The Natural Order of Things (19 page)

Whether from advanced age or the bitter cold, or maybe because they simply haven’t bothered to wear their dentures to this meeting, the men look gaunt, hollow, their faces taking on an appearance of concavity not unlike the pumpkins left to rot on the front porch stoops of the crumbling, clapboard shanties that crowd the narrow brick lanes of the blighted neighborhood. In subdued tones, they make oblique references to their colleague, the twelfth member of their group, a man who seemed touched by grace, impervious to the gradual winding down of all things, but who for the past month has been confined to his sickbed, stricken with the final stages of an irreversible disease, his withered limbs cruelly mimicking the degeneration of a mind once considered legendary in the school’s storied history.

“We don’t expect him to see the first rains of spring.”

“And yet he continues to defy the odds.”

“A most unusual case.”

“Such suffering.”

“If God would only call him home.”

“Perhaps new measures should be considered?”

“Under certain circumstances, gentlemen, the tomb can be a most inviting place.”

Their thoughts teeter dangerously close to perdition, their proposals and conjectures taking on frightful forms, and a few of the men breathe a sigh of relief when Tom Wentworth appears at the threshold and raps gently on the door.

“Please,” says the principal, “come in.”

The boy stands at attention in the center of the room, his head bowed, his hands clasped together behind his back like some captive New World heathen brought before a tribunal of inquisitors. The priests take long, contemplative puffs on their cigarettes, cautious sips of their artificially sweetened coffee.

The principal indicates the empty chair. “Take a seat.”

Tom obeys, but reluctantly, as if afraid the chair might be covered in a bed of red-hot nails.

“I assume you know why we have called you here today?”

“No, sir.”

Tom crosses his legs, uncrosses them, squirms, stares at the tips of his shoes. A nervous boy, powerless and without recourse. This is as it should be. Part of the natural order.

“Then let me remind you,” says the principal, leaning forward. “You didn’t pass your science exam last term, and in order to graduate with the rest of your class, you will need to do some kind of … additional work.”

Though entirely capable of making stern pronouncements, the principal can also address his charges in an oddly solicitous manner, and this is the way he speaks to Tom now, his elocution flawless as ever, the greatest of orators—golden-mouthed, honey-tongued, as is frequently noted by the multitudes of mothers, who along with their loyal husbands and dutiful sons, listen to him each Sunday morning and become so enraptured by the powerful thrust of his arguments, the vatic amplitude of his sermons, the exhilarating descriptions of how they will burn in the lake of fire for all eternity, that they shudder and sigh and then rush to his confessional after mass, eager to reveal every scandalous detail of their private lives.

“This matter requires a quick resolution,” the principal continues. Blue cigarette smoke spills from his lips, looping and coiling into helixes of meaning. “We know you’re clever, very bright indeed, and we want you to succeed, want you to distinguish yourself in some important way. So this is our proposal to you.” He shifts his eyes toward his colleagues. “We’d like you to visit a … 
tutor
who, after a sufficient amount of time, will …” again, a slight shift of his eyes “… 
test
your ability to analyze and interpret the hypotheses of the doctors of the Church.”

Tom flinches. “Doctors, sir?”

“Well, yes. Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine. Start with the A’s.”

The priests offer Tom their jack-o-lantern grins and in faint, parched whistles give him their consent—“Trenchant advice, a most excellent idea, very sensible, quite expedient”—even though a number of them have serious misgivings, believe Tom too incompetent to serve his dark purpose. Privately they wonder why the principal doesn’t ask the boy to clean out his locker and leave the premises once and for all or send him to a remote outpost in the mountains to do missionary work. The principal, perhaps, is more sympathetic to the boy’s plight.

“We have given your situation a great deal of thought,” he continues, “and we are all confident—aren’t we, gentlemen?—that you will fulfill your obligation.”

No one says a word, and the silence is so ponderous that it seems to change the shape of things, makes the tables and chairs buckle under its immense weight. But then there is a single, drawn-out, high-pitched squeak like the sustained, wavering note of a toy trumpet, and Tom’s grim invigilators suddenly blush like schoolboys, clear their throats, brush lint from their lapels, pretend to notice something interesting outside. The principal waves his hand, though whether to dismiss his charge or to disperse the foul gases seeping silently into the room is unclear.

