“Hello,” Tyler said.
She nodded, and then kept walking. “I’ll be right there,” he called after her. She gave no response, and he watched her walk down the corridor. It seemed to him to be a colossal injustice that he should have received a look from her as though he had been caught in some deviant behavior. It was not his fault.
He stood in the empty hallway, the smell of paste and paint pressing on him. Through an open classroom door he saw the little chairs, the small desks. Turning, he saw a janitor with a long mop coming toward him. Tyler raised his hand in a greeting and went down the hall to the principal’s office.
“Come in, come right in,” said Mr. Waterbury, giving Tyler’s hand a vigorous shake. “You know Rhonda, I believe. And of course Mary.”
Mary Ingersoll, having taken her seat by the window, was subdued, but Rhonda stood up and said, “Hello, Tyler,” taking his hand with both her own. “Thank you for coming in, Tyler.” She was speaking slowly, as though he might be deaf and needed to read her lips.
“Have a seat, have a seat.” Mr. Waterbury indicated a large wooden chair. “Let me take your coat.”
Tyler, shaking off his coat and handing over his hat, felt naked without them, and, sitting down, he glanced at Mary Ingersoll and was surprised to realize in her gaze how very much the young woman disliked him.
“Okay, then.” Rhonda Skillings smiled. Her hair was crimped over her head, with bangs curled under and so high up on her forehead that it looked as though she could, if she needed to, reach up and peel the whole thing off. She nodded toward Mr. Waterbury, who sat behind his big wooden desk, leaning forward. The lamp on his desk cast a small arc of light over an open folder of papers that apparently contained, Tyler realized with a slight lurch to his heart, various reports on Katherine. Mr. Waterbury put his glasses on, peered at the papers, took his glasses off.
“A number of incidents, you see,” he said to Tyler. “I’m afraid. Screaming, spitting, drawing obscene pictures.”
“Obscene pictures?”
“Well—”
“Drawing obscene pictures?” Tyler spoke this quietly.
“She drew a picture of a woman defecating, I’m afraid.”
“May I see it?”
Mr. Waterbury handed him the drawing, and Tyler glanced at it. “This is not obscene,” he said, handing it back. “For heaven’s sake. To call that obscene.”
“It’s disturbed,” said Rhonda. “Let’s just put it that way.”
Mary Ingersoll had blushed as pink as a sunset, and Tyler realized the drawing had been of her.
“But! This is an exciting time in education.” Mr. Waterbury’s dark eyebrows shot up as he handed Tyler a bound booklet. “Here you go—you might find this to be of some interest.” Tyler looked at the cover. The Pursuit of Excellence. “A report,” Mr. Waterbury explained. “Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation last year, written by the country’s leading educators, suggesting gifted children might be dealt with separately.”
Tyler nodded slightly—a gesture of conciliation.
“And the retarded.”
In the parking lot, a school bus groaned as it pulled away.
Rhonda spoke. “Katherine scored retarded on an I.Q. test, Tyler. Now, we don’t believe the child is retarded—not for a minute. But we do think it’s necessary she get help.”
Mary Ingersoll caught his eye, held his glance before looking away.
“So much has been learned about children,” said Mr. Water-bury. “Gosh, when we were kids, no one thought about these things.”
Tyler cleared his throat softly. “What things?”
“Here’s my theory on Katherine.” Rhonda sat up straight, touching her round white earring. “But let me first fill you in on some background knowledge, Tyler. Now, the same way we”—and she moved her hand to include the others in the room—“might need to be taught about the history of religion, I thought you could be helped by understanding some basic theories of psychology.”
He said, “Just don’t use too many big words, Rhonda.” She covered for him, laughing, but they knew—it was in the room—that he was feeling like a big, cornered animal. He placed The Pursuit of Excellence back on Waterbury’s desk, laced his fingers together, and waited for Rhonda to begin.
“Children are sexual beings,” she said.
