The Girl on the Best Seller List

Dr. Hammerheim was the local Freud; and it was not always a case of mispronunciation when some citizens referred to him as the local fraud.

— FROM Population 12,360

THAT AFTERNOON while he was waiting for the light on Court Street, Jay Mannerheim noticed the car in front of him. Gloria Wealdon was driving, with Milo slumped beside her in the front seat. As the light went green and Jay turned at the corner, he began to think about the furor Gloria’s novel had created in Cayuta.

It had served to remind him of the fact that the human ego was pitifully fragile, grievously vulnerable; that human beings were far more complex and peculiar than they were already assumed to be.

There was Fern, poor, lonely soul. At one time, probably back in the beginning of her analysis, she had told Gloria Wealdon the delicious falsehood that she and Jay were having an affair. It was innocent enough, as a fantasy(some of Jay’s patients murdered him intheirs) and it was common enough among his female patients. But when Gloria had written it into her novel, Fern felt ruined in Jay’s eyes.

When the book was first published, she spent most of her analytic hour talking about it.

“I suppose,” she would begin, “that you imagine I told Gloria a lie about us. It would be a ridiculous lie for me to tell,” she would continue, “because I don’t have to make up stories about my attractiveness. Why, I used to fight the boys off, down at Laura Bryan’s dancing school, when I was a girl. One boy — he’s a big man in stocks and bonds now and lives in Fairfield County — broke his collarbone racing across to dance with me. Jack Fowler was his name. Fowler and Nash, ever hear of them? Stocks and bonds.”

Then she would reach suddenly for the Kleenex box on Jay’s desk, and start to cry.

Once she said, “I think everyone in town is laughing at me because of that book. I think they all believe I told Gloria Wealdon we were having an affair! I never did, you know.You don’t think I did, do you?”

That was untrue. Jay Mannerheim realized an immense pity for Freddy Fulton’s wife. She had an almost sticky hunger for love, so that being in her presence was like walking through a too-humid hot August afternoon, when you felt as though you were powerless to accomplish anything at all. Sometimes Jay felt that all he could do for her was simply to listen, simply to take her money so she could buy those moments in his presence when there was no more façade, when there was just this miserable woman face-to-face with herself, looking into a mirror where there was reflected the shabby soap-opera of a lifetime; looking at truth instead of for it, the way someone will when dreams are over.

Now, with Gloria Wealdon’s book published, it was as though everyone else could look too; look and point and make fun. Fern Fulton might have been able to convince Gloria Wealdon that she and Jay were having an affair, but most everyone else suspected the truth. Even Freddy Fulton had laughed at the idea. Freddy had said he wished Jaywould have an affair with her.

Fulton puzzled Jay Mannerheim. From all he could gather, Freddy was never unfaithful to his wife, yet Fern confessed that up until about eight months ago their sexual activity had been only spasmodic for some six years. Now it was resuming with surprising frequency. Mannerheim supposed Fulton had either been neurotic in some unknown area, or guilty about whatever he imagined washis contribution to their child’s eye condition. The latter, most probably. Many times people displaced guilt and punished another by withholding love. Still, how had Fulton overcome it, and had the novel Gloria Wealdon wrote had something to do with it? It seemed unlikely. Fulton was too sharp a man for such a glib likelihood; at the same time, he always seemed so easy-going and content, not like someone wrestling with some inner conflict so sexual in its nature. Jay could always see him in his mind’s eye laughing with his head thrown back, standing that way he did with his legs apart, rocking on his heels, his slight paunch poking out in front of him, holding a drink with the ice melting in it (because he wasn’t a fast drinker). Freddy Fulton, philosophical in a sort of kind and cynical way (like a much older man who’d known great love, passion or some kind of adventure). A nice guy, laughing, grinning, winking, saying something too wise and quite clever. He was very much like Milo Wealdon, in a stronger way; Milo was a weak sister to a Freddy Fulton, yet in both there was some uncanny spark, a look in the eye, a spring in the walk, something different that made you like them for a reason you couldn’t honestly fathom. You just liked them, that was all.

Fern Fulton had said in her last session, “I wish Freddy would think we were having an affair! If there were only some way I could make him believe it!”

“Why do you want him to believe that?” Jay had said, even though he knew the answer, even though for her sake he, too, almost wished Freddy Fulton wouldn’t laugh it off.

“I’d like to come and see you on business.” “I wouldn’t worry about Gloria Wealdon, Virginia.” He supposed Fern had been making the same threats at home as she did during her analytic hour. He added, “She can take care of herself, don’t you think?” chuckling. “Perhaps.”

“How have you been, Virginia?” “All right.” “And your dad?” “He’s fine.”

“You didn’t bother me at all. In fact, I’m just about ready to go and play some golf, get the kinks out.”

But it was not Freddy Fulton’s family alone who were affected by the novel. Jay could think of others, and that noon he thought of two in particular. One person was Roberta Shagland from the high school.She was attempting to cope with an altogether different sort of threat — the threat of an intense attraction to Milo Wealdon. It had come over her while she was reading his wife’s book.

