My gostly fader, I me confess,

First to God and then to you,

That at a window—wot ye how?—

I stale a kiss of grete sweteness,

Which don was out of aviseness;

But it is doon not undoon now.

My gostly fader, I me confess,

First to God and then to you.

But I restore it shall doubtless

Again, if so be that I mow;

And that to God I make a vow

And ells I axe foryefness.

Gostly fader, I me confess,

First to God and then to you.

THE EYES GLEAMED BENEVOLENTLY behind the glasses. If she turned her head on the cushion, she could see them, and she kept doing this from time to time, hoping to surprise them in an expression of disapproval, of astonishment or regret—anything but that kindly neutrality. But they did not change, and finally she gave it up, dropped her head back on the cushion, and tried to relax. It was really against the rules (she supposed) to be flopping around there like a fish. He had never scolded her for it; now and then he would say gently, “Don’t worry about what I think. Just let your own thoughts come.”

“I dreamed I was seventeen,” she said, “and I was matriculating at a place called Eggshell College.” She could not resist a teasing smile and another glance up at him. “I must have dreamed that just to please you. It’s custom-made. The womb fantasy.”

“Go on with the dream,” he said.

“Well,” she continued, “there was a sort of an outing cabin. We had one at college. It was supposed to be great fun to spend the week end in it. I never did. I thought it was silly—you know, a vestigial trace of the goofy old days when they had chafing dishes and spreads and college sings and went to the Cider Mill for a binge. My aunt had the idea that college was still like that,” she went on. “She tried to give me an electric doughnut-maker to take away with me when I was a freshman. It was the only present she ever offered me.”

She knew without looking that she had coaxed a smile out of him. It was all right, then; she could go on. He understood her attitude toward the outing cabin. Often it was not so easy. She would spend half a session trying to show him, say, that a man they both knew was a ridiculous character, that a movie they had both seen was cheap. And it would be hopeless, absolutely hopeless, for he was that man, he was that movie; he was the outing cabin, the Popular Front, the League of American Writers, the Nation, the Liberal, the New Republic, George S. Kaufman, Helen Hayes, Colonial wallpaper, money in the bank, and two cocktails (or was it one?) before dinner. When she had worn herself out, he would remind her patiently, “It doesn’t matter what I think, you know.” But it did matter, of course. Sometimes it seemed to her that her analysis could never be finished until he could purge himself of the maple furniture in his waiting room, the etching of the cathedral at Chartres that hung above his desk, the subscription to Newsweek that never ran out. Someone had once suggested to her that all this was a matter of policy, that a psychoanalyst in the decoration of his professional quarters aimed deliberately at that colorless objectivity, that rigorous job-lot asceticism that can be seen in its purest form in the residential hotel room. The notion was pleasant but not really plausible. It was impossible to think of Dr. James as a male Cinderella who lived dangerously every night after office hours, and all day Sundays.

“What are you smiling about?” he asked.

“I’m thinking rude thoughts about you.”

Damn my stream of consciousness, her mind said. Why must it keep harping on this embarrassing topic?

“Let’s have them,” he exclaimed, with that ghastly, hand-regulated cheerfulness that seemed to spurt out of him the more eagerly, the more unpleasant were the facts to be faced. To listen to him, you might think that someone had just set a wonderful dinner before him.

“Oh, Dr. James,” she sighed. “Let’s skip it this time. You know what I think about you. It doesn’t give me any pleasure to say it to your face.”

“But your picture of me is very important,” he said, in his pedagogical manner. “Not for what it says about me, but for what it says about you.”

This angered her slightly. So he took no stock in her opinion, labeled it “aggression against the analyst,” and dismissed it from his mind. Very well, then….

“I was thinking,” she said, “how utterly fantastic it is to imagine you on a tear.”

“Don’t you suppose I have any fun?” There was a certain wistfulness in the question that must have got in by mistake.

“No doubt you do,” she said, “but I think you must have to work awfully hard at it.”

“What do you suppose I do for relaxation?”

Relaxation, she thought; there is the key word. There the poor pedant betrays himself.

“Well,” she said, “you see about six plays a year. Your wife makes a list of the things that are really worth while, and you check them off one by one. You get the tickets well in advance, and you generally take another couple with you. You never go on the spur of the moment; you never take standing room. Sometimes somebody in your party knows the girl who is playing the ingénue, and then you go backstage afterwards. You meet some of the actors and think it’s a lot of fun. Once in a while, you go to a benefit concert with your mother or your wife’s mother. Myra Hess for the British Relief. You like the movies, and you never miss one that the New Yorker recommends. Now and then, if your party is feeling particularly reckless, you go to a swing-music joint. You’re not much of a dancer, but you ask the other guy’s wife to dance once; after that you sit out because the floor is too crowded. In the summer you commute to your mother-in-law’s place at Larchmont or Riverside. There is a nice crowd of young doctors there, and you kid each other about who is going to go into the water first. Probably there is a certain amount of splashing, but nobody loses his temper, and afterwards you play medicine ball on the beach. Your wife likes tennis, but you don’t go in for it, on account of your eyes. Your wife has a three-quarter-length silver-fox coat and several very dear girl friends. You take excellent care of your health. You have small feet and are proud of it, and this is your only foible.”

“What makes you so sure of all this?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’ve got a good eye for social types, and I’ve had a lot of practice. When I was in college, I was a perennial house guest. I never went home for vacations, you know.”

She was anxious, now, to change the subject. She had enjoyed doing that malicious portrait, but suddenly toward the end her self-confidence had wavered. Supposing she were wrong? He would not tell her. She would never know. It was like doing an algebra problem and finding that the answers were missing from the back of the book. She felt the ground give way beneath her.

“Nothing I could do would surprise you?” he said.

She began to cry.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Why do you lead me on so? It’s not fair! You make me say all these awful things to you, and then you won’t even tell me whether I’m right or not.”

The tears streamed from her eyes. She opened her pocketbook and found, as usual, no handkerchief. He took a box of Kleenex from a drawer and handed it to her silently.

“Thank you,” she said, still sobbing. “Do you keep that specially for me or do all your patients weep?”

He did not answer. He never answered questions of this sort.

“What made you cry?” he said at length, in that falsely casual tone he used whenever he asked her an important question.

“You made me feel like a fool,” she said. “I extended myself and you sat and watched. It was like one of those exposure dreams. You go into a restaurant and you think how beautiful and chic you are. You even pose a little, toss your head, draw off your gloves very, very slowly, like an actress. And then all of a sudden you look down and you see that you have nothing on but a pair of pink pants. And the worst of it is that nobody shows the slightest surprise; there is no commotion; the headwaiter doesn’t come and ask you to leave. Everyone goes on eating and talking, so that you think that maybe your eyes have deceived you, and you look stealthily down again, hoping to find your clothes back on. But no; you are still in the same condition. Then you try to tell yourself that perhaps nobody has noticed anything, that if you behave very, very quietly and do not call attention to yourself, your lapse will pass unobserved. But all the time you know that this is not true. They are all watching you, but out of cruelty they will give no sign. If one of your companions were to say, “Why, Meg, you’re undressed,” the situation would be saved. You could exclaim, “Why, gee, I am,” and people would lend you things and laugh and fuss over you, and the whole thing would turn into one of those jolly Embarrassing Moments that readers send in to the Daily Mirror. “‘Imagine my mortification, but there I was without a stitch of clothes!’”

Dr. James laughed.

“Yes,” he said. “But what is there about you that you don’t want me to see?” He spoke softly now, in the tone of a conspirator in a Grade B movie. “What is it, Meg, that you are so ashamed of?”

She pressed her hands wearily to her forehead. If he would give up this whispering, she could forgive everything. It made them both ridiculous. She longed to reply in a sepulchral voice, “Dr. James, when I was a little girl, I buried my four-year-old cousin alive.” (Sensation in the courtroom!) “But don’t tell anybody.” However, these miserable jokes of hers wasted a great deal of time. She knew exactly what would follow. He would scribble furiously in his notebook for a few seconds, and then the questions would come. Did you ever play with a four-year-old cousin? Did you ever want to bury anybody alive? Where did you get this idea of interment? And so on, through The Last Days of Pompeii, A Cask of Amontillado, and the giant, whatever his name was, who slept restlessly under Aetna. Matthew Arnold, Empedocles. And Karl Marx: “weighs like an Alp” on the something-or-other.

