“After her mother died when she was little she used to come into my bed every morning, sometimes she’d sleep in my bed. I was sorry for the little thing. Oh, after that, whenever we went places in an automobile or a train we used to hold hands. She used to sing to me. We used to say, ‘Now let’s not pay any attention to anybody else this afternoon—let’s just have each other—for this morning you’re mine.’” A broken sarcasm came into his voice. “People used to say what a wonderful father and daughter we were—they used to wipe their eyes. We were just like lovers—and then all at once we were lovers—and ten minutes after it happened I could have shot myself—except I guess I’m such a Goddamned degenerate I didn’t have the nerve to do it.”
“Then what?” said Doctor Dohmler, thinking again of Chicago and of a mild pale gentleman with a pince-nez who had looked him over in Zurich thirty years before. “Did this thing go on?”
“Oh, no! She almost—she seemed to freeze up right away. She’d just say, ‘Never mind, never mind, Daddy. It doesn’t matter. Never mind.’”
“There were no consequences?”
“No.” He gave one short convulsive sob and blew his nose several times. “Except now there’re plenty of consequences.”
As the story concluded Dohmler sat back in the focal armchair of the middle class and said to himself sharply, “Peasant!”—it was one of the few absolute worldly judgments that he had permitted himself for twenty years. Then he said:
“I would like for you to go to a hotel in Zurich and spend the night and come see me in the morning.”
“And then what?”
Doctor Dohmler spread his hands wide enough to carry a young pig.
“Chicago,” he suggested.
IV
“Then we knew where we stood,” said Franz. “Dohmler told Warren we would take the case if he would agree to keep away from his daughter indefinitely, with an absolute minimum of five years. After Warren’s first collapse, he seemed chiefly concerned as to whether the story would ever leak back to America.”
“We mapped out a routine for her and waited. The prognosis was bad—as you know, the percentage of cures, even so-called social cures, is very low at that age.”
“Those first letters looked bad,” agreed Dick.
“Very bad—very typical. I hesitated about letting the first one get out of the clinic. Then I thought it will be good for Dick to know we’re carrying on here. It was generous of you to answer them.”
Dick sighed. “She was such a pretty thing—she enclosed a lot of snapshots of herself. And for a month there I didn’t have anything to do. All I said in my letters was ‘Be a good girl and mind the doctors.’”
“That was enough—it gave her somebody to think of outside. For a while she didn’t have anybody—only one sister that she doesn’t seem very close to. Besides, reading her letters helped us here— they were a measure of her condition.”
“I’m glad.”
“You see now what happened? She felt complicity—that’s neither here nor there, except as we want to revalue her ultimate stability and strength of character. First came this shock. Then she went off to a boarding-school and heard the girls talking—so from sheer self-protection she developed the idea that she had had no complicity—and from there it was easy to slide into a phantom world where all men, the more you liked them and trusted them, the more evil—”
“Did she ever go into the—horror directly?”
“No, and as a matter of fact when she began to seem normal, about October, we were in a predicament. If she had been thirty years old we would have let her make her own adjustment, but she was so young we were afraid she might harden with it all twisted inside her. So Doctor Dohmler said to her frankly, ‘Your duty now is to yourself. This doesn’t by any account mean the end of anything for you—your life is just at its beginning,’ and so forth and so forth. She really has an excellent mind, so he gave her a little Freud to read, not too much, and she was very interested. In fact, we’ve made rather a pet of her around here. But she is reticent,” he added; he hesitated: “We have wondered if in her recent letters to you which she mailed herself from Zurich, she has said anything that would be illuminating about her state of mind and her plans for the future.”
Dick considered.
“Yes and no—I’ll bring the letters out here if you want. She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life—even rather romantic. Sometimes she speaks of ‘the past’ as people speak who have been in prison. But you never know whether they refer to the crime or the imprisonment or the whole experience. After all I’m only a sort of stuffed figure in her life.”
“Of course, I understand your position exactly, and I express our gratitude once again. That was why I wanted to see you before you see her.”
Dick laughed.
“You think she’s going to make a flying leap at my person?”
“No, not that. But I want to ask you to go very gently. You are attractive to women, Dick.”
“Then God help me! Well, I’ll be gentle and repulsive—I’ll chew garlic whenever I’m going to see her and wear a stubble beard. I’ll drive her to cover.”
“Not garlic!” said Franz, taking him seriously. “You don’t want to compromise your career. But you’re partly joking.”