Tom stands up and thanks the priests for their time, but he remains skeptical of these men and their intentions, and he worries that despite their debilitating age, they might spring from their chairs with miraculous agility and pelt him with stones. Never daring to turn his back to them, he moves toward the door. He is careful not to hurry or to make any unusual gestures, but at the last possible moment, when he is certain the old men are no longer watching him, Tom shoots a hand toward an ashtray and slips a pack of matches into his pocket. Only then does he turn to go.

“Wentworth!”

Tom pauses in the doorway, and for the first time since entering the office, he makes direct eye contact with the principal, gives him the slightest hint of a smile, a puzzling sort of grin, greased at the corners, his lips sliding from humility to treachery. The principal dabs his forehead with a handkerchief, takes a vigorous drag on a cigarette that, over the course of the meeting, has become a flimsy stick of ash hanging from his lower lip.

“You hover on the edge of a precipice, young man,” he warns.

“I understand,” says Tom. “Thank you for giving me this opportunity. You won’t be disappointed. I promise.”

Eighteen, everyone will surely agree, is a difficult age, and some of the boys, the more reckless among them, gather in the alley before classes begin to gulp vodka and orange juice, wincing like small children forced to swallow bitter and gelatinous medicine, but Tom doesn’t join them; he isn’t a troublemaker, not in the usual sense of the word. He never comes to class drunk or high like so many of his classmates, though he once tried marijuana at the homecoming dance, only to find that it gave him an inexplicable urge to eat an entire bowl of stale pretzels with machine-like precision while the other kids looked on and laughed. He never smirks at his teachers in a way that suggests he is somehow superior to them, though in truth some do suffer from low morale and feel trapped in the intellectual purgatory of a high school classroom, doomed to repeat the same insipid lesson plans over and over again.

By most accounts, Tom is docile, timid, pathetic even. He sits alone in a far corner of the cafeteria where he sips hot chocolate (the Jesuits forbid the sale of coffee) and plays a game of solitaire with a deck of worn and spindled cards. He practices sleight of hand, too, palming and levitating and crimping cards, hobbies that seem innocent enough, so long as he doesn’t encourage the other boys to gamble. Too many have a fondness for poker and blackjack. The priests, had they bothered to look a little more closely, would have been shocked by the lewd images on the back of the cards, naked women contorting their bodies into improbable tantric positions. But no one bothers to check. No one wants to get that close to him.

Tom always looks a mess, his shirts stained with the remnants of a hasty lunch—a smattering of pizza sauce, a bright slash of mustard, a dark dollop of chili—and when he slinks through the hallways between classes, he seems almost to encourage the taunts of his fellow students, the callous ones, the trust fund kids. They jeer at his incredible bellbottom pants rescued from the forgotten racks in resale shops, his knitted ties unearthed from moldering cardboard boxes at garage sales, his wool scarves, fedoras, and cowboy boots, a schizophrenic collection of old and new, a hodgepodge of different decades, regions, sensibilities. “He could pass for a bohemian,” his teachers quip, “if he wasn’t so damn crazy.”

Maybe an understanding and patient woman could have been of some assistance here, a fussy schoolmarm to demand that he brush his teeth, comb his wild mop of hair, and wear a pair of matching socks, but there are no women in his life, no doddering old aunts or devoted girlfriends. His mother is no longer in the picture. She slipped away in the middle of the night three years ago. Bipolar, they say. An abuser of drugs and alcohol,
if the rumors are true. There have been sightings—a ragged figure wandering the streets during the day and sleeping in the park at night—but Tom’s father seems almost relieved that she is gone and can embarrass the family no further. He is a longtime faculty member, a science teacher who earns a very modest salary, barely a living wage, if the priests wish to be honest about it.

Because of their difficult financial situation, Tom is compelled to take a job as a janitorial assistant at the nursing home down the street. This puts a little money in his pocket, but rather than spend his checks on new clothes and school supplies, he resorts to rummaging through garbage cans after class, looking for pencils worn down to chewed, yellow stubs and tearing out blank pages from notebooks used by his classmates to draw cruel caricatures of their teachers.

