The People in the Trees (51 page)

⁷⁵
Esme Duff was particularly vicious and unrelenting in her assaults on Norton, whom she perplexingly but unwaveringly held responsible for Tallent’s disappearance. After Tallent vanished, she remained at Stanford as a lecturer but never earned tenure. She never married, and committed suicide in 1982 at the age of sixty-two.

⁷⁶
So thorough was the various pharmaceutical companies’ and universities’ removal of the mo’o kua’aus who were allegedly discovered on Ivu’ivu that it is thought highly unlikely that any of them were actually ever transplanted to U’ivu. Naturally, both of the aforementioned parties had their own reasons for not allowing any of the dreamers to migrate there, but it is also highly unlikely that the U’ivuans—given the mythology and fear surrounding the mo’o kua’au—wanted any of them in their midst. (Later several of the pharmaceutical companies would claim that they took the dreamers who were discovered back to the States for their own protection, because they would surely be ill-treated or ostracized if they were displaced to U’ivu.) Consequently, the dreamers, as well as the vaka’ina ceremony, remain as exotic and incredible on U’ivu as they do in the States—perhaps even more so: a particularly vivid ghost story, never to be definitively disproved.

PART VI. VICTOR

I
.

He was difficult from the beginning.
Difficult
is such a useful, vague word, but in this situation its lack of specificity is intentional. This is because almost everything about Victor—every interaction, every exchange, every rite of childhood—seemed particularly fraught, and even the basic facts about him that should have been easy to ascertain became the subjects of labyrinthine explorations and investigations. There are children who make life difficult for themselves through their bad behavior or lack of personality or common sense, and there are others for whom—through genetics or circumstances—life is already difficult. It should be said that although Victor eventually became a member of the former category, he began life with me as a member of the latter.

Take, for instance, his age. It was no surprise to me that Victor’s father (or whoever he was) did not know or care how old his child was. The first time I was able to hold him and regard him closely—to scrutinize the smeary eyes, the distended stomach, the scrubby scab of dirty hair, the colonies of glistening, plump lice, each as fat and slick as a grain of buttered rice—I guessed him to be six or so, although an early childhood of malnourishment and disease gave him the appearance of a three-year-old. Upon returning to Bethesda, I took him to see the children’s pediatrician, Alan Shapiro, who thought, after examining him and taking into account his obviously stunted growth, that he might be as old as seven or as young as four. Guessing the age of these children is an imperfect art, one I had long ago ceased fretting over too much. Indeed, it is
usually beneficial to shave as many months off these children’s lives as one is realistically able to; it gives them a year or two to adjust to the work of being a developing American child and eases their burden to thrive and succeed. (Call it a sort of developmental affirmative action, if you will.) So after a sort of lazy, halfhearted debate, Shapiro and I came to an understanding, and on Victor’s medical files (and all official records thereafter) we listed August 13, 1976, as his birthday, August 13 being, of course, the day I found him. I had entered Shapiro’s office with a mystery of a child; I went home with a certified four-year-old.

Nineteen eighty, the year Victor entered my household, was unusual for two reasons. For one, there had never been as many children living in the house at one time as there were that year. For another, it turned out to be one of those years in which the population of children fell fairly neatly into two distinct generations. At one end was a gaggle of eighteen-year-olds—Muti, Megan, Gunter, Lani, Lei, Terrence, Karl, and Edith, I believe—all of whom would be leaving for college, followed closely by another group of older adolescents (sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, primarily, with a few slightly younger ones, including Ella, who was twelve at the time, and Abby, who was eleven, tossed in). But the next oldest children to follow them, Isolde and William—the children who would be Victor’s primary peers—were only six. Altogether, there were some twenty-two children living in the house that year. Most of my memories of that time are sensory rather than anecdotal ones—the lugubrious, looping strains of the rock music the teenagers would play hour after hour; the sickly, fruity stench of the alcohol they filched from somewhere; the various sartorial failures that paraded past me in the mornings. In the evenings the girls talked on the phone and the boys stayed in their rooms and, I am sure, masturbated. At times I was certain that several of them were having sexual relations with one another, but it seemed too exhausting a topic even to begin to address. They all spent a great deal of time fighting, and watching television, and loudly declaring how relieved they would be to finally leave the house and go to college and be on their own (with, of course, ample financial assistance from me). Needless to say, I spent as much time as possible abroad, attending conferences, giving lectures. Returning from the airport, I always half expected to turn
the corner and find the house a pile of rubble, with all of them waiting impatiently and crossly for me to come home so they could leap on me with their demands and complaints and needs.

