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went to the world-renowned Ashland Clinic the next afternoon.
    THE CLINIC WAS housed in a large mansion and several smaller buildings in a fourteen-acre wooded setting on the west side of Eureka. It resembled a rich man’s estate or the campus of a small private school, both of which it had been in earlier lives. One of the founders of Eureka who had made and then lost great sums of money on the huge natural-gas fields of central Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma had built the original house as a monument to himself. His name was Sam Gulliver, and the house—a three-story twenty-seven-room brick replica of an English country home—was still known as the Gulliver House, a fact that often got kids and naive tourists thinking it was where the Gulliver of
Gulliver’s Travels
lived. The place and the land had been taken over by a small Catholic girls’ boarding school after World War II. They had added several buildings, and when the school went out of business in the late 1970s, the Ashland people bought it at auction for their clinic.
    The Ashland founders were eight doctors and researchers from the Moran Foundation, the first of several well-known andwell-regarded mental health institutions in the Midwest. The eight had a joint falling-out with the Moran leadership over Freudian theory as well as what they called “ego development” among the clinic’s older establishment. They moved as a group 140 miles west from Moran, Missouri, to Eureka, Kansas, and opened Ashland Clinic, the name having come from the obscure fact that Freud had once stayed in a British country hotel named Ashland.
    Dr. Clyde (Knothole) Norton was the last of the Ashland founders still alive and, at eighty-seven, continued to exercise overall control of the clinic and the foundation that ran it. Legend was that his very private nickname had been given him years ago—as a young man, he had resembled a knothole in a freshly cut cottonwood tree: small, round, woody, grainy.
    Otis thought about putt-putting out to Ashland on his red motor scooter but figured that would be truly throwing a red flag in the face of the bull. So he went instead in his tan Explorer.
    As arranged, Bob Gidney met Otis at the front desk and took him directly to Dr. Russell Tonganoxie, the psychiatrist Bob had touted before. Bob said Tonganoxie was known worldwide for his studies, writings, and travels in pursuit of truths about what he called “The Mature Male in Crisis.”
    Otis’s first impression of the fifty-year-old-or-so Tonganoxie was that he had to look no further than in a mirror if he wanted to see a mature male in crisis. Russell Tonganoxie’s long dark brown hair came down over his ears, and he wore his khaki chinos at least a size too large and barely pressed, as well as a gray sweatshirt with PACKERS on the front.
    “Don’t be put off by the way I look,” he said immediately, as if he had been reading Otis’s mind. “We all have our situations.”
    He pointed at a leather chair for Otis to sit in. The office hadprobably been a master bedroom in its life with the Gullivers. Lavish moldings framed the room, the ceilings were high, and a huge fireplace and mantel covered most of one wall, tall French windows another. Tonganoxie’s desk was a long pine table covered with books and stacks of stapled-together papers—reports of various kinds, presumably.
    Tonganoxie said, “When I came here from Johns Hopkins six months ago, I negotiated a deal. Not only no white coat but no coat of any kind, no tie. It’s in my contract that I can wear to work anything I want. That was my little Eureka.”
    Otis said nothing.
    “You
do
know what the name of your—our—town means?”
    “Yes. It’s Greek for ‘I found it,’” said Otis matter-of-factly. “The chamber uses the phrase a lot in its promotion stuff, as do the other ten or so towns in America named Eureka.” Otis was not interested in engaging in small talk with this guy. So he didn’t even mention the