The Orphan

by Robert Stallman

  After the main meal was pretty well demolished, Mrs. Boldhuis mentioned that there was mince and pumpkin pie with whipped cream whenever we wanted it, Mr. Boldhuis turned his grin upside down and said he was completely unable, Miss Wrigley protested that later would be better, and Charles looked about almost uncomprehending, stuffed as he was to bursting and with two glasses of wine inside him pleasantly dissolving his mind in a vague air of animal satiety. I am awash with good feeling and concerned with nothing other than the geniality of Charles’s bodily workings. I retreat from Charles’s side, but lie more nearly awake than I usually am as the people stagger into the living room and sit in the furniture crowded around the piano.

  Outside it was almost fully dark now, and Mr. Boldhuis said he could smell snow even if he couldn’t yet see it, which meant it was on its way down from Chicago by special express and would be here by six or seven. Mrs. Boldhuis came in and Mr. Boldhuis said very quietly that if she would play some Chopin while their bodies were recovering from the onslaught of the most marvelous dinner in the Midwest, then they could all attack the dishes and straighten up in jig time. The slender, sad faced woman brightened her face magically, kissed her husband on his smile and sat at the piano bench and began to play without benefit of music before her. As her hands began touching the keys, Charles felt the hair rising along the back of his neck, and as her hands moved more surely in the dimness of the living room, the evocation of the melody which fit together so beautifully, and so seamlessly pieced together poignant sounds that had never been joined before, Charles’s eyes watered, and he realized he was weeping while a series of chills passed through his body, deliciously, slowly, as if he were a creature of the ocean experiencing the pull of a tide for the first time, as if, indeed, he had been living in some tiny, landlocked and muddy pool in a remote solitude, but now was experiencing for the first time the true nature of his world, his proper home, the limitless ocean with its endless variety of life, its vast depths and expanses, the full width of its waters and storms and creatures, the infinite nature of its continuing creation.

  I am present with Charles as the music pounds now like breakers against the shore with a heavy joy and expansive power and lightness combined that I more than just listen to, but want to live in as I live in air or water or the beauty of a cold night with a full moon as I lope along in the free air, feeling the muscles stretching smoothly, the air pulling in and out rhythmically, and the leap off a high bank into the moonlit water, the crash and spray. I am standing now with Charles and moving quietly into the shadowed hallway to stand with my back against the wall. I must feel this music as fully as only my true form will allow, I think, and buoyed by the music pouring out and filling the house, by the wine, by the exaltation of the quiet and intelligent people among whom I feel most safe, I shift and stand in the dark hallway pressed against the wallpaper in my true form, and the music suddenly floods into all my senses, making every hair on my pelt stand out, my spatial sense understanding the ripples, the reverberating harmonics like thousands of tiny winged and singing birds breaking some auditory barrier as they wing higher and higher until their circles of vibration vanish in a trans-auditory burst of rainbows and lightnings. The basses are gentle thunders overlapping in rhythm and rounded like dark cumulous massing against the horizon, as the birds winging in their ascending unison vanish and reappear in rapid arpeggios. There is darkness and color, moonlight and water, coolness and the comfort of trees in full leaf, the softness of turf underfoot and the sleekness of my pelt being smoothed by water as I race like a huge brown otter through waves that rise in green curls to smash against sand while I shoot through the greenness, a creature of water and air, life and beyond life….

  “Charles!”

  I shift.

  I am standing in the doorway. I look into the living room. Mother was playing Chopin, and Father sits in his chair listening. I want to cry out to them, “I am lost! Help me! Where are you?” But I stand in the dim hallway, shocked to be there, alive. I wish …

  I rise, feeling smaller, wrong, tides of grief flooding into my newly conscious self. Who? The woman at the piano turns to look at me. Her face goes through a rapid series of transformations as it sees me. She begins to scream, scream, shattering the music. Have I shifted? I am not Charles. I hold back the smaller person whom I have become. He wants to run in to the living room. I am beginning to be afraid as the other woman looks at me and her eyes first widen, then narrow. Her expression is going through a forced change as if someone were pulling at the skin of her face, and I see the man looking at me with his smile going crooked and his mouth coming open and his face is whiter than the marshmallows as I realize there is something very wrong and turn to move back down the hallway to the bathroom door where I reach out to the door a small freckled hand that is not Charles’s hand but a much smaller one. Have I shifted to Little Robert? No. It is not his hand, and in slow motion I close the bathroom door behind me and turn the lock, knowing exactly how it turns, exactly what the bathroom is like, my bathroom. I turn to the mirror on the back of the bathroom door.

