The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (5 page)

The doctor sat still in his chair.

“Ah, I can’t help knowing what you are thinking,” said the man. “I would think the same. A streamlined version of the Napoleonic delusion.” He reached into his breast pocket, drew out a wallet, and fanned papers from it on the desk.

“Never mind. I believe you!” said the doctor hastily.

“Already?” said the man sadly.

Reddening, the doctor hastily looked over the collection of letters, cards of membership in professional societies, licenses, and so on—very much the same sort of thing he himself would have had to amass, had he been under the same necessity of proving his identity. Sanity, of course, was another matter. The documents were all issued to Dr. Curtis Retz at a Boston address. Stolen, possibly, but something in the man’s manner, in fact everything in it except his unfortunate hallucination, made the doctor think otherwise. Poor guy, he thought. Occupational fatigue, perhaps. But what a form! The Boston variant, possibly. “Suppose you start from the beginning,” he said benevolently.

“If you can spare the time …”

“I have no more appointments until lunch.” And what a lunch that’ll be, the doctor thought, already cherishing the pop-eyed scene—Travis the clinic’s director (that plethoric Nestor); and young Gruenberg (all of whose cases were unique), his hairy nostrils dilated for once in a
mise-en-scène
which he did not dominate.

Holding his hands pressed formally against his chest, almost in the attitude of one of the minor placatory figures in a
Pietà,
the visitor went on. “I have the usual private practice,” he said, “and clinic affiliations. As a favor to an old friend of mine, headmaster of a boys’ school nearby, I’ve acted as guidance consultant there for some years. The school caters to boys of above average intelligence and is run along progressive lines. Nothing’s ever cropped up except run-of-the-mill adolescent problems, colored a little, perhaps, by the type of parents who tend to send their children to a school like that—people who are—well—one might say, almost tediously aware of their commitments as parents.”

The doctor grunted. He was that kind of parent himself.

“Shortly after the second term began, the head asked me to come down. He was worried over a sharp drop of morale which seemed to extend over the whole school—general inattention in classes, excited note-passing, nightly disturbances in the dorms—all pointing, he had thought at first, to the existence of some fancier than usual form of hazing, or to one of those secret societies, sometimes laughable, sometimes with overtones of the corrupt, with which all schools are familiar. Except for one thing. One after the other, a long list of boys had been sent to the infirmary by the various teachers who presided in the dining room. Each of the boys had shown a marked debility, and what the resident doctor called ‘All the stigmata of pure fright. Complete unwillingness to confide.’ Each of the boys pleaded stubbornly for his own release, and a few broke out of their own accord. The interesting thing was that each child did recover shortly after his own release, and it was only after this that another boy was seen to fall ill. No two were afflicted at the same time.”

“Check the food?” said the doctor.

“All done before I got there. According to my friend, all the trouble seemed to have started with the advent of one boy, John Hallowell, a kid of about fifteen, who had come to the school late in the term with a history of having run away from four other schools. Records at these classed him as very bright, but made oblique references to ‘personality difficulties’ which were not defined. My friend’s school, ordinarily pretty independent, had taken the boy at the insistence of old Simon Hallowell, the boy’s uncle, who is a trustee. His brother, the boy’s father, is well known for his marital exploits which have nourished the tabloids for years. The mother lives mostly in France and South America. One of these perennial dryads, apparently, with a youthfulness maintained by money and a yearly immersion in the fountains of American plastic surgery. Only time she sees the boy … Well, you can imagine. What the feature articles call a Broken Home.”

The doctor shifted in his chair and lit a cigarette.

“I won’t keep you much longer,” said the visitor. “I saw the boy.” A violent fit of coughing interrupted him. This time his curious writhing motion went frankly unconcealed. He got up from his chair and stood at the window, gripping the sill and breathing heavily until he had regained control, and went on, one hand pulling unconsciously at his collar. “Or, at least, I think I saw him. On my way to visit him in his room I bumped into a tall red-headed boy in a football sweater, hurrying down the hall with a windbreaker and a poncho slung over his shoulder. I asked for Hallowell’s room; he jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the door just behind him, and continued past me. It never occurred to me … I was expecting some adenoidal gangler with acne … or one of these sinister little angel faces, full of neurotic sensibility.