Mary Ingersoll began playing with the chain around her neck that held the tiny cross; back and forth her fingers went.
“Children come into the world and all they know is Mommy’s breast.” Rhonda placed a hand over her own breast for a moment. “They’re hungry, they cry, and Mommy picks them up. They’re powerful, you see. They, as far as they see it, control the world. ‘Infantile grandiosity,’ this is called.”
The afternoon light through the tall windows had become the pale gray of early dusk. The trees behind the front parking lot seemed far away, twiggy and bare against the sky. Mr. Waterbury leaned back and switched on the tall lamp behind his desk, so that a yellow funnel of light suddenly illuminated half his desk and the lap of Mary Ingersoll. Tyler said slowly, “Infantile grandiosity. There’s a big word.”
“Two words.” Mary turned partway in her chair, smoothed a hand over her lap.
“Two. Yes, indeed.” A silence followed, and then Tyler’s stomach growled loudly. Mr. Waterbury eagerly offered him a Life Savers candy. “No, thank you,” Tyler said.
Rhonda smiled at him. “Okay. But are you with me so far, Tyler?”
“I seem to be.”
Mary Ingersoll stopped playing with her chain. He looked at her, unsmiling.
“All right, then.” As Rhonda spoke, her red lipstick began to stick her lips together on the side. Tyler watched as the lipstick, up and down, became gummy, a little white ball of something appearing finally on her lower lip. She spoke of infantile sexuality, of Oedipal desires, Electra desires, a little girl’s developing sexual desire for Daddy. “Often you’ll hear little girls say to their fathers, ‘I wish you’d divorce Mommy so I could marry you.’ “
Tyler had never heard any little girl say this. He glanced at Mr. Waterbury, who was watching Rhonda with the exaggeratedly pleased and embarrassed look of a parent witnessing a child perform in a play.
Rhonda spoke then of penis envy, of castration fears, even placing her hand, amazingly, across her crotch area, as she described the fear a little girl feels when she realizes her mother and she appear to have been harmed. And then Rhonda returned to infantile grandiosity, the belief that one can do anything, that the whole world is in their power, that they are God-like. She stopped to smile at Tyler; he looked back at her without smiling.
“Small children are very literal,” Rhonda went on. Mary Ingersoll, over by the window, nodded. Rhonda recalled how Toby Dunlop, when he was a little boy, heard Marilyn say, “Gosh, I really have my hands full,” and Toby looked puzzled and said, “But Mommy, I don’t see anything in your hands.”
Mr. Waterbury laughed. “That’s just it—isn’t it,” he said. “That’s just it.”
Tyler crossed his arms over his chest. Rhonda continued, “Freud was a genius. Why, before Freud we were as clueless to the ways of the self as people were to the stars before the invention of the telescope. Galileo allowed us to explore the outer horizons, and Freud has allowed us to explore our inner horizons.”
Tyler felt so sleepy suddenly that his eyelids almost closed.
“Freud was really smart.” Mary Ingersoll said this, over by the window. “He knew so much stuff.” Tyler roused himself, took in a deep breath, crossed his legs. “Everything that happens to us in life just comes from our childhood,” Mary said.
Tyler watched her. “Is that right?” He spoke this condescendingly.
Mary’s face flushed, and she said, “We think Katherine thinks she killed her mother.”
There was a silence in the room. Tyler looked from face to face.
“We think,” Rhonda finally said quietly, “that, considering the stage of Katherine’s develo
pment, considering the concept of infantile grandiosity, that she may unconsciously blame herself for her mother’s death. You know, Tyler, etymologically, infant is the one who cannot speak.”
Outside on the playing field, a whistle blew.
ON THE HILL past town where the Meadowses’ house sat, the sky was now almost the color of the large sweeps of field that unrolled behind; the horizon line was thin and indistinct except for where hackmatack trees grew in a scattering, the bare woodbine twirled through their branches, all of it with a light snow covering from days before. And there were tall clumps of wheat grass closer to the house that had snow in their bent tops. Everything—the lightly covered snow fields and the bare trees and the grasses—held the lightest tint of lavender.
