

“Fine! But look at you now! You looking good! You looking good in the face and slim, not poorly like you used to.”

“You’re looking good too, Frank.”

“You must have been doing some yard work,” says Frank, good eye gleaming slyly.

“Yes,” I say, smiling. He’s guying me. It’s an old joke between us.

“I knowed they couldn’t keep you! People talking about trouble. I say no way. No way Doc going to be in trouble. Ain’t no police going to hold Doc for long. People got too much respect for Doc! I mean.” Again he smote his hands together, not quite a clap but a horny brushing past, signifying polite amazement. He turned half away, but one eye still gleamed at me.

One would have to be a Southerner, white or black, to understand the complexities of this little exchange. Seemingly pleasant, it was not quite. Seemingly a friend in the old style, Frank was not quite. The glint of eye, seemingly a smile of greeting, was not. It was actually malignant. Frank was having a bit of fun with me, I knew, and he knew that I knew, using the old forms of civility to say what he pleased. What he was pleased to say was: So you got caught, didn’t you, and you got out sooner than I would have, didn’t you? Even his pronunciation of police as pó-lice was overdone and farcical, a parody of black speech, but a parody he calculated I would recognize. Actually he’s a deacon and uses a kind of churchy English: Doctor, what we’re gerng to do is soliciting contributions for a chicken-dinner benefit the ladies of the church gerng to have Sunday, and suchlike.

I value his honesty — even his jeering. He knew this and we parted amiably. We understand each other. He reminds me of the Russian serfs Tolstoy wrote about, who spoke bluntly to their masters, using the very infirmity of their serfdom as a warrant to scold: Stepan Stepanovitch, you’re a sinful man! Mend your ways!

“How Miss Ellen doing?” he asked, playing out the game of Southern good manners.

“Just fine, and your family?” I said, watching him closely. Am I mistaken or is there not a glint of irony in his muddy eye at the mention of my wife’s name?

That was my encounter with Frank Macon a week ago, a six-layered exchange beyond the compass of any known science of communication but plain as day to Frank and me.

This is my encounter with Frank this morning, in the same hospital, the same corridor, the same Frank swinging the same brush. He simply stepped aside, not switching off the machine, neither servile nor sullen, not ironical, not sly, not farcical, not in any way complex, but purely and simply perfunctory.

“How you doing, Frank?”

“Good morning, Doctor.”

“Still featherbedding—” I begin in our old chaffing style, but he cuts me off with, of all things, “Have a nice day, Doctor”— and back to his polishing without missing the swing of the machine. I could have been any doctor, anybody.

Here again, a small thing. Nothing startling. He might simply have decided to dispose of me with standard U.S. politeness, which is indeed the easiest way to get rid of people. Have a nice day—

Or he might have decided that the ultimate putdown is this same American civility. What better dismissal than to treat someone you’ve known for forty years like a drive-up customer at Big Mac’s?

Or: Feeling bad, tired, old, out of it, he might have drawn a blank.

Or: Something strange has happened to him.

3. THEN ALONG CAME MY second case, which gave me my first clue that something queer might be going on hereabouts, that Mickey LaFaye was not just a solitary nut.

Donna S—, a former patient, called to make an appointment.

It was last Wednesday afternoon. Downtown was deserted. The banks were closed. The other doctors were playing golf. They’ve mostly moved out to the malls and the hospital parks, where they’ve built pleasant plantation-style offices with white columns and roofs of cypress shakes.

Here I am, waiting for her, not exactly besieged by patients, sitting on the front porch of my office, my father’s old coroner’s building behind the courthouse, a pleasant little Cajun cottage of weathered board-and-batten and a rusty tin roof. It is October but it feels like late summer, the first hint of fall gentling the Louisiana heat, the gum leaves beginning to speckle. I am watching the sparrows who have taken over my father’s martin hotel. The cicadas start up in the high rooms of the live oaks, fuguing one upon the other.

I am the only poor physician in town, the only one who doesn’t drive a Mercedes or a BMW. I still drive the Chevrolet Caprice I owned before I went away. It is a bad time for psychiatrists. Old-fashioned shrinks are out of style and generally out of work. We, who like our mentor Dr. Freud believe there is a psyche, that it is born to trouble as the sparks fly up, that one gets at it, the root of trouble, the soul’s own secret, by venturing into the heart of darkness, which is to say, by talking and listening, mostly listening, to another troubled human for months, years — we have been mostly superseded by brain engineers, neuropharmacologists, chemists of the synapses. And why not? If one can prescribe a chemical and overnight turn a haunted soul into a bustling little body, why take on such a quixotic quest as pursuing the secret of one’s very self?

Anyhow, there I sat, waiting for Donna and making little paper P-51s and sailing them into the sparrows flocking at the martin house. I have had enough practice and gotten good enough with the control surfaces so that the little planes generally made a climbing turn, a chandelle, and came back.

Here comes Donna, swinging along under the oaks. A stray shaft of yellow sunlight touches fire to her coppery hair.

I watch her. She’s a big girl but not fat anymore. Not even stout or “heavy,” as one might say hereabouts. But certainly not fat in the sense that once it was the only word for her, even though physicians, who have an unerring knack for the wrong word, would describe her on her chart as a “young obese white female.”

Then she was plain and simply fat. She was also, or so it seemed, jolly and funny, the sort described by her friends as nice as she could be. If she were put up for a sorority in college, she would be recommended as a “darling girl.” And if one of her sisters wanted to fix her up with a blind date, the word would be: She has a wonderful sense of humor. She was the sort of girl you’d have gotten stuck with at a dance and you’d have known it and she’d have known that you knew it and you’d have both felt rotten. Girls still have a rotten time of it, worse than boys, even fat boys.

I used to see her alone at Big Mac’s: in midafternoon, I because I had forgotten to eat lunch, she because she had eaten lunch and was already hungry again; at four in the afternoon with a halfpounder, a large chocolate shake, and three paper boats of french fries lined up in front of her. Pigging out, as she called it.

She was referred to me by more successful physicians who’d finally thrown up their hands — What do I want with her, they’d tell me, the only trouble with her is she eats too damn much, I’ve got people in real trouble, and so on — as a surgeon might refer a low-back pain to a chiropractor: He may be a quack but he can’t do you any harm. Maybe she’s got a psychiatric problem, Doc.

Actually I helped her and ended up liking her and she me. Yes, she had always been “nice.” “Nice” in her case had a quite definite meaning. It meant always doing what one was supposed to do, what her mamma and papa wanted her to do, what her teacher wanted her to do, what her boss wanted her to do. Surely if you do what you’re supposed to do, things will turn out well for you, won’t they? Not necessarily. In her case they didn’t. She felt defrauded by the world, by God. So what did she do? She got fat.

She started out being nice as pie with me. She listened intently, spoke intelligently, read books on the psychiatry of fatness, used more psychiatric words than I did. She was the perfect patient, mistress of the couch, dreamer of perfect dreams, confirmer of all theories. All the more reason why she was startled when I asked her why she was so angry. She was, of course, and of course it came out. She couldn’t stand her mother or father or herself or God — or me. For one thing, she had been sexually molested by her father, then blamed by her mother for doing the very thing her mother had told her to do: Be nice. So she couldn’t stand the double bind of it, being nice to Daddy, doing what Daddy wanted, and believing him and liking it, oh yes, did she ever (yes, that’s the worst of it, the part you don’t read about), and then being called bad by Mamma and believing her too. A no-win game, for sure. So what to do? Eat. Why eat? To cover up the bad beautiful little girl in layers of fat so Daddy wouldn’t want her? To make herself ugly for boys so nobody but Daddy would want her?

I couldn’t say, nor could she, but I was getting somewhere with her. First, by giving her permission to give herself permission to turn loose her anger, not on them at first, but on me and here where she felt safe. She didn’t know she was angry. There is a great difference between being angry and knowing that you are angry. We made progress. One day she turned over on the couch and looked at me with an expression of pure malevolence. Her lips moved. “Eh?” I said. “I said you’re a son of a bitch too,” she said. “Is that right? Why is that?” I asked. “You look a lot like him.” “Is that so?” “That’s so. A seedy but kindly gentle wise Atticus Finch who messed with Scout. Wouldn’t Scout love that?” she asked me. “Would she?” I asked her. She told me.

She lost her taste for french fries, lost weight, took up aerobic dancing, began to have dates. She discovered she was a romantic. At first she talked tough, in what she took to be a liberated style. “I know what you people think — it all comes down to getting laid, doesn’t it? — well, I’ve been laid like you wouldn’t dream of,” she said with, yes, a sneer. “You people?” I asked her mildly. “Who are you people?” “You shrinks,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t know what you think and probably want.” “All right,” I said. But what she really believed in was nineteenth-century romantic love — perhaps even thirteenth-century. She believed in — what? — a knight? Yes. Or rather a certain someone she would meet by chance. It was her secret hope that in the ordinary round of life there would occur a meeting of eyes across a room, a touch of hands, then a word or two from him. “Look, Donna,” he would say, “it’s very simple. I have to see you again”—the rich commerce of looks and words. It would occur inevitably, yet by chance. The very music of her heart told her so. She believed in love. Isn’t it possible, she asked me, to meet someone like that — and I would know immediately by his eyes — who loved you and whom you loved? Well yes, I said. I agreed with her and suggested only that she might not leave it all to chance. In chance the arithmetic is bad. After all, there is no law against looking for a certain someone.

After hating me, her surrogate seedy Atticus Finch, she loved me, of course. I was the one who understood her and gave her leave. Our eyes met in love. It was a good transference. She came to understand it as such. She did well. She was working on her guilt and terror, the terror of suspecting it was her fault that Daddy had laid hands on her and that they’d had such a good time. She got a good job at a doctor’s office — as a receptionist, did well — and got engaged.

I didn’t share her faith in the inevitability of meeting a certain someone by chance, but I do have my beliefs about people. Otherwise I couldn’t stand the terrible trouble people get themselves into and the little I can do for them. My science I got from Dr. Freud, a genius and a champion of the psyche—Seele, he called it, yes, soul — even though he spent his life pretending there was no such thing. I am one of the few left, yes, a psyche-iatrist, an old-fashioned physician of the soul, one of the last survivors in a horde of Texas brain mechanics, M.I.T. neurone circuitrists.

My psychiatric faith I got in the old days from Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan, perhaps this country’s best psychiatrist, who, if not a genius, had a certain secret belief which he himself could not account for. Nor could it be scientifically proven. Yet he transmitted it to his residents. It seemed to him to be an article of faith, and to me it is as valuable as Freud’s genius. “Here’s the secret,” he used to tell us, his residents. “You take that last patient we saw. Offhand, what would you say about him? A loser, right? A loser by all counts. You know what you’re all thinking to yourself? You’re thinking, No wonder that guy is depressed. He’s entitled to be depressed. If I were he, I’d be depressed too. Right? Wrong. You’re thinking the most we can do for him is make him feel a little better, give him a pill or two, a little pat or two. Right? Wrong. Here’s the peculiar thing and I’ll never understand why this is so: Each patient this side of psychosis, and even some psychotics, has the means of obtaining what he needs, she needs, with a little help from you.”

Now, I don’t know where he got this, from Ramakrishna, Dr. Jung, or Matthew 13:44. Or from his own sardonic Irish soul. But there it is. “Okay, that patient may look like a loser to you — incidentally, Doctors, how do we know you don’t look like losers to me, or I to you?” said Dr. Sullivan, a small ferret-faced man with many troubles. But there it was, to me the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in a field, that is to say, the patient’s truest unique self which lies within his, the patient’s, power to reach and which we, as little as we do, can help him reach.

Do you know that this is true? I don’t know why or how, but it is true. People can get better, can come to themselves, without chemicals and with a little help from you. I believed him. Amazing! I’m amazed every time it happens.

