George

  “Right,” Ben said. “It will be very upsetting to others if you tell them. Especially Marilyn. Marilyn is the second wife of my father. She is also the mother of Frederica who is a patient of your college roommate’s. Marilyn would be very upset to learn about George.” Dr. Herrold did not interrupt; psychiatrists don’t. Ben paused, waiting for Dr. Herrold to ask.

  When Dr. Herrold realized that Ben was waiting, he asked, “Who is George?” He asked it gently as he scanned Ben’s records.

  “You won’t find George on the charts. George is the little man who lives inside of me. He’s really a good friend of mine. My best friend, as a matter of fact. And he is amusing. He swears sometimes, but he says funny things, too.”

  Dr. Herrold gave no look of shock. Ben should have known. The doctor’s look was one of patience and understanding. If Dr. Herrold had realized the importance of what Ben was saying, he would at least have looked surprised. Dr. Herrold thought that he knew about such things. They were rare, but it was his job to talk his patients out of them. After many therapy sessions. He calmly asked, “Does George talk to you at any special times, Ben?”

  “No, but he talks in a special way. He can talk to me silently or out loud. When he wants to say something to Howard, he’ll talk out loud. And he was being very upset about the thefts in the lab when he accidentally talked out loud at Marilyn’s.”

  “Do you think that George would talk to me, Ben?”

  Ben smiled and said, “George? George, Dr. Herrold will let me stop therapy and live with Mother if you explain to him that I am not a schizo and that you are really there.”

  Doctor and patient focused on Ben’s stomach. Nothing. Ben realized that if George had meant to cooperate, he would never even have had to make the request out loud in front of Dr. Herrold. “George!” he urged, looking down at his stomach, something he had never done before when he spoke to his little man. Never ever done before. “George,” he repeated. “C’mon now, don’t be stubborn. Talk to Dr. Herrold.”

  Dr. Herrold cleared his throat. “Does George often not do as you ask him to?”

  Ben heard the tolerance in the voice of the doctor, and he knew that he was tolerantly misunderstood. (I believe in you, Ben, but I don’t believe you. Again. Again.)

  Ben heard himself saying, “The sore sport. We’ve always gotten along until this year; it was always just understood between us, and now he’s mad because last night I told him to shut up.” And as Ben listened to himself, he heard disbelief fall—plunk, plunk—onto the desk that separated Dr. L. Daniel Herrold and Benjamin Dickinson Carr.

  Dr. Herrold asked Ben to describe what had made him tell George to shut up, and Ben spent the rest of his first session with his psychiatrist explaining in a very orderly and logical fashion about the thefts in the school laboratory and how those had evolved into last night’s argument. Then they made an appointment for a week from Saturday, the first Saturday after the New Year, and for every Saturday, 10:00 a.m., after that. Saturday was the one day that Mrs. Carr did not work, and the doctor did.

  As Ben and his mother left the office, they drove past Astra. In the school parking lot Ben noticed the red Mustang that meant Cheryl and William were in the lab doing their thing.

  Ben said to his mother what he usually saved to say to George, “I wish I could do research during Christmas vacation. Those seniors are lucky.”

  “So are you,” his mother added. “You’re lucky to have someone as gifted as Mr. Berkowitz and as interested as he is to teach all of you. That makes you lucky, too. It was wonderful of him to arrange all of it.”

  Ben said, “I could do what the seniors are doing. I could keep up with them. If I had a car and could get to the lab whenever I wanted to, I’d be there all the time. Weekends and vacations.”

  “If you had a car? What good would that do you? You’re not old enough to drive. Besides, if Mr. Berkowitz thought that all the kids in the class should be allowed to do research, he would have arranged it that way instead of the way he did.”

  “Even if he had arranged for me to do research and even if I had a car, I’ll bet that I’d still never get a chance to do it. I’d be busy driving to the supermarket and picking up Howard from the Sandlers’ and driving to the dry cleaners. All that I would be allowed to do if I could drive would be to do more errands for you.”

