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relationship, like so many of my own, would die.
    The pause went on: eight seconds, ten, twelve. A fire truck wailed below then dopplered off.
    Yes, Dr. Schussler said at last. I may have been … perhaps I …
    She fell back into the cushions of her chair.
    You know, she said, in our profession … it is often hard to know when to press on and when to let go.
    (
Mirabile dictu!
)
    Now the patient drew a breath. Do you think … she began.
    Yes? asked the analyst.
    Do you think it’s time …
    What?
    That I dealt with—
    Your adoption? I do, but—
    Find my mother? Do that whole nasty thing where I blow up my family and hers, and make everyone unhappy?
    No, no, no. Not that—
    Then what?
    I mean—
    What else can you mean? Once you open this door, you know there’s no way in hell to close it.
    I glanced at my wristwatch, and to my dismay saw that the patient’s hour was now gone. Then I remembered how often I had done the same: allowed myself to approach the brink only when I knew I could soon back away. There is some instinctive internal clock, some narrative curve, we analysands surely follow, so that we may have the fortitude to tell the story of ourselves another day.
    We will have to explore this next time, the doctor gently said.

8.
     
     
    I was filled with happiness—why deny it? The plot was turning, just as I had predicted. And it was now about to address the subject of my most ardent hopes: how the adoptee creates himself (or herself, in this case). I would learn how one separates from parents of all sorts, “real” or adoptive. And surely that path had to lead through the canyons of genetics. Even my dear friend Paul Beleiter had spent a year wondering over his blood relatives. How could one not? Such is the desire—irresistible, physical, cellular—to find one’s likeness; to know whence came this eye, this brow, this dimple in the chin, or, for that matter, this talent, this compulsion, this madness: whatever one feels is indelibly engraved within.
    Yet it was also imperative that the patient, like Paul, investigate the birth parents as an
idea
—an exploration confined to thoughts, dreams, images in the mind. The slabs of flesh of her actual parents would debase her quest, I thought. If she found those whose genes she carried, she would be surrounded by yet more people owning the perquisites of parenthood—a whole coterie with the power to grant her joy, or snatch it away. Paul had never found his parents. Later he told me of his relief: What if they were only ordinary? he said. And I replied: What if they were monsters? He laughed and said: That would be better.
    All now depended upon the skill of the analyst. The success of the patient’s endeavor, and my own, required that Dr. Schussler lead her patient through the ravines of inheritance without letting her stop there, so to speak. She must not stimulate in her client a thirst for her “true” mother, for that would transform those gloriously “mysterious origins” into a banal reality of blood. But I had no faith in the powers of the psychological professions, as I have said. Who was this Dora Schussler that she would presume to take on the role of psychic guide?
    I feared for the patient. I rode the streetcar up and down Market Street; I went from my house to the office and back again; the weekend went by and then came Monday, Tuesday. And all through, the patient’s words hung in the darkening of my thoughts:
Once you open this door, you know there’s no way in hell to close it
.
    Wednesday morning came; I trembled in my office; at last the patient arrived. The doctor wasted no time in returning to the subject of their prior meeting.
    What we want to do, she said as they began, is probe your
feelings
about being adopted. We want to understand adoption’s effect upon who you are now, upon your relationships with your parents, your friends, your lovers, and, most of all, upon your inner concept of yourself.
    The patient laughed.
    I