“I just feel so sorry for him, Doctor,” she had told Jay. “I know that woman is mean to him, mean as anything! Every time I think of it, I just hate her! I can’t concentrate on another thing but him, do you know? I mean, I’d like to make him feel wanted, do you know? Then I start this hiccuping I was telling you about. Doctor, I get hiccups.” She was always twisting a wet hanky in her hand during her hour. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I don’t think it’s so serious,” said Jay. “I don’t think we have to worry a lot about it.” “But what can I do to stop it?” “We’ll work it out.”

Miss Shagland was Mannerheim’s newest patient. She had begun her consultations (the doctor was convinced that was all they would amount to, that she would hardly need continual treatment) immediately after readingPopulation 12,360. There was another who had done the same, though he had started a week or two before Miss Shagland. He was the second person Jay Mannerheim thought of — Louie Stewart.

Louie did not cry, and he refused to stretch out on the couch. He sat soldier-straight in the armless, leather high-back chair, opposite Jay’s desk, and pared his nails with a squeaky silver clip. At some sessions, Louie said very little. After long silences, he would announce in flat, deep, staccato: “Hate!”

“I am not as quixotic as you may think,” he said once, ignoring Jay’s question. “I have hidden, vitriolic potential!”

“A surreptitious undertaking of mine, which I am not at liberty to think about fully at this time.”

When he was voluble, he concentrated on the mechanical and grammatical errors in Gloria Wealdon’s novel.

“On page 232,” he would say, “there is a typo! Words run together!” His face would get very flushed, and he would lean forward in his chair and crack his knuckles, gripping his hands together so tightly the knuckles went white. He would complain that the pronouns and antecedents in the novel did not agree, that prefixes were not solid with their stems, that there were infinite bromides and redundancies.

“Aren’t you dwelling too much on the book itself?” Jay would ask him. “What’s really bothering you, Louie? What she wrote about some character in the book?” Silence … then: “Do you think you’re in the book, Louie? Is that it?”

“She said ‘feeling ran high’ eighteen times,” he would answer. “Eighteen times!”

Jay Mannerheim was deeply concerned about Louie Stewart. The boy (and no one in Cayuta ever thought of him as a young man, though he was well into his thirties) had always been mixed-up and sissyfied. But now, it was quite another story. Jay was pretty certain that Min Stewart’s son was not even a neurotic, but a full-blown certifiable psychotic. This afternoon, during Louie’s session, Jay was going to decide whether to continue treatment or to recommend to Min that Louie be examined by the physicians at the Cayuta Retreat.

The credit was not Gloria Wealdon’s for all of this, not by any means. In all cases, she simply touched off something that would have gone off sooner or later anyway; she was the catalyst. But the less serious irritations, the minor embarrassments many in Cayuta had suffered since the publication ofPopulation 12,360 shecould take credit for. For her portrayal of Virginia Fulton, for that of her hero, Milo, for the thinly disguised characterization of Min Stewart. For these, the blame rested fully on her, and for some others, probably — smaller ones, where there was only a sting instead of a full punch to the stomach. She had made war on Cayuta, New York, and there was no doubt that there were battle scars and casualties, no doubt either that there would be law suits. Out of it all, Jay felt mostly sorry for Milo Wealdon; yet again, why was that thought always followed by the thought that probably Milo did not need his sympathy? It was an enigma.

Jay himself had minded only one thing about Gloria Wealdon’s portrayal of him, and that was her emphasis on the fact that he was not a medical doctor. It had angered him, in fact. All of his patients understood that he was a psychologist and not a psychoanalyst, and in the county he really had no competition. So his anger was not inspired out of any feeling that she had exposed him, or driven potential patients to an M.D. in the same area. It was rooted primarily in two sentences of conversation in the novel, when two women were discussing entering analysis:

“Don’t go to Dr. Hammerheim,” said Gina to Fernanda, “if you have to get psychoanalyzed. Go to a real doctor, an M.D. Then you can take it off your income tax as a medical expense, but you can’t do it unless you go to a real doctor.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Fernanda exclaimed. “Why, I’d never thought of that!”

Neither had a good many people in Cayuta thought of that, Mannerheim knew; neither had the local tax inspectors. It had probably never occurred to them to notice this very technical but terribly damaging fact. Jay was a perfectly legitimate psychologist, but the tax exemption rules could not be clearer. Only last week at Tuesday’s Rotary, Bill Farley, one of the county government men, said, “That’s a Ph.D. you’ve got, eh, Mannerheim.”

“I just got to get all these D’s straight,” Farley’d smiled. “Ph.D., M.D. — just try to sort them out.”

“ ‘At’s right.” Farley’d clapped him across the back, chewing his half-smoked cigar. Then, unnecessarily, he’d added: “I got nothin’ against either, mind you. It’s just that I gotta keep ‘em straight.”

Remembering it, Jay shrugged. She was a bitch, all right, he thought, boy she was a bitch! He turned west on Genesee Street, and as he did he spotted Stanley Secora idling on the corner. It reminded him that the front windows of his office needed cleaning, and he slowed to call the boy over to the car. Even Secora was not unaffected by Gloria Wealdon’s novel, Jay mused, as he waved at the young fellow, though how Stanley Secora managed to squeeze himself into the confusion, Jay couldn’t figure out. He supposed Secora just had a good case of celebrity worship. The last time he had done the windows for Jay, her picture, cut from a newspaper, had fallen out of his trousers’ pocket as he had reached there for a rag to wipe dry the panes.