“Nothing, Dr. James, nothing. There’s nothing I ever did that I haven’t told you.” (But what about the time she had stolen the ring from the five-and-ten and her aunt had made her take it back and confess to the manager? Could it be that? Oh, surely not, her common sense replied. All children steal, and she had already told him of a half a dozen other childish thefts: the cookies from the pantry, the small change from her aunt’s bureau, the dime for the collection plate she had spent on candy. Oh, surely not! And yet … What if it were important and she failed to tell him? What if her reluctance to delay over a trifle really masked an unconscious fear? In this room, you never knew whether you were putting obstacles in the way or clearing the path. It was a question of relevance, but how could you determine what was relevant to the Unknown?)

Fortunately, he was speaking and she did not have to decide.

“Understand me,” he said. “I don’t think it’s anything you did. It’s a feeling that you have about yourself, a feeling that there is something about you that you have to conceal.”

He means sex, she thought with relief. It was not the ring, after all. She could feel her mind wrinkle into a smile. We are heading for the castration complex, she told herself, the horror of the little girl when she discovers that an important part of her is missing.

“I don’t believe in it,” she said aloud.

“Don’t believe in what?”

“All this castration nonsense.”

“How do you know I was going to mention that?”

“Weren’t you?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I was.” (Ah, she thought, without pleasure, I can read him like a book.) “But,” he continued, “I am not trying to foist this idea on you. It was you who brought it up.”

“Oh, Dr. James,” she murmured reproachfully. “You turn everything to your own advantage. If I can read your mind, you say that I put the idea there.”

“No,” he said. “Think! What are the pink pants in your dream there for? What are they hiding?”

She looked quickly up at him, struck by his question, proud of him for having asked it. Perhaps he was not so stupid as she feared.

“It’s true,” she admitted, “when men have exposure dreams, they’re always completely naked. Most women, too. The pink pants are a little idiosyncrasy of my own. Maybe you’ve got it, Dr. James.” She felt suddenly excited and gay. Everything was going to be all right. They were on the scent. The fugitive, criminal self lay hiding in a thicket, but the hounds of the intellect were hot in pursuit. Ah, she thought, thank God for the mind, the chart, the compass. Of course, the universe had to be meaningful. There can be no question without an answer; if you throw a ball up, it must come down. Her life was not mere gibberish; rather, it was like one of those sealed mystery stories where the reader is on his honor not to go beyond a certain page until he has guessed the identity of the murderer. She had come to that imperative blank page again and again and stopped and retraversed her ground, looking for the obvious, unobtrusive clue, the thing that everyone overlooked and that was nevertheless as plain as the nose on your face. “The Clue of the Pink Pants,” she said to herself. “The publishers take pride in announcing a new kind of detective story by a young author.” But, seriously, if that were really it …

Then she could go on. She paused to examine this phrase, the vague, dramatic resonance of it, the hollowness of the two o’s echoing in a triumph of onomatopoeia the emptiness of the mind that framed it. It was a phrase that came to her lips a dozen times a day. Bumping along on a Madison Avenue bus, she would find herself hammering her fist on her knees and crying out to herself in a sort of whispered shriek, “I can’t go on, I CANNOT GO ON.” And at home, in the apartment on Sutton Place (“not one of the really smart ones, my dear, just one of Vincent Astor’s remodeled tenements”), she would suddenly set her fork down on her plate and say to her husband, “I can’t go on. Listen to me, Frederick, I can’t go on.” She would watch the surprise invade his anxious face, the pain, the irritation, the Do-we-have-to-go-through-all-this-again, the doubt (tact or brutality, which was the better method?), the desire to get through the meal in peace, the final decision to humor her until the maid brought the coffee in. “Finish your supper, my dear,” he would say, calmly, easily, so as not to put pressure on her. In the end, she would pick up her fork again and, with an exaggerated listlessness, begin to eat. This was what she could not forgive herself: the capitulation. If she had any strength of character, she would commit suicide. But they would never find her body in the river. Ah, no, not she! She knew which side her bread was buttered on. Better a live coward than a dead hero, as her colored maid always said. “Cemetery’s full of heroes,” she could hear the soft, wicked Negro voice. Lacedaemonians, shed a tear … Maestius lacrimis Simonideis. The distich of grief was not for her. She remembered how in boarding school, bemused by sad poetry out of an anthology, she had sat half one night with her feet hanging out her window, knowing that she would never have the heart to jump, yet telling herself from moment to moment that of course in five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen, she would. When, at last, she had crept back into her bed, cold and dispirited, the romantic melancholy had blown away, leaving her with a mild, depression, for she had in truth seen her own grave, the narrow, schoolgirl’s bed with its regulation blanket which she would always, however late, return to. It was characteristic, she thought now, that she had not even caught a cold.

“But why should you have committed suicide?” Dr. James had said. “You reproach yourself unnecessarily.” “You have got everything upside down,” her husband told her. And from their point of view, they were quite right. Why shouldn’t she finish her dinner, love her husband, have a baby, stay alive? Where was the crime? There was the class crime, to be sure, yet it was not for having money that she hated herself, but (be honest, she murmured) for having some but not enough. If she could have been very rich … It was the ugly cartoon of middle-class life that she detested, Mr. and Mrs., Jiggs and Maggie, the Norths in the New Yorker. And the more stylish you tried to make it, smearing it over with culture and good taste, Swedish modern and Paul Klee, the more repellent it became: the cuspidors and the silk lampshades in the funny papers did not stab the heart half so cruelly as her own glass shelves with the white pots of ivy, her Venetian blinds, her open copy of a novel by Kafka, all the objects that were waiting for her at home, each in its own patina of social anxiety. Ah God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class. If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was she hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she administered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a parvenu, an upstart, an adventurer, a politician was always cheap, and an opportunist vulgar. But the proletariat did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V. What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow him to give himself the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his sanity questioned.

No, it was not really the humanitarian side of socialism that touched her; though she was moved by human misery when it was brought to her attention, if she went to buy a suit at Bonwit Teller, she was never troubled by irrelevant memories of the slums she had passed through on her way. Her aunt had been one of those pious women who could not look at a garbage pail without being reminded of the fact that there were people in the world who had nothing to eat. “It’s a sin to throw that away,” she was always saying, and her hyperestheticism on this point allowed her to practice an extreme parsimony with a good conscience. But she herself, thank God, was not like that. In this respect, she took after her father, who in his rather uninspired way had been fond of good cigars, good Bourbon, eau lilas végétale, crabmeat, alligator pears, and hotel suites. It was curious, she thought, that all the Puritan penny-pinching should have been on the Catholic side of her family, while her father, that stern Yankee, with his thin skin, his methodical habits, his civic-mindedness, his devout sense of what was proper, should have spent his life buying encyclopedia sets, worthless real estate, patents on fantastic inventions, and have died, to everyone’s astonishment, overdrawn at the bank. What a strange childhood she had had! (“No wonder,” Dr. James sometimes murmured, in a slightly awestruck voice, “no wonder,” meaning no wonder she had turned out so badly. And it was true, she supposed, Freud would have labored in vain if she had not ended up, sobbing, on a psychoanalyst’s blue couch. She was a real Freudian classic, and as such faintly monstrous, improbable, like one of those French plays that demonstrate as if on a blackboard the axioms of the Romantic movement. It was not merely a distaste for the obvious that had led both her and the doctor to avoid, insofar as it was possible, lengthy discussions of her childhood. The subject frightened them both, for it suggested to them that the universe is mechanical, utterly predictable, frozen, and this in its own way is quite as terrible as the notion that the universe is chaotic. It is essential for our happiness, she thought, to have both the pattern and the loose ends, to roughen the glassy hexameter with the counter-rhythm of speech.)

Up to the time her mother had died, she had been such an elegant little girl. She remembered her ermine neckpiece and the ermine muff that went with it, her two baby rings with the diamonds in them, the necklace of seed pearls. All a little on the ostentatious side, she admitted, but it had been an era of bad taste. Then, after the flu was over, and mamma did not come home from the hospital, Aunt Clara had moved in, the rings were put in the vault (to keep for you until you’re older), the ermine set wore out, the velocipede broke, the white sand darkened in the sandpile, there were prunes and rice pudding on the table, and the pretty little girl who looked (everybody said) so much like her mother was changed into a stringy, bow-legged child with glasses and braces on her teeth, long underwear, high shoes, blue serge jumpers that smelled, and a brown beaver hat two sizes too big for her.

