A Good and Happy Child (23 page)

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shrugged. “However, I’ve sent word to the friend I mentioned—Finley Balcomb. When he has seen you, then we can take action.”

“Will he be here in time?” I said. “Before they take me to Forest Glen?”

“Forest Glen?”

“The
home,
” I said, exasperated. “If we get rid of the demon, the doctors will see I’m not crazy!”

“Forest Glen?” Tom Harris repeated, puzzled. “That’s what you’re worried about? There’s more at stake here than the doctors, George!”

I opened my mouth to speak, then shut it. I sank heavily into the chair again. More at stake than being locked away? I slumped miserably. “What do I do until Finley Balcomb comes?”

He thumped around the desk with two strides. He leaned forward, towering over me, brows and black eyes glinting. “You can’t beat the devil on your own. Don’t fool yourself that you can, no matter what gifts you possess as a visionary. They are fallen angels, with all the powers of an angel. They have power over matter. Bodies, faces, furniture. They can make a heart . . .
stop.
” He snapped his fingers. “They are not to be trifled with.”

“Tom,” I whispered, my throat now completely dry, due either to Thorazine or fear, “are you going to help me?”

He raised an eyebrow, teasing. “I thought I
was
helping you. With all this wisdom.”

“I meant . . .” I could not say the words. We had entered a place where only Tom Harris knew the way. I wanted assurance that he would not abandon me, or leave me to the doctors and my mother. They meant well; but they weren’t my father. They did not understand that thing, that element—was it mysticism? or something else: the lonely, strange, and unenviable heroism that went with
seeing evil
—

which bound my father and me together.

“I know what you meant,” he said. “And don’t worry. I owe your father that much, and more.” He paused. “George, if you see it again,”

he said, “say your prayers. That’s our best defense when we’re alone.”

I nodded.

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“This is a lot to digest before dinner.” Tom Harris yawned suddenly. “Shall we?”

He thumped to the threshold and removed his coat from a hook. Tugging on the brown corduroy lump, shoving the ungraded composition in his pocket, he opened the door onto the dark corridor.

“I think,” he said, his accustomed ironic smile returning, “office hours are over.”

r r r

That night I made my first attempt at “cheeking.”

I wanted to be cured—really, truly cured, not
treated
or
rehabili-
tated.
And if my Friend was a demon, then what could the drugs do to protect me? They could only stop me from understanding the truth, or suppress the mysterious gifts my father and I possessed. Tom Harris may have been concerned with my immortal soul; my mother may have felt that taking the drugs, being orderly, punctual, nice, would help me pass whatever tests the doctors had in mind; but I wished, now, to understand my Friend. Was he a demon? What link to my father did he hide? Only when I learned these things could I be free of him; free of the label crazy, strange, or special; and free of the threat of Forest Glen Residential Home for Children, forever. My mother came to my bedroom as she had since my visit to Charlottesville—in that time around ten o’clock when I dithered with my leftover homework and teetered on the edge of either a second wind, or sleep.

“Time for your pill. Do you have water?”

I did. This should have tipped her off. I never had water.

“Okay, down the hatch.”

She handed me the white pill, like a tiny, powdery egg. How did Eustace accomplish this, I wondered, as I stared at the pellet in my hand. I tried to conceptualize the lingual movements that would tuck the pill safely away before the water hit. They would need to be lightning smooth, quick.

“Everything okay, sweetie?” said my mother.

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173

“Yup,” I said, and placed the pill gingerly on my tongue. The bitter taste swam across my palate. I tried to turn my tongue into a scoop to deposit the pill in the red gum space Eustace had showed me. It took several tries. I was sure I was making faces like a clown. My mother would notice any instant. But she was busy neatening my dresser. I lifted the glass and drained it.

“Okay, sweetie,” said my mother. She kissed my forehead. “Go to sleep.” A moment later she was gone.

I spat it into my palm. The pill swam in a sticky pool in the cup of my palm. I climbed on the bed, reached behind it into the dusty corner where the carpet met the wall, and with a little force, stuck the pill to the molding.

