The Inverted Forest (18 page)

Schuller could see Linda Rucker sunk deep into a padded chair at the back of the office. He could read her half-squinting gaze well enough: she thought he was taking too much obvious pleasure in his speechmaking. Perhaps he was. But should it be done any other way? Was he supposed to convince his audience by being stodgy and dull and fumbling with his words?

He waved off her unspoken criticism with a slow shake of the head and said to the assembled counselors, “I honestly cannot imagine what these experts in charge of the state hospital are thinking. To allow the retarded to imitate our worst habits. And then, when they are sick from smoking or hysterical from all the sex and violence they see on the television, then, these experts say to themselves, ‘Oh my, it’s time to cure our retarded patients with therapy or protect them with medication.’ What nonsense. Wouldn’t it be better to create for the retarded an environment in which these influences don’t exist at all?”

A long moment passed before his audience understood he had ended his address. They stared at him, perplexed. He smiled back.

“Are you saying,” a young woman asked, “that we should take away their cigarettes? Is that what you’re saying?”

He told her no, he was not. “I’m talking about an idea,” he said. “An idea of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp as a refuge.”

She gave him a respectful yet dubious nod, an expression of reluctance he saw mirrored on nearly every other face in the room. With one exception: Christopher Waterhouse. He was still thinking through Schuller’s message, still straddling his foldout chair and tipping his forehead up and down, concentrating, and then, as Schuller watched, arriving at a judgment of what he’d just heard—a judgment in favor of Schuller’s message. Clearly this was the case because he rose from his seat with a look of half-grinning approval and turned to the wrangler, Stephen Walburn, one of the more dour skeptics, and pretended to exchange a series of slow-motion punches. (They were fond of acting out elaborate, balletlike slaps and punches, this group.)

“It’s an
idea,
” Christopher Waterhouse said. “If you could roll back the clock and raise them from infants without influences, they’d be totally different people.”

Stephen Walburn shrugged thoughtfully. Nearby other counselors listened in. It was a measure of Christopher Waterhouse’s standing with the group that those who a moment earlier had been ready to argue or ridicule were now willing to stop and reconsider.

For that Schuller was grateful.

He had the rest of the day to do with as he pleased. Hours and hours indisputably his own. In his cottage he stretched out on his bed and read from a book on the castles of Ireland and Scotland. He dozed off, woke, read a few more pages, dozed again. For dinner Maureen Boyd and her kitchen girls put on one of their better meals: oven fried chicken, mashed potatoes with country gravy, fresh green beans. By early evening he was back in his cottage at his drafting table. No way
to explain to others the pleasure he took—a pleasure as expansive and deep-to-the-bone as any—in the coziness and privacy of his cottage, feeling the crisp separation of good paper between the sharp blades of his scissors. His window fan thrummed softly. Through it he could hear the din of the evening activity, a scavenger hunt, coming to him from a pleasing distance.

The good meal. The finely grained texture of the paper. The airy voices.

One small matter detracted from these satisfactions: the memory of what it had been like that afternoon to finish his address and hear the dull silence and then take stock of his uncertain audience.

He was not a fool. Of course, you couldn’t make a public declaration to that effect. Nor could you explain to an audience the private rationales that lay behind your strongest beliefs. But for now it was worth insisting, if only to himself, that he wasn’t a fool. He didn’t lack self-knowledge. Since boyhood he’d been willing to look inward and weigh carefully his private inclinations. Long ago he’d understood something singular and important: whatever it was that made people miserable or frantic or deliriously happy with longing, whatever strong compulsion made them lie down with strangers or writhe alone in their beds, whatever this was, it was not present in himself.

To be clear: not a void, not a hollowness, but a benign absence.

It wasn’t a trait he’d inherited from either of his parents. His father, Theodore Kindermann, owner of a sometimes prosperous St. Louis flooring store, adored his mother. Often he lingered at the breakfast table when he should have left for work or, at his worst, followed her from room to room. Schuller’s mother, Marta Kindermann, was far more fickle in her return affections. Neighbors thought them an odd pair. Handsome, endlessly patient Theodore and matronly, plain, easily distracted Marta. She suffered through fifty-five years of his affection. Yet she wasn’t without tender feelings or sharp desires; they were just aimed at impossible and unacted-upon targets outside her
marriage. At her most distressed, she’d plead for breathing space. She wondered, tearfully and aloud, why she couldn’t be allowed to step away from this endless partnership, if just for a week or two, and have an honest-to-God, actual experience in the world. What she wanted, of course, was the experience of loving other men.

As teenagers Schuller and Sandie were aggrieved to understand this. But they had their own fraught dealings with the opposite sex to contend with. Or at least Sandie did. Like his father, he was easily stricken. A girl in the school choir they attended could undo poor Sandie by encouraging his attention as she tied her hair in a long red ribbon. Schuller wasn’t so easily undone. He’d rather the girl left her affectations and hair ribbons at home. And he’d have liked her better if she arrived at rehearsals on time. Which was not to say that he didn’t notice she was pretty. Prettiness was far better than homeliness, certainly, but he didn’t have the desire, as other boys of his age, to unwrap this prettiness and press his fingers and tongue and the most private parts of himself against it.