Ah, she said to herself now, I reject this middle-class tragedy, this degenerated Victorian novel where I am Jane Eyre or somebody in Dickens or Kipling or brave little Elsie Dinsmore fainting over the piano. I reject the whole pathos of the changeling, the orphan, the stepchild. I reject this trip down the tunnel of memory which resembles nothing so much as a trip down the Red Mill at Coney Island, with my aunt and her attributive razor strop substituting for Lizzie Borden and her ax. I reject all those tableaux of estrangement: my father in his smoking jacket at the card table with his nightly game of solitaire forever laid out before him, my aunt with her novel by Cardinal Wiseman that she is reading for the fifteenth time, and myself with the cotton handkerchief that I must hem and re-hem because the stitches are never small enough; I deny the afternoon I deliver my prize-winning essay at the Town Auditorium and there is no family there to applaud me because my father is away on a hunting trip, and my aunt, having just beaten me for my error in winning the prize (“You are too stuck-up already”), is at home in her bedroom having hysterics; and also the scene at the summer resort where the lady looks up from the bridge table and utters her immortal tag line, “Surely, Mr. Sargent, this isn’t your daughter!” It is all too apropos for acceptance.

Yet what were you going to do? You could not treat your life-history as though it were an inferior novel and dismiss it with a snubbing phrase. It had after all been like that. Her peculiar tragedy (if she had one) was that her temperament was unable to assimilate her experience; the raw melodrama of those early years was a kind of daily affront to her skeptical, prosaic intelligence. She remembered the White Russian gentleman she had met once at a party. They were asking him about his escape from the Soviets, and he had reached the point in his story where he saw his brother shot by the Bolsheviks. Here, at the most harrowing moment of his narrative, he faltered, broke off, and finally smiled, an apologetic, self-depreciatory smile which declared, “I know that this is one of the clichés of the Russians in exile. They have all seen their brothers or sisters shot before their eyes. Excuse me, please, for having had such a commonplace and at the same time such an unlikely experience.” That terrible smile had filled her with love and pity; she had “recognized” him at once, and afterwards on the street she had kissed him, because she too knew what it was to have a sense of artistic decorum that like a hoity-toity wife was continually showing one’s poor biography the door.

If only she could have been disinherited in some subtle, psychological way…. If her alienation from her father could have been expressed in any terms but those crude, shameful ones of food, money, clothes. If that tactless lady’s question had not been written quite so large in all the faces she remembered. She had seen it a thousand times, wherever she went with her father, in the eyes of the Pullman porter, the traveling salesman, the waiter in the ladies’ annex at the Athletic Club downtown. How she had looked forward to those excursions with him, and how disastrously they had always ended! It was impossible for her to be a credit to him, to be anything but an anomaly, the Catholic child of a Protestant father, the shabby daughter of a prosperous lawyer, the underbred Irish offspring of a genteel New England parent. Her appearance, her conversation, her appetite—everything was wrong. The sight of a menu would be like a poem to her (buckwheat cakes and country sausage with Real Vermont Maple Syrup); inevitably, she would order too much to eat. But when the food came, her shrunken stomach could not accommodate it: a few bites would instantly bring on that stuffed feeling, and she would set down her fork in despair, seeing the feast on her plate as an image of the Unattainable. Her father never reproved her for this, but each time it happened, his lean face with its prominent lantern jaw would set in sharper lines, and she would know that he was grieved, both on her account and his own. He would have liked to “make it up to her” for the loneliness, the harsh, antiquated discipline that his sister-in-law had brought into the house, but it was impossible. Aunt Clara could be bodily left at home but her spirit presided over her niece like a grim familiar demon.

In a way, it had been better at home, for there the social and religious differences had been given a kind of spatial definition and it was easier to move about. Upstairs there were red votive lamps, altars, and holy pictures (the Sacred Heart, Veronica’s veil with the eyes that followed you about the room, Saint Cecilia in sepia striking a heavenly chord on an anachronistic piano), a rich, emotional décor that made the downstairs with its China shepherdesses, Tiffany glass, bronze smoking sets, and family photographs look matter-of-fact and faded, just as the stories in the Century in the magazine rack in the living room seemed unendurably tame after the religious fiction she found in her aunt’s favorite periodicals, where people were always being bitten by tarantulas or cobras, struck by lightning, plagued with leprosy or cholera, cursed in the most ingenious and striking ways by an implacable and resourceful God. It was as if the Catholic Church began on the landing, where her father’s suite branched off from the stairway that continued on up to her own room, her aunt’s room, her mother’s empty room with the French perfume slowly evaporating in the silver atomizers on the dressing-table. Her father never entered her bedroom (except once, with the doctor, when she was sick), yet she knew that he was fond of her, thought her clever because she got high marks and talked back to the sisters. It was some peculiar delicacy that kept him from intruding, the same delicacy that made him say, “Aunt Clara knows what’s good for you,” “You must do what the Mother Superior says.”

If he had been truly indifferent to her, she thought, her position would have been more tolerable. She could have set herself to win his love, or fought him as she did her aunt. But she could not win what she had already, and she could not fight him either. For a long time, she believed that perhaps he did not notice, and she began to behave badly in order to attract his attention. She ran away from home and spent the night in a museum, behind a cast of the Laocoön, where an attendant found her the next day and immediately called a policeman. The idea on the surface of her mind was that she wanted to be put in an orphan asylum, but in the end she confessed her name and allowed herself to be led home, because the thing she really desired was to hear her father say, “Why are you suffering so? Is it so terrible for you here that you honestly cannot stand it?” When the policeman brought her in, her father’s face flushed, and she knew that she had disgraced him. He did not scold her, but neither did he ask any questions. “Get her something to eat,” he said to the maid, while the young policeman shuffled his feet, glancing from father to daughter with that expression she was so familiar with, not knowing whether to leave, because the case seemed somehow unsolved. She watched his eyes take in the living room. She knew precisely what he was saying to himself. “Good home, nice kid, prominent family, what the hell is the matter here? Maybe I was wrong about the kid. Maybe she’s the nigger in the woodpile.”

And she did not blame the policeman for thinking this. In fact, she expected him to think it. All the way home on the streetcar, seeing him begin to like her, seeing the sympathy spring up (her old man probably beats her), she had known that it was merely a question of time, that as soon as he met her father, a stupid, suspicious look would come over his cop’s face, and he would feel a little angry and ridiculous, hurt in his professional pride, as if somebody had picked his pocket. Nevertheless, when he had offered to buy her an ice-cream cone at the drugstore at the end of the car line, she had accepted and gobbled it up quickly, just as later on, she would gobble up friendship, love, compliments, with the full prescience of what would come afterwards, the reproachful look, the averted head, the “You are not what you seemed.”

Yet what was she to have done? How explain to the policeman a thing she hardly understood herself, that her father’s being a good man was precisely what was the matter, that she was the victim of his conscience, as Isaac nearly was of Abraham’s? But here there was no God to step in and say, “That’s enough, Mr. Sargent. You have convinced me that you are a man of honor, that you practice religious tolerance and pay your debt to the dead. You may now give in to your natural feelings and get that woman out of your house.” Her father had never liked Aunt Clara. “Your mother,” he said once, succinctly, “was cut from a different bolt of cloth.” This, she recognized, was for him the sustaining myth, the classic delusion of the frontier, where a pretty woman is a pretty woman, poverty is no crime, and all the nonsense of family and religion and connections has been left behind in the East, and you do not look down on anybody for his race, except of course a Chinaman or a Jap. You do not permit yourself to remember New England and the Irish workers thronging off the boats, the anti-Catholic riots in Boston; you forget your mother, who would draw aside her skirts when a nun passed, and your father with his stack of Know-Nothing pamphlets. If you are to cut down the forests, lay the trolley tracks, send up the skyscrapers, you need partners in business and domesticity, and there is no time to be choosy. You cannot pause to consider that your wife’s grandfather is the historical enemy, the jostling, elbowing immigrant whose cheap labor power pushed your own father out into Illinois and sent you as a young man hurrying farther West, where there was still a little space left.

Her mother’s youth and beauty had tempered the amalgam. Nobody could have foreseen that she would die and bequeath her husband Aunt Clara, whose complaints, whose tears, whose blue-white mottled complexion, whose medals and dirty scapulars would put his egalitarian principles to the severest kind of test. Aunt Clara was, in truth, more than he had bargained for, and a more realistic man would have felt himself perfectly justified in calling the deal off, repossessing his daughter, bringing her up according to his own ideas, and letting the Pope go hang. Yet the very injustice of the legacy, its unwarranted, unforeseeable character, had moved her father to accept it. The fact that Aunt Clara was personally distasteful to him put her beyond the pale of his criticism, rendered her untouchable, sacred, just as the very real aversion he felt toward Catholic doctrine drove him to punish his daughter if her mark in Catechism was low. She understood this now very well, for she had inherited from him the twisted sense of honor that was always overpaying its debts, extorting from herself and from others the coin of unnecessary suffering to buy indulgences for a secret guilt, an unacknowledged shame.

