No prison. No juvenile home. And, if my parents were willing to pay for something private, no state institution. I was judged psychologically irresponsible and assigned to a psychiatric hospital for one year, until my eighteenth birthday, after which my case could be reviewed. It was not even a real conviction; the time in the nuthouse was parole.

My parents’ aversion to psychiatry was so deeply ingrained and so reflexive that they could have just as easily related to my being sent to a seminary. (“Let’s consider ourselves very, very lucky,” my mother said through her tears, but I knew that she would soon be thinking—if she wasn’t already—that as deadly as prison might have been, it would have been something I could hold in common with Stalin, with Eugene Dennis, with the Spanish Freedom Fighters, and thousands of other revolutionary heroes, whereas time in a mental institution would put me in league with some chain-smoking wisecracker, Oscar Levant, say, some pampered little fool in love with his own feelings.) I was, however, relieved at the judge’s decision and felt, by and large, that I’d been treated fairly. I could have imagined a complete excusal—and often I fantasized it, the judge saying, “David didn’t mean to do it,” and leaving it at that—but the prospect frightened me. I thought a measure of punishment would be best, all around, and I was grateful that this punishment would be in a private hospital, with rolling green lawns and adolescent flip-outs from privileged, tolerant homes. The judge had indicated that my assignment to psychiatric care could be reviewed after a year, but I felt that with any luck and one or two sympathetic ears to hear the truth of my feelings, to sense the enormity and stability of my feelings, I would be out in a few months, ready to pick up the thread of my life at the point at which I’d snapped it.