“The room was empty. Except for its finicky neatness, and a rather large amount of livestock, there was nothing unusual about it. The school, according to the current trend, is run like a farm, with the boys doing the chores, and pets are encouraged. There was a tank with a couple of turtles near the window, beside it another, full of newts, and in one corner a large cage of well-tended, brisk white mice. Glass cases, with carefully mounted series of lepidoptera and hymenoptera, showing the metamorphic stages, hung on the walls, and on a drawing board there was a daintily executed study of Branchippus, the ‘fairy shrimp.’

“While I paced the room, trying to look as if I wasn’t prying, a greenish little wretch, holding himself together as if he had an imaginary shawl draped around him, slunk into the half-dark room and squeaked ‘Hallowell?’ When he saw me he started to duck, but I detained him and found that he had had an appointment with Hallowell too. When it was clear, from his description, that Hallowell must have been the redhead I’d seen leaving, the poor urchin burst into tears.

“‘I’ll never get rid of it now!’ he wailed. From then on it wasn’t hard to get the whole maudlin story. It seems that shortly after Hallowell’s arrival at school he acquired a reputation for unusual proficiency with animals and for out-of-the way lore which would impress the ingenuous. He circulated the rumor that he could swallow small animals and regurgitate them at will. No one actually saw him swallow anything, but it seems that in some mumbo-jumbo with another boy who had shown cynicism about the whole thing, it was claimed that Hallowell had, well, divested himself of something, and passed it on to the other boy, with the statement that the latter would only be able to get rid of his cargo when he in turn found a boy who would disbelieve
him.
”

The visitor paused, calmer now, and leaving the window sat down again in the chair opposite the doctor, regarding him with such fixity that the doctor shifted uneasily, with the apprehension of one who is about to be asked for a loan.

“My mind turned to the elementary sort of thing we’ve all done at times. You know, circle of kids in the dark, piece of cooked cauliflower passed from hand to hand with the statement that the stuff is the fresh brains of some neophyte who hadn’t taken his initiation seriously. My young informer, Moulton his name was, swore however that this hysteria (for of course, that’s what I thought it) was passed on singly, from boy to boy, without any such séances. He’d been home to visit his family, who are missionaries on leave, and had been infected by his roommate on his return to school, unaware that by this time the whole school had protectively turned believers, en masse. His own terror came, not only from his conviction that he was possessed, but from his inability to find anybody who would take his dare. And so he’d finally come to Hallowell. …

“By this time the room was getting really dark and I snapped on the light to get a better look at Moulton. Except for an occasional shudder, like a bodily tic, which I took to be the aftereffects of hard crying, he looked like a healthy enough boy who’d been scared out of his wits. I remember that a neat little monograph was already forming itself in my mind, a group study on mass psychosis, perhaps, with effective anthropological references to certain savage tribes whose dances include a rite known as ‘eating evil.’

“The kid was looking at me. ‘Do you believe me?’ he said suddenly. ‘Sir?’ he added, with a naive cunning which tickled me.

“‘Of course,’ I said, patting his shoulder absently. ‘In a way.’

“His shoulder slumped under my hand. I felt its tremor, direct misery palpitating between my fingers.

“‘I thought … maybe for a man … it wouldn’t be …’ His voice trailed off.

“‘Be the same? … I don’t know,’ I said slowly, for of course, I was answering, not his actual question, but the overtone of some cockcrow of meaning that evaded me.

“He raised his head and petitioned me silently with his eyes. Was it guile, or simplicity, in his look, and was it for conviction, or the lack of it, that he arraigned me? I don’t know. I’ve gone back over what I did then, again and again, using all my own knowledge of the mechanics of decision, and I know that it wasn’t just sympathy, or a pragmatic reversal of therapy, but something intimately important for me, that made me shout with all my strength—‘Of course I don’t believe you!’