Not until she was fifteen, however, did she guess the real nature of her father’s sin, and the bitterness of his protracted penance. She saw then that to have been locked in closets, beaten, forbidden to read, have a doll, go to the movies or the pantomime was as nothing compared to the agony of permitting these things to happen to your child in the interests of a religious tolerance that you did not really feel.

He had taken her to a dance at the house of one of her Catholic cousins. It was her first evening party. She wore a pink moiré dress with a big, dark-red velvet bow. She was new to the crowd of Irish boys home for Thanksgiving from a Catholic prep school and they kept cutting in and cutting in and bringing her glasses of weak punch from the buffet. Suddenly, her father had shoved his way past her admirers and snatched the glass from her hands. “Get your coat on,” he exclaimed in a strange voice, and began to push her toward the door. She was nearly crying when they reached the street, but he took her by the shoulders and shook her. “God damn it,” he said, “you ought to have more sense than to let those little micks get you drunk. Can’t you see they’re trying to make a fool of you?” “Why, father,” she said, “that’s not true. They liked me. They thought I was the prettiest girl …” “Stop your nonsense,” he shouted. “Don’t you know that they’re all laughing at you?” She had walked sullenly along beside him telling herself that it was hopeless, that she would never have a chance to get married if her father was going to act like this. At the same time, she had sensed that he was right; there had been something degrading about her success. The boys were awfully common, with their red faces and black hair; the whole party was common. Yet it was strange that her father should have noticed this, for he never made social distinctions. She pondered the word “micks,” which came so unexpectedly from him, who had taught her that you must never say nigger or sheeny or dago. All at once, she understood; it was as if he had told her the story of his life, and she was both sorry for him and frightened. In that terrible look on his face, in his hoarse voice, she read the living history of the Irish, the Jews, the Negroes. She felt closer to him than ever before; yet there was no doubt in her mind that her allegiance belonged elsewhere. Let her father vote for Hoover! She was for Al Smith, who used such bad grammar and was married to Mrs. Smith, who looked like all her own dreadful Irish relations rolled into one large woman and decorated with a string of beads. It would have been pleasanter, of course, if Al Smith had been a gentleman, if the Negroes were not colored, and the Jews were not Jewish. Nevertheless … Her heart quickened with romantic defiance. She shook off her father’s arm and stepped proudly into the car.

But by this time she was free. Aunt Clara had been turned into a housekeeper, to whom no one paid any attention, she herself was in her second year at a good boarding school, she had a clothes allowance and charge accounts, took her friends to lunch at the country club, went to the movies and the theater, and read whatever she pleased. She had lost her faith. That was what had done it. In her first year of high school, she came home from the convent one day and announced that she was an atheist. Her aunt had had a fit of hysterics and sent for the parish priest. Her father had said nothing, but when she refused to go to Mass the following Sunday, he picked her up and carried her out to the car, while she kicked at his legs and screamed. “You can send me there,” she kept repeating, “but you can’t make me go in.” At the Catholic church she declined to get out of the car. The chauffeur drove her around for an hour and then brought her home. “I didn’t go,” she said. That night her father called her into the library. “You’re old enough now,” he said, “to know what you want. I can’t make you go to church. I’ve tried to have you brought up a good Catholic because I thought your mother would want it so. I’ve let your aunt have her way, though I’ve told her she was being too strict with you, that there was bound to be an explosion. I can’t do any more.” He paused. “Are you willing to finish out the year at the convent?” She knew that she must take a strong line. “No,” she said firmly. “All right.” He smiled for the first time. “You’ll have to be tutored then till I can find a good school for you. I don’t want you to fall behind.” “I won’t,” she declared intensely, promising herself that she would repay his confidence in her by having a brilliant career. A great writer, an actress, an ambassador’s gifted wife. Perhaps he would like it best if she were to study for the bar. But no, that was out of the question; women lawyers wore flat-heeled shoes. A great lady of some sort who spoke six languages fluently, Diane de Poitiers, Ninon, or Margaret of Navarre.

With a conscious sense of drama, she walked over to the bookshelves and took down The Queen’s Necklace. Dumas had been forbidden her because he was on the Index. “Can I have this now?” she asked. Her father glanced up at the long line of novels in the worn, burgundy-colored bindings. “I ate those up when I was a boy.” She smiled and turned to go. “You can read it in here,” he said. “No need to rub it in. Your aunt is going to be pretty upset. You must go easy on her.” Her face fell. “You must learn to be a good sport, Meg,” he said gently. “It’s a poor winner that gloats.”

Would she have had the courage, she wondered, to have taken up that extreme position if she had not known, unconsciously, that deep down in his soul her father was cheering her on? She was not sure. “You must stop belittling yourself,” said Dr. James. “It doesn’t make any difference what you would have done under some different circumstances. The fact is that you did the best you could with the circumstances you had. Anybody on the outside would say you acted very bravely.” Ah yes, she thought, but again you miss the point. It had not been a real test. That was what she feared and desired, the real test, the ordeal, the burning tenement house with the baby asleep on the fifth floor (would you rush in and save it if there were absolutely no one looking, no God in heaven to welcome your charred but purified spirit, no newspaper account the next day, YOUNG WOMAN DIES SAVING SLUM CHILD; if there were nothing in the world but you and the baby and the fire, would you not say to yourself that it was undoubtedly too late, that the baby must already have suffocated, that the fire was not serious, that the baby was not there at all but in the house across the street?). And of course, as Dr. James said, life is not like that. In life there is always the mitigating circumstance: “Conditions were not right yesterday for the experiment that was to have been performed,” “Findings of observers are open to serious question because of the cloudiness of the atmosphere.” Yet actually all this is misleading; the details, the environmental factors, the conflicting accounts of witnesses serve merely to obscure the fact that the question has been put, is being put, will be put, but worded so ambiguously, tucked into such an innocent context, that the subject cannot learn whether or not he has taken the test, let alone what his mark is. It therefore becomes important—for the subject who is interested in his status (there are many who simply don’t care and doubtless they are the ones who graduate summa cum laude)—to examine the data of his life with the utmost severity and cunning, turning the facts every which way, sidewards, upside down, as one turned those old newspaper puzzles to find the face in the cloud.

In her own case, appearances were certainly against her. (Don’t look now but isn’t she the girl who stirred up all that trouble a few years ago? Treated her husband so badly he drove his car off that cliff. Of course, he was drunk and luckily he wasn’t hurt, but still … And then that other guy—what was his name—she worked on him till he left his wife and then wouldn’t have anything to do with him. And there was another story … he was sick and she didn’t go to see him … The time she made poor so-and-so quit his job on that foundation because it wasn’t radical enough to suit her … Got them to introduce her to some publishers and then dropped them like a hot-cake … Her best friend … Now she’s married to that architect, you know the one, that does those houses with ramps … I guess she’s got what she wants, but they fight like cats and dogs …) A shady case, unquestionably, a sordid history of betrayal. Yet, in some way, she was not like that. She would look at her face in the mirror and recognize in her features something direct, candid, sincere, some inward innocence engraved there that made strangers trust her on sight, tell her their troubles, ask her to watch their babies, help her carry her parcels. Policemen and taxi drivers smiled at her, truck drivers laughed at her hats. There it was, the unreasonable vote of confidence, which was not quite unearned. She would be, she felt, half entitled to it so long as she refused to become reconciled with herself, so long as the right hand remained on guard, the angry watchdog of the left. Yet in Dr. James’ eyes all this was sheer folly.

“Accept yourself as you are,” he said. “Stop trying to dig in to your motives. You have set yourself a moral standard that nobody could live up to. Your early religious training …” Ah dear, she thought, how they all deplore my early religious training. “For God’s sake,” her husband said, “give up worrying about your imaginary sins and try to behave decently. You use your wonderful scruples as an excuse for acting like a bitch. Instead of telling yourself that you oughtn’t to have married me, you might concentrate on being a good wife.” “But I do try,” she said sadly. “I really do.” “Oh, Jesus,” he said, “you overdo it or you underdo it. One day you’re a miracle of a woman and the next morning you’re a hell-cat. Why do we have to live like that? Why can’t you be like anybody else?”