Katherine, bunched inside a winter coat, wearing a woolen hat and thick gloves, gazed around her. She thought maybe the world was built on the boot of a giant, like Paul Bunyan, only the giant was much, much bigger; on his toe was the town of West Annett, and in the summer, moss grew on his boot, little clumps of earth, and houses were built there, like the Meadowses’ red house, and like her own house, and in the winter, when the giant went walking in the snow, the houses got covered with the snow, and nobody knew they were living on the boot of a giant, but it could be true. He was a nice giant, meaning no harm, and maybe he didn’t even know the world was growing on the toe of his boot, because he would be so tall he couldn’t see all that way down.
But her mother would know, because up in heaven you could see far.
Katherine bent her head back, looking straight up at the sky, but the sky was gray and a little whipped-looking, like a messy swirl made from a dirty boot. Maybe at night the giant lay down with his messy boots stuck up in the air and left it smudgy like that. When the giant remembered to wipe up the floor, then it shone a pretty blue. Katherine smiled to think the sky could be the floor; the giant could be upside down and nobody would know. People wouldn’t fall off because he was so strong that everything on earth was protected in the little pieces of twigs and soil and ice and snow.
“Hurry!” shouted the older Meadows girl. She had just come out the back door of the house and was clapping her hands. She called to her sister and brother, and to Katherine. “Come on,” she called. “Ma said we can go in the shelter for just a little bit before it gets dark!”
This was a regular, but rare, treat. Davis Meadows liked to know that even when there was snow on the ground, the bomb shelter he had constructed so carefully could be opened quickly, and so sometimes he let Carol open it when he wasn’t home, and the children were allowed to play in there. He thought the children should be familiar with it, so should there be a nuclear attack and he and his family had to spend days down there, the children would not be frightened.
Katherine could not believe her eyes. There, in the backyard, Mrs. Meadows bent down in her red coat and snow boots, and pulled up a trap door. “Careful, kids,” she said. “Careful. One at a time.” The older girl went first, disappearing down into the earth. Then the little boy, helped by his mother, and then the next girl, and then it was Katherine’s turn. A ladder went down, down, and there was a light on. “Turn around and go down backward,” Mrs. Meadows said to her, and so Katherine went, slowly, feeling someone taking hold of her legs and guiding them down the ladder.
“Just ten minutes,” called Mrs. Meadows from up on the earth. “And remember the rules.”
Built into the walls were narrow bunk beds, and also two cots along the sides of the little room Katherine found herself in. “Sit,” said the older girl, and so Katherine sat on one of the cots. “Look, there’s cards. Want to play Go Fish?”
Katherine didn’t move. There was a Raggedy Ann doll on one of the bunks, and the younger girl, seeing Katherine look at it, climbed up and tossed it down. “You can play with her,” the girl said. “But then it has to be kept here.”
“Do you have a bomb shelter?” asked the older girl, flipping down cards.
Katherine shook her head.
“What will you do when it bombs?” asked the younger girl.
Katherine shrugged.
The boy said somberly, “You might die, ’cause of what gets in the air.”
“Stop it, Matt,” his sister said. “Don’t scare her.”
Hanging on one wall was a big shovel, a pickax, a flashlight, and a can opener. Katherine turned to look behind her. There were rows of canned food, like they used to have in the mudroom at home. Mrs. Meadows was climbing down the ladder, and she smiled at Katherine, her cheeks pink. “Matthew, get your feet off the cot, honey. Let’s make sure the batteries are working in the flashlight and radio.” She took the flashlight from the wall and switched it on.
“Let me hold it,” said the younger girl, and Mrs. Meadows handed it to her.