Very well, I am an optimist. I was an optimist with Donna. I was willing to explore her romanticism with her. What I believed was not necessarily that her knight might show up — who knows? he could — but rather that talking and listening ventilates the dark cellars of romanticism. She needed to face the old twofaced Janus of sex: how could it be that she, one and the same person, could slip off of an afternoon with Daddy, her seedy Atticus Finch, do bad thrilling things with him, and at the same time long for one look from pure-hearted Galahad across a crowded room? Daddy had got to be put together with Galahad, because they belonged to the same forlorn species, the same sad sex. She was putting it together in me, who was like her daddy but had no designs on her and whom she trusted. She could speak the unspeakable to me. Sometimes I think that is the best thing we shrinks do, render the unspeakable speakable.

So here she is two years later. I watch her curiously as she comes up the porch steps. She looks splendid, a big girl yes, but no fat girl she. She’s wearing a light summery skirt of wrinkled cotton in the new style, slashed up the thigh and flared a little. Her hair is pulled up and back, giving the effect of tightening and shortening her cheek. With her short cheek, flared skirt, and thick Achilles tendon, she reminded me of one of Degas’s ballet girls, who, if you’ve noticed, are strong working girls with big muscular legs.

I try to catch her eye, but she brushes past me, swinging her old drawstring bag, and strides into my office. She ignores the couch. Seated, we face each other across the desk.

Her gaze is pleasant. Her lips curve in a little smile, something new. Is she being ironic again?

“Well?” I say at last.

“Well what?” she replies equably.

“How have you been?”

“Oh, fine,” she says, and falls silent. “How about you?” Yes, she is being ironic.

“I’m all right.”

“I see”—and again falls silent, but equably and with no sense of being at a loss.

“Do you wish to resume therapy?”

She shakes her head but goes on smiling.

“It was you who called me, Donna.”

“I know.”

I wait for her to start up. She doesn’t. I decide to wait her out.

Finally she says, “I knew you were back.”

“And you wanted to wish me well.”

“I saw you in the store.”

“I see.” Something stirs in the back of my head.

“I often see your wife in the store.”

“Is that right?”

“She’s your second wife, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“She is often with that famous scientist, or is he a bridge player, anyway a close friend, I’m sure.” Again the lively look. Again the stirring just above my hairline.

“Donna, I’m sure you didn’t come here to tell me you saw my second wife at the store.” “No.” She opens her mouth and closes it.

When patients get stuck, you usually get them off dead center by asking standard questions, as if you were seeing them for the first time.

“Are you still working at the clinic?”

“Yes”—neutrally. Again she falls silent, but without a trace of the old unease or hostility.

“How does it go?”

“Oh, fine.”

As we gaze at each other, the stirring at the back of my head comes up front. I have the same nutty idea.

“Where do you live now, Donna?”

“In Cut Off, Louisiana.” Her reply is as prompt and triumphant as if I had at last hit on the right question.

“I see. Where is Cut Off, Donna?”

Her eyes move up a little as if she were consulting a map over my head. “Cut Off, Louisiana, is sixty-one miles southwest of New Orleans.” There is no map over my head.

“Very good, Donna. Donna, where is Arkansas?”

Again the eyes going up into her eyebrows. “Arkansas is bounded on the north by—”

“That’s fine, Donna, I see that you know. Give me your hand, Donna.”

She gives me her right hand across the desk. I had thought she was right-handed, but needed to be sure. I look at it, the broad thumb, the short nail. I remember dreaming of her once, making much in the dream of a certain stubbiness of hand and foot. Her foot does in fact have an exaggerated arch, like a dancer’s. A broad quick little hoofed mare of a girl she was in the dream.

I look into her eyes, which are dilated and dark with pupil. Again she reminds me of Degas girls, with their big black eye dots.

“Are you taking any medicine, Donna?”

She shakes her head quickly. How do I know, as certainly as if she were a four-year-old, that she is telling the truth?

“Donna, make a circle with your thumb and forefinger like this and look at me through it, like so.”

She does. She looks at me through the circle with her left eye. Ordinarily in a right-handed person, the right eye is dominant.

I am musing but rouse myself. I’ll muse later.

“Donna, is there anything I can do for you?” She shakes her head, almost merrily.

“Donna, why did you come to see me? What do you want?” Although I had not yet got onto this peculiar business, I already knew — with her as well as with Mickey LaFaye — that I could ask her any question in any context.

Her eyes are focused above me. She nods toward something. “That.”

I turn around in my chair. There in the bookshelf, in a space between two bookends, squats a little pre-Columbian figurine, a mud-colored, sausage-shaped woman with a large abdomen. A patient with mystical expectations from a trip to Mexico and some Mayan ruins had given it to me. Her mystical Mexican expectations didn’t pan out. They seldom do.

“You like that?” I ask Donna.

She nods.

“Would you like to have it?”

She nods eagerly, the same quick assent of a four-year-old.

“Why?” I am curious. Is it because it is fat and fertile? Because it is mine? Because it is Mexican? Does she have the Mexican itch?

“Something I need.”

“It is something you need?”

“Yes, I need.”

I need? A curious expression. I get up to get it to give it to her. Not hearing her chair scrape, I am startled when at the very moment I turn around, I run into her. She has come around my desk, barefoot and silent. She backs into me.

“Oh, sorry,” I say automatically, moving sideways to my chair, but she has already reached behind her, seized my hands, brought them around her clasped in hers and against her. She presses the figurine in my hand against her body.

“What’s this about, Donna?”

By way of answer, she cranes her head back into my neck and begins turning to and fro. I begin to free my hands. She tightens her grip. “You know.”

“Know what?”

“Donna needs you.”

“No, Donna doesn’t. We’ve been through all that, remember? First the hatred, then the love, neither of which had anything to do with me. We got past it, remember?”

She’s turning to and fro. “I always liked to smell you. You in your seersuckers, not young not old, but like—?”

“Like Atticus?”

“Yeah.” She nods but is not heeding.

She is engaging me, so to speak. To describe her backward embrace, I can only use the word primatologists use, presenting. She was presenting rearward. Enough of this. What probably saved me from the erotic power of her move was its suddenness and oddness.

She reaches back for me, clasping her hands at the back of my neck.

“You smell like—”

“Like your father?”

That did it. As suddenly as she started, she stops and goes stiff.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, and turn her, not to face me, but to get her back to her chair with minimal embarrassment. She is not embarrassed. But her face is heavy and lengthened, mouth pulled down like a sulky child.

“It’s okay, Donna.”

“Okay.” She’s not badly put off.

I look at her for a while. Something crosses my mind.

“Donna, do you wish to come back next week?”

“Yes.” An ordinary, perfunctory yes.

“All right. You come back. Meet me at the hospital. Same time. I want to run a few tests on you. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She’s up and off, swinging her bag, as carelessly as she came.

It is only after she’s left that I discover I’ve broken out in a sweat. There’s this business about seductive patients, known even to Hippocrates, and no credit to the physician — consider old funny-looking Hippocrates, who probably smelled stronger than I or Atticus Finch. But seductive is seductive, more or less, sometimes more than less. Ahem. What to do. One thing to do is open lower right desk drawer, remove fifth of Jack Daniel’s from where it’s been for two years, still half full and two years older, pour four fingers into a water glass, knock back. Ahem. That’s better.

4. IS THERE A COMMONALITY between these two cases? Have I been away so long and lived so strangely that everyone else seems strange? No, there’s something wrong with these women. And with Frank Macon. Two cases are too few even to suggest a syndrome, but I am struck by certain likenesses … In each there has occurred a sloughing away of the old terrors, worries, rages, a shedding of guilt like last year’s snakeskin, and in its place is a mild fond vacancy, a species of unfocused animal good spirits. Then are they, my patients, not better rather than worse? The answer is unclear. They’re not on medication. They are not hurting, they are not worrying the same old bone, but there is something missing, not merely the old terrors, but a sense in each of her — her what? her self? The main objective clue so far is language. Neither needs a context to talk or answer. They utter short two-word sentences. They remind me of the chimp Lana, who would happily answer any question any time with a sign or two to get her banana. Both women will answer a question like Where is Chicago? agreeably and instantly and by consulting, so to speak, their own built-in computer readouts. You wouldn’t. You’d want to know why I wanted to know. You’d want to relate the question to your — self.

I’m sitting on the porch again, not sailing airplanes but musing and keeping one eye on my watch — I have to meet Max and Bob, my “parole officers,” at two — when suddenly I get a flash. Well, not quite a flash, but a notion. Could it be that—

Could it be that there has occurred in both Mickey and Donna some odd suppression of cortical function?

I am thinking of my sole contribution to medical science, a paper I wrote some years ago after an explosion in the physics lab at Tulane on the effect of a heavy-sodium fallout on the inhibitory function of the cerebral cortex on sexual behavior, which earned me a write-up in Time and some small local fame. I did in fact make a contribution toward the development of the present-day CORTscan, a scanning device for measuring localized cerebral functions. But there’s no reason to suspect a heavy-sodium factor in these cases. There’s been no explosion. It is true that the nuclear facility at Grand Mer has a sodium reactor, but there’s been no accident — or even an “occurrence,” as they call it.

But accident or not, are there not signs of a suppression of cortical function in Mickey and Donna? I’m thinking particularly of the posterior speech center, Wernicke’s area, Brodmann 39 and 40, in the left brain of right-handed people. It is not only the major speech center but, according to neurologists, the locus of self-consciousness, the “I,” the utterer, the “self”—whatever one chooses to call that peculiar trait of humans by which they utter sentences and which makes them curious about how they look in a mirror — when a chimp will look behind the mirror for another chimp.

Yes, I’ve been away, and yes, I’ve not been so well myself. But there’s an advantage in absence and return. One notices changes which other people don’t. Tommy has grown six inches, hadn’t you noticed? Betty looks ill. Mickey and Donna? Maybe they, my patients, are not crazy, but something’s going on here. What I need is objective evidence, more cases …

But first I must convince Max and Bob that I am not crazy myself, or at least no crazier than most doctors.

5. MEET BOB COMEAUX and Max in Bob’s splendid office in Fedville, the federal complex housing the qualitarian center, communicable diseases control, and the AIDS quarantine. He’s at the top now, director of something or other — Quality of Life Division, or something like — in the penthouse of the monolith with a splendid panoramic view of the river in its great sweep from the haze of Baton Rouge to the south to the wooded loess hills of St. Francisville to the north. Except for the cooling tower of Grand Mer looming directly opposite and flying its plume of steam like Mt. St. Helens, it could be the same quaint lordly river of Mark Twain, its foul waters all gold and rose in the sunset. There’s even a stern-wheeler, the new Robert E. Lee, huffing upstream, hauling tourists to the plantations.

Max and Bob are cordial and uneasy, having no stomach for this chore, riding herd on a colleague — what doctor would? Ordinarily we get along with standard medical jokes and doctors’ horsing around, but this business is official, legal, and awkward.

Accordingly, they go out of their way to be easy, yawn and stretch a lot, sit anywhere but in chairs. Bob is dressed for riding, in flared stretch pants, field boots, and suede jacket, as if he had dropped in from the stables. There’s a connection between us. We went to the same medical school in the East and so we talk about Murray’s Bar and Grill on upper Broadway and old Doc So-and-so at Columbia-Presbyterian, as if we were classmates. In fact, we didn’t even know each other. He was some years after me. He’s from Long Island, but is very much the Southern horseman now, as handsome as Blake Carrington, with his steel-gray eyes and steel-gray sideburns brushed straight back like the rest of his hair, and his easy way of half sitting on his desk, swinging one leg and leaning over, hands in pockets. There is not a single wrinkle on his smooth tanned face except for a fold of skin at the corner of each eye, which gives him a slightly Oriental look.

There is a manila file on the desk next to his thigh.

