The Children of Hamelin Read Free

be friendly.”
    “I mean about Harvey Brustein. Myra says he’s a great human being, he’s helped her more than any other therapist she’s tried. Why are you putting down someone you’ve never met?”
    “Why are you defending someone you’ve never met?”
    She bit her lip again. “Haven’t you ever wanted to believe in something? Haven’t you ever needed to believe in something? I’ve tried just about every kind of therapy there is.”
    “What’s your problem?”
    “What?”
    “Why therapy in the first place?”
    She stared at me as if I were crazy. “If I knew the answer to that, I’d be halfway there, now wouldn’t I?” she said.
    “Sounds to me like you dig therapy.”
    “I...” she paused, considering, then looked at me almost as if I were a human being. “I never thought of it that way before. But yes... it... gives me a sense of being human, you know, real contact with other human beings. That’s important, isn’t it?”
    “Therapy is your idea of human contact? Telling stuff to some shrink that you should be telling to your lover?”
    “I... I’ve never had what you’d call a lover. That’s one of the reasons I’m in therapy.”
    “Or vice versa.”
    “I don’t understand...”
    “Look, if what you’re looking for is real human contact, how about splitting with me right now? Forget therapy and pick up on a human being for a change.”
    “You’re disgusting!” she said “Can’t think about anything but sex, can you?”
    “I said something about sex?”
    “Didn’t you?”
    “You ever been on junk, baby?”
    “Certainly not!”
    I had had it. “That’s what you think,” I said. She stared at me for a long moment; furious but not quite sure what she was furious at.
    Fortunately, at that point there was some kind of commotion at the doorway to the hall. A lot of people seemed to be clustering around someone I couldn’t see. Ted was looking around the room. He spotted me, yelled: “Tom! Tom! Over here!” It was a convenient out. “Later,” I grunted, getting up and walking toward the tumult.
    Ted grabbed me by the arm, pulled me into the mystic circle at the center of which was a short, balding man of about fifty in a faded white tieless shirt and baggy gray pants with a soft, pallid pudding-face and watery mild eyes behind brown-rimmed glasses—just about the grayest cat you could ever hope to meet.
    “Harvey,” Ted said, “this is Tom Hollander, I told you about.”
    This was the great Harvey Brustein? The Black Villain or the Living Buddha, depending on which side you were on? This... nothing? This... this schmoo?
    “Uh... yes...” Harvey said in a bland dentist’s voice. “Pleased to meet you... uh... Tom...”
    “Uh, yeah,” I said. It was all wrong. A cat who looked like a scruffy accountant had all these people enthralled? How did he do it? How could Ted and Doris take this creep seriously?
    “Well... uh...” Harvey said. “We... ah might as well get started.”
    He made his way to the dais, sat down on the folding chair. People began to settle themselves on the floor. I sat down on the floor near the back of the room with Ted and Doris. Good old Linda sat a good distance away. In a few minutes of shuffling around, the whole floor was covered with silent acolytes waiting eagerly for pearls of wisdom to fall from the mouth of the gray little guru in the folding chair.
     
    Old Harv fished in a paper shopping bag under his chair, shuffled some papers, put them back. It got quieter and quieter. Harvey took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, put them back. People hunkered forward. Ted’s face was tense, his blue eyes strangely blank. Linda nibbled her lower lip. I began to take old Harv a little more seriously; he was doing that old Man number—make ‘em wait—and he was doing it well.
    Harvey opened his mouth. Everyone tensed. “Ashtray?” he said.
    Almost an audible moan. He was really stretching it out, seconds into minutes, minutes