In the morning he found himself in stranger waters. Another gentleman—Coverly guessed they were all doctors—showed him a series of pictures or drawings. If they were like anything they were like the illustrations in a magazine although they were drawn crudely and with no verve or imagination. They presented a problem to Coverly, for when he glanced at the first few they seemed to remind him only of very morbid and unsavory things. He wondered at first if this was a furtive strain of morbidity in himself and if he would damage his chances at a job in the carpet works by speaking frankly. He wondered for only a second. Honesty was the best policy. All the pictures dealt with noisome frustrations and when he was finished he felt irritable and unhappy. In the afternoon he was asked to complete a series of sentences. They all presented a problem or sought an attitude and since Coverly was worried about money—he had nearly run through his twenty-five dollars—he completed most of the sentences with references to money. He would be interviewed by a psychologist on the next afternoon.
The thought of this interview made him a little nervous. A psychologist seemed as strange and formidable to him as a witch doctor. He felt that some baneful secret in his life might be exposed, but the worst he had ever done was masturbate and looking back over his life and knowing no one of his age who had not joined in on the sport he decided that this did not have the status of a secret. He decided to be as honest with the psychologist as possible. This decision comforted him a little and seemed to abate his nervousness. His appointment was for three o’clock and he was kept waiting in an outer room where many orchids bloomed in pots. He wondered if he was being observed through a peephole. Then the doctor opened a double or soundproof door and invited Coverly in. The doctor was a young man with nothing like the inexpressive manners of the others. He meant to be friendly, although this was a difficult feeling to achieve since Coverly had never seen him before and would never see him again and was only closeted with him because he wanted to work in the carpet factory. It was no climate for friendship. Coverly was given a very comfortable chair to sit in, but he cracked his knuckles nervously. “Now, suppose you tell me a little about yourself,” the doctor said. He was very gentle and had a pad and a pencil for taking notes.
“Well, my name is Coverly Wapshot,” Coverly said, “and I come from St. Botolphs. I guess you must know where that is. All the Wapshots live there. My great-grandfather was Benjamin Wapshot. My grandfather was Aaron. My mother’s family are Coverlys and …”
“Well I’m not as interested in your genealogy,” the doctor said, “as I am in your emotional make-up.” It was an interruption, but it was a very courteous and friendly one. “Do you know what is meant by anxiety? Do you have any feelings of anxiety? Is there anything in your family, in your background that would incline you to anxiety?”
“Yes sir,” Coverly said. “My father’s very anxious about fire. He’s awfully afraid of burning to death.”
“How do you know this?”
“Well, he’s got this rig up in his room,” Coverly said. “He’s got this suit of clothes—underwear and everything—hanging up beside his bed so in case of fire he can get dressed and out of the house in a minute. And he’s got buckets full of sand and water in all the hallways and the number of the fire department is painted on the wall by the telephone and on rainy days when he isn’t working—sometimes he doesn’t work on rainy days—he spends most of the day going around the house sniffing. He thinks he smells smoke and sometimes it seems to me that he spends nearly a whole day going from room to room sniffing.”
“Does your mother share this anxiety?” the doctor asked.
“No sir,” Coverly said. “My mother loves fires. But she’s anxious about something else. She’s afraid of crowds. I mean she’s afraid of being trapped. Sometimes on the Christmas holidays I’d go into the city with her and when she got into a crowd in one of those big stores she’d nearly have a fit. She’d get pale and gasp for breath. She’d pant. It was terrible. Well then she’d grab hold of my hand and drag me out of there and go up some side street where there wasn’t anybody and sometimes it would be five or ten minutes before she got her breath back. In any place where my mother felt she was confined she’d get very uneasy. In the movies, for instance—if anybody in the movies was sent to jail or locked up in some small place why my mother would grab her hat and her purse and run out of that theater before you could say Jack Robinson. I used to have to sprint to keep up with her.”
“Would you say that your parents were happy together?”
“Well, I really never thought of it that way,” Coverly said. “They’re married and they’re my parents and I guess they take the lean with the fat like everybody else but there’s one thing she used to tell me that left an impression on me.”
“What was that?”
“Well, whenever I had a good time with Father—whenever he took me out on the boat or something—she always seemed to be waiting for me when we got home with this story. Well, it was about, it was about how I came to be, I suppose you’d say. My father was working for the table-silver company at the time and they went into the city for some kind of banquet. Well, my mother had some cocktails and it was snowing and they had to spend the night in a hotel and one thing led to another but it seems that after this my father didn’t want me to be born.”
“Did your mother tell you this?”
“Oh, yes. She told me lots of times. She told me I shouldn’t trust him because he wanted to kill me. She said he had this abortionist come out to the house and that if it hadn’t been for her courage I’d be dead. She told me that story lots of times.”
“Do you think this had any effect on your fundamental attitude toward your father?”
“Well, sir, I never thought about it but I guess maybe it did. I sometimes had a feeling that he might hurt me. I never used to like to wake up and hear him walking around the house late at night. But this was foolish because I knew he wouldn’t hurt me. He never punished me.”
“Did she punish you?”
“Well, not very often, but once she just laid my back open. I guess perhaps it was my fault. We went down to Travertine swimming—I was with Pete Meacham—and I decided to climb up on the roof of the bathhouse where we could see the women getting undressed. It was a dirty thing to do but we hadn’t even hardly got started when the caretaker caught us. Well my mother took me home and she told me to get undressed and she took my great-grandfather’s buggy whip—that was Benjamin—and she just laid my back open. There was blood all over the wall. My back was such a mess she got scared, but of course she didn’t dare call a doctor because it would be embarrassing, but the worst thing was I couldn’t go swimming for the rest of that summer. If I went swimming people would see these big sores on my back. I wasn’t able to go swimming all that summer.”
“Do you think this had any effect on your fundamental attitude toward women?”
“Well, sir, where I come from, I think it’s hard to take much pride in being a man. I mean the women are very powerful. They are kind and they mean very well, but sometimes they get very oppressive. Sometimes you feel as if it wasn’t right to be a man. Now there’s this story they tell about Howie Pritchard. On his wedding night he’s supposed to have put his foot into the chamber pot and pissed down his leg so his wife wouldn’t hear the noise. I don’t think he should have done that. If you’re a man I think you ought to be proud and happy about it.”
“Have you ever had any sexual experiences?”
‘Twice,” Coverly said. “The first time was with Mrs. Maddern. I don’t suppose I should name her but everybody in the village knew about her and she was a widow.”