That was what he had sent her to the doctor for—a perfectly simple little operation. First comes the anesthetic, the sweet, optimistic laughing-gas of science (you are not bad, you are merely unhappy, the bathtub murderer is “sick,” the Dead End Kid is a problem child, poor Hitler is a paranoiac, and that dirty fornication in a hotel room, why, that, dear Miss Sargent, is a “relationship”). After consciousness has been put to sleep, it is a very easy matter (just look the other way, please; it isn’t going to hurt, but the sight of the instruments seems to disturb excitable people like yourself), it is a very easy matter to cut out the festering conscience, which was of no use to you at all, and was only making you suffer. Then the patient takes a short rest and emerges as a cured neurotic; the personality has vanished, but otherwise he is perfectly normal; he never drinks too much or beats his wife or sleeps with the wrong person. He has returned to the Garden of Eden, the apple is back on the tree, the snake is a sportive phallus. If there is something a little bewildered, a little pathetic about this revenant, it is only that the ancestral paradise is, like all the homes of our childhood, smaller than he remembered.

Already, in her own case, the effects of treatment were noticeable. “You have lost those unnatural high spirits,” her friends told her. “You are not so tense as you used to be. You don’t get so excited about causes.” It was true, she was more subdued; she did not assert herself in company; she let her husband talk on his own subjects, in his own vein; she told white lies, where before she had only told black ones. She learned to suppress the unpleasant, unnecessary truths: why let an author know that you do not like his book, why spoil a party by getting into an argument, why not tell your friend that her ugly house is pretty? And why mention to your husband that you have spent too much money on an evening dress, gone to the races and lost, had too much to drink, let a man kiss you in the pantry? Pay your debt with the housekeeping money, take your mother’s bracelet to the pawnshop, stifle the hangover with benzedrine, say the ice tray stuck and you were a long time getting it out. Do, in other words, what every normal wife does, agree and go your own way (it would only upset him if he knew; it is not important anyway; he would think I was silly to mention it). And if you want the last chop on the plate, the last drink in the bottle, take it, do not force it on him merely because you want it so much—that would simply be making a nuisance of yourself. Stop trying to be fair; only a child insists that everything should be divided equally. Grab whatever you need; he will do the same to you.

What Frederick had not foreseen was that the good would vanish with the bad, that a man may easily overreach himself in making provisions for his comfort. His situation was like that of a woman who gets a hat altered to suit her features. It is only a small adjustment, the crown is lowered or heightened, the rakish feather is removed; there is no longer any fault to be found, but the customer looks in the mirror and weeps for her folly, because the hat is no longer stylish. Moreover, it is not returnable; it must lie in the closet for a certain number of seasons, till it is old enough to be given to a charity. And she herself was not returnable either. She could no longer go back into circulation, as she had done so often before. The little apartment in the Village, the cocktail parties, the search for a job, the loneliness, the harum-scarum, Bohemian habits, all this was now unthinkable for her. She had lost the life-giving illusion, the sense of the clean slate, the I-will-start-all-over-and-this-time-it-is-going-to-be-different. Up to the day that Frederick had sent her to the doctor, she had believed herself indestructible. Now she regarded herself as a brittle piece of porcelain. Between the two of them, they had taught her the fine art of self-pity. “Take it easy,” “Don’t try to do too much,” “You are only human, you know,” “Have a drink or an aspirin, lie down, you are overstrained.” In other words, you are a poor, unfortunate girl who was badly treated in her childhood, and the world owes you something. And there is the corollary: you must not venture outside this comfortable hospital room we have arranged for you, see how homey it is, the striped curtains, the gay bedspread, the easy chair with the reading lamp, why, you would hardly know it was a hospital—BUT (the threat lay in the conjunction), don’t try to get up, you are not strong enough; if you managed to evade the floor nurses, you would be sure to collapse in the street.

Certainly, Frederick could not have intended this. He had sent her to Dr. James because he was unimaginative, because he believed in science in the same way that as an architect he believed in model tenement houses, and slum-clearance projects, and the Garden City of the Future, which would have straight streets, and lots of fresh air, and parks of culture and rest. When she had wept and cursed and kicked at him, he had not known how to “cope with” her (the phrase was his), and out of timidity, out of a certain sluggishness, an unwillingness to be disturbed, to take too much spiritual trouble, he had done what the modern, liberal man inevitably does—called in an expert. How characteristic of him, she thought, smiling, this great builder of cities, who cannot fix a leaky faucet! Poor Frederick, she murmured to herself, he did not see it in the cards at all that his spirited termagant of a wife would be converted into a whimpering invalid who no longer raged at him so often, who no longer wept every morning and seldom threatened to kill him, but who complained, stood on her prerogatives, and was chronically, vocally tired. And yet … Perhaps he had seen it, and accepted it as a lesser evil to living with her on terms of equality or allowing her to leave him. He was always talking about what he called her “bad record,” a divorce, three broken engagements, a whole series of love affairs abandoned in medias res. Perhaps what counted for him more than anything else, more than love (did he love her, did he know what love was all about?), more than a stable household with a pretty wife across the dinner table, was that this should not happen to him, that no one should be able to say, “Well, she’s done it again.” Furthermore, the fact of her illness, a fact she could not talk away, since she went to the doctor daily, this fact was invaluable to him as a weapon in their disputes. He was always in a position to say to her, “You are excited, you don’t know what you are saying,” “You are not a fit judge of this because you are neurotic,” “We won’t discuss this further, you are not sane on the subject,” and “I don’t want you to see your old friends because they play into your morbid tendencies.” And under the pressure of this, her own sense of truth was weakening. This and her wonderful scruples were all she had in the world, and both were slipping away from her. Overcome by the pathos of her situation, she began to cry.

Dr. James, who was still talking about castration, stopped in the middle of a sentence.

“What is it?” he said. “What upset you?” He had his notebook ready.

“I wasn’t listening,” she said, knowing that this was not quite accurate. She had heard him, but the mind’s time is quicker than the tongue’s. Through the interstices of one of his measured paragraphs her whole life could flood in. “Everything you tell me may be true, but it’s irrelevant. Supposing at a certain time in my life, a time I can’t remember, I found out that girls were different from boys. No doubt this was a very poignant moment, but I can’t go back to it. My horrors are in the present.”

“But you have never learned to accept that difference.”

“Ah,” she said, “now you are on Frederick’s side. You think I ought to welcome my womanly role in life, keep up his position, defer to him, tell him how wonderful he is, pick up the crumbs from his table and eat them in the kitchen.”

“No,” he said, “no. You have a lot to contend with. The marriage is not ideal. It’s unfortunate, for one thing, that you should have chosen to marry exactly the kind of man who would make you feel most enslaved and helpless.”

“Feel!” she replied indignantly.

“Well,” he said in his most reasonable and optimistic manner, “you could always get away from him. I think you want to stay with him. I think you are fond of him and that the two of you have the possibility of a solid relationship. Mutual interests … you could have children … you can’t keep on the way you were going, flying from one hectic love affair to another.”

“No,” she said ruefully, “you can’t.”

If one only could … But it required strength. It took it out of one so. The romantic life had been too hard for her. In morals as in politics anarchy is not for the weak. The small state, racked by internal dissension, invites the foreign conqueror. Proscription, martial law, the billeting of the rude troops, the tax collector, the unjust judge, anything, anything at all, is sweeter than responsibility. The dictator is also the scapegoat; in assuming absolute authority, he assumes absolute guilt; and the oppressed masses, groaning under the yoke, know themselves to be innocent as lambs, while they pray hypocritically for deliverance. Frederick imagined that she had married him for security (this was one of the troubles between them), but what he did not understand was that security from the telephone company or the grocer was as nothing compared to the other security he gave her, the security from being perpetually in the wrong, and that she would have eaten bread and water, if necessary, in order to be kept in jail.

To know God and yet do evil, this was the very essence of the romantic life, a kind of electrolytical process in which the cathode and the anode act and react upon each other to ionize the soul. And, as they said, it could not go on. If you cannot stop doing evil, you must try to forget about God. If your eyes are bigger than your stomach, by all means put one of them out. Learn to measure your capacities, never undertake more than you can do, then no one will know that you are a failure, you will not even know it yourself. If you cannot love, stop attempting it, for in each attempt you will only reveal your poverty, and every bed you have ever slept in will commemorate a battle lost. The betrayer is always the debtor; at best, he can only work out in remorse his deficit of love, until remorse itself becomes love’s humble, shamefaced proxy. The two she had cared for most (or was it that they had cared most for her?) had, she believed, understood all this during those last hours when the packed trunks stood about the room and the last pound of butter got soft in the defrosting icebox (it seemed a pity to waste it, but what were you going to do?). They had consoled her and petted her and promised that she would be happy, that she would soon forget them—just as if they had been leaving her, instead of the other way around. The most curious thing about it was that their wounds, whose seriousness perhaps she had exaggerated, had been readily healed by time, while her own, being self-inflicted, continued to pain her. There are other girls in the world, but there is only the single self.