Max doesn’t do as good a job at acting casual. He’s dressed too carefully in suit and vest, like a local doctor summoned before a congressional committee. He’s concerned about me and seems at a loss — Max of all people — not knowing what to say except to express his concern. “You’re okay, Tom?” he asks softly, keeping hold of my hand after the handshake. “Sure.” “Are you sure?” he asks. “Sure.”

For some reason I become aware of my seedy suit. Ellen is not around much and I pay no attention to what I wear. I haven’t got around to buying clothes since my return. My cousin Lucy calls it my Bruno Hauptmann suit, a ten-year-old double-breasted broad-stripe seersucker, which I wasn’t even aware I was wearing until suddenly it feels dank and heavy.

“Let’s get this over with, guys,” says Bob Comeaux briskly, leaning over his hands and swinging his leg. “So we can have a drink or something. I got to muck out a stall.” This, we understand, is in a manner of speaking.

“Right,” says Max. Max and I are now sitting like patients in two chairs facing Bob Comeaux’s splendid desk.

“Oh, say, Tom,” says Bob Comeaux.

“Yes?”

“Thanks for looking in on Mrs. LaFaye this morning. I appreciate it.”

“Glad to. As a matter of fact, I’d like to speak to you, to both of you, about the clinical changes in her. I have an idea that—”

“Yeah, sure,” says Bob, looking at his watch. “We’ll do that.”

“I’m also a bit confused about the consultation. It was never made clear to me who requested it.”

“We’ll get into that too. Right now, what say if we do the boiler plate and get the official crud out of the way.”

“Fine,” I say.

“Yes,” says Max. “Here’s what I suggest—”

“Let’s do it by the book, guys,” says Bob Comeaux, removing his hands from his pockets and clapping one softly into the other. “What I’m proposing is that, at least for the time being, Tom come aboard here in my division. It’s not just a matter of my making room for him — hell, I’ve been after him for years and he can write his own ticket — and he won’t need a license.”

“Wait,” says Max. “Hold it, Doctor.” Max holds up a hand like the Tulane professor that he is, flagging down an errant intern on grand rounds. “Let’s just hold it a second.”

“Very well, Doctor,” says Bob Comeaux gravely. “What’s the problem?”

“No problem. Possibly a misunderstanding. My understanding is that Dr. More wants to return to private practice. Has, in fact. Isn’t that so, Tom?”

“That’s so,” I say, thinking for some reason about an expression in Mickey LaFaye’s eyes, in Donna’s eyes. There was something about her, them — There was something like—

“I understand! I read you, Doctor! And believe me, there is nothing I admire more about us old-time clinicians, ha, than our concern for the traditional one-on-one doctor-patient relationship. But we got a little problem here.”

“What’s the problem?” says Max in his old ironic style. Max is upset about something. I am noting that for some reason Bob Comeaux is striving for standard medical heartiness and not succeeding; is, in fact, doing very badly.

“The problem, fellows,” says Bob Comeaux, looking up for the first time and smiling his rueful attractive smile, “is that Tom’s license to practice is in bureaucratic limbo. Theoretically he has a probationary license, but that leaves him open to malpractice suits and any cop who wants to lean on him. What I’m saying is that I can take him aboard here and he can do what he pleases, licensed or not.”

“That’s ridiculous,” says Max to me. “That’s wrong!”

“What’s ridiculous?” asks Bob Comeaux, puzzled.

“That he has to report to us on his practice.”

Bob Comeaux leans forward over his pocketed hands, frowning but not unpleasantly. “I’m not clear, Max. Do you mean that we both agree that Tom should be practicing any kind of medicine he pleases? Or do you mean that he was wrongfully deprived of his license?”

“I mean it’s wrong! The whole damn thing.”

We fall silent. Max’s defense of me is loud and lame.

I am thinking that I should be experiencing a sinking of heart at Max’s lame defense of me, but that I’m not. Instead, I find myself watching Bob Comeaux curiously. There is a new assurance about him. I observe that when he leans over, and now when he takes his hands out of his pockets and folds them across his chest, grasping his suede-clad arms, at the same time sitting-leaning gracefully, one haunch on the desk, he is doing so consciously and well. There is a space between what he is and what he is doing. He is graceful and conscious of his gracefulness, like an actor.

Max is nothing of the sort. He is upset and at a loss. Max suddenly looks tired and old. No longer the bright young Jesus among the elders, planes of his temples flashing light, amazing the older staff physicians with his knowledge, he sounds more like a Jewish mother. He moralizes: This is wrong, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.

But Max revives, perks up, sits erect. “Excuse me, Bob, but this is all a lot of humbug. The fact is that is why we are here: to review Dr. More’s competence and integrity, which I’m assuming is not in question here, and as members of the ethics committee of the medical society to recommend to the state board that his license be reinstated in full, which will then occur as a matter of course, right?”

“Right. Except for one annoying little glitch like I told you,” says Bob Comeaux patiently. He looks both genial and doleful.

“What glitch?”—Max, cocking his head.

“You know as well as I do, Max,” says Bob Comeaux wearily. “In the case of a felony count, even with our recommendation, a license can only be reinstated after a year’s probationary service under our supervision — which is exactly what I’m offering him, except that he’ll be free and won’t have to report to us.”

“Felony?” Max spreads his hands, beseeches the four walls, the Mississippi River. “What felony?”

“Oh boy,” says Bob Comeaux softly, shaking his head. He flips open the file next to his thigh on the desk where he’s still lounging at ease, reads in a neutral clerk’s voice, sighting past his folded arms. “These are the minutes of the first hearing before the State Medical Board. Dr. Thomas More charged by Agent Marcus Harris of the ATFA — let me see, blah blah — with the sale of one hundred prescriptions of Desoxyn tablets and two hundred prescriptions of Dalmane capsules at one dollar per dose for the purpose of resale at the Union 76 truck stop of I-12 near Hammond, Louisiana — blah, blah — look, guys, there is no need to go back over this stuff.” He closes the file.

“That’s entrapment!” Max cries, again to the world at large. “That narc guy was posing as a trucker.”

“Right,” says Bob Comeaux glumly. “A sting operation. Could I ask you something, Tom — something I’ve never understood?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve never understood why you didn’t just charge those guys a medical fee. Why sell the damn prescriptions wholesale through a goddamn truck stop?”

“I needed the money. I knew the owner of the truck stop and had confidence in him, that he would only deal with truckers who needed them. You will note that the dosages were minimal, twenty-five milligrams of Desoxyn and thirty milligrams of Dalmane, just enough to get them up enough to keep awake and then down so they could sleep. You know those guys push those big double and triple tandems over crumbling interstates for up to eighteen hours a day. Then they’re so tired they can’t sleep.”

“Oh boy,” says Bob Comeaux.

Max opens his hands again but says nothing. Doesn’t have to. Tom, that was dumb, was what he would say.

“Okay,” says Bob gently. “Here’s our little problem. Desoxyn is an amphetamine, isn’t it, Tom?”

“Yes.”

“Dalmane is a hypnotic, right?”

“Yes.”

“We’re talking controlled substances, fellows, schedule three. We’re talking a felony count under new state and federal statutes.”

“So what’s the big deal?” asks Max, asking the space between me and Bob Comeaux. “So it was a dumb thing to do. Not dangerous, but dumb. As a matter of fact, he probably saved lives by keeping those poor bastards awake. Dumb, yes. But he’s paid for his mistake. The feds are not interested in him. As far as we are concerned, the ethics committee, I don’t see the problem. I’m sure Tom doesn’t mind my saying that he was not at all himself at the time. I know because I was treating him.”

“No, Max,” I say. “You were not treating me at the time. That was earlier.” For some reason I am having difficulty concentrating.

“Tom is a very creative person,” says Max, “as we all know. Like all creative people he has periods of lying fallow.”

“I wasn’t lying fallow, Max. I was mostly lying drunk. My practice went to pot. I needed the money.”

“But for a good cause!” exclaims Max, raising a finger. “You were thinking of your family. And what a lovely family!”

Bob Comeaux is shaking his hand, but tolerantly, even smiling. “Okay, how’s this?” he asks briskly, again setting one hand softly into the other. “Let’s just put this business on hold for a couple of weeks. I think there may be a way to beat this bum rap.” He rises, stretches. Max rises.

“Let me just say one thing,” says Max, not moving toward the door.

“Sure, Max,” says Bob Comeaux, smiling. He is no longer ironic.

“I don’t have to remind you of what Tom here has accomplished, by his breakthrough in the field of cortical scanning, for which he received national recognition. Furthermore—”

“No, Doctor, you don’t have to remind me.” Bob Comeaux is holding out both arms to us in a kind of herding gesture in the direction of the door. “What is more, I feel certain we can work something out. We’re not about to lose Dr. More’s services. Two things, Tom. One, Mrs. LaFaye. I’m going to need your help with her, okay?”

“Sure. As a matter of fact I have an idea—”

“Sure sure. I’ll get back to you, there’s plenty of time. The other is frankly a favor you could do me and also an old friend of yours.”

“Sure. Who?”

One arm falls. Bob Comeaux’s hand touches my shoulder. “Your old friend, Father Simon.”

“Father Simon?”

“Father Simon Smith.”

“Oh. Rinaldo.”

“Yes. Father Simon Rinaldo Smith.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Well, he’s not doing well.” He moves closer, hand still on my shoulder. “It’s a long story, but I was sure you’d be concerned. I’ll call you in a day or so. Will you talk to his assistant, Father Placide?”

“Placide? Sure.” What is Comeaux up to with the clergy? Whatever it is, I sense only that he wants me to talk them into something or other, probably something to do with Rinaldo’s hospice, and I don’t particularly want to. Don’t want to talk to them, let alone talk them into something.

“Okay, Doctors,” says Bob Comeaux, opening his arms again. “Meeting’s adjourned — unless you have a question. Dr. Gottlieb?”

Max sighs and shakes his head.

“Dr. More?”

“Yes?” I can’t stop thinking about Donna and Mickey,

“Any questions?” asks Bob Comeaux patiently.

“Well, we’re here to review my present practice, aren’t we?”

“Sure, fella, but we’re not worried about—”

“As a matter of fact I’d like to discuss a couple of cases, one a patient of yours, Bob, Mickey LaFaye. There is something interesting—”

“Very!” cries Bob Comeaux, looking at his watch. He claps his hands softly. “Why don’t we have lunch? I’ll give you a buzz. Any further questions? Max? Tom?”

“Bob, where is Hammond?”

“What?” says Bob quickly.

“You mentioned Hammond, Louisiana. Where is it?”

“Where is Hammond,” Bob repeats, looking at me. His eyes stray toward Max. “Okay, I give up. What’s the gag?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

Now Max is doing the herding, smiling and herding me. He’s like a guest trying to get a drunk friend out the front door before he throws up on the rug.

We’re both anxious to leave. But first I’d better fix things up with Bob Comeaux. He’s up to something, wants something, wants me to do something. What’s he cooking up with this business about my license and with his smooth invitation — threat? — to hire me on here at Fedville? I don’t know, but there is no need for me to look nuttier than I am.

“Thanks, Bob, for everything,” I say warmly, shaking hands, matching his handshake for strength, his keen gray-eyed expression for its easy comradeliness — two proper Louisiana gents we are. “I’ll let you in on a little secret.”

“Yeah?”

“I just used you as a control.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah. I’ve had a couple of patients who may show an interesting cortical deficit at Brodmann 39 and 40, you know, the Wernicke speech area. They answer questions out of context — and I’m thinking of using it as an informal clinical test. I needed a couple of normal controls. You wouldn’t answer the Hammond question out of context. You’re a control. Max is next.”

“Gee thanks.” But Bob Comeaux cocks a shrewd eye at me. “But who — Never mind.”

“Max,” I say, “where is Hammond?”

