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increased animation.
    Levy took a second course, then a third, and excelled.
    He told his father of this new ambition at lunch in Cambridge, with Charles present. With all the passion he could muster, he explained that he wished to treat the human mind, not the body.
    Martin Levy leaned over the table. In a torrent of words he rasped that this would be a waste of his money, that psychiatrists were charlatans and that screwed-up people were born that way, beyond anyone’s redemption. Levy felt himself shriveling inside; Charles, who knew that the suicide of Levy’s mother was the unspoken subtext to this tirade, fixed Martin Levy with an icy stare. When the speech was finished, it was Charles who answered softly, “But suppose you’re wrong.”
    Martin Levy’s head jerked toward Charles. They stared at each other; Levy saw in his father’s shocked face that he felt the thrust of Charles’s meaning, and knew it was intended.
    Martin Levy did not answer.
    The lunch had two results. The first was that Martin Levy no longer admitted Charles Carey to his home. When his son apologized for this, over a late-night beer, Charles only smiled. “Well,” he said, shrugging, “it was never kismet, anyhow.”
    At that moment, sensing a cool determination his smile could not hide, Levy knew suddenly that Charles meant him to escape a tie: the ambition of a father, with which Charles himself might have to grapple all his life.
    The second result was that Martin Levy still sent him money.
    In medical school, when his father could no longer help him, Charles lent him some of his own savings from the war, to help him over a few tough months. Later, at the times in Levy’s internship when he felt most down and tired, Charles would call to suggest dinner, diverting him with chat of publishing or satiric imitations of bizarre imaginary patients. “I just love wet suits,” Charles would tease, until Levy began to laugh. And so it went, through dinners and periodic evenings out, until the two men became pillars of each other’s reality, making their separate worlds seem better than they were.
    And then Charles had married Allie Fairvoort.…
    â€œShe refuses electroshock,” Levy told him now.
    â€œI don’t really blame her.” Charles Carey cast an ironic eye at the diploma on Levy’s wall. “I thought you’d learned to cure these things without witchcraft.”
    â€œWhat I learned is that you don’t revamp personality, only modify it by a few degrees. If the patient wants to.”
    Charles lit a cigarette. “And Allie doesn’t.”
    â€œShe won’t talk to me as a real person.” To Levy, Alicia Carey seemed impaled on her inner life, like a butterfly in a box. “Most of us consign our fantasies to daydreams, and peek at them every so often to help us get through the day. Others, like writers or actors—remember, she used to act—try to live off their imaginings, and are sometimes driven crazy by it. She’s moved one step past that. Reality is poison to her, and this new baby is its symbol.” Levy scowled. “I know all this sounds like such crap.”
    â€œAt least your metaphors are improving.” A smile flickered at the corner of Charles’s mouth without changing his eyes. “You were never long on metaphor.”
    â€œShe calls for it.” Alicia Carey made him feel poetic and impotent, like the tall, cool women he had dreamt of in school, and could not touch. Now it was Charles Carey’s wife he could not touch, even through his profession: eight months had accomplished only his own immersion in her flight. He wished he could protect her, or perhaps use his gifts to give a woman back to Charles, but he had no means. He could stir in her no interest for her infant son; she would not stay in analysis, and Thorazine—an alternative he despised—depressed her further. Finally, he had