Angelica's Grotto Read Online Free

in very good shape. I live about a mile away and I walked here. I had to stop four times and rest because of angina. Life seems more of a struggle than it used to be; often people coming towards me don’t give me room to pass, as if I’m invisible. When I take a bus the people who should be queuing behind me shove past me to get on – that sort of thing …’ He trailed off into whispers.
    She asked him what medications he was on and he told her. ‘Now we’ll begin with the Bender Gestalt Test,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you nine cards and I’ll ask you to look at them and copy them.’
    ‘How does that bear on my inner-voice loss?’
    ‘This problem doesn’t come out of nowhere; we need to look at what’s underneath it.’ She showed him the cards and one by one he copied the various arrangements of lines, dots, and geometric shapes, whispering, muttering and singing into his left hand while his right hand was drawing. He sang ‘Stormy Weather’ and ‘Nobody’s Sweetheart Now’.
‘“Oh no,”’
he said,
“‘it wasn’t the airplanes, it was Beauty killed the Beast.”’
    ‘“… Beauty killed the Beast”’, wrote Mrs Lichtheim. ‘Is that a quote?’
    ‘From the film
King Kong,’
said Klein as he continued his copying, ‘when Kong’s lying dead in the street. I notice that I shorten everything. I wonder if tall men elongate.’
    “‘… if tall men…?”’
    ‘Elongate.’ When he had copied the nine cards Mrs Lichtheim removed them, asked him to sign the sheet with his drawings, gave him a new sheet of paper, and asked him to draw the cards from memory.
‘“Far and few, far and few, are the lands where the Jumblies live …”’
he said as he set to work.
‘“The very thought of you makes my heart sing, like an April breeze on the wings of spring …”’
he sang, no longer hiding his mouth with his hand. He was able to recall seven of the cards more or less but not in the correct order; his attempts at the eighth and ninth were only guesswork. Again he signed his name and she collected that sheet and gave him a fresh one.
    ‘That was the Bender Recall,’ she said. ‘Now I would like you to draw a person, any kind of person.’
    Klein drew a young woman seen from the rear.
    ‘Sign it, please,’ said Mrs Lichtheim, ‘and now a person of the opposite sex.’
    Klein drew himself seen from the rear.
    Mrs Lichtheim took the drawing and placed the first one in front of him. ‘Could you tell me a bit about this one?’
    ‘She’s a young woman I saw in the Underground a couple of summers ago; I don’t believe I ever saw her face. She had long fair hair, was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, straw or maybe canvas, black cotton vest, tight white denim trousers, tennis shoes I think. She was very attractive, very appealing; her figure was shapely and girlish, she was graceful in the way she moved. She looked the very essence of youth and beauty. Walking away from me.’
    Mrs Lichtheim wrote down his words. ‘Anything about her state of mind? What she could be feeling, what she could be thinking about?’
    ‘She looked as if she might be going to meet someone she liked. She seemed well-pleased with life.’
    ‘Anything about her future?’
    ‘Years and years ahead of her, full of good things.’
    ‘How old would you say she was?’
    ‘Twenty-two or so.’
    ‘And this other person you’ve drawn?’
    ‘Well, that’s me. I’m seventy-two years old. I’ve drawn this man from the rear in pretty much the same pose as the young woman. His posture – he looks hesitant, as if he’s been brought to a halt, come to a pause. He’s wearing a rucksack because I don’t feel right unless I’m burdened to some extent. I think somewhere in Sholem Aleichem somebody says something like, “God doesn’t ask how far you can carry your burden, He just says to put it on your back.”’
    When Mrs Lichtheim finished taking down his words she offered him another sheet of paper. ‘Now I’d like you