She wet her lips. “It can happen any time; there’s never a sign or a warning. It can happen now, and again a minute from now, or not for months. It can last most of a day or flash by like a bird. Sometimes he goes on talking to me while it happens; sometimes what he actually says is just nothing, small-talk. Sometimes he just stands looking at me, without saying anything. Sometimes he—I’m sorry, Fred—he makes love to me then and that’s . . . Oh, dear God, that’s . . .”
“Here’s my handkerchief.”
“Thank you. He—does that other times, too, when there’s nothing loving about it. This—this thing-to-love, it—it seems to have nothing to do with anything else, no pattern. It happens and it’s what I wait for and what I look back on; it’s all I have and all I want.”
When he was quite sure she had no more to say, he hazarded, “It’s as if some other—some other personality suddenly took over.”
He was quite unprepared for her reaction. She literally shouted, “No!” and was startled herself.
She recoiled and glanced guiltily around the cafe. “I don’t know why,” she said, sounding frightened, “but that was just—just awful, what you said. Fred, if you can give any slightest credence to the idea of feminine intuition, you’ll get that idea right out of your head. I couldn’t begin to tell you why, but it just isn’t so. What loves me that way may be part of Dick, but it’s Dick, not anybody or anything else. I know that’s so, that’s all. I know it.”
Her gaze was so intense that it all but made him wince. He could see her trying and trying to find words, rejecting and trying again.
At last, “The only way I can say it that makes any sense to me is that Dick could be such a—a louse so much of the time and still walk a straight line without something just as extreme in the other direction. It’s—it’s a great pity for the rest of the world that he only shows that side to me, but there it is.”
“Does he show it only to you?” He touched her hand and released it. “I’m sorry, but I must ask that.”
She smiled and a kind of pride shone from her face. “Only to me. I suppose that’s intuition again, but it’s as certain as Sunday.” The pride disappeared and was replaced by a patient agony. “I don’t delude myself, Fred—he has other women; plenty of them. But that particular something is for me. It isn’t something I wonder about. I just—know.”
He sat back wearily.
She asked, “Is all this what you wanted?”
He gave her a quick, hurt glance and saw, to his horror, her eyes filling with tears.
“It’s what I asked for,” he said in a flat voice.
“I see the difference.” She used his handkerchief. “May I have this?”
“You can have—” But he stopped himself. “Sure.” He got up. “No,” he said, and took the damp handkerchief out of her hand. “I’ll have something better for you.”
“Fred,” she said, distressed, “I—”
“I’m going, forgive me and all that,” he said, far more angrily than he had thought he would. But polite talk and farewells were much more than he could stand. “The layman stranger has to have a long interview with a professional acquaintance. I don’t think I’d better see you again, Osa.”
“All right, Fred,” she said to his back.
He had hurt her, he knew, but he knew also that his stature in her cosmos could overshadow the hurt and a hundred more like it. He luxuriated in the privilege and stamped out, throwing a bill to the waiter on the way.
He drove back and plodded up the ramp to the clinic. For some obscure reason, the inscription over the door caught his attention. He had passed it hundreds of times without a glance; he had ordered it put there and he was satisfied with it, and why should it matter now? But it did. What was it that Newell had said about it? Some saw about the sanctity of personality. A very perceptive remark, thought the doctor, considering that Newell hadn’t read it:
ONLY MAN CAN FATHOM MAN
It was from Robert Lindner and was the doctor’s answer to the inevitable charges of “push-button therapy.” But he wondered now if the word “Man” was really inclusive enough.
He shook off the conjecture and let himself into the building.
Light gleamed from the translucent door of his office at the far end of the corridor. He walked down the slick flooring toward it, listening to his heels and not thinking otherwise, his mind as purposively relaxed as a fighter’s body between rounds. He opened the door.
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting,” said Miss Thomas.
“Why?”
“Just in case.”
Without answering, he went to the closet and hung up his coat. Back at his desk, he sat down and straightened his tired spine until it crackled. Then he looked at Miss Thomas in the big chair. She put her feet under her and he understood that she was ready to leave if he wished her to.
He said, “Hypothesis: Newell and Anson are discrete personalities.”
While he spoke, he noticed Miss Thomas’s feet move outward a little and then cross at the ankles. His inner thought was. Of all the things I like about this woman, the best is the amount of conversation I have with her without talking.
“And we have plenty of data to back that up,” he continued. “The EEGs alone prove it. Anson is Anson and Newell is Newell, and to prove it, we’ve crystallized them for anyone to see. We’ve done such a job on them that we know exactly what Anson is like without Newell. We’ve built him up that way, with that in mind. We haven’t done quite the same with Newell, but we might as well have. I mean we’ve investigated Newell as if Anson did not exist within him. What it amounts to is this: In order to demonstrate a specimen of multiple personality, we’ve separated and isolated the components.
“Then we go into a flat spin because neither segment looks like a real human being . . . Miss Thomas?”
“Yes?”
“Do you mind the way I keep on saying ‘we’?”
She smiled and shook her head. “Not at the moment.”
“Further,” he said, answering her smile but relentlessly pursuing his summation, “we’ve taken our two personalities and treated each like a potentially salvable patient—one neurotic, one retarded. We’ve operated under the assumption that each contained his own disorder and could be treated by separate therapies.”
“We’ve been wrong?”
“I certainly have,” said the doctor. He slapped the file cabinet at his left. “In here there’s a very interesting paper by one Weisbaden, who theorizes that multiple personalities are actually twins, identical twins born of the same egg-cell and developing within one body. One step, as it were, into the microcosm from foetus in foetu.”
“I’ve read about that,” said Miss Thomas. “One twin born enclosed in the body of another.”
“But not just partly—altogether enclosed. Whether or not Weisbaden’s right, it’s worth using as a test hypothesis. That’s what I’ve been doing, among other things, and I’ve had my nose stuck so far into it that I wasn’t able to see a very important corresponding part of the analogy: namely, that twinning itself is an anomaly, and any deviation in a sibling of multiple origin is teratological.”
“My,” said Miss Thomas in mock admiration.
The doctor smiled. “I should have said ‘monstrous,’ but why drag in superstitions? This thing is bad enough already. Anyway, if we’re to carry our twinning idea as an analogy, we have got to include the very likely possibility that our multiple personalities are as abnormal as Siamese twins or any other monstrosity—I hate to use that word!”
“I’m not horrified,” said Miss Thomas. “Abnormal in what way?”