Wicked Angel

  Angelo was alerted. He hated Dr. McDowell with an intense hatred. Jack had always been most kind to him, and had listened seriously when Angelo had spoken. But he listened! He had a listening air, as if hearing beyond mere words, and he especially had that air when he was present in this house. A subtle threat hung about him, for all his consideration, for all his pleasant words, and the threat was to Angelo. There was nothing Angelo could do about it, for the doctor was beyond his reach, but Angelo had had the most satisfying daydreams of how he would eliminate one whom he considered his enemy. No one must listen to what Angelo Saint really thought!

  Kathy sighed patiently. “All right, how about a week from tonight? I’ll call Mary, and you call Jack. I suppose it’s only the courteous thing to do.”

  HE would be here again, the threat, the listener! Angelo put down his fork and glared at his mother, and the skin about his mouth whitened. Of course, he could be away that night, at the home of one of his devoted friends. But Angelo made it a point to be present when the doctor was here. A person couldn’t tell what he might say to his parents in his absence, dangerous things. Dr. McDowell “understood.” On his last visit he had hardly taken his eyes from the boy, and there had been a most curious expression in them.

  “No!” shouted Angelo, and struck the tablecloth with his fork.

  Kathy was amazed. “I thought you liked Jack,” she said. “He’s always so nice to you, and treats you like an adult, unlike some others I could name,” she added with annoyance.

  Mark asked quietly, “Why not, son?”

  Angelo’s nostrils distended. Careful, he told himself. They mustn’t suspect why he hated Jack McDowell. That would make them curious; they might ask the doctor questions which would disrupt his world and ruin it.

  “I don’t like him,” said Angelo, meticulously picking his words and looking at his parents meltingly. “Oh, I’m ashamed to tell you why.” He peeped at Kathy as if begging her forgiveness in advance.

  “Oh, do tell us, darling!” she sang.

  So Angelo folded his hands on the table and took on a serious, manly expression and let his big light brown eyes fix themselves sincerely on his mother. “It’s just that I have a feeling he let Aunt Alicia down, and that’s why she went away. I think she expected him to marry her, and then when she found out he’d just been taking up her time and had no intention of marrying her, she couldn’t stand it. After all, she’s my aunt, part of the family and so I resent him.”

  “Do you hear that, Mark!” cried Kathy in rapture, striking her hands together and clasping her fingers and glowing like a light “Oh, the darling, the darling! How he bleeds for others! He’s so sensitive, so wonderful! So—feeling!”

  Mark said nothing. Angelo did not see the sudden fixity on his father’s face, the sudden resolution, the sudden thought. Kathy sprang up girlishly from her chair and rushed to her son and embraced and kissed him in a flurry of ecstatic passion.

  “But you’re wrong, darling, darling!” bubbled Kathy. “How unjust, and that isn’t like you at all! Jack did want to marry Alicia; she told us that herself.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Angelo soberly. “I think she was just saving her pride.”

  “It could be, oh, it could be!” cried Kathy, with compassion. “‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!’” She sat down and regarded her son as if he were a miracle.

  “Nonsense,” said Mark bitterly. “Angelo’s only using his imagination. And it was Jack, remember, Kathy, who told us he wanted to marry Alice and she refused.”

  “I don’t believe it!” said Kathy emphatically, still staring fascinated at her son. “Children are very subtle. Angelo struck right at the heart of it all! Under the circumstances, considering how he treated Alicia, I just can’t be friendly to Jack. And all the time the real truth was right under our noses!” she added, marveling. “He just wanted to ingratiate himself with us, and that is why he lied.”

  “Why should he want to ingratiate himself with us?” asked Mark. “He has hundreds of friends. He’s very respected, and is called in on many consultations by other psychiatrists. He isn’t the affected kind, with an accent and owlish glasses. And he’s independently wealthy too, and is socially accepted in circles where even we can’t penetrate. What benefit could we give him?”

  “Oh, psychiatrists are always looking for patients,” said Kathy, dismissing her husband’s remarks. She leaned toward Angelo, and touched his hand as one would touch a saint. “Even a rich doctor isn’t going to overlook an opportunity for twenty dollars to fifty dollars an hour.”

