"I see." And I did see, dimly, his general reasoning, I believed: Sear needed to come to me at the behest of someone else, preferably someone who didn't understand the situation. It had seemed to bother him, though, Anastasia continued, when she reminded him that she was only a nurse. But before she could suggest that he consult a professional colleague, their conversation had been interrupted by Greene's visit.
"You won't believe what he came to tell me!" The memory so renewed her astonishment, she forgot her pique at my having pretended she was pregnant.
I smiled. "He apologized for confusing you with your flunkèd twin sister."
"How did You know? He's crazy, George! And I hate to say it, but I'm afraid Kennard's mind has been affected, too. By the cancer…"
I followed her account as well as I could, for it was more arresting and suggestive than I'd anticipated. But my attention was sorely divided: not only was I listening at the same time to the conversation in the Treatment Room, which I'd remembered could be overheard at the flip of a switch; I was also sharply interested in observing through the glass what appeared to be a new development in the strange relation between Greene and Sear.
"I thought he wanted to apologize for last spring," Anastasia said. "In fact, I was going to offer to explain the whole thing to his wife, in case she thought it was his fault, what he'd done to me. But when he started in on this sister business, and how he was sorry he'd ever thought it was me that wasn't a virgin…! He got more excited all the time, saying his wife was the dearest little wifey on the Founder's green campus and I was the dearest little sister, and women like Maurice's secretary and my sister were floozies that ought to be horsewhipped! Kennard was right there listening to the whole thing, and when Mr. Greene started saying he'd defend my honor to the death, and pawing me at the same time, I thought Kennard would help me! Because it wasn't the first time, You know, that a patient ever got fresh, and I really think Mr. Greene thought he was protecting me, or something… But do You think Kennard helped? He was listening to Mr. Greene as if it were the Grand Tutor talking, and when Mr. Greene tried to lay me down on the desktop, all Kennard said was 'Remember what George told you, Stacey'!"
In the Treatment Room, as she spoke, Greene had been inveighing against the decline of moral standards in "the present modern campus of today" and recommending that the dunce-cap and birch-rod be restored to their place of honor in New Tammany kindergartens; Sear interrupted him to ask whether, when he played Doctor with Mrs. Sear in the Asylum sandbox, he ought to pretend to be the doctor and Hedwig the patient, or vice-versa: to his mind, taking make-believe rectal temperatures with a forest-green crayon was an apt symbolic affirmation of the element of childish perversity which had always underlain his sophisticated medical researches; on the other hand, he could see that assuming the "patient's" role not only in the office, as he was doing presently, but also in the sandbox — baring his bum to Hedwig's popsicle-stick — might be said to combine inversion, perversion, reversion, and reversal.
"What do you suggest, Doctor?" he inquired.
"Now that's enough!" Greene said angrily. "That's just plain dirty talk, is all it is!"
"I know," Sear admitted. "But the fact is, you see, I was a very naughty five-year-old. I peeked up the little girls' dresses and tasted my b.m.'s and showed me my pee-tom to the teacher. So what I hope you'll tell me is whether 'becoming as a kindergartener' means returning innocently to childish perversions or pervertedly feigning a childish innocence…"
"Did Greene actually service you, then?" I asked Anastasia.
"He would have, I'm sure," she said, "and thought he was defending my virginity the whole time! But when Kennard reminded me of what You'd told me I got all mixed up, because I don't like Mr. Greene — not that way, especially since last spring — and yet I do believe in You, George, even if You don't. But it's so hard for me to act like a… a floozy, You know…"
"That's just more smut, Dr. Sear!" Greene was declaring. "You know durn well I'm not any sawbones, say what you want, nor a headshrinker either — excuse the expression! I'm a simple country boy that's trying to do the right thing by his wife and family and his alma mater. Don't think I don't see you're up to some naughtiness with this playing-doctor business, pull-the-wool-over-my-eyeswise."
"What did you do?" I was wondering vaguely whether the net effect of a seduction of Greene by My Ladyship would be therapeutic or antitherapeutic, so to speak, in their separate cases; likewise a repetition, under present circumstances, of her previous forcible allaying. At the same time, the conversation in the Treatment Room I found more absorbing, and relevant to my Assignment as well as to Greene's and Sear's.
"All I could think of was how crazy that sister idea was," Anastasia said. "He was trying to take my clothes off, and Kennard was taking Mr. Greene's clothes off — You know Kennard! I was squirming around on the desk, and Kennard thought I was trying to be sexy — - so did Mr. Greene, I guess. But really I was trying to be loose and get loose at the same time, I was so mixed up by what You'd told me. Anyhow, I was shouting in Mr. Greene's ear that I was Maurice Stoker's wife and hadn't been a virgin since I was twelve, and between that and my wiggling around he decided I was the flunkèd sister! So he got off me, thank the Founder — in fact, I could see he couldn't do anything then, even if he'd wanted to; You know what I mean — and he started lecturing me about disgracing my sister Stacey. Honestly! Then Kennard took him into the Treatment Room to calm him down, even though Mr. Greene said he wouldn't listen to any more of Kennard's talk, because he was okay and it didn't matter anyhow. But Kennard spoke to him very respectfully and said he wanted to ask advice instead of giving it…"
At this point, though my mind remained much on My Ladyship, I stopped listening to her story (which was growing somewhat hysterical anyway) in order to hear with delighted surprise Greene's counsel to Dr. Sear.
"You ought to quit this playing Doctor and Patient," he was saying severely. "It don't become an educated man like yourself, that kind of smartness. And it don't show proper respect for your wife, neither, that I'm sure is a good upstanding woman…"
"It was her idea," Dr. Sear complained. His voice grew stubborn as a pre-schooler's. "It was her crayons and popsicle-sticks, too."
"That don't matter," Greene insisted. "You ought to have a proper self-respect for her. Take yourself, now: except for that there cancer you're a healthy man! So don't let your wife's craziness fool you, all that drinking and messing around with floozies like Lacey — you got to learn to see through a woman like that."
"I've seen," Dr. Sear insisted half-heartedly.
"I wonder," Greene chided. "Why, take away her failings and you've got a passèd wife and mother!"