From my sock drawer I retrieved the icon and clenched it in my hand as I turned off the light.
Be our safeguard against the wickedness and
snares of the devil,
I quietly repeated to myself in the dark.
Thrust down
to hell Satan and all wicked spirits.

N o t e b o o k 1 2

Man of the House

In the morning I awoke with the icon in my hand. Its lightness again surprised me, its hue seemed more golden, the worn features of Saint Michael in the wood, more sad. I brought the icon to my lips and kissed it. The gesture came to me naturally; I had no idea that I had discovered for myself the ritual gesture of millions of Orthodox Christians; nor did I understand that I held the symbol of the church’s warrior archangel. I only guessed that if the devil appeared to me as my Friend, or as an evil-favored black dog, Saint Michael could help. My mother called me. I dressed hastily, one of those times when, in search of clean clothes, I dug deep in the back of the drawers. I retrieved a red-and-blue-striped shirt that had slumbered at the bottom of my drawer like a rotten log in a woodpile. From the same zone, corduroys that did not zip all the way. But I did not stop and check; I grabbed my schoolbooks and ran. When I at last arrived at school and recognized the extent of the sartorial damage (my underpants were exposed by the defective zipper and my belly stretched a broad horizontal hole in the striped shirt, like a run in a stocking), I was forced to walk the corridors with my crotch to the wall. By noon I was twisted up like a piece of taffy.

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175

I carried my lunch in a brown bag, my first time doing so. It had not occurred to me, before, that the cool kids carried their lunches in brown bags, and only the oddballs used lunchboxes, which smacked of Mommy and back-to-school shopping. It was an early version of slumming it; the hicks also carried brown bags (though often the outsized grocery-sized brown bags rolled from the top, not the slim, stylishly crumpled ones that Byrd and Dean brought to school). So perhaps it was my new accessory, a brown paper bag, that emboldened me, against all reason, to join Toby, Byrd, and Dean, gathered at one of the Formica tables. Trouble started before I even sat down.

“Uh-oh, here he comes,” said Dean, loud enough for me to hear. This did not deter me. I sat.

“Hi guys,” I said weakly.

“Woooooooooo!” Dean said, waving his arms.

“What’s your problem?” I said in as cool a voice as I could muster.

“It’s not my problem you need to worry about,” said Dean, darkly.

“
Guys,
” protested Toby.

“Wooooooooo!” Dean said again.

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” said Toby.

They watched me quietly then. Dean stared at me with his ferocious, narrow eyes.

“What,” I demanded, but halfheartedly, smelling disaster.

“Toby heard a rumor that you went to the hospital,” explained Byrd.

“Byrd!” squeaked Toby, like a scolding spouse.

“Cuckoo, cuckoo,” said Dean.

“I did not!” I protested.

“It was only a rumor, Dean,” Toby scolded. “God, I just said I didn’t
know.
”

“It’s not a
rumor.
Your mom
told
you,” Dean replied.

“How does she know?” I demanded. I had forgotten that Toby’s mom volunteered at the hospital two days a week and probably saw my name on an ER admission list, kindly checked up on me to see if I was okay, and stumbled on the information that I had been referred to the
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psychiatric unit in Charlottesville. This would have become dinner conversation, passed from parent to child, and so on. Thus flows the news in small towns.

“See? He admits it,” said Dean.

“I do not!”

“Yes, you do. You just did. I wish they’d kept you there,” Dean continued morosely. “So I wouldn’t have to look at you. Every-fucking-day!”

“Dean,” I said, trembling with anger, “why don’t you just shut up.”

Byrd and Toby’s eyes shot to Dean.

“Ooooooooh,” Byrd said.

“Burn,” pronounced Toby.

“You’re telling me to shut up. You. You,” Dean repeated, nodding his head in scorn, as if to say, you of all people, you the mental patient, you the pathetic.

Girls descended. Tiffany Struggles, another fatty, who diverted abuse from herself to others with an obsequious grin and a tendency to gossip; Holly, the prim, blond, freckled, sullen dentist’s daughter seemingly destined to date Byrd; with one or two others in tow, including a tiny girl with a sardonic manner, named Violet, whom I had grown to like. They bore hot lunch trays and brown paper bags. When they sat, we ceased the conversation. But this could only arouse interest. Only something juicy could reduce four seventh graders to silence.