“I can’t say I care,” says Max. Max looks relieved.

“You guys get out of here,” says Bob Comeaux. “Jesus, shrinks.”

We’re in the hall. Max is padding along faster than usual, but in his usual odd, duck-footed walk. Max waits until we hear Bob Comeaux’s door close behind us. He moves nearer and speaks softly.

“You okay, Tom?”

“Sure.”

“What was that stuff about Hammond?”

“I wasn’t kidding. I really have picked up a couple of odd things lately, Max. And I wanted to check Comeaux out. Have you noticed anything unusual in your practice lately?” “Unusual?” Max is attentive but still guarded. “Such as?”

“Oh, changes in sexual behavior in women patients—”

“Such as?”

“Oh, loss of inhibition and affect. Downright absence of superego. Loss of anxiety—”

Max laughs. “Well, don’t forget my practice is not here but in New Orleans, the city that care forgot. It has never been noted for either its anxiety or its sexual inhibitions.” Max is eyeing me. It is not his or my patients he’s thinking about. “Tell me something, Tom.”

“What?”

“What is Comeaux up to?”

“You noticed. I thought you might tell me.”

“That business about your license was uncalled for. This so-called probation is pro forma, purely routine and up to us. There is no reason to have any trouble.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Dr. Comeaux wants something,” says Max thoughtfully.

“I know. Do you know what it is?”

“No, but it was interesting that Mrs. LaFaye, your wealthy patient, was mentioned.”

“Why is that interesting?”

“The word is, he’s got something going with her.”

“Such as?”

“My wife, who knows everything around here because she is a realtor like your wife, says he has been very helpful to Mrs. LaFaye, his neighbor and fellow horseperson, rancher, whatever, and that he or Mrs. LaFaye or both are trying to buy up the adjoining land.”

“That’s the hospice he was talking about.”

“Oh, you mean out at—”

“Yes.”

We’re standing at the elevators. I notice that Max is still preoccupied.

“Max, I’d like to talk to you about a couple of cases.”

“Sure. Come on over to my place now. Sophie would be delighted to see you — and Ellen.”

Max is always embarrassed to mention Ellen. Why? Because my first wife ran off with a fruity Englishman. No, two fruity Englishmen.

“I can’t. I have to get home.”

“I understand. How’s Ellen and the kids?” he asks too casually. We’re standing side by side gazing at the bronze elevator doors.

“They’re fine.”

“Is Ellen home?”

“Well, you know she went back to Georgia to stay with her mother when I was convicted and sent to—”

“I know, I know. But she’s back now.”

“Yes — though I haven’t seen much of her. She just got back from a bridge tournament.”

“Yes. I heard from — I heard she was some sort of prodigy at it.”

“She just got back from Trinidad. The big annual Caribbean tournament. She and her partner, Dr. Van Dorn, won it.”

“I see. Well, I know she’s way out of our class, that is, mine and Sophie’s. But do you think the two of you might come over one evening—”

“Sure. I’ll ask her.” We gaze at the bronze door one foot from our noses.

“How about next week?”

“She won’t be in town.”

“No?”

“No. She’s been invited to the North American championships.”

“I see. How long does it last?”

“I think about a week. It is being held at the Ramada Inn West in Fresno, California.”

“I see.”

The elevator doors open.

“John Van Dorn thinks she can compile a sufficient number of red points to become a master, I think they call it, in less than two years’ time, starting from scratch, something of a record.”

“Remarkable,” says Max, concentrating on the arrow. Something — Ellen? — is making him uneasy again. He wants to get out of the elevator and go about his business. But then his worrying gets the better of him. “Look. Who’s been watching Tommy and — ah—”

“Margaret. Well, we still have old Hudeen, you will remember—”

“Oh yes. Hudeen. Fine old woman.”

“Yes. And a live-in person, Hudeen’s granddaughter, who stays with the kids at night.”

“Good. Very good. Very good,” says Max absently. Max is torn, I notice, torn between his desire to welcome me back and his Jewish-mother disapproval. He worries about me. But as soon as we’re out of the Fedville high-rise and into the parking lot, Max seems to recover his old briskness. He eyes my Caprice with mild interest, takes hold of my arm. “Now, Tom—”

“Yes?”

“I am concerned about — concerned that you get going again with your practice and back with your — ah — family.”

“I know you are, Max.”

“I think we can straighten out this license business. I’ll take care of Comeaux.”

“Good.”

Max is examining his car keys intently. “You don’t seem much interested.”

“I’m interested.”

“You’re not depressed, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, I do wish you would check in with me. You were, after all, my patient once, and I need all the patients I can get, ha.” This is as close as Max ever comes to making a joke. “Just a little checkup.”

“Sure. And I do want to discuss a couple of bizarre cases with you. I wasn’t kidding about some sort of cortical deficit. But it’s more radical than that.”

“More radical?”

“There’s not only a loss of cortical inhibitions, superego, anxiety which was once present. There’s something else, a loss of — self—”

“Of self,” Max repeats solemnly, concentrating on his ignition key. He looks worried again. He’s thinking. There are worse things than depression, for example, paranoia, imagining a conspiracy, a stealing of people’s selves, an invasion of body- snatchers.

“So you give me a call,” says Max, frowning, eyes casting into the future.

“Right, Max.”

“You need more cases, Tom,” he says carefully.

“I know, Max.”

“Two cases are not exactly a series.”

“I know, Max.”

He doesn’t look up from his car keys. “What’s this business about Father Smith?”

“Have you seen him since you got back?”

“Father Smith? No. Only a phone call.”

“What did he want?” Max asks quickly.

I look at him. This quick, direct question is not like him.

“I’m not sure what he wanted. As a matter of fact, it was a very odd conversation.”

What was odd was that Father Smith sounded as if he was calling from an outside phone, perhaps a booth in a windy place. I remember thinking at the time that he reminded me of those fellows who listen to radio talk shows in a car, decide to call in a nutty idea, stop at the first booth. The priest said he wanted to welcome me home. Thanks, Father. He also wanted to discuss something with me. Okay, Father. Did I know he had been to Germany? No, I didn’t. Recently? No, when I was a boy. I see, Father. So he gets going on the Germans for a good half hour, in a rapid, distant voice blowing in the wind.

“What did he talk about?” asks Max, eyeing me curiously.

“The Germans.”

“The Germans?”

“Yes.”

“I see. By the way, Tom. Don’t argue with Comeaux. It’s a waste of time. And stop worrying about this. It’s going to work out.”

“I’m not worried.” I’m not. Max is worried.

6. BOB COMEAUX LIKES to argue. I don’t much.

For two years I was caught between passionate liberals and conservatives among my fellow inmates at Fort Pelham. Most prisoners are ideologues. There is nothing else to do. Both sides had compelling arguments. Each could argue plausibly for and against religion, God, Israel, blacks, affirmative action, Nicaragua.

It was more natural for me, less boring, to listen than to argue. I was more interested in the rage than the arguments. After two years no one had convinced anyone else. Each side made the same points, the same rebuttals. Neither party listened to the other. They would come close as lovers, eyes glistening, shake fingers at each other, actually take hold of the other’s clothes. There were even fistfights.

It crossed my mind that people at war have the same need of each other. What would a passionate liberal or conservative do without the other?

Bob Comeaux reminds me of them. He comes just as close when he argues, much closer than he would in ordinary conversation, his face, say, a foot from mine. He wants to argue about “pedeuthanasia” and the Supreme Court decision which permits the “termination by pedeuthanasia” of unwanted or afflicted infants, infants facing a life without quality.

I can tell he has hit on what he considers an unanswerable argument and can no more resist trying it out on me than a lover can resist giving his beloved a splendid gift.

“Can you honestly tell me,” he says, coming even closer, “that you would condemn a child to a life of rejection, suffering, poverty, and pain?”

“No.”

“As you of all people know, as you in fact have written articles about”—he says triumphantly, and I can tell he has rehearsed these two clauses—“the human infant does not achieve personhood until some time in the second year for the simple reason, as you yourself have shown, that it is only with the acquisition of language and the activation of the language center of the brain that the child becomes conscious as a self, a person. Right?”

He waits expectantly, lips parted, ready, corners moist. His eyes search out mine, first one, then the other. “Do you see what I mean?” he asks. “I see what you mean,” I answer.

He waits for the counter-arguments, which he already knows and is prepared to rebut.

He is disappointed when I don’t argue.

Instead, I find myself wondering, just as I wondered at Fort Pelham, what it is the passionate arguer is afraid of. Is he afraid that he might be wrong? that he might be right? Is he afraid that if one does not argue there is nothing left? An abyss opens. Is it not the case that something is better than nothing, arguing, violent disagreement, even war?

More than once at Fort Pelham I noticed that passionate liberals, passionate on the race question, had no use for individual blacks, and that passionate conservatives could not stand one another. Can you imagine Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson spending a friendly evening alone together?

One of life’s little mysteries: an old-style Southern white and an old-style Southern black are more at ease talking to each other, even though one may be unjust to the other, than Ted Kennedy talking to Jesse Jackson — who are overly cordial, nervous as cats in their cordiality, and glad to be rid of each other.

In the first case — the old-style white and the old-style black — each knows exactly where he stands with the other. Each can handle the other, the first because he is in control, the second because he uses his wits. They both know this and can even enjoy each other.

In the second case — Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson — each is walking on eggshells. What to say next in this rarified atmosphere of perfect liberal agreement? What if one should violate the fragile liberal canon, let drop a racist remark, an anti-Irish Catholic slur? What if Jesse Jackson should mention Hymie? The world might end. They are glad to get it over with. What a relief! Whew!

Frowning and falling back, Bob Comeaux even gives possible arguments I might have used so that he can refute them.

“In using the word infanticide, you see, you are dealing not with the issue but in semantics, a loaded semantics at that.”

“I didn’t use the word.”

Bob shrugs and turns away, his eyes suddenly distant and preoccupied, like an unsuccessful suitor.

7. HOME TO THE QUARTERS. We’ve lived there for years. Sure enough slave quarters they were, from an old indigo plantation, twenty or so sturdy brick boxes with stoops and kitchen gardens, attached like row houses with chimneys in common, lined up under the cliff and along the bayou like old Natchez-under-the-hill, repossessed by vines and possums — where no white folks had dreamed of living for a hundred years.

Even when we were poor, Ellen fixed ours up with authentic iron hooks and pots for the fireplace. Then Ellen and my realtor mother, Marva, teamed up and between them became a realestate genius, my mother being naturally acquisitive, thinking money, Ellen having natural good taste. They bought the whole row for a song and during the time I was away borrowed money, added two stories painted in different pastels like the villas of Portofino, stuck on New Orleans balconies, put a tiny dock in front of each and a Jacuzzi behind, calculating the place would be as prized now as it was misprized then, for being too small, too close together, too near the water — and named it The Quarters. All this during the two years I was detained by the feds at the minimal security facility at Fort Pelham, Alabama. They, Ellen and my mother, were like those fragile Southern ladies who, when their men, brave and somewhat addled, went off to that war, suddenly turned into straw bosses, hucksters, fishwives, tallywomen, slickers.

Here is my mother, before she took to her bed in her own nursing home, pitching to a client, more likely than not a West Texas oilman or a Massachusetts account executive removed to New Orleans, frightened by the blacks, bugging out to the country, looking for a weekend place on the water and what he conceived to be authentic historical Louisiana quaintness. Mother: “Notice the walls, authentic slave brick, eighteen inches thick, handmade by the slaves — many were magnificent artisans, you know — from local clay from claypits right up the bayou— it’s all gone now, the clay and the art, a lost art, notice that odd rosy glow. You hardly need air conditioning with these walls— they didn’t live so badly, did they? You see that bootscrape by the steps? Do you know what that is? an authentic brick form handwrought by the slaves. We think The Quarters combines the utility of a New York townhouse with the charm of a French Quarter cottage, don’t you?” As a matter of fact, they did.

