his mind these days that he didn’t even mention it. All he wanted to talk about was his brother-in-law’s car wash operation, and was the brother-in-law trying to cheat Jerry, and would Jerry be happier working for strangers who didn’t know about his past, and so on and so on. He was still chipper and cheerful, the same spry little man who’d first showed me to my room, but even though I knew he’d been insane and not in control of his senses on that day twelve years ago, I kept thinking of those seven dead people and wondering about their questions about brothers-in-law and job opportunities and the rest of it, clicked off now, silent forever. And the man who’d clicked them off was now cured, happy, cheerful, weighing his possible futures. The seven, unfortunately, were uncurable. I knew it was an unfair reaction, but I disliked Jerry Kanter intensely all the time he was talking.
The last two new faces turned out to belong to Nicholas Fike and Helen Dorsey. Nicholas Fike was forty-three and looked seventy, a man who had gone from simple alcoholism to mental collapse. The only trouble was, he’d done it twice now, and neither his body nor his mind was up to that kind of punishment. He talked with a very bad stutter, blinked constantly, and was in an obvious agony of self-consciousness whenever Doctor Fredericks asked him a question. Why he’d come here when it was such plain torture for him I couldn’t guess, unless it was some belief that if he forced down every bit of bad-tasting medicine he could lay his hands on, sooner or later a cure would result.
Helen Dorsey was forty-five, a stocky, brutally girdled matron with a harsh voice and a tendency toward playing the drill sergeant. She was clearly trying to control that tendency, with only limited success. Four years ago, when the last of her three sons had departed for college, Helen Dorsey and her husband sold their house and moved to a smaller ranch-style house in a new development section outside their city. Helen had always been a neat housekeeper, but in the new house she gradually became obsessive about it. Her husband would wake in the middle of the night to find her scrubbing the kitchen floor. Late the next summer, with the two still-unmarried boys home from college and overcrowding the little house, Helen Dorsey went berserk, driving husband and sons from the house, barricading herself in alone. The police had to go in after her, and now, three years later, she was deemed sufficiently in control of herself to be released from the sanitarium.
The pecking order in the session was also interesting. Helen Dorsey, bossy and perfectionist, pecked everyone except Molly Schweitzler, the fat woman, who in her turn pecked only to counterattack and was therefore mostly left alone. Jerry Kanter pecked everyone but Molly and Helen, but was himself occasionally pecked by William Merrivale. Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike, the culture shock victim and the alcohol victim, were pecked by everyone and pecked no one, not even each other.
Doctor Lorimer Fredericks was somehow simultaneously separate from the pecking order and deeply a part of it. He pecked away at everybody from the security of his position as psychiatrist, and yet he went overboard so consistently that he was frequently pecked right back, particularly by Molly Schweitzler and Helen Dorsey. William Merrivale betrayed a sullen desire to turn Fredericks into a substitute father two or three times, his clenching-unclenching fists on the table demonstrating that the paternal hostility was still very much alive. Jerry Kanter tended to express his irritation the most openly, and thus to get rid of it more quickly than the others, turning irritation into a joke more often than not. Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike both merely wilted before Fredericks’ tongue until rescued by someone else, usually Helen Dorsey.
I couldn’t understand how someone with a personality as generally repellent as Doctor Fredericks’
The last two new faces turned out to belong to Nicholas Fike and Helen Dorsey. Nicholas Fike was forty-three and looked seventy, a man who had gone from simple alcoholism to mental collapse. The only trouble was, he’d done it twice now, and neither his body nor his mind was up to that kind of punishment. He talked with a very bad stutter, blinked constantly, and was in an obvious agony of self-consciousness whenever Doctor Fredericks asked him a question. Why he’d come here when it was such plain torture for him I couldn’t guess, unless it was some belief that if he forced down every bit of bad-tasting medicine he could lay his hands on, sooner or later a cure would result.
Helen Dorsey was forty-five, a stocky, brutally girdled matron with a harsh voice and a tendency toward playing the drill sergeant. She was clearly trying to control that tendency, with only limited success. Four years ago, when the last of her three sons had departed for college, Helen Dorsey and her husband sold their house and moved to a smaller ranch-style house in a new development section outside their city. Helen had always been a neat housekeeper, but in the new house she gradually became obsessive about it. Her husband would wake in the middle of the night to find her scrubbing the kitchen floor. Late the next summer, with the two still-unmarried boys home from college and overcrowding the little house, Helen Dorsey went berserk, driving husband and sons from the house, barricading herself in alone. The police had to go in after her, and now, three years later, she was deemed sufficiently in control of herself to be released from the sanitarium.
The pecking order in the session was also interesting. Helen Dorsey, bossy and perfectionist, pecked everyone except Molly Schweitzler, the fat woman, who in her turn pecked only to counterattack and was therefore mostly left alone. Jerry Kanter pecked everyone but Molly and Helen, but was himself occasionally pecked by William Merrivale. Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike, the culture shock victim and the alcohol victim, were pecked by everyone and pecked no one, not even each other.
Doctor Lorimer Fredericks was somehow simultaneously separate from the pecking order and deeply a part of it. He pecked away at everybody from the security of his position as psychiatrist, and yet he went overboard so consistently that he was frequently pecked right back, particularly by Molly Schweitzler and Helen Dorsey. William Merrivale betrayed a sullen desire to turn Fredericks into a substitute father two or three times, his clenching-unclenching fists on the table demonstrating that the paternal hostility was still very much alive. Jerry Kanter tended to express his irritation the most openly, and thus to get rid of it more quickly than the others, turning irritation into a joke more often than not. Doris Brady and Nicholas Fike both merely wilted before Fredericks’ tongue until rescued by someone else, usually Helen Dorsey.
I couldn’t understand how someone with a personality as generally repellent as Doctor Fredericks’
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