  “You talk as if you are being deprived of the Nobel Prize because you have to do a few things around the house.”

  “William and Cheryl never have to. And even Karen who is poorer than we are, at least poorer than Dad, doesn’t have to.”

  “What do they have to do?”

  “Get good grades. Get into a good college. Grow. Have fun. That is all they have to do. All they have to do when they are at home is to BE.”

  “What do they have to be, Ben?”

  Ben waved his arm and flapped his hand. “Be themselves. That’s all. That’s all that is asked of them.”

  Charlotte Carr could not look at her son because she was driving, but she wished that she could. She spoke very softly and seriously. “Ben, they are not being asked to be themselves. They are being asked to be everything. Everything except members of their families. They think that William and Cheryl must make contact with everything outside their homes to find what they have inside themselves.” A red light. Mrs. Carr looked at her Ben and added, “I think that they’re afraid of asking their children to do something unimportant because they think that will stop them from doing something important. How about Archimedes discovering the principles of buoyancy while taking a bath.”

  Ben was impatient with explanations, with the truth. “Taking a bath, yes, but he ran out without washing out the tub. I’ll bet that if I said to you, ‘Mother, I am on my way to the lab because I am on the verge of discovering the relationship between the hydrogen bomb and halitosis,’ you would say, ‘That’s cute, Ben, but take out the garbage before you leave.’”

  Mrs. Carr laughed. “I hate the word cute. I’d say, ‘That’s nice,’ and I’d say please when I asked you to take out the garbage.”

  Ben continued, “And if I said, ‘Mother, I have to leave this minute or all the equipment will disintegrate,’ you would say, ‘Talk about disintegration, that garbage is beginning to stink. The equipment can wait a minute, but the garbagemen won’t.’”

  “No,” Mrs. Carr insisted, “now, that I wouldn’t do. I might suggest that you take out the garbage on the way to the lab, but I would let Howie do it if you really didn’t have the time; and if he weren’t around, I would do it myself. I respect your work more than I do the garbage.”

  Ben gave his mother a cold look. She caught it and realized that he was not ready to make a joke of the situation. She was worried. Ben had always been unsettled after a visit to Marilyn’s. In the past, she had waited for his blues to go, but now she wondered how she should handle her son. Maybe the psychiatrist would tell her that she wasn’t allowed to argue with a child in therapy. She wanted to be reassuring, “Doesn’t it make you proud to realize how important you are to our family? That is, to our family here in Lawton Beach?”

  “Important?” Ben grunted. “That doesn’t make me important. One uneducated, full-time Mr. Clean could unimportant me right out of the house.” He paused, then added, “I’ll tell you what it does, though. It sure makes me peculiar at school. I’m the only kid at Astra who wheels groceries home in a cart and who knows the price of dry cleaning a lady’s skirt. Now, you take William. He is important to his mother. She happens to think that he is something great, and she never puts garbage or dirty dishes in the way of his being great.”

  “It never seemed to bother you before this year,” Charlotte Carr said.

  They pulled into the carport. Mrs. Carr shut off the motor. Ben added, “It never did bother me before this year. I never thought much about what other kids might think of me before this year. I was so busy listening to George. I was happy listening to him. And you, you happen to be lucky that George has alw
ays been on your side.”

  “George? George who?”

  “George Carr. That George who. George, the little man who lives inside of me. I told Dr. Herrold about him this morning, but George wouldn’t talk to him. And he probably won’t talk to you, either, even though he’s always been on your side and has always made me take out the garbage and keep everyone in the family on time.”

  “Did George ever tell you to do something that you didn’t want to do?”

  “Mother, it is just that kind of thinking that has me in the trouble that I’m in now. Right now.”

  “Sorry, Ben. Take it easy. I don’t understand what kind of thinking you are talking about.”

  “Thinking that George is responsible for all the thefts in the lab.” And with that, Ben marched into the house and sat at his desk for a long time listening. Thinking and listening. Until his mother called him and asked him to go with Howard to the Qwik-Chek for a loaf of bread for supper.

