“We’ll see,” he said, mysteriously.
I tensed. He was holding his permission in abeyance. I was in for more clinical probing. I couldn’t waste time with that jazz. All I could think about was getting upstate for that final gruesome rendezvous with Mother.
“You’re so talented,” he said. “Mozart on the piano. And a novel finished.”
“Not quite,” I said. “My precocity will make it a sure commercial success when it is finished. And its literary value will bring praise from critics. They’ll compare it with early Sagan, which will then seem like the mewlings of a semi-literate sophomore.”
Dr. Lawrence grinned. “You couldn’t convince me you had delusions of grandeur, not even if you came in here saying you were Françoise Sagan.” He blinked slowly like a frog. “Your case intrigues me. Why do you insist on loving your mother? Why no normal resentments?”
I was on guard. My Mother was my own business. I couldn’t afford to have any interference now. She was going to settle up with me. I was going to get everything that was coming to me. And I didn’t intend giving anything away.
“Level with me, Sunny.” He thumped a file folder. “I think you’re the victim of injustice. Something smells.”
“Such as what?”
“In the first place, I don’t think you’re any crazier than I am — if that’s any sort of effective comparison.”
“It’s quite appropriate,” I said. “Anyway, I’m only a patient here myself. Dr. Zitner put the official stamp on me. I’m strictly psycho.”
“I put in my dissenting vote, Sunny.”
“So what? You’ll never go over the head of Dr. Zitner.”
“But you could level with me and we might work out something.”
“Who am I to challenge Dr. Zitner’s diagnosis?” I said.
Dr. Lawrence leaned forward. “It’s easy to railroad a juvenile. Any constituted adult authority can have any juvenile committed. A juvenile has no legal rights. You found that out didn’t you, when at the tender age of fifteen you were accused of being a teen-age maniac? All right, so you were committed. But so far as I’m concerned you were perfectly sane at the time. Now, every month Dr. Zitner gets a big fat check from your Mother, and as a result you remain crazy. So Zitner’s human, and we all must earn a living, granted. But why should you accept it all so meekly? Why no protests?”
“Either because I’m really a loony,” I said, grinning. “Or because I’m too smart to disagree with Doc Zitner. I might be proud of my 178 I.Q. and prefer not to get my cells short-circuited by having Zitner subject me to shock-therapy. Take your pick.”
Dr. Lawrence nodded. “That makes sense.” He fondled his lower lip and mused over my enigmatic presence. Meanwhile I was eagerly trying to control my nervous excitement in anticipation of leaving Heathstone and getting the show on the road. There was a kind of beautiful terror in imagining my Mother and me confronting one another at last — with murder arriving to seal our continued familial affections forever.
“All right, Sunny. It’s a rare thing for an authentic psycho to admit it. And you’re obviously a phony. No one but a psycho can act like one and you’ve never fooled me for a minute. Your being in a booby hatch is about as logical as Noel Coward standing in for King Kong.”
I laughed appreciatively.
Then he barked suddenly. “So why do you insist on loving your mother who has kept you locked up in a cage for three years?” Lawrence was getting himself worked up. “Of course I know she sent you to the finest institution of its kind, but it isn’t an ivy-walled private school! This is a nuthouse, friend! But you don’t fight. You never protest. Why do you go on loving your mother?” He slammed the desk. “If you were really crazy, then loving the hand that poisoned you might make crazy sense. Guilt, need for punishment, disguised hostility. Name your school, take your choice. But you’re not crazy. So loving your mother has to make some other kind of sense.”
“I don’t love her. Love is a deceptive illusion, a sentimental relic of the past. I admire, respect my Mother.”
“All right! Call it admiration and respect then. But do flies admire Flit? You ought to hate your Mother!”
“But that’s just it,” I yelled. “She’s my Mother!”
“Just simple, old-fashioned loyalty to the clan. That it?”
“The present fad of loathing one’s parents doesn’t appeal to me. Mother did the only possible thing under the circumstances. It hurt her far more than it hurt me, I’m positive of that.”
“Well, for a broken-hearted mother she’s sure been having a good time out there. If your mother’s behavior is supposed to represent celebrated mother-love, then it’s too far out for me. Ever since you were in swaddling clothes it seems your mother’s main concern was to avoid the sight and sound of you. She farmed you out to foster homes when you were less than a year old. Then into private schools, finally into an insane asylum! Mother seems to have considered you an intentional leper, or a carrier of bubonic plague.”
“She had to earn a living,” I said. My face felt flushed. Inside of me, a cauldron of hot lava waited to boil over.
“What kind of work? Come on, tell me. Whisper it in my ear if it’ll make you blush. Write me a note.”
“It was none of my business,” I said.
“Then why do you conceal facts?”
“I’m not!”
“You’re trying to conceal your own sanity!”
I shrugged. “All right, I’m sane, perfectly normal. All I ask is that you don’t tell Dr. Zitner I’ve been arguing about his judgment. Now, what about my transfer to Heathstone Hall?”
“Acquiescence isn’t an explanation,” Dr. Lawrence said. “Now you cooperate, answer questions with some pretense at honesty, and I’ll seriously consider giving you another trial ran in the Hall.”
I tried to appear cool and relaxed. This salvation-happy Doctor was intent on seeking what he thought of as justice in my case. He could foul up everything. He was sharper than I would have given him credit for being. He might even end up having my mother investigated before I could get to her myself!
I lit up another cigarette and grinned. “I know your game,” I said. “You want to expose Zitner as a fraud so you can take over Heathstone yourself.”
His eyelids flickered. “An astute deduction and it only intensifies my conviction that you are not crazy. But listen, Sunny, has it ever occurred to you that I don’t want to see your genius wasted, that I don’t like seeing talent railroaded into a booby hatch?” He glanced at the file. “Three years ago you ran to the police with certain — it says here — ‘fantastic allegations’ concerning your mother. Is that correct?”
I nodded.
“You were enrolled at Black Hills Military Academy and you ran away from there so you could go home for Christmas. Was your charming mother expecting you?”
My throat felt tight. “No, I wanted to surprise her,” I said.
“You mean it surprised your mother to have her only beloved son home for Christmas! Is it possible that you sneaked home for Christmas, Sunny, because you knew that if you gave advance notice she would prevent you from sharing the joyous Yuletide?”
My mouth felt dry. The cigarette tasted foul and I smudged it out.
“Why don’t you admit it, Sunny? She didn’t want you home for the happy holidays. You would have been an impediment, a canker, a wet blanket—”
“Why don’t you try the rack, or thumbscrews?” I asked.
Lawrence studied me a moment. Then he swiveled his chair and looked out the window. “On that Christmas Eve, did you or did you not interrupt a rather bizarre interlude between your mother and a certain Mr. Croats?”