Part 12 (1/2)

I think one child was a boy and one was a girl, but it may have been that both children were boys or that both were girls, it is hard to tell when children are so small. I think there was also a dog in the picture, toward the bottom--a kind of airedale or a golden retriever--but it may have only been the pattern in the woman's skirt.

For some reason the photograph made me furious.

I didn't see why it should be turned half toward me unless Doctor Gordon was trying to show me right away that he was married to some glamorous woman and I'd better not get any funny ideas.

Then I thought, how could this Doctor Gordon help me anyway, with a beautiful wife and beautiful children and a beautiful dog haloing him like the angels on a Christmas card?

”Suppose you try and tell me what you think is wrong.”

I turned the words over suspiciously, like round, sea-polished pebbles that might suddenly put out a claw and change into something else.

What did I think think was wrong? was wrong?

That made it sound as if nothing was really really wrong, I only wrong, I only thought thought it was wrong. it was wrong.

In a dull, fiat voice--to show I was not beguiled by his good looks or his family photograph--I told Doctor Gordon about not sleeping and not eating and not reading. I didn't tell him about the handwriting, which bothered me most of all.

That morning I had tried to write a letter to Doreen, down in West Virginia, asking whether I could come and live with her and maybe get a job at her college waiting on table or something.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right almost diagonally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

I knew I couldn't send a letter like that, so I tore it up in little pieces and put them in my pocketbook, next to my all-purpose compact, in case the psychiatrist asked to see them.

But of course Doctor Gordon didn't ask to see them, as I hadn't mentioned them, and I began to feel pleased at my cleverness. I thought I only need tell him what I wanted to, and that I could control the picture he had of me by hiding this and revealing that, all the while he thought he was so smart.

The whole time I was talking, Doctor Gordon bent his head as if he were praying, and the only noise apart from the dull, flat voice was the tap, tap, tap of Doctor Gordon's pencil at the same point on the green blotter, like a stalled walking stick.

When I had finished, Doctor Gordon lifted his head.

”Where did you say you went to college?”

Baffled, I told him. I didn't see where college fitted in.

”Ah!” Doctor Gordon leaned back in his chair, staring into the air over my shoulder with a reminiscent smile.

I thought he was going to tell me his diagnosis, and that perhaps I had judged him too hastily and too unkindly. But he only said, ”I remember your college well. I was up there, during the war. They had a WAC station, didn't they? Or was it WAVES?”

I said I didn't know.

”Yes, a WAC station, I remember now. I was doctor for the lot, before I was sent overseas. My, they were a pretty bunch of girls.”

Doctor Gordon laughed.

Then, in one smooth move, he rose to his feet and strolled toward me round the corner of his desk. I wasn't sure what he meant to do, so I stood up as well.

Doctor Gordon reached for the hand that hung at my right side and shook it.

”See you next week, then.”

The full, bosomy elms made a tunnel of shade over the yellow and red brick fronts along. Commonwealth Avenue, and a trolley car was threading itself toward Boston down its slim, silver track. I waited for the trolley to pa.s.s, then crossed to the gray Chevrolet at the opposite curb.

I could see my mother's face, anxious and sallow as a slice of lemon, peering up at me through the winds.h.i.+eld.

”Well, what did he say?”

I pulled the car door shut. It didn't catch. I pushed it out and drew it in again with a dull slam.

”He said he'll see me next week.”

My mother sighed.

Doctor Gordon cost twenty-five dollars an hour.

”Hi there, what's your name?”

”Elly Higginbottom.”

The sailor fell into step beside me, and I smiled.

I thought there must be as many sailors on the Common as there were pigeons. They seemed to come out of a dun-colored recruiting house on the far side, with blue and white ”Join the Navy” posters stuck up on billboards round it and all over the inner walls.

”Where do you come from, Elly?”

”Chicago.”

I had never been to Chicago, but I knew one or two boys who went to Chicago University, and it seemed the sort of place where unconventional, mixed-up people would come from.

”You sure are a long way from home.”

The sailor put his arm around my waist, and for a long time we walked around the Common like that, the sailor stroking my hip through the green dirndl skirt, and me smiling mysteriously and trying not to say anything that would show I was from Boston and might at any moment meet Mrs. Willard, or one of my mother's other friends, crossing the Common after tea on Beacon Hill or shopping in Filene's Bas.e.m.e.nt.

I thought if I ever did get to Chicago, I might change my name to Elly Higginbottom for good. Then n.o.body would know I had thrown up a scholars.h.i.+p at a big eastern women's college and mucked up a month in New York and refused a perfectly solid medical student for a husband who would one day be a member of the AMA and earn pots of money.

In Chicago, people would take me for what I was.

I would be simple Elly Higginbottom, the orphan. People would love me for my sweet, quiet nature. They wouldn't be after me to read books and write long papers on the twins in James Joyce. And one day I might just marry a virile, but tender, garage mechanic and have a big cowy family, like Dodo Conway.

If I happened to feel like it.

”What do you want to do when you get out of the Navy?” I asked the sailor suddenly.

It was the longest sentence I had said, and he seemed taken aback. He pushed his white cupcake cap to one side and scratched his head.

”Well, I dunno, Elly,” he said. ”I might just go to college on the G.I. Bill.”

I paused. Then I said suggestively, ”You ever thought of opening a garage?”

”Nope,” said the sailor. ”Never have.”

I peered at him from the comer of my eye. He didn't look a day over sixteen.