“I know that,” I said. “But I don’t want to go to Dr. Roberts.” He waited for me to go on, but I could find no more words, and as I kept my eyes averted from him, seeing the green felt under the glass top of his desk with the harried realization that I had no idea what I was looking at, I knew what his next question was going to be, but as in the dream when our benumbed throats will not let pass a cry for help, I could summon nothing to stave it off, and when he spoke, I heard him as though his voice came from a phonograph record whose revolutions I did not know how to stop: “Look here, I don’t know who you are but I don’t believe you are Miss Pride’s friend. All this mystery doesn’t ring true. Are you quite sure it’s your mother who is ill? I don’t want to sound unkind, but tell me frankly, isn’t it instead that you’ve committed an indiscretion and, to use the common expression, have got yourself knocked up?”

Because I had known that that was the way he would interpret my timidity and my lie about the message, I could not be angry with him for anything but the vulgarity of his phrase, which he had used in the intention of lowering himself to my level, but at the same time had uttered in almost audible quotation marks to assure me that he would have nothing to do with the matter, that I had come to the wrong person for an abortion.

I found my voice and said, “Oh, no, it’s not that at all. It’s that I think my mother is insane.”

“You should have said so at once. Please forgive me, but your coming here was so unusual. Why do you think your mother is insane?”

I told him her history. As I talked, his attentive blue eyes showed me that he was marshaling recollections that my presence and my story disinterred, was giving the skeletons flesh and blood, yet was keeping me, my “case,” separate like the solo part of a concerto which is enriched and surrounded by the ritornelle. To ease me, to divert me from the horror of what I told him—for one’s sin or sorrow is most intolerable at the moment of confession even when we know that we are soon to be absolved or comforted—he halted me now and again with seemingly inconsequential questions or observations. He had, for example, been to Würzburg and as he spoke of it, pleased that I had caused him to remember the hotel where he had stayed which had formerly been a Franciscan monastery and still preserved an atmosphere of asceticism, he canceled out the distaste and aloofness that had been in his voice when he thought I was pregnant, and without deviating from his purpose as a physician, elevated me to his own plane as at first he had descended to mine. He was, I could tell, profoundly moved by Ivan’s death and burial. He said, “Your story is a Russian one,” and asked me if I had read Dostoievsky. I said I had not, but he led me to the place from which he surveyed the geography of my mother’s mind so that I saw her not as my mother, but as a type, as the embodiment of the traits he had read about. We looked together from our vantage point and, lighted by the stories and the novels from whose context he extracted what was applicable to my mother, I saw her, for a little while, as he did.