A Good and Happy Child (21 page)

“The handwriting was in . . .”

“Yes?”

“It was in blue . . . blue . . .” The word stuck—the effects of Thorazine. “Blue ink.”

“Is there something wrong with blue ink?” asked Richard.

“There was something funny about the handwriting.”

“Funny, how?” asked Richard.

“The handwriting was all wrong,” I said. “It was horrible.”

In a week, I received one myself. The day was a Thursday, a golden summer afternoon I passed on the Fort Virginia parade ground watching summer-school cadets play softball alongside Civil War cannons. When a teammate left, they let me play catcher, and the time vanished into foul balls and base hits, and when our side batted we watched from iron benches under the shade of a buckeye tree. As the seven o’clock cannon fired—a summer tradition at the military school—I pulled myself away from the game, dusty and sunburnt, and wandered home in no rush to enter the house when, on our porch, I saw the lip of the mailbox raised—

no one had removed the mail. I noticed the blue airmail envelope immediately, and my father’s handwriting. The letter was addressed to me. Letters can be hard to read; people omit punctuation, words are unintelligible; my father’s penmanship at its best spiked and squiggled
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hieroglyphically. But this was a letter to be lost in. It would speed along for paragraphs with conversational notes on the heat, the water, and the reek of the latrines, and then, somehow, several sentences, paragraphs, or possibly pages later, it was as if the subject of the sentence had gone missing, the way a friendly, well-marked road fades into a strange turning. I flipped back and forth between the leaves, in search of what I’d missed; the pagination got confused; I scrutinized passages repeatedly, hunting for references that I was certain belonged but were not there. I grew flustered, then breathless and angry. The post office had removed a page, I determined. The letter had been censored by the Honduran government (my parents had joked darkly about this). Someone had done something to the letter. It did not occur to me that that someone was my father, or that some terrible flaw had been embedded in his mind, and that it was this defect that allowed the letter’s logic to zigzag like a spider across a tabletop. I turned, and returned, the pages, and squinted, and cursed, sure that I had missed something, and
where was it,
suppressing a sickened feeling I did not understand.
What is wrong with this letter?

And that’s the way my mother found me. It was dusk. She emerged from the house, looking for me, and hesitated on the verge of saying something to the effect of
Dinner’s almost ready
or
I’ve been wait-
ing for you
or
You’re late.
But she saw the letter, took in my expression quickly, and dashed across the porch, snatching the letter from me as if it were a bottle of Drano I had put to my lips. She read a little in the light of the window.
I don’t understand it!
I said. My voice trembled. My mother flipped the page, read more, and emitted a sob, so sudden it was nearly a burp.
Oh, George,
she said. I began to cry. She sat beside me and I pressed my face to her chest, wetting her blouse and apron.
What’s
happening?
I wailed. She rocked me and held me. Amid the fear and misery, one part of me reflected: This is how things happen—

summertime and excitement and play and then you come home to the shock and the lightning bolt, and find your life has become an undesirable story, the one people hear about and feel glad they’re not in, and a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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you never realized how lucky you’d been the moment before. We rocked back and forth on the porch swing. I asked her questions, but none of the answers were good.

“Your father was already sick,” Richard guessed, “and it affected his mind?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Did your mother know, then, that he might die?”

I shook my head. “She said she couldn’t find out anything about him, she couldn’t reach him,” I said. “She said she was scared.” I thought a moment. “She didn’t have to tell me. I knew.”

Then I remembered.