The Jesuits understand the many hardships Tom faces—how can they not; they’ve taken vows of poverty—so if they pity him, it isn’t because of the missing buttons on his winter coat or the dangling threads on the cuffs of his shirts; rather, it’s because of a shocking incident that occurred several months ago that left them wondering if their rigorous curriculum and strict code of conduct played more than superficial roles in what the principal calls the boy’s “spiritual crisis.”

Initially, his father wanted to remove him from school altogether, admit him to a psychiatric ward, let a team of doctors that specialize in emotional disorders poke and prod at their young patient, draw blood, take urine and stool samples, scribble clinical jargon on his chart, pump him full of mood-altering drugs—modern science has so many curious treatments these days—but the Jesuits frowned upon this idea. Physicians tend to be materialists, no better than mechanics tinkering with the engine of a car. The priests, on the other hand, understand that the body is merely a vehicle for conveying a soul, and they have long considered themselves experts in the cure of any soul that is damaged, diseased, broken, benightmared.

The incident in question took place during biology class on a blustery Saint Patrick’s Day last March. The instructor, Father Loomis, should have responded more quickly, but he was an elderly fellow whose eyesight and hearing, not to mention lucidity, had been in steep decline for some months. That he looked ridiculous probably didn’t help matters. Later, when the other priests questioned him about the episode, he tugged at the wheel of flesh around his throat and cried, “Idlers! Those boys are idlers, every one of them!”

A portly man, famed for his ability to guzzle tremendous amounts of ale from the local brewery, Father Loomis resembled an ancient temple, something that didn’t need to be bathed and powdered and dressed each morning so much as scaled at the appropriate solstice or equinox and upon which propitiations had to be made to a pantheon of temperamental gods. Students never tired of ridiculing him. They made vulgar and obnoxious sounds, pretended to fart and wheeze and gag when he waddled his hamburger-and-beer-bloated body into the biology lab. A man didn’t reside within that body, they claimed, but an overactive mutant gene about to burn out like an old fuse. He was an expanding star, a red giant exhausting the last of its hydrogen. He was a tremendous boulder rolling down a slope that led to the third circle of hell, a cold realm of torrential rain reserved for unrepentant gluttons. Unfortunately, heaven was too steep an ascent and Father Loomis little more than a corpulent Sisyphus burdened by his big ball of flesh.

“Now then!” he said, rapping a yardstick against his chair. “Today we will be doing dissection.” He hummed, whistled, quoted with a chuckle, “Faith is a fine invention when gentlemen can
see
, but microscopes are prudent in an emergency.” He unlocked a cabinet and then placed the glass jars in neat rows at the edge of his desk. “Before making your first incision, you must … First, you must … Gentleman, your animal. Anesthetize it. Remember. Always remember. They are created creatures …”

He seemed suddenly confused, and maybe in his confusion, he thought he was standing before the church altar, struggling to transform the bread into the body of Christ. After reciting the necessary formula—“
Hoc est enim corpus meum
”—he raised each consecrated frog by his forefinger and thumb and distributed them to his pupils like hosts on a day of holy obligation.

At the front of the line stood Tom Wentworth, who accepted his frog in an almost reverential manner, perhaps expecting, and even hoping for, a sense of peace and tranquility to invade his soul, to cleanse his troubled mind. Indeed, a great and disturbing calm fell over him, almost as though some ultimate Truth, awful in its lack of humanity and complete absence of purpose, had stalked into the room. He sat perfectly upright on his stool, muttering words without sense or meaning. The other boys watched his lips move, his eyelids flutter. They prodded him with their rulers and slapped the back of his head.

“Hey, man. What the hell. You flippin’ out, or what? You
on
something? You gobble a few pills? Whatever it is, let us have some.”

Oblivious to their taunts, Tom turned his attention to the work at hand, but rather than smother his frog with a chloroform-soaked cotton ball, he reached into his backpack and grabbed his protractor, the one he used in geometry class to draw concentric circles and to make arcs along a plane like a carpenter’s apprentice. With the sharp point glimmering under the fluorescent lights, he stabbed the back and legs and the soft, pliant skull of his thrashing frog, never flinching at the sharp pop of the spleen and the long, sad wheeze of the evacuating rectum. From the sounds alone he could identify each organ.