This is the real thing, she told them — and it was — and it makes Chateau Isles, Belle-this, and Beau-that look phony, don’t you agree? Yes, they did. The Quarters sold out at three hundred thousand per unit.

While I, a disgraced shrink, was doing time in Alabama, my wife and mother were getting rich selling slave quarters.

I am anxious to see Ellen. I’ve seen her once since she got back from Trinidad late last night, but she was so tired we hardly exchanged ten words. She slept like a child, on her stomach, mouth mashed open on the pillow, arm hanging off the bed. I put her arm up. It’s still splendid, her arm, as perfectly round and firm as a country girl’s.

There’s noise above — the kitchen is upstairs. I go up the tight spiral of a staircase, heart beating, but not with effort. Ellen’s not there. There’s only the help and the kids.

Hudeen’s at the stove. She’s eighty and infirm and gets to the kitchen by an outside elevator. She likes to come to work for a few hours. Ellen has installed her in a tiny square bounded by stove, fridge, sink, table, and stereo-V mounted in a bracket so that she need never take more than two steps in any direction, mostly sits, need never take her eye from the daytime drama that unfolds for four hours, precisely the four hours she’s here.

“Where’s Miss Ellen?” I ask her.

“Miz Ellen she still piled up in the bed!” says Hudeen in a soft shout, doing me the courtesy of touching the volume control of the stereo-V but not turning it down. “You talk about tired,” she says, still keeping an eye on the screen. “But she be down directly.”

Chandra, a young, very black woman, is playing Monopoly at the breakfast table with Margaret. Neither looks up.

Tommy is standing in the middle of the room, hands at his side, standing in place but footling a soccer ball, toeing, slicing, ankling, caroming the ball from foot to foot, idly and without effort.

I give Margaret and Tommy a hug. My children don’t know what to say to me. Margaret is still hot and sweaty from the school bus. She gives me her cheek and a swift sidelong look. She has straight black Ella Cinders hair and is secretive and knowing, twice as smart as a boy will ever be. In her thin brown body, sweet with the smell of hot cotton and schoolgirl sweat, there is both a yielding and a resistance. She’s a swift brown blade of a girl.

“Why you standing around?” Chandra asks me. Chandra is abrupt and unmannerly, but is the only one who will speak to me. “Why don’t you sit down?”

I sit down.

“You looking good, healthy for a change,” says Chandra to me. “Roll, Margaret.”

Tommy and Margaret are on an easy footing with old black Hudeen and young black Chandra. They look and talk past me, as if I were still a drunk, a certain presence in the house which one takes account of, steps around, like a hole in the floor. Are all fathers treated so by their children, or only disgraced jailbird fathers?

“Hudeen, what time is Miss Ellen coming down?” I ask, wondering whether to go upstairs.

“She be fine!” cries Hudeen softly, shelling peas and keeping an eye on the stereo-V. “She be down!” Is she telling me not to go up?

Long ago Hudeen gave up ordinary conversation. Her response to any greeting, question, or request is not the substance of language but its form. She utters sounds which have the cadence of agreement or exclamation or demurrer. Uhn-ohn-oh (I don’t know?); You say! You say now!, Lawsymussyme (Lord have mercy on me?); Look out! — an all-purpose expression conveying both amazement and good will.

Hudeen is barely literate, but her daughter went to college and became a dental hygienist. She married a dentist. They are as industrious, conventional, honest, and unprofane as white people used to be. They have five children, three girls named Chandra, Sandra, and Lahandra, and twin boys named Sander and Sunder.

Chandra is smart, ill-mannered, discontent, but not malevolent. She graduated in media and newscasting at Loyola, interned at a local station, worked briefly as a street reporter. She wants to be an anchorperson. The trouble is, she hasn’t the looks for it; she doesn’t look like a tinted white person, what with her Swahili hair, nose, lips, and skin so black that local light seems to drain out into her. Said Hudeen once, talking back to the TV as usual when somebody mentions black — Hudeen, who still has not caught up with the current fashion in the proper race name: colored? Negro? black? — “Black?” she said to the TV. “What you talking about, black? That woman light. Sunder he light. Sandra bright; Chandra now — we talking black!”—hee hee hee, cackling at the TV.

At first it worried me, Chandra’s anger and her rash goal, aiming for anchorperson, perhaps even hoping someday, this being America, to replace good gray Dan Rather, and finding herself instead doing what? back in the kitchen feeding white children. Good Lord, such exactly might her remote ancestor have done, living in these very quarters — if she were lucky enough to get out of the indigo fields and up in the kitchen of the big house. Mightn’t Chandra blow up one of these days, I used to think, change one diaper too many and pitch Margaret into the bayou?

As a matter of fact, no. So much for the wisdom of psychiatrists. Maybe this is what I might have done in her place, but not Chandra. Having observed them carefully, Chandra and Margaret, I long ago concluded that women don’t work that way. At least Chandra doesn’t. Chandra has nothing but good nature and patience and — dare a white Southerner say it? — affection for Margaret. Margaret loves Chandra.

Instead, she, Chandra, takes it out on me. She goes out of her way to be pert with me, perter than I’m used to from people black or white. At first I took it for sass and felt the old white gut tighten: one more piece of lip and you’re out on your ass, and so on.

Right now, for example:

I: “How’ve you been, Chandra?”

Chandra, frowning as she lands on Park Place with her little token, a flat iron: “Nothing wrong with me! Anything wrong with you?”

Shocked murmurings from Hudeen, who overhears this — not real shock but conventional, socially obligatory shock: “Lawlaw ainowaytawpeepuh,” eyes not leaving the TV. Translation: Lord, Lord, that ain’t no way to talk to people, that is, white people.

The other day Chandra gave me a lecture: “You want to know your trouble, Doc?”

“What’s my trouble, Chandra?”

“You too much up in your head. You don’t even pay attention to folks when they talking to you. How you act in your office? Psychiatrists are supposed to be sensitive to the emotional needs of their patients, aren’t they?”

“That’s true.”

Chandra’s speech is a strange mixture of black Louisiana country and Indiana anchorperson. It’s because she was brought up by Hudeen when her super middle-class mother was going to college, and then took courses at Loyola in standard U.S. TV speech. She sounds like Jane Pauley fresh out of a cotton patch.

“Doc, you know what you do?”

“No, what do I do?”

“You walk around like this, hands in your pockets, your eyes rolled back in your head like this. Somebody asks you something and you don’t even ack like you hear. You just nod like this.” Chandra has gotten up and is walking around, eyes rolled back. Hudeen is making deprecating sounds but is laughing despite herself. Tommy and Margaret laugh outright. I have to laugh too. Note that she says asks—with effort — not aks. But then says ack.

“No, Doc, I’m kidding. I know you’re a highly trained psychiatrist, the best around here. I know some of your patients and what you’ve done for them. I know you’re people-oriented in your practice.”

People-oriented! Only from an Indiana anchorperson.

Ed Dupre, a proctologist colleague, heard Chandra talk pert to me one day when we came in for a drink after fishing.

“You know what I would do if she worked for me and talked to me like that?”

“I think I do.”

“I would lay one right upside her head.”

“I know you would.”

Once when she was particularly sassy with me and my short-comings — though by then I knew it wasn’t sass, it was directness — I told her as directly, “Chandra, you know what you ought to do?”

“No, what I ought to do?” she asked quickly, frowning.

“You ought to go to charm school.”

“What you talking about, charm school?” She looked at me sharply, thinking at first I’m getting even, sassing her back, then seeing that maybe I’m not.

“No, I’m serious. You’re a very smart professional woman but you lack certain social skills.” I can get away with saying that but not “bad manners.” “You have to have these skills to get ahead in your profession. You can’t walk into a studio and talk to a program director or producer, white or black, the way you talk to me.”

“Uhmmhmm!”—fervent noises of agreement from Hudeen. “What it is, this charm school?” Chandra wanted to know. She knew I was leveling.

I told her. She listened. Of course there are such places where you go to get coached for job interviews, how to walk, sit, carry on a conversation, eat.

“Chandra”—I told her to get away from the old black-white business—“it’s the current equivalent of the old finishing school.”

“Finished is right,” she said, but she was eyeing me shrewdly. “No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

Thoughtfully she spooned stuff into Margaret — and went to charm school, and got a job — for a while.

Who knows? She might make it yet. As the Howard Cosell of anchorpersons.

“Tell Miss Ellen I’ll be downstairs,” I tell Hudeen.

“She be down!” cries Hudeen softly, inattentively.

“Chandra,” I say, “where is St. Louis?”

“What you talking about, where is St. Louis!” cries Chandra, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Tell Doctor where is St. Louis!” says Hudeen, hardly listening.

“St. Louis is on the Mississippi River between Chicago and New Orleans,” says Margaret, my daughter, Miss Priss, smartest girl in class, first to put up her hand.

“Right,” I say.

They’re all right.

“My other daughter, she live in Detroit,” says Hudeen to the TV.

Two strange thoughts occur to me in the ten seconds it takes to spiral down the iron staircase.

One: how strange it is that we love our children and can’t stand them or they us. Love them? Yes, for true. Think of the worst thing that could happen to you. It is that something should happen to your little son or daughter, he get hurt or killed or die of leukemia; that she be raped, kidnapped, get hooked on drugs. This is past bearing. Can’t stand them? Right. When we’re with them, we’re not with them, not in the very present but casting ahead of them and the very present, planning tomorrow, regretting yesterday, worrying about money and next year.

Counselors counsel parents: Communicate! Communicate with your kids! Communication is the key!

This is ninety percent psycho-crap and ten percent truth, but truth of a peculiar sort.

I don’t communicate with Tommy and he doesn’t with me, beyond a single flick of eye, a nod, and a downpull of lip. If I sat Tommy down and said, Son, let’s have a little talk, it would curdle him and curdle me, and it should.

Imagine Dr. Sarah Smart, popular syndicated columnist and apostle of total communication, showing up one night and saying to her daughter, Let’s have a little talk. I hope daughter would tell Mom to shove off.

Second thought on last iron step: It occurs to me that, except for the drink I took after Donna’s visit, I haven’t had a drink or a pill for two years, except for the drink at the Little Napoleon on the way home.

I sit down. I am able to sit still and notice things, like a man just out of prison, which I am, and glad of it. I sit in a chair, feet on the floor, arms on the arms of the chair, and watch the reflection of the late-afternoon sun off the bayou. I had never noticed it before. It makes parabolas of light on the ceiling which move and intersect each other.

I’ve gotten healthy. For two years I was greenskeeper of the officers’ golf course at the Fort Pelham air base. They made use of my history as a golfer. But instead of worrying about putting and chipping, hooking and slicing, I ran a huge John Deere tractor with a gang of floating cutters fore and aft, raked the sand traps, swung down the rough, manned the sprinklers, kept the greens like billiard tables.

Here’s the mystery: Why does it take two years of prison for a man to be able to sit still, listen, notice his children, watch the sunlight on the ceiling?

8. DIXIE MAGAZINE IS on the coffee table next to the fireplace, which bristles with wrought-iron hooks and pots.

Van Dorn is on the cover.

I pick it up and hold it in the sunlight. Under Van Dorn’s picture is a list of captions:

RENAISSANCE MAN

NEW OWNER AND RESTORER OF BELLE AME

NUCLEAR WIZARD

MITSY’S TROUBLESHOOTER

INTERNATIONAL BRIDGE CHAMPION

OLYMPIC SOCCER COACH AND EDUCATOR

Van Dorn is wearing a yellow safety helmet and holding rolled-up blueprints in one hand and socking the end of the roll with the other. He’s standing in front of the house at Belle Ame and gazing at the great cooling tower of Mitsy. He’s a bit thick in the neck, but quite handsome, handsomer in the picture than in fact he is. His expression as he looks at the cooling tower is condescending, if not contemptuous. In his helmet he reminds me of a German officer standing in the open hatch of a tank and looking down at the Maginot Line.