I wonder what Victor must have thought the first time he saw the house and met the strange, populous collection of children whom he would now be expected—if only legally—to regard as his brothers and sisters. I am certain it must have been overwhelming for him; I myself had a difficult time keeping track of the faces that walked by me every morning, asked me for money, thrust report cards and petty injuries in front of my face. At one point one of the older children had even brought a friend of his home to live with us for a week to see if I’d notice an extra setting at the table, an extra permission slip to sign. Naturally, I didn’t notice at all (my time and thoughts being occupied with a multitude of things), and when the prank was finally revealed to me, amid much hilarity, I laughed as well, and shook the hand of the interloper, an angular, handsome boy whose skin was the purplish black of figs. In the mornings children would literally fly past me, leaping off the middle of the flight of stairs toward the front door, or trooping out the back door in dense flanks, clasping hockey and lacrosse sticks and baseball bats like weaponry, like the spears they would once have taken everywhere. (Sometimes I would watch them marching together, their blunt, unfriendly, planar faces brailled with acne, and think involuntarily of Captain Cook’s cloaked advice that I had chosen in my youth to disregard—
The fierceness of the Wevooans makes the crew uneasy
—and shudder, because was I any more equipped to live with these people who had so unsettled the explorer’s brave crew, who knew more and had seen more than I ever would?)

I do admit that I had trouble remembering everyone’s name. I would call for the girl I thought was Lani and in her place would appear someone I had always thought was Megan (that is, if anyone heeded my call at all). Sometimes this was not my failure but an intentional bit of trickery; they would try to play games like this—one person standing in for another, trying to confuse me—but quickly learned not to do this after I began playing some games of my own: giving money to the person who answered my call, for example, or requesting that he or she complete a particularly odious chore. Squabbles would break out, confessions would be made,
mistaken and deliberately confused identities would be righted. It was this generation of children who had instituted the prohibition against, as they said, “infants” at the dinner table, which meant that Isolde and William (and thereafter everyone younger than seven) were consigned to the “baby table,” a squat, white-laminated wooden toy of a thing that was used primarily for quick, slapdash breakfasts eaten in the kitchen, to take their evening meal with Mrs. Tomlinson an hour before everyone else ate. There was, of course, much crying and screeching from Isolde and William over this decision and an equal amount of not quite logical but self-righteous screaming from the elders (“Majority rules! Majority rules!” shrieked Fred, one of the sixteen-year-olds, who was studying the Constitution in high school; you could always ascertain their school syllabus by observing the realpolitik they tried to apply to various household regulations), but in the end the amendment was passed. Even I had to admit it was an inspired solution; at any rate, it made dinnertime less of a spectacle than it had been.

Into this household, then, came Victor, whom I introduced to them on a weekend evening when poor weather had kept everyone indoors. He did not make a very good impression on them. The older children gawped at him silently for a long moment. The more polite ones gave him nervous, useless smiles; a few of them reached out to touch him and then withdrew their hands quickly, as if Victor might leap out of my arms and gobble them whole. Isolde and William stood in the doorway and stared. Victor, for his part, turned his face into my shoulder and remained completely silent. After I had had Mrs. Tomlinson take him away, they began pecking at me with questions.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Why does he look like that?”

“Is he sick? Why is he that color?”

“How old is he?”

Hearing their reactions upon the introduction of a new child always amused me. How quickly they forgot what
they
had looked like when they had arrived in this country! They came, most of them, accompanied only by lice and disease and wearing scraps of filthy cotton that could only aspire to be called proper clothing. The nature of their infections varied from cholera to dysentery to gangrene
to conjunctivitis to malaria, as did the rate of their recovery, but they were all malnourished and undersized and (it must be said) notably unattractive, with large, pulsing, delicate heads and curled, flaccid limbs; they looked like oversized fetuses, things born too unformed and monstrous to be allowed among humans, mistakes never meant to be seen.

“You should be embarrassed,” I told them. “Don’t you think you looked like that, Megan, when you first came? Or you, Owen?” I was always made to rebuke them in this way after their initial reaction to a new child: the older ones would be ashamed, the younger ones defiant.

