New Moon by Richard Grossinger Page B

candy machines, and played “Geography” (the last letters of places providing the first letters of other places you had to supply). If we were early, he took me to a nearby cafeteria, ordered treats, and bought me a puzzle book. We would sit on adjacent stools connecting numbered dots and solving things like “One of these objects is not like the others” and “What’s wrong with this picture?” “Well, the clock has three hands, the table is missing a leg, the dog has the back legs of a rabbit, and the lamp isn’t reflected in the mirror.”
    He liked to tease me about baseball being so important. In challenge of that, he invented a game in which he said words that supposedly had nothing to do with baseball and I tried to make up a baseball sentence about each of them. His first two were stumpers:“paradise” and “florist,” so I said, “The baseball player went to paradise” and “The baseball player bought flowers at the florist.”
    He called that cheating but said that it taught us an important lesson. I couldn’t guess, so he told me, “It’s that human beings can’t make up anything that isn’t human.”
    Neil would sit in the waiting room while I went inside. Afterwards, if there was time, he asked Dr. Fabian questions about his own studies. Then he took me on the subway home.
    Dr. Fabian never said precisely who he was or what his job comprised, but I understood that he was my special ally. He got in on everything, reviewing and correcting my arithmetic and spelling and teaching me stuff I hadn’t understood in class. Sympathetic about hectoring at school and miffed on my behalf about being blamed for everything at home, he mainly wanted to hear about Nanny. Unfortunately, I could remember little except how she reminded me of the cackling witch in Tubby and Little Lulu.
    “But you loved her too,” he submitted.
    I considered the notion, then nodded.
    From the long line of volumes on his shelf I understood that Dr. Fabian was a spokesman for a man whose name I misread as Dr. Freund because there was a brass plate with that name on the outside of our apartment building. “He lives downstairs from us,” I told him.
    “Dr. Freud does?”
    I nodded.
    He didn’t correct me.
    With a deck of cards we played War and Casino and then Hangman, a paper-and-pencil word-guessing game, with stages toward a completed figure on a noose tabbed by lines representing wrong guesses. He also taught me Battleship—a duel of hiding and “shooting” ships by placing them in grids we drew on blank pages and then guessing each other’s coordinates (a foreshadowing of algebraic axes)—then how to fold and tear pieces of paper many times over into boats and little flat diamonds that blew up in balls with a single puff.
    Our routine was to use part of each session for me to tell himabout what had happened since I last saw him. He always inquired how often I had wet my pants and bed that week, but he didn’t stop there. “What do you think at the moment you are wetting? What do you feel when your mother takes Jonny’s side?” No one had ever asked such stuff before, and I was usually stumped, so he drew responses by asking me to say the first thing I thought of, no matter what it was or how unrelated … then the thing after that … and so on. These chains of thoughts, like the game of Telephone, led us in unlikely directions, through comic book characters, fairy tales, baseball players, puns, jokes, advertising rhymes, and plain nonsense. Yet they always astonishingly got to something that made sense and gave a hidden explanation for my behavior. It was by far the neatest game I had ever played.
    After a few sessions Dr. Fabian explained that we were trying to get into my unconscious mind where the true causes of my fears and wetting were disguised in a code. “Things you can’t tell yourself directly you let dreams and unconscious actions speak for you. Once you learn what these are, they can no longer