Dr. Adams was late. The charred cigarettes piled up.
At last, he phoned from the lobby.
Come up.
One of those psychiatrists about whom interviewers write:
... nothing of the abnormal about him; he would be mistaken anywhere
for a successful businessman....
Because Dr. Adams took considerable pains to look exactly like a
successful American businessman who would be mistaken anywhere.
dark, chalk-striped suit, polished brown brogues, foulard tie,
fifty-one years old, seventy-one inches high, a hundred and seventy-one
pounds, heavy horn-rims in his breast pocket with the Parker 51,
smoothly brushed iron-gray hair, smoothly brushed iron-gray eyebrows,
smoothly unbrushed iron-gray eyes, the outdoor complexion that is
imperative for indoor men of distinction, and the prize already awarded
for filling in the last line of the limerick:
Healthy, wealthy and wise.
You couldn't help liking him if you tried, and believe me, I tried.
I tried because Adams (Hargrave H.P.) was the head of the private
hospital where Dave had sent Paul and I wouldn't have one of those
top-notch third-rate psychiatrists fooling with my nephew.
He said he'd always wanted to meet me and I said I'd never heard of him
and he laughed because he was amused, not because he laughed when he
didn't know what else to do, like an American businessman.
He sat down in one of my chairs and refused a drink and said, "Tell me
all you think I ought to know about Paul."
Three hours and several hundred questions later he left.
Paul was going to be all right.
Not soon--but someday when he'd learned the masochisms, sadisms,
castration complexes, repressed homosexual feelings, mistaken anima
identification, archetypal possessions, and other data not shown by the
meters in his laboratory.
Hargrave H.P. Adams had plenty of what it would take. I wouldn't have
minded asking him some of my own questions. He had come up with a few
suggestions and formulations unknown to me....
That brought the evening up past midnight.