  “So, we aren’t going to invite them, then?”

  “No, not en famille. I’ll talk to some of the girls. We can make it a big restaurant party. I won’t have him here, hurting Angel.”

  Mark looked at his son, and his gray lips tightened. So, he thought, you’ve won again, and I think I know what was in your mind. God help me, and God help you, too, my son.

  Mark became aware, for the first time, of the soft hum of the air-conditioner on this warm late afternoon in June. He became aware that he had been talking steadily, with anguish, occasionally with panic and frenzy, for a long time, though he had tried to keep his voice reasonable and quiet. And he had not been interrupted once.

  Dr. McDowell had listened, his light blue eyes fixed earnestly on the tormented other man, his hands clasped together on the leather top of his fine desk. He had not moved, except to light an occasional cigarette. He had asked no questions. He had only listened.

  It was cool in the large and airy office, with its friendly furniture, its reassuringly handsome draperies, its excellent rug. Yet Mark repeatedly wiped his ashen face with his handkerchief, until the linen was a sodden lump in his hand.

  “There it is; all of it,” said Mark finally, and in a hoarse voice. “Tell me I’m insane. Tell me I’m a neurotic. Tell me I’m out of my mind, and need psychiatric treatment.”

  “In short,” said the doctor gently, “tell you anything but the truth.”

  Mark’s heart jumped savagely, then beat with a sickening rhythm.

  “What do you mean, Jack?” he asked. “The truth?”

  The doctor stood up, thrust his hands into his pockets and walked slowly around the room, his head bent. Then he stopped before Mark and contemplated him somberly. “You’re his father,” he said. “Parents don’t want to be told. … They’ll do anything to avoid that. They want to be reassured; they even want to be told they’re crazy themselves, and should be confined. They’d find that easier to bear. For they love their children.”

  Mark looked dazedly at the lump of soiled cloth in his hands. He felt as though he were dying.

  “Then you believe me?” he whispered. “You don’t think I’m imagining things, inventing things, that I’ve been having hallucinations?”

  Jack sat down again, and now he looked at his clasped hands. He waited a moment or two, then he opened a drawer and took out a bottle of good whiskey and two glasses. “Let’s have a drink,” he said. “No, don’t wave it away. There are a lot of times when a drink is a lifesaver. And this is one of them. Frankly, I don’t like your color. You’ve been living under a terrible strain for a long time. I’ll give you the name of a good cardiologist. I don’t think, however, that it is organic; I think it’s functional in your case.” And no wonder, he added to himself in commiseration.

  Mark forced himself to drink. All at once he did not want to know the truth. He had come here to be laughed at in a friendly fashion; he had come here to have his fears blown away. He had even come to be told that he was mad. Anything. He finished the drink; he stared down into the empty glass with eyes that had no expression. A dark lock of his hair slipped on his wet forehead.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” he said dully.

  “Of course you should have,” said Jack. “If only for your own sake. Mark, I’m going to tell you the truth. Your son is a psychopath, and there is no cure for him, though other doctors are experimenting with
shock treatments and everything else. Your son is an atavist, a throwback. In his own way he is as normal as anyone else; he’s as normal as any boy born in a cave tens of thousands of years ago. He isn’t insane, if that is what you fear. He could pass examinations brilliantly. In fact, he’s eminently sane. It’s just that he’s been born with a lack, just as some children are born physically lacking an arm or a leg, sight or hearing. And that lack is what we call conscience. There are some Freudians, even today, who insist that conscience is an acquired trait, forced on children by parents and theologians, and that no child is born with it. I disagree. There was an experiment made … but that isn’t relevant to Angelo at this time. Man is born a moral creature; he can be perverted, later, but he was born moral, and with a conscience. That has been proved over and over, until there isn’t the slightest doubt left. I interviewed some Nazis long after the war, who had been brought up to have no conscience, who were allowed no religious teachings, who were taught almost from babyhood to be ruthless and cruel and even murderous when commanded. They knew nothing else but violence and hatred. And yet, while I was talking with them many of them burst into tears and told me how they had loathed what they were, even as children, and hated themselves as men, and had covertly assisted potential victims of the Gestapo. Some of their friends, caught in this very thing, had either committed suicide, or had been executed. But they had taken this risk.