An odd dilemma: in many ways they were the same, he and Sandie, but in this respect they were different. And they knew it, each of them, without ever discussing the matter openly. Sandie pined for the company of girls. He composed letters—even songs—that hours later caused him to cringe in shame. He looked at photographs. He kept a hand towel wedged between his mattresses. Schuller did none of these things. When he was twenty, his parents sent him to lunch with an elderly physician uncle who asked a series of prying questions. Was he too shy to speak to girls? Was he afraid of them? Did he think it disgusting to kiss a girl? Did he prefer the company of boys? Did he dream of boys?

He was startled, of course, to have the conversation take such a private turn. No, he said. No, not afraid. Not disgusted. He didn’t really keep company with anyone besides Sandie, but if he did, he’d probably choose boys since they were smarter and more capable.
As for dreams, romantic or otherwise, the answer was definitely no. Not ever. (Until this chat it hadn’t occurred to him that boys could lust after boys.) His uncle gave a tenuous nod of acceptance. It was unclear what he reported back to the family at large.

Undaunted, Schuller went forward with his life and career: a college degree in business, a carpet cleaning service that he expanded into a successful venture, then sold. In 1956 he acquired a summer camp. All the while his parents and extended family thought up safe euphemisms for Schuller’s situation: he was a late bloomer in his teens, an all-consumed entrepreneur in his twenties, a confirmed bachelor in his thirties. They went to their graves wondering.

He’d have liked to have spared his family this disappointment. Yet it couldn’t be helped. It couldn’t have been otherwise. In his later years he’d come to understand a peculiar irony at work in the world: what you lack will always be magnified by the people and events that constitute your life. A boy with no appreciation for food will be born into a family of cooks and live above a bakery. A woman who feels no kindness for her children will see, everywhere she goes, mothers and fathers fawning over their babies. So it was with him. He’d gravitated to a career as a summer camp director. All his life he’d been exasperated by other people’s unwise longings.

The next morning he chose a different route for his walk: a straight trek across the meadow and onto the gravel pathway that slipped under the roof of the forest and led to Cabins One through Four. He had thought, mistakenly, that he would be a lone figure at 6:45
A.M.
strolling past barracks of sleeping men and women. Not so. Already there were faces pressed against the porch screens—peculiar faces in that they were intensely homely or intensely comic or intensely naked in their expressions. Outside Cabin Two, a group of retarded men were squeezed onto the concrete landing as if it were a tiny stone
island in the middle of a boiling sea. No one dared step off the edge. They were all in their pajamas and had unlit cigarettes squeezed into their mouths. When they saw Schuller, they let out a great clamor of grunts and jeers, none of it intelligible, and yet it was so cheerful and clearly aimed at Schuller that he felt obliged to answer back.

“Yes,” he said. “Good morning, friends.”

They crooned back at once. “Harruuuuuuummme! Arrryuhhh!”

“Yes, yes. Let’s keep it down. We have people still sleeping.”

The cabin door opened and one of the counselors stepped out, the big one with the disfigured face and the somewhat lumbering manner. He was in the process of setting fire to the men’s cigarettes when he spotted Schuller.

“Mr. Kindermann. Good morning,” he said and raised a hand to wave. How odd it was, truly, to see his distorted face among so many distorted faces and then have him bark out a clear greeting.

“Yes,” he said. “Good morning . . . young man.”

Schuller pressed on, and a hundred yards farther, with the women’s cabins in view, he encountered another unexpected sight: the girl lifeguard, Marcy Bittman, dressed in her swimsuit and blue jean shorts, walking briskly from women’s Cabin Four to women’s Cabin Three with a wicker laundry basket balanced in her arms. She stepped inside Cabin Three just long enough to collect something and put it in her basket. Afterward she trotted down to the pathway and wished Schuller a good morning.

He was pleased to have remembered her name. “Marcy,” he said. “Nice to see you up early and ready to go.” He asked what she was collecting.

“Pot lids,” she said.

True enough. Her basket contained an unruly stack of pot lids, the wide clamorous type that Maureen Boyd used in the camp kitchen.

“I’m on my way to the men’s cabins to get the rest,” Marcy said, by way of explanation.

“But why?”

“In case Maureen needs them to cook breakfast.”

“No, no,” he said. “Why would you keep pot lids in the cabins?”

She wrinkled her slender nose and grinned. A pretty young woman, Schuller supposed. She had an open face, and her enthusiasms had a way of sweeping across her petite features, sharpening her dimples and lighting her hazel eyes. “Because of what Christopher figured out,” she said brightly. “About how to use the pot lids to keep the campers in line.”

“And how, exactly, does that work?” Schuller asked.

“Well,” she said. “Last night they tried separating the men in Cabin Two. Just like you said. Except as soon as the counselors dozed off, the campers, you know, got together in the back of the barracks. So Christopher Waterhouse snuck up to the kitchen and brought back some pot lids. The next time they tried it, he jumped out and clanged them together.” She made a grand flapping gesture with her slender arms. “Like cymbals,” she said, smiling hugely. She seemed to be waiting for a reply from Schuller—a response of equal exuberance.

“That’s something,” Schuller said. “I would imagine that . . . that would startle them, certainly.”

“All it took was one big clang and they let go of each other and ran back to their beds. Stayed there, too,” Marcy said. “Worked so well he went and got more lids, Christopher did, and brought a pair to each of the cabins. We used them last night in Cabin Four, with the women who like to sleep together in the same bed.”