“Do you want to play with the doll for a bit?” Mrs. Meadows asked Katherine, picking up Raggedy Ann. Katherine nodded and sat on the cot with the doll sitting beside her, making the doll’s feet stick out in front of her. “Okay, let me try the radio. Turn the flashlight off now. We don’t want to use up the batteries.” A staticky sound filled the small place, and Mrs. Meadows fiddled with the knobs on the radio, which sat next to a table that held two pots.
“We can live in here up to two weeks,” the older girl told Katherine. “There’s water behind that cabinet.”
“Shhh,” said her mother, bending her ear to the radio. “Oh, my goodness.” Mrs. Meadows stood up straight. The announcer’s voice said, “. . . wanted by the police for robberies at the county nursing home, has turned herself in. Police say Constance Hatch hid for almost a month before deciding to—” Mrs. Meadows turned the radio off.
“Ma, what was that?” the older girl asked, turning.
“I’m not sure,” Mrs. Meadows said. “Let’s go back into the house now.”
AS HE SAT captive in the office of Mr. Waterbury, Tyler was aware of the pain beneath his collarbone radiating with such intensity that a nail might have been driven through him there. But he sat without moving. Rhonda, if he heard her right, had been saying in a perky tone of voice that everyone experienced the desire to kill his or her parents. That this information was relayed to him with a sense of irreducible truth about it, that Rhonda’s perky tone held a restrained, incontrovertible authority, while Mary Ingersoll spread into the air the noxious, invisible cloud of her disdain, and Mr. Waterbury wore the eager smile of someone in befuddled allegiance with all that was being said—all this seemed to Tyler to be sharply offensive, calling upon the deepest part of himself to remain civilized, polite, manly. But anger, like the Red Sea, swirled through his head.
“Original sin, Tyler,” Rhonda said, leaning forward, smiling, “answers all this. It’s fascinating, really. The story of original sin has risen from man’s need to grapple with guilt. We feel guilty, all of us. And we’re confused by this guilt. The story of the fall from grace, being booted right out of that Garden of Eden, and the ability to be redeemed, appeals to us so strongly because we really feel guilty by our sense of being enraged as infants, by that unconscious desire we have to kill our parents. Our innocence is shattered, you see, before we barely have words to understand it.”
Silence.
They were all looking at him. He nodded his head slowly, because he had no idea, really, what Rhonda was talking about, only that he found it ludicrous, as if she had been brainwashed. He wanted to say that she was an idiot, just as his father-in-law had been, that more and more this was a godless world. He looked out the window, dark enough now that it reflected back to him the scene in the office: the lamp behind Mr. Waterbury’s desk, the still figure of Mary Ingersoll, legs crossed, leaning forward in her chair. He peered beyond the reflection and saw a small flock of birds move in one short flutter from the top of one bare tree to another. Why hidest thou thy face from me? . . . I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up.
“What are your thoughts, Tyler?” Rhonda asked.
He turned to look at her. “
Well,” he said, nodding slightly, “certainly everything you say is interesting. And seems to me to be rubbish.” He had a sense of being entirely separated from himself; where his words came from, who was allowing them, he couldn’t have said; a vacuum seemed to be around him, but more sentences came from his mouth, a web of strings, a mess of stuff. “How it helps Katherine for you to reinterpret the story of Genesis is beyond me. Interpret anything you like, but to drag Katherine through such foolishness when she has already much on her back to bear, to accuse her of”—and here Tyler turned toward Mr. Waterbury—“drawing obscene pictures . . . I ask you, what’s going on here? They used to say when I was young, ‘Get your mind out of the gutter,’ and—”
“Whoa now,” Mr. Waterbury said, his chair creaking as he sat back. “Whoa now. Let’s think here, and not speak so rashly. Let’s try and be polite.”
Undeniably, Mary Ingersoll smirked. He was their dancing bear, their circus fun. And he thought he had spent his entire life trying to be polite. Thinking of the other man first. Probably, he was having a heart attack right now, or a stroke, for the pain beneath his collarbone was almost intolerable.