  “Why? Because almost all men are born with a moral conscience, and nothing can extirpate it, not even a Hitler, not even a Stalin, not even a Khrushchev. Why do you suppose that hundreds of Soviet soldiers refused to fire on the Hungarian revolutionaries, and permitted themselves to be shot rather than to murder little children and women and men who loved their country and loved their God? Some are weak enough to try to smother their conscience and their human compassion, and conceal them in self-defense. But others prefer to die rather than live with themselves and their memories. And those Communist boys, so many of them, chose death to the final violation of their natures. The heroes aren’t the killers; they are often the killed, perhaps they are the only heroes. And I might remind you that those Communist boys had never been taught anything about God or conscience or morality, or right or wrong except how it advanced the cause of Sovietism. You see, God is never absent from the hearts of men.”

  “But, He is absent from Angelo’s.”

  “Yes. You see, nature has a way of destroying the at- avists in the womb, or building in a mechanism which will destroy them in early childhood. But prenatal care of mothers, and antibiotics and scientific feeding of infants, have kept these atavists alive, and flourishing. Too, some Evil, and the Church calls it Lucifer, often gives these atavists a superior constitution so that they can survive, and superior intelligence, so that they can destroy. The atavists are spiritually retarded, if you want to put it that way.”

  He paused and looked at the distracted father. “You aren’t a Catholic. If I talk to you of inborn evil, you may smile indulgently. After all, don’t the child psychologists say every child is born perfect, but is corrupted by parents later? Of course, that is false. Satan is unusually vital and dominant in the world now. The time is imminent when we, who have consciences, must face those who have no consciences—the atavists. It is a terrible fact that these atavists now control the world.”

  Mark was thinking of his beautiful and vital son. “Angelo is the favorite of our minister. He sings in the choir. He is at the head of his Sunday-school class. He reads the Bible, and can discuss it intelligently with us. He is in the Boy Scouts. He belongs to local boys’ groups. …”

  “Yes. Of course. He has learned what is socially acceptable, what is socially desired, what is expected. And he always wants to please—for his own awful ends. And, in his heart, as a realistic atavist, he laughs at us. He is one with the saber-toothed tiger, the dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus. He is, spiritually, the inhabitant of the mighty fern- filled jungle, the steaming pits. He belongs with the birth of the world; he knows the ancient convulsions, the hot, pouring rains, the volcanoes. Is it his fault? No. Nature is in flux; sometimes the old patterns intrude; they haven’t been bred out yet.”

  Jack fumbled with a cigarette. “Do you think, for one instant, that Angelo is moved by the prayers in your church, that he believes, for one moment, the glorious story of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion? Of course not! To him, they are childish fairy stories. But they are accepted. Therefore, to be accepted he must accept them also, at least outwardly. They do not touch his heart; but he sees that they touch other hearts. He doesn’t want to be an outcast, a pariah. So he pretends to be touched, too. Don’t blame him! He is what he is, and no one can change him.”

  “Jack, is it something in our ancestry, Kathy’s or mine? Are we at fault, in some way?”

  “Of course not! An imbecile, an idiot, a retarded child, a feeble-minded child, an atavist like Angelo, can be born in any family. They are primitives, hangovers from the race’s infant years. Before God touched humanity with His light-filled finger and called forth a soul in man.”

  “You are trying to tell me that Angelo was born without a soul?”

  Jack was silent a moment. And then he said, “Yes. Perhaps. His soul is embryonic. It may be there, but it isn’t developed. It has been—delayed. I don’t know, Mark, and no other psychiatrist knows either, though some pretend to, out of pity for parents.”

  “And nothing can develop Angelo’s soul?”

  “Nothing. He hasn’t one, or it is still embryonic. Malformed; not developed.”

