A Good and Happy Child (20 page)

“I—I guess not,” I stammered.

“Of course not! That’s why the mystics view visions of pure sense with
gre-eat
skepticism,” intoned Uncle Freddie warningly. “Especially when they’re being told to do things.” He leaned in toward me. “
You
never know who’s on the other end of the line.
”

“But what does that
mean?
” I pleaded, almost whining now, my comprehension stretched to the breaking point.

“It means,” said Tom Harris, slowly and calmly, “that if you see or hear the visions again, you are to view them with suspicion. You are not to listen to them. Do you understand?”

The three friends now watched me intently. The sun had sunk into the hills on the far side of Tom Harris’s rambling home, leaving every windowpane black, the warps in the glass reflecting the single light in the kitchen.

“This is scarier than when they were hallucinations,” I said, in an attempt at levity. No one laughed.

“Visions are a window into things beyond our understanding,” said Tom Harris in low tones. “Your fear shows uncommon good sense.”

I felt suddenly cold. I shivered in the dark.

Click.
A golden glow illuminated the room. We startled. Clarissa withdrew her hand from the neck of a table lamp.

“Abracadabra,” she smiled.

Tom Harris rose and thumped on his crutches—their rubber caps squeaking—to a far corner of the room. He bent over one of his many bookshelves with a grunt of difficulty and retrieved something from the shadows. He turned it over in his hand, examining it.
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“Your father and I had a professor at Calhoun. A gentleman—and a gentle man,” his eyes twinkled, “who took a special interest in us. Finley Balcomb. He loves ancient things. Finley gave this icon to your father. Your father left it to me when he died,” he said. “But I think it’s better if you take it.”

I rose and received from him a small rectangular box about the size of a playing card crafted from a soft, coppery metal. It sat lightly in my hand. Sculpted crudely on the front was a figure with halo and wings, carrying a sword. In the place of a face, there was a hole in the metal, revealing features carved in wood underneath. The image had worn down, leaving only a few ridges.

“What is it?” I asked.

“An icon,” said Uncle Freddie. “An artistic representation of a holy figure, from the Eastern church. “You’re holding Saint Michael the archangel. It’s very old.”

Tom Harris’s tall figure bent close, placing a long, strong hand on my shoulder. I smelled his herby tea breath as he whispered: “Keep it with you.” I placed the icon in my pocket, and he smiled.

“Can you tell me more about my father?” I pleaded. He patted my shoulder. “That’s enough for today.”

r r r

“What about my mother, then?”

Uncle Freddie made a face. “You’re relentless!”

His Mercedes purred through a pool of highway light as he drove me home, plunging over a hill with yellowed, winter-dry cedars on either side. The lights along Route 17 strobed across Uncle Freddie’s glasses.

“Well,” I said, “you keep saying,
it’s got to be a secret
. . . or,
your
Mom won’t approve.
I just want to know why.”

Uncle Freddie chewed his lip. “It’s no secret. Your mother’s not exactly old school when it comes to religion. She got a bellyful of Marxism a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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at Columbia. Very trendy. Very lit crit. She’s a brilliant woman. But scrape the surface and she’ll be calling Christianity a
patriarchal construc-
tion
or some other nonsense,” he said, taking flight now in his accustomed mode—a melancholy, yet somehow combustible, state of disapproval.

“Liberals. They want to think of religion as a
metaphor!
”

“And my father was a mystic,” I said, recognizing the conflict at last.

“Oh yes. I think he enjoyed the challenge your mother offered. I’m not sure the feeling was mutual. Your father became quite absorbed in theology,” said Uncle Freddie, pronouncing it
ab-sawwbd,
“in his work
and
his life. If you ask me, your mother rather resented it.”

“Why?”

He shrugged dramatically. “Wasn’t
modern.
Found it distasteful.”

I thought of my mother, with her stacks of jargony journals, her knee-high boots, and her slender collection of pop records that leaned up, so modestly, against my father’s miles and miles of Mahler and Wagner and Beethoven. Why shouldn’t she have her tastes, too?

