"We have no children," Dr. Sear dryly pointed out.
Greene was not abashed. "Get busy and have some, then! What's a marriage without children?" Tears rose in his eyes; he fetched out his wallet. "Take a look at these kiddies here and tell me you don't want a passel of your own! Aren't they the passèdest little scapers you ever laid eyes on? They're grown up now, of course…"
Though presumably he could not weep, Dr. Sear wiped the bandages near his eyes with a handkerchief and waved away the photographs as if the sight of them was more than he could bear. Greene sniffled and declared that, fool and flunker though he was in other respects, he'd been a loving father to his children, and Miss Sally Ann a loving mother, nobody could take that away from them, and in this conviction they could go to the Gate content, fulfill-their-natural-purpose-on-this-campuswise. Satisfied, even inspired, I turned to Anastasia, and was surprised to observe that she too was in tears. I recalled her emotion on the occasion of my own recommending, for very different reasons, that Dr. and Mrs. Sears beget a child, and assumed that now, as then, she was weeping with pleasure for their sakes.
"Out of the mouths of babes," I said cheerfully. "That's about what I was going to tell Dr. Sear myself, with maybe one qualification; but it's even better for him to hear it from Greene." I gave her pretty rump a pat, and by way of a cordial tease declared it was high time she herself was bred; if Stoker wasn't stud enough and Bray should miss his appointment, maybe I'd service her myself…
She cried, "You're hateful!" and fled into the Reception Room. I followed after.
"I was only joking, Anastasia."
"You don't understand anything!" She turned on Mother, who was silently making the Enochist sign with her knitwork. "Will you stop that?"
Shocked as I was, I believed I saw through her anger then: so rare a thing was barrenness among the does, I could not keep in mind that My Ladyship was infertile. I had been tactless; no doubt she'd wanted to breed with Stoker, if only for the improvement that lactation would work upon her udder. I apologized sincerely, and by way of consoling her pointed out that Mrs. Lucius Rexford, for example, was all but flat-chested despite her having been freshened once or twice by the Chancellor; also that I'd heard it claimed (by the free-speaking inmates of Main Detention) that there were men who actually preferred rather udderless women. For all I knew, Maurice Stoker might belong to that fraternity.
She pummeled at my head.
"Stop it, Anastasia! I don't understand this at all!"
Our scuffling brought Greene and Sear from the Treatment Room; as soon as they opened the door My Ladyship fled inside, turning her face from them. Greene curled his lip, even spat in her direction. Dr. Sear's reaction I couldn't observe, owing to the bandages, but we greeted each other warmly. He was delighted to learn I'd overheard his conversation with Greene and approved his reasoning; he embraced us by turns, nowise amorously, and though he was unable to weep or sniffle, his voice caught at the notion of fathering a child.
"We tried last time, George, as you know," he said with difficulty. "It was so outrageous, taking Heddy to bed — and at the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, of all places, like freshman newlyweds! It should've been marvelously perverse, just as you intended, but when Hed put on her bridal nightie, and I thought of the incredible things we'd done over the semesters…" It was then, he said huskily, that the ceaseless flow of tears had commenced, and instead of mounting his wife, perversely, in the ordinary way, he had been smitten with the hopeless wish that they could be free, if only for an hour, of the burden of all they'd seen and done, and could come together in simple, bashful love. Impossible, of course: not distaste or disinclination but shame unmanned him; what kind of parents would they be, anyway? they sneered, and contemning each other and themselves they'd gone, she to the bottle and to Croaker in the lobby, he to the sleeping-capsules.
"It weren't no proper way," Greene said stoutly.
"Founder help me, George!" Sear exclaimed. "What a blind dunce I've been! If a man could only wipe the slate clean!"
"A fresh start," Greene affirmed. "Being smart never made a man happy. Where there's life there's hope."
The awful triteness of these sentiments made Sear sob. But dared he imagine, he asked me, that even with the aid of what he called "self-hypnotic autoamnesis" he could ever achieve enough unselfconsciousness to make love to his wife — not to mention begetting a child in the Honeymoon Lodge Motel?
"If a person wishes hard enough," Greene solemnly declared, "his wishes'll come true. Say what you want."
I smiled. "You might try, anyway, I think, if they'll let Mrs. Sear leave the Asylum." In his case, I decided, it was inadvisable to add that he needn't worry if the plan misfired again, since failure and passage, rightly conceived, were not different. Judging from what he'd told Anastasia, he was acquainted with the truth of that paradox. "Forget about Taliped and Gynander as well as yourself," I advised him. "Keep telling yourself that you'll live happily ever after."
"What I always say to myself," Greene said: "I'm okay. And what the heck anyhow."
Sear shook his head, unable to speak.
"I have some business with My Ladyship," I said. "May I use the Treatment Room for a while?"
When he understood to whom the term referred, Dr. Sear readily granted permission, he being too unsettled to see more patients that day. But for all his absorption in his own "Assignment" (as he called the wife-bedding project), he ventured the opinion that "seeing through my ladyship" must mean denying my male sexuality — or better, affirming and embracing the female aspects which he claimed no male was without — in order to demonstrate that male and female were no realer than any other categories. Was that not the sense of my new Answer? And "overcoming my infirmity," if he understood Sakhyanism correctly, ought similarly to mean denying either the difference between sick and well or the reality of the "I" alleged to be ill — an attitude he himself meant to take toward his squamous-cell carcinoma if he could. "After all," he said, "if I'm dying of cancer, then cancer is living of me: in the Founder's eyes it's all the same, isn't it?"
I shrugged. "You may be right, sir. But what the heck anyhow."
He put a fist to his bandaged brow. "I see, I see!" He might have embraced me again, but Greene held up a finger and said, "Ah-ah."
"Flunk me for ever doubting You, George! You really are the Grand Tutor!"
I shook my head, but Mother in the corner said, "A-plus."
"A-plus indeedy," Greene agreed, but added that in his opinion Grand Tutors should have no traffic with the flunked likes of Lacey Stoker.
"I'll be okay," I assured him, and pointed out that even Enos Enoch in His term had passed a floozy or two. "It's a curious thing," I said to Dr. Sear, more seriously; "I think I understand you two pretty well, for instance, and Max and Dr. Eierkopf and the rest. Even Maurice Stoker I can see through, more or less. But My Ladyship's a mystery; I never know what to make of her."
"I feel the same durn way about Sally Ann," Greene confessed.
"I used to think I knew Hedwig inside out," said Dr. Sear. "But now sometimes I wonder whether I've ever known her at all. Or anything, for that matter."
We may not have been thinking of the same thing: Anastasia's mysteriousness, I felt, was not just the famous unpredictability of human women or the celebrated difference between male and female points of view; it had rather to do with the insufficiency of any notion I entertained of her. I was reminded of a time long past, in the barns, when Max, more familiar to me than my own face, had seemed suddenly, unbearably other than myself: a stranger, alien and distinct; as who would find that his arm or leg has a will not his, a personality of its own. But in the case of Anastasia this foreignness was the more conspicuous for its contrast with our obscure intimacy: I had never bit Max in a sidecar, after all, or serviced him memorially, or declared to him despite myself (strange words) "I love you!" or chosen him, in the days of my error, as my first Tutee. Bright as Anastasia's eyes shone on me, I could not see what lay behind their luminosity, or account for her behavior.