But this time they were unmoved. “We didn’t look like that,” they chorused.

And they were not, it must be said, entirely incorrect. I have commented earlier on the depravity of Victor’s previous situation, the physical shock one felt upon seeing him. But here, if I am to be honest, I must also say that one was not merely astonished when regarding him but rather repelled. I have, over my years, been privileged to see some of the worst ravages disease can wreak on the human body, and while Victor was not—not by a very long measure—one of the most
impressively
diseased specimens I had encountered, he was certainly one of the most pitiable. Not because it was clear that he possessed a great natural beauty or native attractiveness that had been deadened or distorted by his illnesses, but rather because of the
thoroughness
of the infections. Indeed, nothing that I could see or feel had managed to escape the marks of disease—no part of him appeared healthy. Looking at him, I felt, not for the first time, a sort of admiration for the multitude of viruses and bacteria, the distinct and creative marks they had left on even the smallest, most forgettable parts of his body, how they had mapped his skin with furrows of hot, bubbling welts, each capped with a snowy peak of pus, how they had moved across the whites of his eyes, leaving them as yellow as fat and secreting a mysterious slime that was as thick as wax. Various bacteria appeared to have successfully conquered even the most inconsequential parts of his anatomy: even his toe- and fingernails were as opaque as bone, the tips ossified into jagged arrowheads. Every orifice wept liquids, some thin and rust-colored that bore the sharp, steely stench of menstrual blood, others clear and jellylike that
oozed to the surface only reluctantly. He was fascinating, a home to thousands of visitors. Shapiro and I spent a few pleasant afternoons examining him, naming the diseases we could (ringworm, conjunctivitis, eczema) and arguing over the ones we could not. It was a great, thrilling puzzle, and Victor—who sat quietly, breathing adenoidally through his mouth as Shapiro and I poked and prodded and ran our fingers over his body—was, I must say, very patient. But of course most of his infections, no matter how alarming or intimidating in appearance, were in fact quite treatable, and after his nightly bath I would settle him in my lap, rub cream into his sores, and give him antibiotics secreted in a plug of honey cake. Over the days I’d watch his skin smooth as a crunchy scab of blisters that had annexed his inner thigh slowly dissolved, like salt disintegrating into a dark puddle of liquid. So while his initial appearance was unsettling, it was certainly not permanent, and in fact easily rectified. No, the greater problem with Victor was his almost complete lack of socialization, his fundamental—and the word is intentional—savagery. For very shortly after I acquired Victor, I realized that I was going to have to teach him how to be a human.

There are people—even otherwise logical and clear-minded people—who believe that we are born with a predisposition to behave as, well, humans. That is, that we are born with a certain set of desires or tendencies—the tendency, say, to be sociable with others, or to share with others, or to communicate with others. (These are also the people who believe in such concepts as good and evil and enjoy debating whether man is one or the other.) But although this is a pretty notion, it is fundamentally untrue. For proof, one need look no further than my own children, and especially Victor, who seemed to have little understanding of what it meant to behave like a human being. His body fulfilled its basic needs, of course—he ate, he slept, he defecated—but he was not, it appeared, capable of doing anything else. To begin with, he was almost wholly unemotive. Once, as an experiment, I pricked the sole of his foot lightly with a pin, and although he twitched his head, he remained mute, and his blank, dumb look did not change. I devised other tests as well. At mealtimes he would open his mouth, eat whatever was placed within (he had no idea even how to feed himself; if I set a plate in front of him, he would only gaze at it fixedly, as if it were some precious
thing he had been assigned to guard), his jaws opening and closing with a steady rhythm, his teeth coming together with an exaggerated, steely tap. Once I slipped into a spoonful of cooked carrots a small square of newsprint, which he imperturbably chewed away at until I reached into his mouth and retrieved the pulpy mash of inky paper. In these moments I would look at his face and be able to see only Eve’s echoed back to me, and his presence would seem a punishment, and a reminder of how I would never escape what I had seen and been and done on that island. At night he would be placed in his bed, but by morning either Mrs. Tomlinson or I (or William, with whom he shared a small knuckle of a room on the third floor, under the sloping eaves of the attic) would find him curled into a knot in the corner of the room, dark and silent and still, clutching his genitals with his hands.