Free Consenting Adult by Laura Z. Hobson

shield over each eye. Behind the closed fingers, the tears were hot, and she was embarrassed and helpless before the stranger across the desk.
    “I would suggest that we skirt the field of causation for the time being,” Dr. Dudley said firmly. “Our interest now is not primarily in developmental history or theory, but in the possibility of heading off a true inversion.”
    “True? Could this be not true?”
    “If Jeff actually has had no physical experience as yet—”
    “He wouldn’t lie. He always told the truth, even when he was a child.”
    “My point is that patients who have been practicing homosexuals for years, patients much older than Jeff of course, are the ones whom it is very difficult to treat But even then, one cannot always rule out a successful outcome.”
    “And at Jeff’s age, a seventeen-year-old?” She waited, but there was no answer. He again responded by waiting himself. He had a folder open in front of him, but beyond Jeff’s name and address and the telephone number at school, nothing was written there. He was staring down at the nearly empty page now, and once more she felt an obscure wish that he was not quite so controlled. She finally said, “Well, about Jeff at school—” and talked almost uninterruptedly for the rest of the fifty minutes, talked only of Jeff as a boy in kindergarten, in the first grade, starting at Placquette, his prowess at sports, talked without faltering for a word. It all came back with the clarity of safeguarded memory, fresh again, happening again. She looked only occasionally at Dr. Dudley. He continued to look down at his desk, his face blanked of expression, of promise or commiseration. A clock struck and he stood up.
    “You have been very helpful, Mrs. Lynn,” he said unexpectedly.
    “I didn’t know what this visit would be for. I hope I have been.”
    “I won’t be seeing you again for the present. It is better for the patient not to feel that he is being ‘reported on’ to any outsider, even his parents. You do understand that?”
    “I think so. Yes, I do understand. But try to help him, Dr. Dudley, will you, please?”
    “I’ll try.”
    The drive back to New York was an automatic procedure for her, as if it were done by some force other than herself. Her brain seemed to have stopped functioning; she seemed to have no thoughts, no emotions, no faculty for making a judgment of the hour she had spent with James Dudley. She sat numb behind the wheel, piloting the car through the thin city-bound traffic, hardly aware of where she was.
    There were so many things she should have asked him, things she had meant to ask him, and had not got to. Is it a disease? Is it abnormality? Is it a psychic disturbance, like schizophrenia? She did not think in terms of “sin” or “evil,” and it would not have occurred to her that any physician would, but already she knew that there were sharp and divergent differences of opinion about the age-old phenomenon of the homosexual in a world predominantly heterosexual.
    She thought suddenly, I could stand it if it weren’t sex, if it had nothing to do with sex, if the idea of “sexual aberration” didn’t even enter into it. If it were any other abnormality or neurosis, I could say, Oh well, and try my best to help Jeff without this inner horror. I’m so afraid for him, so afraid he will suffer terrible things because of something he didn’t arrange or seek out. He can’t help it, he didn’t choose it; if he had, would he be writing this strangled letter for help?
    Would Ken see that? If it were about anything besides sex, there would be no doubt. At his office, he had been patience and loyalty itself to Fred Dirkeley and his incessant drunkenness, and Fred had not been a member of his family, only of his firm. Ken had been the bulwark between Fred and the rest of the company, had stood by him through all his periods of drying out, slipping again, of being hospitalized once more, had withstood all the