  “What do we do with him?” And Mark thought of his wife, and winced.

  “At the best, you can help him with his pretendings, not for his sake, but for the sake of others. You can help him take on coloration, and convince him that unless he does he will perish in some way. And these people are always so protective of themselves. You can appeal to their greatly intelligent selves, and nothing else.”

  “Angelo—he’s so charming. Everyone loves him.”

  “Naturally. That is the atavist’s disguise. And don’t think they don’t work hard to acquire that disguise! They work like hell. Only their families get a glimpse of their saber-toothed selves, occasionally. I treat so-called neurotics everyday who are married to atavists. I can’t advise a divorce, being a Catholic, but I do advise separation before a tragedy happens.”

  Mark could not speak. He thought of his beautiful son, his clever and intelligent son. And he knew now that his son was part of a mist-filled age millennia in the past, and no part of this age. No wonder he found the spiritually developed ridiculous, for his world in himself was ruled by tooth and claw, red and dripping, hungry and devouring.

  Jack said, “There is something else I must tell you. Angelo tried to kill Alice some years ago. She told me.” He held his breath and waited for Mark to cry out.

  But Mark only listened and nodded repeatedly, automatically. Of course, he had always really known that. He listened to Jack’s story of what had happened to the innocent little dog, and still he nodded. He was so ill that, to stop the endless nodding, he had to put his hands forcibly on his head. “I have been hiding,” he said at last, in a strange voice. “Jack, why can’t we have a law to do away with them?”

  “We are humanitarians,” said Jack wryly. “We think all creatures born in the shape of man are men. Now, come. Would you consent, right now, to having Angelo mercifully and painlessly killed, as you would in the case of any other incomplete animal?”

  Mark did not answer. Jack said, “What is evil? Is it atavism? Is it Satanism? I don’t know! But it is both of these, I think.”

  Mark put his arm on the desk, for he was exhausted, and he bent his head to it. “What do we do now?”

  “I’ve told you. Don’t be so discouraged. Psychopaths, or atavists, sometimes, quite often, make what we light-heartedly call an adjustment. That is, they learn to conform for their own gain and profit. Angelo may grow up to be a most magnetic and successful man. I can te
ll you this, he’ll never be a neurotic! To be a neurotic, you have to have a soul, to be earnestly and terribly soul-aware and suffering. Angelo, if protected, if constantly assured of his superiority, may make you proud some day. But I pity his wife and children.”

  Mark felt as if he weighed several tons. His flesh dragged on his bones. He looked at the palms of his hands. “I’m worried. That is putting it mildly. Kathy is over forty. She’s pregnant. She learned that a couple of weeks ago. Now, must we worry about having another—psychopath, an atavist?”

  Jack got up and came to him swiftly. “Does Angelo know?”

  Mark looked at him, dazed. “No. Kathy thinks he is still a baby. And she’s embarrassed about conceiving at her age. But I’ve thought, perhaps a brother or a sister might help Angelo.…”

  Jack was greatly concerned. He rolled a cigarette over and over in his fingers. “When will the baby be born?”

  “October.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t be told for a while.”

  “Why? He’s going on eleven. He’s been taught all about sex; Kathy made a point of that. She’s eagerly answered all his questions ever since he was five years old. And he probably now knows more about sex than Kathy does.”

  Jack looked at the cigarette in his fingers. “How is Kathy taking this?”

  “I told you—embarrassed. But lately, she is becoming ‘radiant’ again. She is bursting to tell Angelo, but controls herself. She doesn’t want to worry him, she says. He may be concerned that his mother might not survive. That is what she says.”

  “Would you consider sending him away until the baby is born?” Jack was very pale.

  “I thought of that. Camp in July. Boarding school in September. But he doesn’t even want to go to camp this summer, though he liked it last year. When I mentioned a fine boarding school—a military school—he screamed like a girl. He was hysterical for days.”

  He feels something, thought Jack, terribly alarmed. He feels something threatening him, though he doesn’t yet know what it is. His sacred, his self-encompassing world—it’s in danger, and he doesn’t yet know why.