“Moulton, his face contorted, fell forward on me so suddenly that I stumbled backwards, sending the tank of newts crashing to the floor. Supporting him with my arms, I hung on to him while he heaved, face downwards. At the same time I felt a tickling, sliding sensation in my own ear, and an inordinate desire to follow it with my finger, but both my hands were busy. It wasn’t a minute ’til I’d gotten him onto the couch, where he drooped, a little white about the mouth, but with that chastened, purified look of the physically relieved, although he hadn’t actually upchucked.

“Still watching him, I stooped to clear up the debris, but he bounded from the couch with amazing resilience.

“‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

“‘Feel better?’

“He nodded, clearly abashed, and we gathered up the remains of the tank in a sort of mutual embarrassment. I can’t remember that either of us said a word, and neither of us made more than a halfhearted attempt to search for the scattered pests which had apparently sought crannies in the room. At the door we parted, muttering as formal a goodnight as possible between a grown man and a small boy. It wasn’t until I reached my own room and sat down that I realized, not only my own extraordinary behavior, but that Moulton, standing, as I suddenly recalled, for the first time quite straight, had sent after me a look of pity and speculation.

“Out of habit, I reached into my breast pocket for my pencil, in order to take notes as fresh as possible. And then I felt it … a skittering, sidling motion, almost beneath my hand. I opened my jacket and shook myself, thinking that I’d picked up something in the other room … but nothing. I sat quite still, gripping the pencil, and after an interval it came again—an inchoate creeping, a twitter of movement almost
lackadaisical,
as of something inching itself lazily along—but this time on my other side. In a frenzy, I peeled off my clothes, inspected myself wildly, and enumerating to myself a reassuring abracadabra of explanation—skipped heartbeat, intercostal pressure of gas—I sat there naked, waiting. And after a moment, it came again, that wandering, aquatic motion, as if something had flipped itself over just enough to make me aware, and then settled itself, this time under the sternum, with a nudge like that of some inconceivable foetus. I jumped up and shook myself again, and as I did so I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in the closet door. My face, my own face, was ajar with fright, and I was standing there, hooked over, as if I were wearing an imaginary shawl.”

In the silence after his visitor’s voice stopped, the doctor sat there in the painful embarrassment of the listener who has played confessor, and whose expected comment is a responsibility he wishes he had evaded. The breeze from the open window fluttered the papers on the desk. Glancing out at the clean, regular façade of the hospital wing opposite, at whose evenly shaded windows the white shapes of orderlies and nurses flickered in consoling routine, the doctor wished petulantly that he had fended off the man and all his papers in the beginning. What right had the man to arraign
him
? Surprised at his own inner vehemence, he pulled himself together. “How long ago?” he said at last.

“Four months.”

“And since?”

“It’s never stopped.” The visitor now seemed brimming with a tentative excitement, like a colleague discussing a mutually puzzling case. “Everything’s been tried. Sedatives do obtain some sleep, but that’s all. Purgatives. Even emetics.” He laughed slightly, almost with pride. “Nothing like that works,” he continued, shaking his head with the doting fondness of a patient for some symptom which has confounded the best of them. “It’s too cagey for that.”

With his use of the word “it,” the doctor was propelled back into that shapely sense of reality which had gone admittedly askew during the man’s recital. To admit the category of “it,” to dip even a slightly co-operative finger in another’s fantasy, was to risk one’s own equilibrium. Better not to become involved in argument with the possessed, lest one’s own apertures of belief be found to have been left ajar.

“I am afraid,” the doctor said blandly, “that your case is outside my field.”

“As a doctor?” said his visitor. “Or as a man?”

“Let’s not discuss me, if you please.”

The visitor leaned intently across the desk. “Then you admit that to a certain extent, we
have
been—?”

“I admit nothing!” said the doctor, stiffening.

“Well,” said the man disparagingly, “of course, that too is a kind of stand. The commonest, I’ve found.” He sighed, pressing one hand against his collarbone. “I suppose you have a prescription too, or a recommendation. Most of them do.”

The doctor did not enjoy being judged. “Why don’t you hunt up young Hallowell?” he said, with malice.

“Disappeared. Don’t you think I tried?” said his vis-à-vis ruefully. Something furtive, hope, perhaps, spread its guileful corruption over his face. “That means you do give a certain credence—”