was.”
“No, they had their fun first, and then they came around to see if Rose and me were okay.”
Doctor Fredericks was off in hot pursuit of this new quarry by now, and it was with a great feeling of relief that I sat back and let the hunt go on without me.
Molly Schweitzler’s feelings of having been laughed at when she’d hurt herself were easily plumbed, of course. A grossly fat woman like Molly could hardly go through life without running into cruel humor now and again, and of course in overeating Molly was hurting herself, just as much as when the table had hit her. Her anger at the laughter that apparently really had gone around the dining room when the table first gave way was really much older anger than that. She was angry at all the people who had been funny at her expense all her life, and angry at herself for never having done anything about it. She’d never fought back, never stood up for her own dignity, and she had the angry frustration of someone determined to fight back when the last round is already over.
Still, however obvious Molly’s misplaced anger, it proved interesting to the group at large, and led to a discussion which shortly switched to another woman, Doris Brady, whom I was seeing for the first time. Doris Brady was a young woman suffering from a fairly recent addition to the list of mental illnesses, called culture shock. She had joined the Peace Corps at twenty-seven, after a childless marriage of five years had ended in divorce, and was sent to one of the most backward and poor of the emerging African nations. She was expected to be a schoolteacher, in a society so totally different from anything she’d ever known before that her mind was incapable of encompassing it. This doesn’t happen frequently, and the Peace Corps people try to weed out ahead of time those to whom it might happen, but when it does occur it is a brutal and terrifying experience. Doris Brady had found herself suddenly cast adrift, between two cultures neither of which she could any longer see as viable. The values and assumptions she’d grown up with in the United States had been swept away by the realities of the African village to which she’d been sent, but the values and assumptions of the village were too alien for her mind to live with. Life without some safe bedrock of accepted truths is insupportable for most people, among them Doris Brady. From what she was saying now, as the focus shifted to her from Molly Schweitzler, the hospital where she’d spent the last three years had done an adequate job of rebuilding her faith in the assumptions we live by in the United States.
The session lasted two hours, and in that time everyone present got a chance at the limelight. I found it fascinating to sit and listen to them, watching them reveal themselves a thousand times more freely than if they’d known they were suspects being observed by a hired ex-cop.
I finally got to resolve the O’Hara/Merrivale problem, when the one in this room turned out to be William Merrivale, the young man who had once tried—almost successfully—to beat his father to death. He had never been as sick as his home situation, and the last year in a private sanitarium had helped him primarily by giving him somewhere other than his own home in which to live. Now The Midway was performing the same function, and it developed in the conversation that he was still ambivalent about where to go and what to do when his six months here was ended.
So if this was Merrivale, the missing one must be Robert O’Hara, who had begun his career as a child molester while still a child himself, and could never for very long keep his hands off little girls. O’Hara and Merrivale were both twenty-one, the two young males at The Midway, both blond and muscular, both looking like Marines or college football players.
The day twelve years ago when Jerry Kanter took a rifle downtown and killed seven people he’d never met before was so distant in
“No, they had their fun first, and then they came around to see if Rose and me were okay.”
Doctor Fredericks was off in hot pursuit of this new quarry by now, and it was with a great feeling of relief that I sat back and let the hunt go on without me.
Molly Schweitzler’s feelings of having been laughed at when she’d hurt herself were easily plumbed, of course. A grossly fat woman like Molly could hardly go through life without running into cruel humor now and again, and of course in overeating Molly was hurting herself, just as much as when the table had hit her. Her anger at the laughter that apparently really had gone around the dining room when the table first gave way was really much older anger than that. She was angry at all the people who had been funny at her expense all her life, and angry at herself for never having done anything about it. She’d never fought back, never stood up for her own dignity, and she had the angry frustration of someone determined to fight back when the last round is already over.
Still, however obvious Molly’s misplaced anger, it proved interesting to the group at large, and led to a discussion which shortly switched to another woman, Doris Brady, whom I was seeing for the first time. Doris Brady was a young woman suffering from a fairly recent addition to the list of mental illnesses, called culture shock. She had joined the Peace Corps at twenty-seven, after a childless marriage of five years had ended in divorce, and was sent to one of the most backward and poor of the emerging African nations. She was expected to be a schoolteacher, in a society so totally different from anything she’d ever known before that her mind was incapable of encompassing it. This doesn’t happen frequently, and the Peace Corps people try to weed out ahead of time those to whom it might happen, but when it does occur it is a brutal and terrifying experience. Doris Brady had found herself suddenly cast adrift, between two cultures neither of which she could any longer see as viable. The values and assumptions she’d grown up with in the United States had been swept away by the realities of the African village to which she’d been sent, but the values and assumptions of the village were too alien for her mind to live with. Life without some safe bedrock of accepted truths is insupportable for most people, among them Doris Brady. From what she was saying now, as the focus shifted to her from Molly Schweitzler, the hospital where she’d spent the last three years had done an adequate job of rebuilding her faith in the assumptions we live by in the United States.
The session lasted two hours, and in that time everyone present got a chance at the limelight. I found it fascinating to sit and listen to them, watching them reveal themselves a thousand times more freely than if they’d known they were suspects being observed by a hired ex-cop.
I finally got to resolve the O’Hara/Merrivale problem, when the one in this room turned out to be William Merrivale, the young man who had once tried—almost successfully—to beat his father to death. He had never been as sick as his home situation, and the last year in a private sanitarium had helped him primarily by giving him somewhere other than his own home in which to live. Now The Midway was performing the same function, and it developed in the conversation that he was still ambivalent about where to go and what to do when his six months here was ended.
So if this was Merrivale, the missing one must be Robert O’Hara, who had begun his career as a child molester while still a child himself, and could never for very long keep his hands off little girls. O’Hara and Merrivale were both twenty-one, the two young males at The Midway, both blond and muscular, both looking like Marines or college football players.
The day twelve years ago when Jerry Kanter took a rifle downtown and killed seven people he’d never met before was so distant in
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