There’s a noise above me, a breath of air? I look up.

Ellen comes whirling down the staircase. She’s wearing her Trinidad outfit, a bright orange-and-black print wound around her like a sari. It flares as she descends, showing her strong bare brown legs. She’s gained weight. The muscle on her shin curves out like a dancer’s. In her hair she’s woven a bit of the same cloth in a bright corona of color.

She’s effusive, gives me a hug and a kiss, as if she hadn’t seen me since Trinidad. Maybe she was too sleepy to remember me last night.

“Good God,” she says, frowning and backing off, eyeing me up and down in her old canny Presbyterian style. “Where did you get that suit? Throw it away. Burn it.”

Her skin is as clear as ever, almost translucent, transmitting a peach glow of health, her skin faintly crimsoned, like flesh over light. She’s put on weight but not too much. Her tightly wrapped Trinidad sari becomes her.

An idea occurs to me.

“You’re looking extremely well.”

“Well, thank you.”

“The tan is very becoming. Moreover—”

“It ought to be. I worked on it. I usually peel.”

“Do you remember how nice it used to be in the afternoon?”

“What? Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“What do you say if we go in there for a while?” I nod to the downstairs bedroom.

“That’s the best proposal I’ve had all week!” she says, too heartily.

“Well?”

“Dummy, we’ve got to go to the awards dinner in thirty minutes.”

“This will only take fifteen.”

“Oh, for—! That’s Chandra’s bedroom now.”

“Chandra won’t mind. Do you remember the Sears Best?” Sears Best was a king-size mattress on a big brass bedstead.

“What? Oh, I certainly do. And it certainly was!”

I look at her. She is both hearty and preoccupied. She taps her tooth.

“Do you remember standing at the sink and being approached from behind?”

“What? Oh.” She blushes. For half a second I could swear she remembered love in the afternoon and was on the very point of heading for Sears Best. But she frowns, looks at her watch, makes her clucking sound. “Oh, God, I forgot. I have to call Sheri Comeaux about tonight. What — a — pain!”

“I don’t think I can make it.”

“Why the hell not?” Her fists are on her hips.

“I’m not much for school functions—” I begin.

“Well, hear this. You damn well better be. This happens to be important to Tommy and for his future. It just so happens that Tommy is getting an award for summer soccer, the award, and that he is Olympic material. It also just so happens that if Tommy and Margaret are going to Belle Ame Academy, an honor in itself, you had damn well better show some interest, because Van is already breaking the rules taking them this late.”

And so on. Instead of letting me lay her properly on a kingsize bed, she picks a king-size argument. Van Dorn, it seems, has started up a private school at Belle Ame on the English model, with tutors, proctors, forms, and suchlike. Ellen has yanked Tommy and Margaret out of St. Michael’s — it’s possible because school has just started. It’s all right with me, I’ve already agreed, but for some reason she wants to pick a religious argument. This is, in a sense, funny. It is as if I were still a Catholic and she a Presbyterian, when in fact I am only a Catholic in the remotest sense of the word — I haven’t given religion two thoughts or been to Mass for years, except when Rinaldo said Mass on the Gulf Coast, and then I went because it was a chance to get out of the clink — and Ellen is now an Episcopalian. She’s become one of those Southern Anglicans who dislike Catholics — Romans, she calls them — and love all things English.

I won’t argue. She can send them to Eton if she likes. Mainly I’m glad to have her back. Very well, I’ll go to the awards dinner. There’s something else on my mind. But my acquiescence only makes her angrier.

“And not only that,” she says, fists still on hips.

“Yes?” I say, thinking how nice it would be, what with all this anger, flushed face, flashing eyes, if — and in fact say as much. “It certainly would be nice if we could fight it out in there.”

“And not only that,” she repeats.

“Yes?”

“For Tommy’s sake, you better remember you promised to take Van fishing.”

“I remember,” I say gloomily.

“All right.” Again she looks me up and down, me in my Bruno Hauptmann suit. “And get dressed, for heaven’s sake. And keep in mind about Van.”

What I keep in mind is her voluptuousness and distractedness. It is odd. At the height of her anger she’s both voluptuous and distracted, preoccupied by something. Her eyes do not quite focus on me.

9. THE AWARDS BANQUET is shorter and less painful than I had feared. I manage not to drink. What is surprising is that Ellen does — does drink — something she seldom did, and not merely drink but in the end gets so drunk I have to take her home. Sheri Comeaux explains why. Van Dorn let her down, did not invite her to the North Americans at Fresno.

John Van Dorn is doing a very graceful job emceeing the banquet and passing out trophies. He is talking about the summer soccer camp and plans for the soccer “program” during the academic year at Belle Ame. Afterward he passes out trophies. When he hands Tommy his trophy, a gold-colored statuette, he doesn’t let go, so there are the two of them holding the trophy while Van Dorn speaks. Tommy is embarrassed. He doesn’t know whether to keep holding on to the trophy or what to do with his eyes.

“I have one little suggestion for you moms and dads,” says Van Dorn, who is not embarrassed. “What would you say to giving up your sons and daughters to this program for four years? That’s all I ask. And what do I promise in return?” He pauses, looks at the moms and dads, looks at Tommy, speaks in a soft voice. “What I promise is a good shot at the Junior Olympic gold for this team four years from now in Olympia, Greece, where the original Olympics were held.”

Applause, cheering. From Tommy only relief when Van Dorn lets go of the trophy and he can sit down.

Ellen, surprisingly, is already drinking a lot. Ordinarily she’d be the proud mom, but she polishes off her third Absolut, smiles and applauds, and goes to the ladies’ room.

“Listen, Tom,” says Sheri Comeaux, pulling me close. We’re sitting at a table for four in the rear of the Camellia Room of the Holiday Inn. Bob Comeaux is silent and distant, as if we had had no dealings this morning. Their son Ricky also got a trophy, but a smaller, silver-colored one. “I have to talk fast. Ellen just found out Van’s not going to the North Americans and she’s taking it hard. She had her heart set on it. They’d have won for sure.”

Sheri’s a good sort. “Welcome home, Tom,” she had said earlier. “You have friends, you know — more than you know.” Sheri was a New Orleans nurse when she married Bob Comeaux. She’s not uptown New Orleans or Garden District, but she’s not Irish Channel or Ninth Ward either. French-Irish-Italian, she’d have gone to school at Sacred Heart, not with the Mesdames of the Sacred Heart Academy on St. Charles Avenue but at Sacred Heart parochial school on Canal Street. She and Ellen both married doctors, both took up duplicate bridge at the same time, neither having to work — Sheri because Bob was a successful doctor, Ellen because she and Marva made a lot of money in real estate. Sheri has the fond, slightly dazed look of many doctors’ wives.

“I better talk fast before she comes back,” says Sheri.

“Okay, talk fast.” Sheri is making me nervous because she’s drinking too, hanging on my arm, talking a lot, mentioning names, and making a point of it as if she knew about Bob and Mickey LaFaye. But she always comes back to Ellen.

“That girl is loaded! With talent I mean. I mean, she is some kind of genius and doesn’t even know it. Do you know what she did?”

“No.”

“We were playing in this dinky little sectional over at Biloxi — this was before we met Van Dorn. It was good for nothing but black points of course. So there we were, two little bridge ladies with a bunch of other bridge ladies. It’s about four women to one man, and what men. And here he comes — surprise, surprise — God knows what they paid him to make an appearance. We were playing women’s pairs the first day and there he is, strolling around the tables watching the play. We were all nervous and giggling. I know you don’t know anything about the strange world of duplicate bridge, but having John Van Dorn show up at a sectional tournament is like Ivan Lendl turning up at the local tennis club. I mean, we’re talking world-class, Tom.” She finishes her drink. Bob Comeaux, to my relief, has gotten up and is talking to Van Dorn in the aisle. He’s listening intently to Van Dorn, looking down, arms folded, ear cocked. Van Dorn catches my eye, winks, makes a casting motion with his wrist. I nod.

“Yes, Sheri?”

“You got the picture? Us little bridge ladies trying to keep our minds on the game and him walking around, kibitzing. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“So next day, it’s mixed pairs. And we’re resigned to anybody we draw. We’re standing at the customers’ desk to get our partners and wondering who we’re going to end up with — you talk about dogs — I mean, you wouldn’t believe who I got. But anyway. There were a few professionals hanging around as usual. You know, you can get a life master or a professional, but you have to pay — personally I think the system stinks — it’s like a bunch of middle-aged ladies looking over the gigolos. But there we were, counting our little money to see if we can afford one of the L.M.s or professionals at least. Actually it’s the best way to learn, but I think it’s degrading. I look up and there he is. Oh, he’s a charmer. He introduces himself to both of us as if we were the famous ones. ‘You’re Mrs. More, I believe, and you’re Mrs. Comeaux?’ I nearly drop my teeth, but you know Ellen, laid back and cool. ‘Yes?’ she says.” Sheri mocks Ellen’s coolness. “He bows, I swear I think he even clicked his heels like a Prussian general, you know? He’s the perfect gentleman, but it’s obvious it’s not me he had in mind. Oh, he knew all about you too. ‘I know your husband’s work,’ he says to Ellen. ‘Magnificent!’ Ellen still hasn’t got the message. ‘But I’ve also seen your work — oh, I can tell in about thirty seconds,’ he tells Ellen. ‘I saw you pull that Steknauer finesse not once but twice.’ Then he turns to me as if Ellen’s not there. ‘Mrs. Comeaux,’ he says, there’s such a thing as card sense and there’s such a thing as a sixth sense. This lady knows where the cards are. I don’t know how she knows but she knows. I don’t think she knows how she knows either. It is as if she had a little computer stored in her head.’ Then he turns to Ellen and there’s Ellen going, Ah — uh — ahem, and so forth. So he says to Ellen, ‘Would you do me the honor of being my partner in mixed pairs today?’ ‘Well, ah uh,’ goes Ellen. ‘I don’t believe I have the — ah—’ And she’s actually going through her purse. I give her a nudge: Dummy! So he says, with another bow, ‘The fee is waived. The honor is mine.’ Well, let me tell you, I have to give Ellen credit. That gal’s got class. Without turning a hair she shrugs and says, ‘Very well.’ Very well, I’m thinking, Jesus. Of course, some of the old biddies were jealous, said he was interested in Ellen’s money, but that’s a lie. She’s a natural-born bridge genius.”

“Did they win?” I ask. I look at my watch. What is keeping Ellen?

“Win! They haven’t lost since. And now they’re not going to Fresno. I don’t get it. Old charmer turns into old asshole. Right, Tom?” She’s got another Tanqueray.

“Right. But why don’t you go see if Ellen’s—”

“Sure.” Her son Ricky comes up and shows her his trophy. She gives him a hug and me a wink. “Wonderful, darling.” After Ricky’s gone, she says, “You want to know what those trophies look like?”

“What?”

“Like K.C. bowling trophies, right?”

“Right. Now—”

“You want to know something, Tom?”

“What?”

“You really screwed up, didn’t you?”

“I suppose I did.”

“But you know something?”

“What?”

“I always thought you were the best around here, the most honest and understanding — unlike some I could mention, namely Dr. Perfect here.” And here in fact is Bob Comeaux, who pays no attention to her even though she hasn’t lowered her voice. Instead, he leans past me, ear cocked with the same intensity, and speaks to the table: “I hope you’ve given some serious thought to our conversation this morning. Okay, Tom?” His hand rests heavily on my shoulder.

“Sure, Bob,” I say, not sure what part of the conversation he means. Probably Father Smith. “Sheri—” I turn to her, but she’s gone — to fetch Ellen, I hope.