She remembered Frederick’s impatience when she had tried to explain this to him. “You couldn’t have cared much for him or you wouldn’t have wanted to leave him,” he had said in a grumpy voice. “Really, Frederick,” she had answered, “can’t you possibly understand …?” “By their fruits ye shall know them,” he replied, sententiously. This was one of his favorite quotations, a quotation which, of course, damned her utterly. Yet, she said to herself now, be fair. This is precisely what you want, to be condemned but condemned unjustly, on circumstantial evidence, so that you can feel that there is still some hope for you, that the very illegality of the proceedings against you will advance your cause in some higher court. The prisoner has been under duress; she has been treated with great harshness; let me show you, your honor, the marks of the cat-o’-nine-tails. It was for his incomprehension, his blunt severity, his egoism, that she had married Frederick in the first place. She had known from the very beginning that he would never really love her, and this was what had counted for her, far more than the security or the social position. Or rather perhaps she had felt that she was free to accept these things because the gift of love was lacking. When that man on the train had offered them to her she had had to refuse because love had been offered with them. And yet, she thought, she was being unfair again, for she would never under any conditions have married the man on the train, while there had been something about Frederick (the so-called mutual interests, a certain genuine solidity of character of which the mulishness was only one aspect) that had made her marry him and even believe for a short while that surely it would turn out well, that this time she would be happy and good, that a strong, successful architect was exactly what the recipe called for. An architect, she said to herself scornfully, the perfect compromise candidate, something halfway between a businessman and an artist.

“What you don’t see, Dr. James, is that I was better then than I am now. You and Frederick do wrong to be so deeply shocked by my past. Why, if I forget to send out his laundry, he can’t resist reminding me of my former sexual crimes. ‘You always were a slut,’ he says.”

“Come now,” said Dr. James. “Don’t take it so hard. He doesn’t mean everything he says, any more than you do.”

“Ah,” she exclaimed, sitting up, “but he thinks he does. I still know when I lie, I can recognize a frame-up when I make one. But Frederick is his own stooge, his own innocent front. He has a vested interest in himself. He is the perfect Protestant pragmatist. ‘If I say this, it is true,’ ‘If I do this, it is justified.’ There is no possibility of dispute because Frederick has grace, Frederick belongs to the Elect. It’s the religion of the Pharisee, the religion of the businessman. It’s no accident that Catholicism is the religion of the proletariat and of what is left of the feudal aristocracy. Our principles are democratic; we believe that original sin is given to all and grace is offered with it. The poor man is democratic out of necessity, the nobleman is democratic out of freedom. Have you ever noticed,” she went on, forgetting her quarrel with Frederick, warming up to her subject, “that the unconscious hypocrite is a pure middle-class type? Your aristocrat may be a villain, and your beggar may be a criminal; neither is self-deluded, puffed up with philanthropism and vanity, like a Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie. And the French, who are the most middle-class people in the world, have produced a satirical literature that is absolutely obsessed with this vice.”

Dr. James frowned slightly. It was plain that the subject did not interest him. If only her analysis could be kept on the plane of intellectual discussion! But with Dr. James this was out of the question. Whenever she did manage it, she was sorry almost at once, for, divested of professional infallibility, Dr. James was a pitiable sight. He was no match for her in an argument. It was murder, as they said in the prize ring. And the brief pleasure she got from showing herself to advantage (now he sees me at my best) curdled quickly into self-contempt, as she perceived how abject indeed was her condition, if she could allow this blundering sophomore to get his hands on her beautiful psychology.

Would she have done better, she wondered, to have gone to one of the refugee analysts, or to one of the older men like Brill? Many of them were intelligent, and they had another merit, they were peculiar. You could see at a glance why psychoanalysis had attracted them. They suffered from migraine, divorced their wives, committed suicide, bullied their patients, quarreled with their colleagues; they were vain or absent-minded or bitter or dishonest—there was hardly a one of whom it could not be said, “Physician, heal thyself.” And popular opinion was wrong when it held that an analyst’s personal failings disqualified him as a healer. Psychoanalysis was one of those specialized walks of life, like the ballet or crime or the circus, in which a deformity is an asset; a tendency to put on weight is no handicap to a professional fat lady; moral idiocy is invaluable to a gangster, and the tragedy of a midget’s life occurs when he begins to grow. What Dr. James and his young American colleagues lacked was, precisely, the mark of Cain, that passport to the wilderness of neurosis that the medical schools do not supply.

Yet for all their insight and cultivation, the others, the marked men, were dangerous. They might give you their own neurosis; they might neglect you or die or go insane or run away with their stenographers, and then where would you be? With Dr. James you were safe. He might never cure you, but he would not kill you. He would try to make up in conscientiousness and sympathy what he lacked in the other departments. Whatever you did or said, he would be unfailingly kind, and now and then in his blue eyes you would see a small, bright flame of pain, which told you that he was suffering with you, that you were not alone. And if, in many ways, he seemed Frederick’s ideal apostolic delegate (for Frederick would have been afraid to have you go to one of those showy, gifted analysts), if he seemed a symbol of compromise, of the mediocrity you were rapidly achieving, you must forgive him, pretend not to notice, since he was all you had left. Your father was dead, your first husband, your first lover, and your next-to-the-last, even your Aunt Clara. Your other lovers were married, your friends were scattered or disgusted with you or on bad terms with Frederick. One reason, it occurred to her suddenly, that she continued to go to Dr. James long after she had admitted that he could do nothing for her was simply, if the truth were acknowledged, that she had no one else to talk to. Her conversation had become official conversation—the war, the Administration, the Managerial Revolution, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, the latest novel by a friend. Even on these public subjects, Frederick did not like it if she were too “sharp,” and she could never guess ahead of time whether he would laugh uproariously at one of her jokes or rebuke her for a want of taste. Frederick, she thought, must have known that with all the will in the world she could not transform herself overnight into a “public” character like himself, that a certain amount of isolation was desirable but too much might bring on revolt. Dr. James was the Outlet, paid for by the month, the hygienic pipe line that kept the boiler from exploding.

“Let’s go back a little,” he said now. “It made you angry when I told you that you felt enslaved. Understand me, I don’t mean that this is a delusion. It’s true that you’ve put yourself in a position that isn’t easy to retreat from. You have gone and burnt all the bridges that could take you back to your old life. But you have done this on purpose.”

She nodded.

“I asked for it all right,” she said bitterly. “I haven’t any call to blame Frederick. It’s my own cowardice that got me into this, and it’s my own cowardice that’ll keep me there. Every time I say to myself that I can’t go on, it’s a lie. Or maybe it’s a kind of prayer. ‘Let me not go on.’”

“Wait!” He sustained a dramatic pause. In this moment he was very much the magician. Behind him you could see Mesmer and then Cagliostro, the whole train of illusionists, divine, disreputable charlatans, who breathe on the lead coin, and, lo, it is purest gold. In spite of herself, she felt a little excited. Her hands trembled, her breathing quickened. She was ready for the mystery. “I am going to suggest to you a different view of your marriage.” He paused again. Now she hung ardently on his words. She would have liked a cigarette, but she was afraid to reach for her pocketbook, lest the movement disturb him. She held her body perfectly still, like a woman who is expecting that any minute now the man by her side will kiss her.

“Yes?” she said in a soft, weak voice.

“You accuse yourself every day of having done something cowardly in marrying your present husband. I want to suggest to you that the exact opposite may be true, that this marriage took more real daring on your part than anything you have done since you left your father’s house.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, mildly.

“No!” he declared. “Think! In your childhood you had a terrible experience. Your mother died and you found yourself the prisoner of a cruel and heartless relative.”

“She wasn’t really cruel,” she protested. “She was just misguided.”

“I am talking about the way it appeared to you. Your aunt was the wicked stepmother that you read about in the fairy tales. Now where could you turn for help? To your father, obviously. But your father refused to help you. He even refused to notice that anything was wrong.”

“He was away a great deal.”

“That was what you told yourself. You began by trying to excuse him, but all the time you had the feeling that there was something queer going on, something you couldn’t understand. Maybe your father and your aunt had a horrible covenant between them, maybe your own subjection was somehow part of the deal.”

He is trying to imitate the way I talk, she thought, but it sounds silly when he does it.

“At the same time, you suspected that you would have been treated differently if you were a boy. You’ve described the arrangement of your house to me, and you lived in a kind of harem. Your father never went into your bedroom. You began to think that there was something ugly about being a girl and that you were being punished for it.”