“What’s going
on?
” Tiffany’s eyes darted around the table, foraging for news.

“Nothing,” said Dean moodily, suddenly disgusted with the whole topic.

I tucked my half-eaten sandwich back in the paper bag and left. I threw the bag in the garbage.

“Going on a diet?” Dean called after me. Then the whispering began.

It would not have been Dean to tell them. Dean despised girls, after a fashion; he might flirt or crack jokes to impress them, but gossip was beneath his countrified manly code. No, it would have been Toby a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

177

to crack under the social pressure. I was only halfway to the door when Tiffany’s voice burst out:

“MENTAL hosp—” before she theatrically clamped her hand over her mouth and changed to a stage whisper, “
Mental
hospital?”

“Oh my God,” said someone. “Is that true?”

My heart beat with shame. I stood and looked back, hoping to see a table filled with sympathetic stares. But they were engrossed in this delicious development.

By the end of the day, my locker had the word
psycho
scratched into it. Only it was misspelled, fortuitously, as “sicko” (a redneck passing my locker, seeing my confusion, translated it phonetically for me). Because of the misspelling I knew it was not Dean, but more likely one of the hicks—the ominous Tex with the patch over one eye from a firewoodchopping accident, or his sidekick, the malnourished, scrawny J. J. Sweet, a pale boy in the ill-fitting clothes of the dirt poor who walked his phlegmatic, retarded sister to school every day. This was worse than Dean doing it, or Byrd, because if the news had traveled from one social group to another—middle-class kids to the hicks—it meant everyone knew. r r r

Richard’s office was freezing.

“I’m sorry about the cold,” he said. “Something wrong with the boiler. You going to be okay?” He was wearing his cardigan, with a tartan scarf wrapped around his neck. “Keep your coat on, if it will be more comfortable.”

He asked me how things were going in school. I told him about the mental hospital revelations. He was sympathetic; he nodded and did some modest probing; but as always, he steered me away from the present and into other areas, dim areas, the shaded places where I did not want to look, forcing me to describe, enact, revive the painful moments: to set the clay figures in my mind to life. But what good were all these words? I could string them together,
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along with the feelings they described:
powerless, impotent, wounded,
defeated, crushed, unloved.
But would revisiting all my unhappy scenes put me at peace? I wondered, dispiritedly, whether a simple exercise in an office could make make me a normal boy, a citizen of the active world, like Dean who explored the bumpy back mountain roads with his father in a truck, or Byrd with his endless hours of father-son weekend golf. The painful truth beneath it all is that the shock and shame of my father’s death only served as the final snap for my brittle personality. If my father had lived to be a hundred and won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it would never redeem us; we would never belong to the world. That haunted man, in our grubby house, lived in a world of his own imagination. He viewed people over a chasm of bitterness, spiritual isolation, untreated depression; a marriage made of career compromises; and maybe even, who knows, a share in the pain of the Old South, passed down like a bloodstained deed with hereditary memories of Sherman’s march and the boll weevil. My grandparents’ modest Greenville, South Carolina, home, whose decor boasted a few grand heirlooms—a giant mahogany secretary, a silktasseled Civil War cutlass wrapped reverently in felt in an upstairs chest—

betrayed the failed hopes of a postaristocratic household that stood awkwardly at the sidelines of a suburban, television-driven culture. Academe provided a refuge, but not a haven, for my father’s particular brand of gloom. A proud colleague whose piercing silences intimidated department chairmen and university presidents alike; a tale-spinning host; a quarrelsome friend to Uncle Freddie, Abby, and the Bings; a confessing melancholic to his old friend, Tom Harris; and a father and husband who paced the floors of his own house like a prisoner. In the end, my father left me a kind of treasure—the many phrases of Byzantine shine and brilliance that arose from his intellect and his nonconformist views—and I was the dragon atop the pile. I could never be a citizen of the world. My inheritance lay in that musty, poisoned, ephemeral heap. Richard sensed this, maybe; maybe he did not. He was doctor enough to sniff out the wound, however, and treat it, by asking the simple questions.