Four Kinds of Rain by Robert Ward Read Free Book Online Page B

session, Bob lay in bed, his hand on her left breast, and said: “Come on, Jess, you don’t want to hear about that ancient history, do you?” But Jesse had laughed and
insisted.
She wanted to know everything, how he’d gotten into psychology and what it was all about. So Bob started telling her the story of his life, how he’d fallen into it when he was attending Hopkins in the seventies and how he and a group of his radical friends had studied Jung, and his theory of the collective unconscious. At that point he had to stop the story to explain to her just what that was. “Remember,” she said, “I’m jest this ignorant old country girl.” Bob kissed her on the head and assured her that wasn’t true at all. Naked, he held in his stomach as he reached up to the bookshelf and pulled down his musty old paperback copy of
Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
and just touching that book gave him a shock. He remembered Meredith and Rudy and himself all sitting there talking about archetypes and how the mandala was the symbol of wholeness in a divided world, and how they had felt they were on to something so deep, so wonderful, the secrets of the unconscious mind, and in their youthful arrogance so much more than that, the secrets of the
universe
even. He hopped back into bed and began to explain Jung to her, how he had started with Freud but then developed the collective unconscious theory, in which all mankind dreams and shares the same myths, even though they are expressed symbolically in different ways. She caught on right away, and was thrilled not only by what Bob was teaching her but by the fact that she could understand it.
    “That’s the thing,” she said. “I never knew I was smart enough to go to school. I was told I was a dummy by my daddy so often that I just stayed away from books and ideas.”
    “That’s a terrible thing that was done to you, Jess,” Bob said. “In our country the poor are made to feel that they are stupid, so they’ll stay right in their place.”
    She shook her head and tears came to her eyes.
    “Oh Bobby,” she said. “And to think now I have my own personal guru.”
    Bob shook his head, but she was all over him, kissing him with her lovely lips and asking him to tell her more. And so he did. He told her about how he and his friends wanted to use their therapy to wake up the world, because they all believed society was moving into a new kind of consciousness, and it was beyond anything the old straight political leaders could see or understand. They thought they could show people the way to a new spiritual growth, beyond material possessions. A world governed by a grace and harmony. And most of all kindness, compassion.
    After going on for a while, Bob stopped and felt slightly embarrassed. Surely she must have heard enough by now. But she only snuggled up closer to him and said, “Bobby, I could listen to you talk for the next hundred years. Do you know what it’s like to grow up in a place like Beckley where talk is considered unmanly, where the only strength is the strength of your arms and back? Where if you’re a woman you would never even think to go to college?” She suddenly broke into tears at the thought of it and Bob patted them away, then heard himself telling more of his old stories, the ones he’d sworn he’d never tell again, not because they were dull but because they hurt so badly to recall. Because to tell her about those days of bright hope when he and Rudy and Meredith and the others lived together in a big-shingled house on St. Paul Street was to remind himself how far they had all fallen short of their youthful ideals. It was almost impossible to believe that the battered, compromised group of lumpy, middle-aged people were once the hot and sexy young stars of the Hopkins psychology program, the young radicals who started a revolutionary People’s Free Clinic, where they offered an alternative to the kinds of square psychotherapy that were going on at