“And then there was the book,” Freddie said.

That book
again. The one that people hated. “My mother didn’t want him to write it?”

“The academic establishment—which your mother is always very keen to penetrate—
viciously
attacked your father.”

“Why?”

“He had the temerity to claim evil existed. That there is a devil. He wrote eloquently about Christianity being the foundation of our civilization. All of it unassailably true. Naturally, they treated him like a pariah.”

“Who did?”

“Oh,
everybody.
Reviewers. Faculty. The president of Early snubbed your father publicly. Called him
dangerous to the reputation of
the college.
But bring in a
Leninist,
someone spouting Chomsky, and people fawn. Ah, me,” he groaned, volubly. “What a world we live in.”

“My mom agreed with them?”

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“Not at all! Your father would have fallen to pieces if not for your mother. But by the time it
had
blown over . . .” He turned to me with a crooked smile. “Your momma had had enough of religion.”

Your mother will not approve.
I fully understood now Tom Harris’s injunction to keep our conversations secret.

“There’s nothing wrong with skepticism, in itself,” continued Freddie. “If someone walked up to you and told you they have hallucinations sent from God, how would you react?”

“I guess I’d think they were weird.”

“You’d have every reason to believe they were crazy, or a fool!” he boomed. “Even if you are a practicing Christian. Don’t misunderstand Tom Harris—true mystics are very rare, very special. Plenty of people fake it. Plenty are crackers. So if you’re
not
especially religious, well . . . it’s a bit hard to swallow.” He sighed. “Your mother loved your father very much. But . . .”

“It was a bit hard to swallow,” I finished.

Uncle Freddie looked over at me. “That’s right.”

We rode in silence.

“So I shouldn’t tell Mom?” I said.

Uncle Freddie fidgeted, no doubt dreading the reaction my mother might have to the afternoon’s discussion.

“Mm. Best to be discreet. Or we’ll all be in trouble.”

“Discreet?”

“That’s the
fay
-ncy way of saying, yew keep your mouth shet, boah!” he said, with a country twang and a mirthless laugh. But a prolonged inquisition did not await me at home. Kurt did. He leaned against our kitchen counter, elbow crooked, holding a beer in a foam rubber cozy, beaming as I told my tales of Tom Harris’s ramshackle home, about the slaves’ quarters and smokehouses, interjecting in a kind but highly unrealistic way that I could learn a lot about
restoration
in a place like that. Over supper my mother added a story about Tom Harris:
how his housekeeping was so notorious . . . during a
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dinner party Abby Gold saw a bowl of brown slop in the pantry near the
bathroom, and she assumed it was you-know-what . . . so she flushed it
down the toilet! She had a hard time explaining herself when it turned out to
be dessert!
After supper, as we did the dishes, the kitchen radio played a song my mother loved. She wiped the dishwater off her hands and bounded to the living room, lifted the velvet cover off my father’s hi-fi, found the station (the dial still set at the local classical station, a short, violent burst of organ music blasting through the speakers when my mother pressed the power button), and began bopping mildly around the living room rug to
oooooooooooohhhh . . . how do you like your
loooove
as Kurt and I stood in the doorframe, both mortified and excited by the blasting disco tunes. Kurt leaned to me, saying in my ear,
You know she’s going to try and get us to dance,
milliseconds before my mother started exhorting us in an endearingly square way to
Come on,
and she came and took Kurt’s hands, forcing him to stand on the rug and shuffle in a self-mocking version of the twist as he shrugged at me, grinning. As I watched, I felt the primitive and overwhelming pulse of the song—
more more more
—and was seized with the urge to escape. I ran upstairs.

n o t e b o o k 1 i

The Ruin of Souls

Well,” said Richard. “You look much better than when I last saw you.”

We were both in heavy sweaters: Richard in a knotty brown cardigan (replacing his usual yellow), me in a Scottish wool one. The weather had turned crisp. His office seemed smaller, cozier than before.