Van Dorn, passing behind Bob Comeaux, makes a sign to me as if he did not want to talk to Bob. He holds up one hand open and a forefinger.

“Okay,” I say. “Six o’clock.”

Ellen comes back, seeming all right, and drinks two more Absoluts. She smiles and nods in her new unfocused way at nothing. She’s getting somewhat dreamy but seems on the whole composed and pleasant.

10. ELLEN IS NOT so drunk that she cannot get up the spiral staircase. But it is well that I am behind her, because I can assist her without seeming to, moving up behind her and in step, knee behind her knee, hands up the rail and almost around her. I fear she might fall.

Our new bedroom is on the third floor across a tiny hall from the children’s. Ellen bought two iron convent beds, now in high fashion, when the convent closed. What short narrow nuns. My feet stick out through the bars.

How to sleep with her? There’s no spoon-nesting on these cots. And she’s already flopped on one, dressed, filling it. She’s not passed out or even drunk, but open-eyed, dreamy, placative, and still smiling in the same moony way.

Well then, turn out the light and—

I turn out the light.

“Lights! “says Ellen.

I turn on the light. True, drink and dark can make you sick. I know. But she’s smiling.

I have an idea. “I have an idea.”

She waits, smiling.

“Let’s go downstairs to our old room.”

“Chandra.”

“Chandra’s not here.”

“How?”

“How to get down? We can go down to the kitchen and take the elevator.”

“All right.”

She seems agreeable. I am pleased.

She’s not too drunk to back down the stairs to the kitchen exactly as we came up, smiling at the joke of me keeping her safe.

Chandra’s room, our old bedroom, is spick and span. The Sears Best bed takes up half the room. There’s a photograph on the bed table of Chandra receiving the Loyola broadcast journalism award from Howard K. Smith.

“Undress,” says Ellen.

I begin undressing.

“Me.”

“What? Oh.” She’s leaning over toward me, arms outstretched, pullover blouse pulled half up. The neck drags across her short wiry wheat-colored hair, but it springs back into place.

She waits for me to undress her, smiling and cooperative, standing when standing is required, sitting, lifting herself. I finish undressing her; she is standing, naked, smiling and turning. She is tanned all over. There are no white areas. Compared to the convent beds, the Sears Best mattress looks as big as a soccer field.

Ellen starts for the bed. I start for the wall switch and turn out the light and head back.

“Lights!” says Ellen.

Very well. By the time I’ve turned on the light and come back, Ellen is in bed but is, to my surprise, not lying on her side as she used to but is on all fours.

Very well, if that’s—

“Well, bucko?”

Bucko?

“Cover,” says Ellen.

“You mean—” I say, taking the sheet.

“No.”

“I understand,” I say, and cover.

“All right,” says Ellen.

It is all right, though surprising, because we have never made love so. Her head is turned and I miss seeing her face. There is only a tousle of wiry hair, a glimpse of cheek and eyes, now closed, and mouth mashed open. She utters sounds.

Afterward as we spoon-nest in our old style, she drowses off but goes on talking. It’s a light, dreaming sleep, because the words I can understand are uttered with that peculiar emphasis people use when they talk in their sleep. It’s REM sleep. I can see her eyes move under her lids. I’m afraid to turn out the light.

“Schenken or K.S.?” she asks in her dream.

“Schenken?”

“Blackwood shmackwood.”

“All right.” I think she’s using contract bridge words. She’s playing in a tournament.

“Mud,” she says.

“Mud?”

“Bermuda Bowl, but no Fresno.”

I am curious. I think these are places where bridge tournaments are held. Why no Fresno? I give her a shake, enough to bring her up into a waking dream, enough to talk. It’s like talking to a patient under light hypnosis.

“Why not Fresno?” I ask her, using the same quirky tone of her sleep-talking.

“You want me to stand around at the partnership table with all those other women?”

“Well, no,” I say. I didn’t think she’d been invited.

“I’d feel like a dance-hall hostess. For open pairing you just stand there while they look you over.”

“I see.”

“Noway.”

I am silent. After a while her eyes stop moving. She’s going to sleep but still talking.

“Schenken?” she murmurs, asking a question, I think.

“No,” I say, not liking the sound of it.

“K.S.?”

“No.”

“Roth-Steiner?”

“No.”

“Azalea?”

“Yes.” Azalea sounds better, whatever it is.

“Azalea,” she murmurs drowsily, smiling, and as drowsily she straightens and turns on her stomach. Before I know what she’s doing, she has swung around on the bed like a compass needle, dreamily but nonetheless expertly done a one-eighty, buckled and folded herself into me, her wiry head between my thighs.

We’ve not done this before either, but by now I’m not surprised and I’d just as soon.

When we’ve finished, she’s quite content to nestle again and go to sleep. “No Fresno,” she murmurs, does another one-eighty, settles into me.

“Very well,” I say. “No Fresno.”

I have an idea.

“Listen, Ellen. This is important.” I drop the dream voice and get down to business — just as you talk to a patient after fifty minutes on the couch when she swings around ready to leave. “Are you listening?”

She’s listening. She’s turned her head enough to free up her good ear from the pillow. She’s deaf in the other. It happened at Leroy Ledbetter’s bar. I tell her about it.

On the way home I stopped at the Little Napoleon, but not, I thought at the time, for a drink.

The Little Napoleon is the oldest cottage in town. It hails from the days when lake boatmen used to drink with the drovers who loaded up the pianos and chandeliers on their ox carts bound from France via New Orleans to the rich upcountry plantations. It is the only all-wood bar in the parish, wood floor worn to scallops, a carved wood reredos behind the bar — a complex affair of minarets and mirrors. Two-hundred-year-old wood dust flies up your nostrils. The only metal is the brass rail and a fifty-year-old neon clock advertising Dixie beer. I decided I needed a drink after talking to Bob Comeaux.

The straight bourbon slides into my stomach as gently as a blessing. Things ease. It is one condition of my “parole” that I not drink. But things ease nevertheless.

I buy Leroy Ledbetter a drink. He drinks like a bartender: as one item in the motion of tending bar, wiping, arranging glasses, pouring the drink from the measuring spout as if it were for a customer, the actual drinking occurring almost invisibly, as if he had rubbed his nose, a magician’s pass.

There is one other customer in the bar, sitting in his usual place at the ell, James Earl Johnson. He’s been sitting there for forty years, never appearing drunk or even drinking, his long acromegalic Lincoln-like face inclined thoughtfully. He always appears sunk in thought. His face is wooden, fixed. It might be taken to be stiff and mean with drink, but it is not. Actually he’s good-natured. In fact, he’s nodding all the time, almost imperceptibly but solemnly, a grave and steadfast affirmation. He’s got Parkinsonism and it gives him the nods, both hands rolling pills, and a mask of a face. He smiles, but it’s under the mask.

“What seh, Doc,” says James, as if he had seen me yesterday and not two years ago.

“All right. How you doing, James?”

“All right now!”

James comes from Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood in New York City. He was once a vaudeville acrobat and knew Houdini, Durante, and Cagney. He was with a Buff Hottle carnival that got stranded here fifty years ago. He liked it in Feliciana. So he stayed.

“What about Ben Gazzara?” I asked him years ago about an actor I admired, knowing that he too came from Hell’s Kitchen.

James would always shrug Gazzara off. “He’s all right. But Cagney was the one. There was nobody like Cagney.” He nods away, affirming Cagney. “Do you want to know what Cagney was, what he really was?”

“What?” I would reply, though he had told me many times.

“Cagney was a hoofer.”

“What about his acting, his gangster roles?”

“All right! But what he was was a hoofer, the best I ever saw.” The only movie of Cagney’s he had any use for was the one about George M. Cohan. “Did you see that, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see him dance ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’?”

“Yes.”

“You see!”

“You looking good, Doc,” says Leroy. “A little thin but good. All you need is a little red beans and rice. But you in good shape. You been playing golf?”

“Not exactly. I’ve been taking care of a golf course, riding a tractor, cutting fairway and rough.”

Leroy nods a quick acknowledgment of the courtesy of my oblique reply, which requires no comment from him and also relieves him of having to pretend I’ve not been away.

“You going to a funeral, Doc?” asks James, his face like a stone.

“Why no.”

“You mighty dressed up for Saturday afternoon.”

I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror of the reredos, whose silvering is as pocked as a moonscape. It’s true. I’m dressed up in my Bruno Hauptmann double-breasted seersucker. Why do I remind myself of an ungainly German executed fifty years ago?

Leroy buys me a drink and pours himself one. I knock mine back. It feels even better, warmth overlaying warmth. His disappears in a twinkling, hand brushing nose.

Leroy feels better too. He leans over and tells me about his safari. He owns a motor home, and he and his wife belong to a club of motor-home owners, ten other couples. They’ve just got back from Alaska. Last year, Disney World. Year before, Big Bend.

“Tell you what you do, Doc. You need a vacation, you and the missus. Ya’ll take my Bluebird and head out west or to Disney World. Do you both a world of good. Take the kids. Here are the keys.”

“Thank you, Leroy.” I’m touched. He means it. His Bluebird is a top-of-the-line motor home, the apple of his eye. It cost more than his home, which is the second floor of the Little Napoleon. “I might take you up.”

I tell Ellen about the Bluebird. I know she’s listening because her head is turned, good ear clearing the pillow.

“Why don’t we get in Leroy’s Bluebird and drive out to Jackson Hole? The aspens will be turning. Do you remember camping at Jenny Lake?”

“I’m not going to Fresno alone.”

I didn’t think she was going to Fresno.

“We’ll drive to Fresno and then come back by Jenny Lake.”

“Not time.”

“Not time enough? Why not?”

“Fresno is — twenty-one hundred miles.” I look at her. I can see the slight bulge of her cornea move up like a marble under the soft pouch of her eyelid. “Jackson Hole is nine hundred miles northeast of Fresno.”

“I see.”

“Fresno is almost exactly in the geographical center of California.”

“I see.”

I turn out the light.

11. VAN DORN SHOWS UP bright and early Sunday morning, dressed in a Day-Glo jacket, a sun helmet in which he has stuck colorful flies. He’s wearing waders.

“You won’t need that jacket.”

“Right. The bream might mind?”

“Yes. And you won’t need the waders.”

“Why not?”

“If you try to wade in one of these bayous, you’ll sink out of sight in the muck. I’ll get you some tennis shoes.”

We spin down the bayou in my ancient Arkansas Traveler, a fourteen-foot, olive-drab aluminum skiff with square ends and a midship well. My twenty-year-old Evinrude kicks off first yank.

A bass club is having a rodeo. Identical boats, of new grassgreen fiberglass, nose along the bank. Fishermen wearing identical red caps sit on high swivel seats in the bow.

“You sure you want to fish for bream?” I ask Van Dorn.

“I figured you might know places those guys don’t know. I’ve been with them. They’re mostly Baton Rouge lawyers.”

Down the Bogue Falaya past country clubs, marinas, villages, bocages, beaux condeaux. I turn into the bushes, through a scarcely noticeable gap in the swamp cyrilla, and we’re in Pontchatolawa, a narrow meander of a bayou, unspoiled because there’s too much swamp for developers and it’s too narrow for yachts and water-skiers. It is not even known to the bass rodeo.

I cut the motor. Pontchatolawa hasn’t changed since the Choctaws named it. The silence is sudden. There is only the ring of a kingfisher. The sun is just clearing the cypresses and striking shafts into the tea-colored water. Mullet jump. Cicadas tune up. There is a dusting of gold on the water. The cypresses are so big their knees march halfway across the bayou. Their tender green is just beginning to go russet.

“My Lord,” says Van Dorn, almost whispering. “We’re back in the Mesozoic. Look at the fucking ferns.”