  Mrs. Carr waited until Ben and Howard had gone to buy the loaf of bread that she didn’t need before she called Dr. Herrold. After thinking back and further back, she had remembered that George had been the name of Ben’s imaginary friend in the time before he had started school. In the long ago before Howard was born. Before their father left home. Was her son so emotionally disturbed that he had re-invented George, an imaginary creature from a happier time, from a time when his father was around the house? She told Dr. Herrold over the phone all she knew of George, and she told him how worried she was. He asked her to come to his office to see him. Without Ben.

  eight

  School resumed with the usual post-holiday inertia, the tendency of a student body at rest wanting to stay at rest. Boys together and boys and girls together talked about what they had done during vacation. The girls came to school, not on the first day following vacation but on the second, wearing that which was new and which they had received from Christmas.

  Ron and Lacey had made considerable progress in their research during vacation. Adam and Violet had had a little trouble, but they appeared to have enjoyed it.

  William complained, “The closest that I came to a lab was the smell of alcohol in the drugstore I worked in.”

  “Working during vacations is also profitable,” Mr. Berkowitz said.

  “Only mildly so. A buck and a quarter an hour,” William joked.

  “Did your mother cut your allowance, William old boy?” Lacey asked.

  “Nothing like that; working was my idea. Actually, I had to talk them into it.”

  “I think,” said Mr. Berkowitz, “that having some responsibility outside of school would be helpful to a lot of people. As long as Cheryl didn’t mind being held back.”

  “Oh, Mr. Berkowitz,” Cheryl said, “I don’t feel that I was held back by William. We’ll make it up weekends and over the Easter holidays.”

  “Should I bother looking at this?” Mr. Berkowitz asked Cheryl, picking up her lab book.

  Cheryl stroked her hair out of her eyes and slowly nodded no. Mr. Berkowitz handed her back her notebook without opening it. “Ah, too bad that for the two of you, the frontiers of science remained somewhere north of Lawton Beach over this vacation. In research you have to be prepared for everything, including long periods when there is no progress at all.”

  Cheryl brushed her hair out of her eyes and said, “You know, that is very true, Mr. Berkowitz.”

  And Mr. Berkowitz added, “Not only is it very true, but it also makes a good song title. Sometimes nothing happening means that something is happening. Cha cha cha.”

  Ben thought: You have to like that guy, Berkowitz, cha cha cha. Even George liked Berkowitz. Ben knew, even though George had never discussed his feelings with him. Actually, William was the only person that they had ever disagreed about. Actually, Ben never bothered with very many kids. Actually, that may be the reason that there had been little disagreement between George and him. Well, if George couldn’t take any competition at all, that showed what an incompetent he was.

  He would show George. He would do the homework that George had asked him to do. He had more time lately, anyway; he wasn’t busy with George and he had no other friend taking his place yet. He would learn all the details of making amides from indole compounds. (If George cared to listen and learn, he could.) And then, and then, Ben decided, he would take all that information and with it he would help William. And Cheryl. Smiling kindly, talking patiently, he would help William. And Cheryl. William would be thankful and tell Ben that he was. And Cheryl would say thank you and ask Ben if she could take Howard for a ride in the red Mustang, and Ben would let her. And that would show George. George needs me more than I need him, Ben thought. I can stay silent as long as he can. Longer. Because once I help William, he will be my friend outside of school until he goes to college. That will make George begin to talk again to make William look bad. George loves being sarcastic about William.

  Ben reviewed all these thoughts later as he boarded the school bus. Cheryl drove out of the parking lot just as the bus was pulling up. William was sitting so close to her that she looked as if she had two heads. Two heads are better than one, he thought, reminding himself of the last argument he had had with George. What would George say if he told him about Cheryl’s driving with William sitting so close? Ben was sure that it would be sarcastic. George would probably say something about their not making progress in the lab over Christmas because they couldn’t unfasten themselves from each other to get out of the car. Then Ben would say they must have gotten unfastened because the car was empty when he saw it in the parking lot over Christmas. And then George would say how come William said that he didn’t get near the lab. And then Ben would say that maybe Cheryl worked alone. And then George would say that any way you looked at it, something was rotten because either Cheryl broke the rules and worked without a partner or else William lied and was in the lab. And then Ben would tell George to shut up. And then Ben stopped his thinking. Why did he lately always end with wanting to tell George to shut up?