“Yes. There was something odd there. It seems to me now that my father felt that he had committed a sexual crime in marrying outside the clan. Race pollution. That was why he was so strict with me about boys. He wouldn’t let me walk down the street—in broad daylight—with a boy I’d known all my life. The temptations of the flesh must have seemed very lively to him.”

“We can’t go into your father’s psychology here. Something like that probably happened. In any case, you were made to feel unclean about your sex. And your religion got into the picture. You compared the upstairs with the downstairs.”

Ah, yes, she thought, you are right. The terrible female vulgarity of blood, the Sacred Heart dripping gore, Saint Sebastian with the arrows, the dark red of the votive lamps, and the blue robe of the Madonna, the color of the veins in one’s wrists. How schematically it had all been lived out, the war between the flesh and the spirit, between women and men, between the verminous proletariat and the disinfected bourgeoisie.

“You thought that you belonged with your Aunt Clara, that you were a dark, disgusting person, and that your father, though you could not acknowledge this, was the real jailer.”

“I see,” she said. “And I felt that I deserved my imprisonment, that my father in segregating me from the community was performing a social service, throwing a cordon sanitaire around a slum section that was full of typhus.”

It was all true. Yet there had been some ambiguity in the situation, arising from the fact that she was, after all, her father’s daughter. Yet this element, far from easing her lot, had made it the more intolerable. The ugly duckling might be able to get along in life, adjust, resign itself, if there were not the charming, tantalizing possibility that at any moment it might turn into a swan. And, of course, that was what had happened. The second transformation had been quite as magical as the first. The little girl who looked like her mother had suddenly reappeared, seven years older, but otherwise unchanged. Or so, at any rate, it had seemed. She was pretty, she dressed expensively, she was gay, she made friends, and the only remarkable thing about her was that she had the air of coming from nowhere, of having no past. Her classmates in boarding school could not understand why they had never met her before. When they asked her about this, she would blush and say that her father had kept her in a convent. But this explanation was never quite adequate. “What about vacations?” they would wonder. “Who did you go around with?” “Oh, a lot of Catholic girls,” she would answer. “It was very boring.” Questions of this sort annoyed her, for she was anxious to think of herself as a completely new person. If anyone would have believed her, she would have pretended that she had spent her former life in some different, distant city, where she had gone to dancing class every Tuesday and been just like everyone else. Unfortunately, her father was too well known; her lie would have been discovered. In a way, she supposed, it was to escape from these questions, from the whole unfair business of having to have a verifiable history, that she had gone East to college. There, if you had money and used the right fork, no one could suspect an Aunt Clara in your vague but impeccable background. Later, when she had grown more sophisticated, Aunt Clara had been converted into an asset. It was amusing to have an aunt who said “ain’t” and “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” and ate her peas with a spoon, amusing because it seemed so improbable that you could have an aunt like that.

Moreover, the change had not been merely superficial. Her whole character had altered, or, rather, she had believed that it had. She, who had spent seven years in crying fits, spent the next seven without shedding a tear. Where her artistic tastes had been romantic, they quickly became realistic. Everything she had formerly admired became detestable to her. The sight of a nasturtium or a pink cosmos could make her tremble with anger, though these were the very flowers that, at her aunt’s suggestion, she had chosen to grow as a child. Most extraordinary of all, she had suddenly developed wit and, even now, she never failed to be surprised when people laughed at her jokes, because for years it had been a household axiom that poor Meg had no sense of humor.

How remarkable it had all been! How very strong she had felt! She used to think back over her childhood and marvel, telling herself that it was really extraordinary that “all that” had not left a single trace. Yet as soon as she had married for the first time, she had begun to change back again. The first time she cried, she had said to herself, “This is very strange. I never cry.” The first time she got angry with her husband and heard a torrent of abuse pour from her own lips, she had listened to herself in astonishment, feeling that there was something familiar about the hysterical declamatory tone, something she could not quite place. It happened again and again, and always there was this sense of recognition, this feeling that she was only repeating combinations of words she had memorized long ago. She had been married some time before she knew that she sounded exactly like Aunt Clara. Yet she could not stop, she was powerless to intervene when this alien personality would start on one of its tirades, or when it would weep or lie in bed in the morning, too wretched to get up. And when it began to have love affairs, to go up to strange hotel rooms, and try to avoid the floor clerk, she could only stand by, horrified, like a spectator at a play who, as the plot approaches its tragic crisis, longs to jump on the stage and clear up the misunderstanding, but who composes himself by saying that what is happening is not real, those people are only actors.

“This isn’t like you, Meg,” her first husband would tell her, in that gentle voice of his, and she would collapse in his arms, sobbing, “I know, I know, I know.” She was inconsolable, but he could almost console her, since he shared her own incredulity and terror. It was as if she had lent her house to a family of squatters and returned to find the crockery broken, the paneling full of bullet-holes, the walls defaced with obscenities, her beautiful, young girl’s bedroom splashed with the filth of a dog. And it was as if he had taken her hand and said, “Don’t look at it. Come away now. Everything will be just the same; we will send for the cleaning woman, the house painter, and the restorer. Don’t cry, it has no connection with you.” She was glad to believe him, naturally. Nevertheless, before long, she began to think him a fool. At the outset, it had seemed to her that he was right, that she was being impersonated by some false Florimel; however, as time went on, she herself became confused. She was losing the thread of the story, which was getting fearfully involved, like one of those Elizabethan dramas in which the characters change their disguises so often (Enter the Friar disguised as a Friar) that the final unmasking leaves everyone more perplexed than before. She came at last to the place where she wondered whether the false self was not the true one. What if she were an impostor? The point could only be settled by producing the false self in all its malignancy, and asserting its claim to belief. To say, “You were wrong about me, look how dreadfully I can treat you, and do it not impulsively but calmly, in the full possession of my faculties.” Her first husband, however, had not been convinced. (And how could he be, she thought now; it was far easier for him to believe in her innate, untarnishable virtue than to believe that for three years he had been the dupe of what her present husband called a natural-born bitch.) He had grieved over her and let her go, remarking only that her fiancé would never understand her as he did, that she must be out of her senses.

At once she was restored to herself. She knew that she did not cry or make disgusting scenes or have cheap tastes or commit adultery (unless she were very much in love). Yet whenever a new love affair grew serious the usurper would crowd in again. Each time she would persuade herself that with this particular man her defenses would be impregnable, and each time the weak point, the crumbling masonry, would be discovered too late, when the enemy was in occupation. And she would reflect sadly that of course she ought to have realized that this one was too selfish, that one too lazy, the other too pliant to permit her being herself, though actually it was these very qualities that she had relied upon for protection. And unfortunately she had used very little realism in her selections. She was not in a position to ask herself any of the conventional questions (are our tastes congenial, will he be able to support me, will I still want to sleep with him after the first few weeks?) because precisely what she dared not look into was the Medusa-face of the future. “I will have to take a chance,” she would always say, and her friends, marveling at her recklessness, did not see that she was exactly as gallant as a soldier who moves forward flourishing the standard, because he knows that if he does not do so, his officers will shoot him in the back.

“Now,” said Dr. James, “you were helpless, you had no one to turn to, not even the Juvenile Court. And yet …” He paused again, even more impressively. This is the moment, she said to herself. This time surely he will get that rabbit out of the hat. “You won your freedom. And the thing to remember, Margaret,” he pronounced her full name with all its syllables, “is that you did it yourself!” His voice was full of triumph.

“Perhaps,” she said sadly. “But I can’t do it again.”

“I think you can,” he answered. She felt belief stir, faintly, fondly, within her. It would be nice if he were right. However, the whole tone of his address was so deplorably YMCA. “I think you can,” he repeated. “The very fact of your marriage indicates that you can.”

She looked up at him. At last he had surprised her.

“Let me suggest to you, Margaret, that this ordeal of your childhood has been the controlling factor of your life. You forgot it, blotted it out of your consciousness, just as you blotted your aunt out of your family history, yet you have never ceased to think about it for a single moment. You did not understand how you had escaped, you could never really believe that you had. Everything that happened afterwards seemed unreal to you, like a story, but you disguised this from yourself by turning everything upside down, by pretending that your childhood was the fantasy, the thing that never took place. Nevertheless, as you grew older, as you found yourself able to get along, to graduate with honors, have friends and a husband and a job, as you began to feel more secure in your role, the past reasserted itself. This could not have taken place earlier because you were still too frightened. When it did come out, however, it expressed itself in various ways, not all of them bad. It expressed itself in neurotic symptoms, but also in your political beliefs, in a taste for colorful language that has been useful to you as a writer. It expressed itself in what you call emotional greediness, which has done you good as well as harm.