Van Dorn is busy with his tackle. I watch him. There is as usual in him the sense both of his delight and of his taking pleasure in rehearsing it.

There is a huge swirl of water under his nose. He gives a visible unrehearsed start.

“Good God, what was that, an alligator?”

“Probably not, though they’re here. Probably a gar.”

“Gators won’t bother you, will they?”

“No, gators won’t bother you.”

I try to place his speech. Despite its Southernness, the occasional drawled vowel, it is curiously unplaced. He sounds like Marlon Brando talking Southern.

We are drifting. I keep a paddle in the water.

“Can we try for bream?” Van asks.

“All right, though it’s late. The best time is when they nest in April and July. But some of them will be hanging around. You see those cypress knees over there.”

“Sho now.”

“You see the two big ones?”

“Yeah.”

“Just beyond is a bed. It’s been there for years. They use the same bed. My father showed me that one fifty years ago.”

“Well, I be.”

“You see that birch and cyrilla hanging out over it from the swamp?”

“Those two limbs? Yeah.”

“What you got to do is come in sideways with your line so you won’t get hung up.”

“Sho. But wouldn’t it be a good idea to cut those limbs off? That’s pretty tight.”

“Then all the sunfish would leave. You don’t mess with light and shade.”

“No kidding.”

Van Dorn has opened his triple-tiered tackle box. He takes out a little collapsed graphite rod and reel, presses a button, and out it springs, six or seven feet. He shows me the jeweled reel, which is spring-loaded to suck back line.

“Very nice.”

“You can keep this in your glove compartment. Once I was driving through Idaho, saw a nice little stream, pulled over. Six rainbows.”

“What type of line you got there?”

“It’s a tapered TP5S.”

His equipment probably cost him five hundred dollars.

“You not fishing, Tom?”

“No. I’ll hold the boat off for you.”

“You don’t want to fish!”

“No.” What I want to do is watch him.

He takes off his helmet and selects a fly. “I thought I’d try a dry yellowtail.”

“Would you like something better?”

“What’s better?”

“Something that’s here and alive. Green grasshoppers, wasps. Catalpa worms are the best.”

“Fine, but—”

“Wait a minute. I remember something.”

We drift silently past the bed and under a catalpa tree. The perfect heart-shaped leaves are like small elephant ears. A few black pods from last year hang down like beef jerky. This year’s pods look like oversized string beans. I stand up, cut a leaf carefully at the stem. “Hold out your hands.” I roll the leaf into a funnel, shake down the worms, small white ones that immediately ball up like roly-polies. “Sunfish are fond of these.”

“Well, I be. What now?”

“Take off that fly and put on a bream hook.”

“This little bitty job?”

“Right. Even big sunfish have tiny mouths.”

“How about just nigger-fishing with worms?”

“Earthworms are all right, but these are better.” It is hard to tell whether he is trying to say “nigger-fishing” in a natural Southern way or in a complicated liberal way, as if he were Richard Pryor’s best friend.

“Okay, you’re set,” I tell him. “You see the beds close to the bank, a dozen or so?” Bream beds are pale shallow craters in the muck made by the fish fanning the eggs.

“I see.”

Van Dorn is surprisingly good. He slings his hundred-dollar line under the cyrilla on second try. Even more surprising, he catches a fish. I thought they’d be gone. A big male pound-and-a-half sunfish feels like a marlin on a fly line.

“Well, I be goddamned,” says Van Dorn, landing him, his pleasure now as simple as a boy’s. We gaze at the fish, fat, round as a plate, sinewy, fine-scaled, and silvered, the amazing color spot at his throat catching the sun like a topaz set in amethyst. The colors will fade in minutes, but for now the fish looks both perfectly alive yet metallic, handwrought in Byzantium and bejeweled beyond price, all the more amazing to have come perfect from the muck.

But the beds are mostly empty. Van Dorn catches a couple more bream and a half dozen bass. “For y’all,” he says. Y’all? Hudeen will be pleased. Into the ice well go the fish, out comes the beer.

It is getting on to noon and hot in the sun. We drink beer and watch the gnats swarm. The cicadas are fuguing away. I watch him.

“That was sump’n, cud’n,” says Van Dorn.

Cud’n?

“You want to know something, Tom?”

“What?”

“I’ll make you a little confession. I think at long last I’m back where I belong. Among my own people. And a way of life.”

“I see.”

“Do you understand? What do you think?”

“Yes.” What I’m thinking is that Louisiana fishermen would not dream of speaking of such things, of my own people, of a way of life. If there is such a thing as a Southern way of life, part of it has to do with not speaking of it.

“Tom, I’m what you call a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I do all right, but I’m not really first-rate. I’ve been a pretty good physiologist, computer hacker, soccer bum, bridge bum, realtor, you name it. I went to Harvard and M.I.T. and did all right — I was a real hacker at M.I.T. and not bad at Harvard, but they were not for me, too many nerds at one, too many wimps at the other. So I cut out and headed for the territory like Huck. I chucked it all — except the kids.”

“Don’t you run the computer division at Mitsy?”

“Yeah, but it’s routine, checking out systems and trying to keep the local yokels from messing up — we don’t need another T.M.I. No, if I’d been first-rate I’d have gone from hacking to A.I.”

“A.I.?”

“Artificial intelligence, Tom. That’s where it’s at. As you well know — don’t think I don’t know your work on localizing cortical function.”

“I’ve gotten away from that.”

“Tom, you’ve no idea what’s around the corner. It’s a scientific revolution to end all revolutions. But I’m out of it now— quite content to be back where I started from.”

“Where are you from originally, Van?”

“Not a hundred miles from here. Port Gibson. Did you know the general was born there?”

“What general?”

“Earl Van Dorn.”

“You related?”

“How can there be two Van Dorns from Port Gibson without being kinfolks?”

“I see.”

I watch Van Dorn as he lounges at his ease, head cocked, eyes squinted up at the cypresses. He’s not as handsome as his picture in Dixie. His handsomeness is spoiled by the heaviness of his face and jaw, his pocked skin, the coldness of his blue eyes in the shadow of his sun helmet, humorless even when he is smiling. But he does remind me of an Afrika Corps officer, the heavy handsome face, helmeted, the steel-blue eyes, even the skin so heavily pocked on the cheeks that it looks like a saber scar.

“Do you enjoy bridge?” I ask, watching him.

“Let me put it this way, Tom. It was fun, I was good at it, and I made a living. Now I don’t have to. Do you play?”

“No. A little in college. All I remember is the Blackwood convention. When you bid four no-trump you’re asking for aces.”

He laughs. “Still do — with modifications.”

“Tell me something, Van,” I say, watching him over my beer can. “What is mud?”

“Mud?” He takes a long swig, holds the can against his forehead. “You mean as in drilling mud?”

“No, a bridge term.”

“Oh.” He laughs. “You mean mud as in M.U.D. You do know something. That means the middle of three cards in an unbid suit. It’s an opening lead and tells your partner something.”

“I see. How about Schenken?”

“Schenken? Oh, I get it. Ellen must be talking bridge. That’s an Italian bidding system.”

“K.S.?”

“Same thing.”

“Roth-Steiner?”

“Same, though it sounds German. Ellen goes for the Italian systems — and she’s good. Say, what—”

“How about Azalea?”

Van Dorn frowns. “Azalea?”

“The Azalea convention.”

“Oh.” He smiles as he shakes his head slowly, rolling his forehead against the beer can. “That’s a wild one. Not Azalea — you had me confused. Azazel. The Azazel convention. After the fallen angel.”

“What is the Azazel convention?”

“It means you’re in a hell of a mess. It is a way of minimizing loss.”

“How does it work?”

“It’s in the bidding. If you discover that you and your partner are bidding different suits and are at cross purposes and over your heads, you signal to her that it is better for her to go down in her suit. We’ll lose less that way. You do it by bidding your opponents’ suit for one round.”

“You mean if your opponents are bidding hearts, and your partner is raising you in your suit, hoping for a slam, you wave her off by bidding hearts for one round, signaling to her: You go back to your suit and go down.”

“You got it.”

“I see.”

“I think you’ve played more bridge than you’re letting on, Tom.”

“Why do you think that?”

“You know the jargon and you’re even on to their harmless little double entendres.”

“Double entendres?”

“You made one yourself — bidding hearts and going down.”

“So I did.” Azazel. “So Azazel can be more than one kind of invitation.”

“You got it, cud’n.”

When we round our grand canal of a bayou and come in sight of The Quarters, Van Dorn makes a sign to me.

I cup my ear to hear over the motor.

“Cut the motor.”

I cut the motor.

“It’s about Ellen, Tom.”

“Yes?”

“There’s something I want you to do.”

“What’s that?”

“I want you to go to Fresno with Ellen, Tom.”

“You’re not going?”

“No way. I got these kids starting up school and soccer. First things first.”

“She seemed disappointed.”

“She’ll do fine! True, we’ve done well, won some tournaments, but what she doesn’t know is that I’m not indispensable. She’s the one. That’s why I wanted you to go.”

“I couldn’t play tournament bridge.”

“No. I mean to watch her.”

“Watch her?”

“Tom, you got to see it to believe it. And I think you’d be interested even if it weren’t Ellen.” As the boat drifts, Van Dorn takes off his Wehrmacht helmet, leans forward, and gives me a keen blue-eyed look.

“See what?”

“I can only give you the facts. You’re the brain man, the psychologist. Maybe you’ve got an explanation.”

“Of what?”

“Tom, it’s not her bidding — which is okay, better than okay, somewhat shaky but highly proficient — after all, bidding is nothing more than a code for exchanging information. No, it’s in the play. Tom, she knows where all the cards are. Do you hear what I’m saying? She knows what cards her opponents are holding. Now, most of us can make an educated guess after a few rounds of play, but she knows!”

“So?”

“Tom, let me ask you a question.”

“All right.”

“Do you set any store in ESP, clairvoyance, and suchlike?”

“No.”

“Neither did I. But how else do you explain it? She’s not cheating. So either she is reading the cards, which is clairvoyance, or she’s reading the minds of the players, which is telepathy, right?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think, Tom?”

“You did mention A.I. earlier. Artificial intelligence.”

“Yes.”

“If, as you say, brain circuitry can be understood as a fifth-generation computer, maybe she’s able to use hers as such and after a few rounds of play calculate the exact probabilities of where the cards are.”

Van Dorn gives me his keenest look. “And that would be even more amazing than ESP, wouldn’t it? You mean like an idiot savant. Don’t you think that hasn’t occurred to me? But Ellen is no idiot.”

“No.”

“Tom, look.”

“Yes?”

“You’re a very intuitive therapist — on top of having made an early breakthrough in cortical function. But we’re not talking about brain circuitry. We’re talking about something else. We’re talking about someone who may be able to use her own brain circuitry. How about that? Think of the implications.”

“All right.”

“Tom.”

“Yes?”

“I think you should go to Fresno with Ellen.”

“I see.”

“Tom?”

“Yes?”

“I really think you ought to do something about this.”

“I will, Van. I will.”

Azazel is, according to Hebrew and Canaanite belief, a demon who lived in the Syrian desert, a particularly barren region where even God’s life-giving force was in short supply. God told Moses to tell Aaron to obtain two goats for a sacrifice, draw lots, and allot one goat to Yahweh as a sacrifice for sin, the other goat to be marked for Azazel and sent out into the desert, a place of wantonness and freedom from God’s commandments, as a gift for Azazel.

Mohammedans believe that Azazel is a jinn of the desert, formerly an angel. When God commanded the angels to worship Adam, Azazel replied, “Why should a son of fire fall down before a son of clay?” Whereupon God threw him out of heaven and down into the Syrian desert, a hell on earth. At that very moment his name was changed from Azazel to Eblis, which means despair.

Milton made Azazel the standard-bearer of all the rebel angels.