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sound unimportant; but she was, after all, a strenuous woman and I knew she wasn’t kidding. She had disapproved of his Yoga, as she had disapproved of his Reichian analysis, his health foods, and his allegiance in 1948 to Henry Wallace. She was a dedicated opponent of the impossible, which my father happened to be for; but he was for her too, and that was what had weakened him. Even so, it was no easy job for her to restore him to reason. It had finally been necessary, where his orgone box was concerned, to shame him out of the thing by hinting of its existence one night to a group of his colleagues at a convention of the American Dental Association in Miami. What had forced her to such a cruel extreme was something my father had done with his box one afternoon in her absence: he had put me in it. After the ADA convention, a length of wooden rod was purchased, some nails driven in the right places, and the next thing Millie knew she had a zinc lined wardrobe closet in the corner of her room. The end result of my mother’s maneuver was that it managed to bring my father back into his family living room in the evenings, the proper place, my mother told him, to be collecting sexual energy in the first place.
    As for the avocado and fresh vegetable dinners, she had put up with them and put up with them, until finally she had forbidden Millie to set
anything
green and uncooked on our table. We all had to go without vitamin C until it was certain that my father was on the wagon. My mother claimed she would hold out until the entire family had scurvy, though my father gave in before the first symptoms of the disease made an appearance. Henry Wallace is a more complicated story. He had been entertained in the Wallach apartment, andtreated graciously. My father, as I had told Marge, had been chairman of an organization of doctors and lawyers in New York City who had dedicated themselves to campaigning for the third party. One would imagine, of course, that my father would then have voted for Wallace, but he did not; election eve my mother had kept him up, feeding him coffee, until she had finally convinced him that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Dewey. What a moment it must have been for him in the booth, pulling down that Truman lever. How he must have hated the woman he loved.
    It was Hatha Yoga that she had not been able to lick. Even when my father had ceased being a damned fool on her Moroccan rug, his nurse reported persistence after hours in the waiting room. The fact was that his wife could have as easily shamed him out of Yoga as out of dentistry. He was much too attached to the idea of healing. At least that was the way he might have thought of it himself. More likely, for all his belief in restitution, progress, reform, reconstruction—he
had
rebuilt some of the most talked-about mouths in New York—he was more attracted to ideas of disease. Wilhelm Reich, Henry Wallace, leafy green vegetables: all somehow were antibodies. And the disease? He apparently blamed some bug, some germ, for his perennially swollen heart. The disease was the doctor’s feelings. Not that he ever said this to anyone; to the worlds, professional and lay, he claimed dedication only to science. To the upper Fifth Avenue rabbis who made their way through our apartment, he was open-faced about his atheism. I have myself heard him explain his high colonic Yogic enema to the biggest internist in New York, absolutely physiologically, no mention of the soul at all. And Bhujangansa, of course, stimulated the autonomous and sympathetic nervous systems.
    Well, that all may or may not have been so. My own suspicion, even as a growing boy, was that my father’s particular trouble wasn’t with his sympathetic nervous system at all. It was, as a matter of fact, with his sympathies: his passions ached him. Whatever terror he saw in life, whatever turbulence gave him inward hell, he was unable to answer it with reason. So he took to magic.
    My mother was a