“It was the last time I cried,” I told Richard.

r r r

I spent the week interpreting line drawings and inkblots for Rachel. Rachel was a psychologist with a hint of cool. She sauntered in and sauntered out of a special testing room, all elbows and knees in long, tight, worn hippie jeans and embroidered linen tops, and honey-blond hair she combed down her back in a rippling cascade. When I told her once that a Rorschach blot reminded me of “a peninsula, maybe in the Aegean,” she made a note and cooed, “Ooh, I love the Aegean,” as if I had suggested we jet there for supper. In these sessions, I felt the effects of the drugs most. My mind moved flexibly enough, but as if it were making tiny motions in a wide, echoing chamber; thoughts and intentions didn’t “take,” didn’t move to the lips or limbs. There were some days when pulling on my socks required effort; where I could not taste my food; where I stumbled in my speech. As a result I had quickly exchanged the school label “in-tell-ectual” for “Mr. Special” (as in Special Olympics), courtesy of Dean. Did I need to fail my own psychological testing as well?

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I told Rachel I thought I was not performing very well on the tests—maybe I could take them again, without the medication. “Oh, you need your medication,” she said in her singsong cadence, ever smiling.

“George Davies?” said the receptionist.

A winter evening had descended: though it was just four o’clock, I could see only streetlights, like weak stars, beyond the clinic’s tinted glass walls.

“Yes?”

“Your mother work in Foxcoe?”

I nodded.

“She called. She said you should walk home, ’cause she’ll be late.”

The woman smiled. “She said she’s sorry.”

I stalked home in the dark, counting my paces over the brick sidewalks.
Working again. Working late.
The normal kids had normal moms waiting for them at home to cook them normal suppers, or to force them to do chores, which they would complain about in their normal way. My mother lingered late in the office to teach Feminism, and telephoned me, at my therapist, not to wait for a ride. No wonder I was going to a home.
Maybe they’re right,
I thought angrily.
Maybe I’ll be better off there.
I fetched the key from the windowsill and unlocked the front door. The rooms within throbbed with dark silence. I stared inside, stretching out with my senses, but I heard and saw nothing. I punched the light switch. The sickly yellow overhead bulb somehow made it worse. If the Thorazine had not been dragging through my circulatory system—the dry mouth it gave me forcing me to swallow constantly—

I would have dashed up the stairs, sprinting to make it before whatever was going to get me, got me. Instead, under the influence of the drug, I plodded up the stairs one by one, while inside I screamed
go up go up go
up go up faster it’s coming.
Terror and immobility combined. I stood at the end of the second-floor corridor. A string dangled from the ceiling. This cord pulled down a wooden staircase leading to the attic. I had been forbidden to touch it as a little boy. I had not even a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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thought of this string for a long time. But I also had not been alone in the house for a long time, not since Charlottesville. Dragging over the hallway chair, I reached up for the string, and tugged. I unfolded the wooden steps. Carefully, I ascended into the narrow attic.

A gust of stale air and dust struck me as I climbed. The attic had been filled with my father’s suits after he died. They hung in plastic zipper bags under the beams, like cocoons. From the bags seeped the pungent, chemical odor of mothballs. I pulled a chain hanging from the ceiling, and in the light of a bare bulb, I saw that not only my father’s clothes, but all his possessions—shoes, framed photos and diplomas, letter openers and personal knickknacks—had been stored here in boxes and on shelves. They mingled with my own baby clothes and toys, my boyhood sled and board games.

A bookshelf on my right drew my attention. Pulling aside a velvet drape hung over them for protection, I found shelves of poetry, mythology, art books, cookbooks; and finally, on the bottom, a shelf containing some dozen copies of a single title.
The Ancient Prayer,
it read, and at the base of the spine,
Davies.
The cover was silver, bearing a photo of a medieval ivory carving of devils clawing at naked bodies. The subtitle read,
Early Church Doctrine and the Problem of Evil.
I knew it by another name:
That Book.
I flipped it open. It was dedicated to my mother. The epigraph was ancient Greek, but below it the translation read:
Holy Michael the archangel, defend us in the day of battle;
be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;

and may the prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God,
thrust down to hell Satan and all wicked spirits,
who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Michael the archangel . . . I felt in my pocket for the icon and pulled it out. The low relief figure caught the attic’s lightbulb, and I saw again that he held a sword.
Defend us in the day of battle.
I lowered
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the drape and yanked the bulb and quickly descended to my room, holding
The Ancient Prayer,
carefully folding up the staircase behind me. Then I crawled into bed and began to read.