“What did I look like?”

“You had what grownups call a hangover.”

“A hangover?” I smiled.

“A headache from drinking alcohol.”

I stopped smiling. “Oh.”

“I’m glad to have you back,” he said. “Can you tell me about what happened that night?”

I shook my head. “I lost control. I lost myself.”

“Do you remember what you did?”

I found myself unexpectedly angry. “Are you going to tell them what I say?”

“Who?”

“The UVa doctors.”

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“What we say in here is confidential.”

“You told them about my Friend,” I said, accusingly. “Now I’m going to a home.”

Richard, taken aback, spoke carefully. “Dr. Gilloon is recommending you receive long-term treatment. That’s because of what happened on Halloween, not because of anything I told them. Everything is still between the team of people treating you, and you and your family—still confidential.”

“I don’t want to end up one of those kids in Charlottesville,”

I blurted. “You should have seen them. They were like animals.” I remembered the uncanny smile on Kimberly’s face as she choked herself with a cord.
“I don’t want to go to a home,”
I said fiercely.

“You don’t think you belong there?”

I gripped the chair handles—realized I’d been picking at the armrests with my fingernails.
I started to become like them,
I thought,
to
understand the urge to pace up and down the long hallway. When my
mother came for me, my face—accustomed to that limbo of a place, built to
contain, control, and deaden the wild things within us—did not remember
how to smile.

I only managed to whisper, “No.”

But he read my expression. I saw him absorb it all: the misery, the fear. His jaw set with determination.

“All right,” he said. “Then I’m going to help you stay out.”

I know it was transference, or whatever term it is that Freud coined a hundred years ago to describe the attachment patients feel for their therapists, the host of admiring, attention-craving, even lustful impulses generated by that strange, special relationship; but I’d swear that as Richard said those words, he sat up straight in his chair, lifted his chin, maybe even puffed out his chest; he was resolute as a warrior on the threshold of a besieged city, saying, battle-scarred and defiant,
I
give myself.
I melted in hero worship.

“But let’s be clear, George,” he continued. “Things are going to be different now. The tests you’re taking . . . the medication.
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These are all pieces in the puzzle. We will have to work harder,” he warned.

“Okay,” I said. “I want to.”

“All right then,” he said. “There’s something very important we need to explore now, directly. And that’s your father’s death.”

“We already talked about it.”

“I’d like us to delve deeper.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Well . . . you can start by telling me how you first found out he was sick.”

It was late July.

Summers I went altogether barefoot, over the grass and green walnuts in the yard and over our hot, prickly graveled sidewalk. Inside the house the floors were as cool as a cellar, and the shades would be pulled until evening, or until a late afternoon storm rumbled over the valley, turning the light gray-green. In former years my father might have taken his place on the porch swing, cradling me under his arm, to watch the storm as if it were a tennis match, the winds whipping the trees and flipping their leaves pale-belly side outward and bending their branches. This summer I sat alone on the swing and felt the spray of the rain on my knees. I shuddered when thunder rattled the windows. I wrote my father letters in my head, a few of which I committed to paper. The relief organization returned them to me when they shipped his effects home. That had been our means of communication. Crinkly blue airmail letters stenciled POR AVIÓN, posted fat and full of hope, the replies arriving battered and bent. My father answered my first two letters. My third reached him too late, and he never replied. My mother received more—usually one per week. She would take the letters to her bedroom to read. Once I came home when she was alone, reading them, and I found her sitting on the edge of the bed, sobbing, holding the baby blue airmail envelope torn open in her hand, her face broken up and miserable.

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•

•

•

“Why was she crying?” Richard asked.

What does he say?
I asked her, and she said,
It’s nothing important.
I tried to grab the corner of the letter to peek but she took it away firmly.
What is it?
I cried.
Is Daddy okay? I hope so,
she said.

“That must have worried you,” said Richard.