  Mrs. Carr did not mind getting off work to keep her appointment with Dr. Herrold. He couldn’t fit her in until after Ben had had his second visit. Did not mind would hardly describe Mrs. Carr’s condition. Between the time Ben had told her about George and the time she could see his doctor, she felt like a raw, pared potato, exposed and darkening. She was anxious to do the right thing, but she did not know what that might be. Mrs. Carr was as curious about George as any mother would be who suddenly discovers that either she had a third child or that her first one really has a severe problem. She never mentioned George to Ben, not because she didn’t want to but because she didn’t know if she ought to.

  Dr. Herrold began their conversation by saying that he was not ready to make a conclusive diagnosis yet, but after only two sessions he was willing to say that Ben was not a schizophrenic.

  Mrs. Carr smiled. “I hope that you will write that to Mr. Carr and address the letter to Marilyn, his present wife, living in Norfolk, Virginia.”

  Dr. Herrold cautioned, “Ben does have a problem even though he is not a schizophrenic. A schizophrenic is a split personality, and the split off part is out of touch with reality, with what is going on. Ben is in touch with reality. Even the George part, who can’t see it, is in touch with reality.”

  “My son, the invisible,” said Mrs. Carr.

  Dr. Herrold warned Mrs. Carr not to be too optimistic. He called it optimistic, but he really meant for her not to be flip. What Ben was, he pointed out, was a multiple personality. He was two people: Person A and Person B. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was an example. Ben was Ben, but he was also George. Sometimes people who are two people don’t let one half know what the other half does. Like Dr. Jekyll didn’t know about Mr. Hyde. But in Ben’s case that wasn’t so. And sometimes, one of the personalities does evil and the other does good. But that was not Ben’s case either. Mrs. Carr sighed with relief—thinking again of the thefts in the lab. Ben knew about George, and Geo
rge knew about Ben. “George has become Ben’s mouthpiece. George swears while Ben smiles. With a youngster as intelligent as Ben, I think that we can clear this up in time. I am encouraged already by the fact that George has stopped speaking to Ben.”

  Dr. Herrold wanted to know from Mrs. Carr, Ben’s reaction right after she and her husband had separated. He asked other questions—about Howard and history, personal Carr history. Mrs. Carr left the office after learning that she should talk about George only if Ben did and that she herself should take out the garbage if Ben seemed particularly annoyed at the job. Piecing together all that she had learned in Dr. Herrold’s office, she realized that her son Ben was not the neat package of good adjustment that she had thought he was. He was two packages, one part invented. Howard, whom any man on the street or any teacher or any baby sitter could spot as a bundle of chaos, got everything out of his system through a well-developed opening, his mouth, his loud-o-mouth. But not Benjamin. Ben kept it all in and invented George. When Ben was disturbed, when Ben was angry, when Ben was resentful, George spoke up for him. Privately, silently George had spoken. Until he went loud and public at Marilyn’s.

  nine

  From the time that Ben first saw Dr. Herrold until Easter was a time of great progress in the therapy. Dr. Herrold had asked to see Howard.

  Ben explained to his brother, “He wants to see you because you are my sibling.”

  “I know what a sibling is. Raymond’s mother uses that word all the time. I don’t like it much; it sounds like it belongs to rabbits. Mrs. Sandler puts up with me because Raymond has no sibling of his own. She calls me a substitute sibling. Doesn’t that sound like rabbits?”

  “Dr. Herrold is going to ask you about George. You can tell him.”

  “You mean you told him about George? I’ll bet that George is furious. I’ll bet that’s why he hasn’t been talking lately.”