The book analyzed heresies, doctrines, points of theological debate (many, many pages on Manicheanism), social history, and political history of fourteenth-and fifteenth century-century Europe, with endless boring footnotes. Eventually I began to flip. The book lay ten years beyond my grasp at least, and with the medication, I watched it more than read it. I nearly lost interest or hope of interest in the book by the time I opened chapter nine, with its unpromising title, “A Case History.” But within minutes I found my hands shaking. My father’s voice—not the analytical, painstaking scholar, but the one I recognized, the spinner of tales about strange and arcane legends—rang out of the volume so clearly my eyes filled with tears. I read the story of a convent in the fifteenth century where many nuns began speaking in strange voices, going into angry fits in the presence of the Eucharist, claiming to be “the Enemy,” and jousting with priests in Greek and Aramaic (languages they did not know); then how they wore down the priests who tried to save them with sudden physical attacks, endless debate, and attempts at seduction.
The few who stood up to their enemy
did so alone, with only their mind and their faith to defend them,
wrote my father,
and risked everything.
His commentary chilled me:
If even within
the walls of a convent, souls may be subject to the invasion of the devil, how
could any be safe?
Then came a sweeping view of the ancient world, in my father’s voice, like urgent testimony from a witness stand: Pliny’s belief that the “upper airs” were thronged with demons who pluck people’s prayers as they rise to heaven; in the saints’ lives of the
Golden
Legend,
record of people killed outright by demons; early church fathers’ conviction that Christians must be engaged in constant prayer as
our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the spir-
itual forces of evil;
how the monastic tradition of morning, midday, and evening prayer, combined with vigils through the night, represented nothing less than a constant spiritual defense against the devil, by solitary monks, on behalf of the world; and finally how our world had a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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changed:
Protestantism and modernity brought with them so-called
progress and reform, but with these came anxiety. In past ages, the heroic
nature of the Church was not in dispute; angels and human saints formed a
protective ring around their flock. But with empirical knowledge on the
ascendant, revelation, and God’s power with it, seemed to weaken . . . and
Satan’s presence seemed never to be stronger. Protestant countries such as
England and the Netherlands abounded with unresolved case histories of
demonic possession, greeted by authorities as the “rantings of the rustic few”

and condemned by Calvinist propaganda. In much the same way, contempo-
rary psychiatry conspires to undermine the belief in God today, and to render
superstitious, lower-class, and backward those claiming to have brushed
against something as mythic and obsolete as evil. Such people must be either
beneath our concern (uneducated, fanatical) or abnormal—in need of fix-
ing.
This almost bitter view of the modern world echoed the sentiments I’d heard Uncle Freddie give voice to, but something different lay beneath. An immediacy; not just argument or opinion, but the voice of someone who may have been himself labeled backward, who understood the monk in his lonely vigil. And the reference to psychiatry fell like a blow.

A sudden crash sent vibrations through the house. I jerked erect. Slowly, cautiously, I set down the book and made my way downstairs. The yellow light still buzzed in the hall. I listened to the silence. Then I inched my way to the kitchen. A splay of brooms and mops lay on the floor. I stared at them. They had flopped out of a closet—their weight must have shifted and pushed the door open.

Nothing,
I told myself. But I did not touch them. I returned to my room and picked up the book again with trembling hands. The next passage shocked me as much as the others thrilled and frightened me. My father recounted a tale told by the French jurist Jean Bodin. It described an encounter with a man he knew who had become
afflicted by a spirit who appeared to him in many shapes, sometimes in the
guise of an evil-favored dog, black in color . . . a familiar which would
haunt his steps.
Bodin’s friend at first welcomed these encounters with the spirit.
It promised to tell him secrets which might make him rich and
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