“As soon as the past showed itself, you tried to run away. At the same time you set yourself various tests to find out what you were like. None of the results appeared to be conclusive, though, because the tests did not seem to you real. What you were being drawn toward all the time was a re-enactment of the old situation, but your first marriage and your other relationships fulfilled practically none of the conditions that had prevailed in your father’s house. And the essential thing was lacking: you felt free; you were an equal; you could always get away. You say that you were happier in these relationships. In the end, though, they proved unsatisfactory. You dropped them abruptly. However, as you got older and—you must not forget this—stronger, you began to choose men who more nearly resembled your father. A middle-aged man, married men, even, once, a New Englander who came from your father’s home state.”

“That was nothing,” she said. “A flash in the pan. One afternoon.”

“Yes. All these affairs are mere signposts of a direction. Finally, however, your father dies, and you are free to make a real marriage. You at once marry Frederick and imitate, as much as it’s possible for a grown woman, your own predicament as a child. You lock yourself up again, you break with your former friends, you quit your job; in other words, you cut yourself off completely. You even put your money in his bank account. You are alone: if you cry out, no one will listen; if you explain, no one will believe you. Frederick’s own weaknesses contribute to this picture; they affirm its reality. His own insecurity makes him tyrannical and over-possessive; his fear of emotional expenditure makes him apparently indifferent. On the one hand, he is unjust to you, like your aunt; on the other, like your father, he pretends not to notice your sufferings and to deny his own culpability in them. Religion appears again, but now (this is very significant) it is the Protestant religion. A doctor enters the scene. If I remember rightly, you say that the only time your father came into your bedroom, he was bringing a doctor with him.”

She nodded, unable to speak.

“You reproach yourself with cowardice for having contracted this marriage. But look at the facts. Isn’t this the most dangerous action you have ever performed as an adult? You have run a terrible risk, the risk of severe neurosis, in putting yourself to this test. For that’s the thing you are asking: will I be able to get out? And once again you have the answer in yourself.”

“No, I haven’t,” she said. “I’m turned to water. I’m finished. I’m overrun by barbarian tribes. Two or three years ago, perhaps … Not now.”

“Two or three years ago, Margaret,” he said gently, “you wouldn’t have had the courage to put yourself in this situation, let alone to save yourself.”

“It’s not true. I was wonderful then.”

He smiled.

“In those days, you were avoiding the things you feared. Now you are eating breakfast with them.”

“Not eating breakfast,” she said. “Frederick prefers to breakfast alone. I disturb his train of thought.”

“The weakness you feel is a result of living with these fears. You must find your way out, and you’ll discover that you are just as strong as Frederick.”

“But what can I do? He won’t allow me to leave him. I have nobody left to borrow money from. I could run away and sleep on a park bench, I suppose.”

But she did not want that. Ah, no! The days of romantic destitution were gone for her. It was no longer possible for her to conceive of herself as a ribbon clerk at Macy’s. Now there was not so much time left in the world that you could spend two years or three in the unrewarding occupation of keeping yourself alive. Her apprenticeship was finished. If she took a job, it would have to be a good one, one that would keep the talents limber. No more secretarial work, no more office routine, that wonderful, narcotic routine that anesthetizes the spirit, lulls the mind to sleep with the cruel paranoiac delusion of the importance, the value to humanity, of the humble-task-well-done.

“You tried running away as a little girl, and it didn’t work,” he said. “No. You misunderstand me. I’m not advising you to leave Frederick. You must win your freedom from him, your right to your opinions, your tastes, your friends, your money. And, of course, your right to leave him. Once you have it, I believe, you will cease to want to exercise it. You can become truly reconciled with Frederick, and you may even be happy with him.”

“It sounds impractical,” she said. “How am I going to get these rights?”

“You did it before,” he answered. “You did it with your mind. That and your beauty are the two weapons you have.”

He closed his black notebook.

“All right!” he announced in a totally different voice, high and unnaturally sprightly, as if he were giving a bird imitation. The hour was over. She looked at the electric clock. He had given her five minutes extra. This pleased her, and she was ashamed of being pleased over such a small, such a niggardly present. What a pass indeed she had come to when the favors of this commonplace little doctor could be treasured, like autumn leaves in a memory book! The knife of terror struck at her, and she saw herself as a transient, and this office with its white walls as the last and bleakest hotel room she would ever lie in. Guests who stay after one P.M. will be expected to pay for the extra day. When she was gone, he would empty the ash tray, smooth out the white cloth on the pillow, open the window for an instant, and the room and he would be blank again, ready for the next derelict. She put her hat on carefully, trying not to hurry, lest he see how humble and rejected she felt, how willing to be dislodged; and trying, on the other hand, not to take too much time, lest he think her inconsiderate. He picked up her coat from the end of the couch and held it out for her, an attention he rarely paid her. She glanced at him and quickly lowered her eyes. Does he think I am unusually upset today, she wondered. Or was it something else? “My beauty,” she murmured to herself. “Well, well!” She slid her arms into the coat. She turned, and he offered her his hand. In slight confusion, she shook it. “Good-bye,” she said softly. He patted her arm. “Good-bye. See you tomorrow,” he said in a rather solicitous voice. He held the door open for her and she slid out awkwardly, half-running, not wanting him to see her blush.

On the street, she felt very happy. “He likes me,” she thought, “he likes me the best.” She walked dreamily down Madison Avenue, smiling, and the passers-by smiled back at her. I look like a girl in love, she thought; it is absurd. And yet what a fine rehabilitation of character that had been! The most dangerous action … runs a terrible risk. She repeated these phrases to herself, as if they had been words of endearment. I think you can … Suddenly, her heart turned over. She shuddered. It had all been a therapeutic lie. There was no use talking. She knew. The mind was powerless to save her. Only a man … She was under a terrible enchantment, like the beleaguered princesses in the fairy tales. The thorny hedge had grown up about her castle so that the turrets could hardly be seen, the road was thick with brambles; was it still conceivable that the lucky third son of a king could ever find his way to her? Dr. James? She asked herself the question and shook her head violently. But supposing he should fall in love with her, would she have the strength to remind herself that he was a fussy, methodical young man whom she would never ordinarily have looked at? All at once, she remembered that she had not told him the end of her dream.

She was matriculating at a place called Eggshell College. There was an outing cabin, and there were three tall young men, all of them a sort of dun color, awkward, heavy-featured, without charm, a little like the pictures of Nazi prisoners that the Soviet censor passes. They stumbled about the cabin, bumping their heads on the rafters. She was sorry she had gone there, and she sat down at a table, resolved to take no part in the proceedings. Two other girls materialized, low-class girls, the kind you said, “Hello, there” to on the campus. A sort of rude party commenced. Finally one of the men came toward her, and she got up at once, her manner becoming more animated. In a moment she was flirting with him and telling one of the other girls, “Really he is not so bad as the others. He is quite interesting when you begin to talk to him.” His face changed, his hair grew dark and wavy. There was something Byronic about him. He bent down to kiss her; it was a coarse, loutish kiss. “There must be some mistake,” she thought. “Perhaps I kissed the wrong one,” and she looked up to find that the Byronic air was gone; he was exactly like the others. But in a few minutes it happened again; his skin whitened, his thick, flat nose refined itself, developed a handsome bridge. When he kissed her this time, she kept her eyes shut, knowing very well what she would see if she opened them, knowing that it was now too late, for now she wanted him anyway.

The memory of the dream struck her, like a heavy breaker. She stopped in the street, gasping. “Oh my God,” she demanded incredulously, “how could I, how could I?” In a moment, she told herself that it was only a dream, that she had not really done that, that this time at least she need feel no remorse. Her thirsty spirit gulped the consoling draft. But it was insufficient. She could not disown the dream. It belonged to her. If she had not yet embraced a captive Nazi, it was only an accident of time and geography, a lucky break. Now for the first time she saw her own extremity, saw that it was some failure in self-love that obliged her to snatch blindly at the love of others, hoping to love herself through them, borrowing their feelings, as the moon borrowed light. She herself was a dead planet. It was she who was the Nazi prisoner, the pseudo-Byron, the equivocal personality who was not truly protean but only appeared so. And yet, she thought, walking on, she could still detect her own frauds. At the end of the dream, her eyes were closed, but the inner eye had remained alert. She could still distinguish the Nazi prisoner from the English milord, even in the darkness of need.

“Oh my God,” she said, pausing to stare in at a drugstore window that was full of hot-water bottles, “do not let them take this away from me. If the flesh must be blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity. O di,” she said aloud, “reddite me hoc pro pietate mea.”

It was certainly a very small favor she was asking, but, like Catullus, she could not be too demanding, for, unfortunately, she did not believe in God.