  I see myself, eight years old, black hair, round face, freckles and the upturned mouth that is like my father’s. I wish …

  But I must shift quickly, for I hear footsteps in the hallway. I concentrate. I shift. The mirror image startles me. I am so large, almost larger than the mirror will show, more fearsome than I realize. It is a shock to see myself. I have grown greatly and did not know. There is a knocking at the door and Miss Wrigley’s voice says with a break in it, “Charles?”

  I concentrate, saying the name firmly. Charles Cahill. I shift.

  Charles stood, a tall, blond haired boy in the dim bathroom. He opened the door to see Miss Wrigley standing in the hallway with her hand in front of her mouth. She reached out for his hand.

  “Will you come into the living room, Charles,” she said. “A strange thing has happened, and we have to be very understanding. Just be very kind to these people, and I’ll tell you why later. And Charles,” she said as they began to walk down the dark hall, “please remember that I like these people very much.”

  Charles nodded. They walked back to the living room where the short round man stood by his chair, his face still white and his smile leveled out into a straight line, the gaunt woman sitting on the piano bench still half turned toward the hall doorway, both her hands touching her mouth as if the scream had in some way injured it.

  Charles walked back to the chair he had been sitting in before. Miss Wrigley went to the piano and sat beside Mrs. Boldhuis on the bench, putting her arm around the slender woman’s shoulders.

  “I think we have all been the victim of a hallucination,” Mr. Boldhuis said to the room in general. “Charles, I apologize for our strange behavior. Let me explain what I think happened here.” He turned a face that had almost regained its smile to his wife and Miss Wrigley. “With your permission, Lucille?” His wife nodded, looking down at the piano keys.

  “You see, Charles, we had two lovely children, Victor Junior and Danielle, who we lost in an accident when the school bus they were riding in ran off a bridge as they were returning from a Sunday school picnic. It has been several years now, but we still feel the loss very much, and I think especially on occasions like this when families are,” he paused and swallowed, “together.”

  Charles heard the words, trying to think in several dimensions at once, to retain his social composure, to understand what had happened so that it could be avoided in the future, and to piece together for his own survival the reasons for the strange shifting into an unknown form.

  I am listening also, nearer to the surface than is comfortable for Charles, curious about the shift I have made in a moment of ecstasy. It is true that I have shifted into a form I had not concentrated on, a form previously unknown even in name, and it is obvious that this form has been impressed upon me by the sorrowing thoughts of these two strangers, or perhaps even by the ambience of this home. It is of interest to
me that my shifting has been thus influenced by forces outside myself, but for Charles a different revelation is being made.

  As supremely comfortable and happy as he had ever been in his life, Charles had suddenly been supplanted, his personality usurped in a way wholly beyond his control. He realized now that no matter how happy or how safe he felt, he was always in mortal danger. It was for him an intimation of mortality far more rigorous and distinct than the death of a loved one or the nearly fatal accident which usually shadows forth personal knowledge of the precariousness of existence. Charles knew in a flood of fear and anger that left him shaking that he might at any moment not only be put aside for a time, but annihilated forever if conditions arose that required his disappearance. Compounding this rage and fear was the knowledge that he must be unique, that he must be the only creature in the world so constituted and so threatened that the slightest accident of association or the whim of that underlying power of which he was an avatar would erase his personality as if it had never existed. In this state of sudden comprehension, he sat and tried to take in the sorrowful story of the Boldhuis children who had perished three years before in just such a causeless and purposeless act of the universe.

  The incident seemed to affect his demeanor very little, Mr. Boldhuis thought, watching the blond boy’s face in the overhead light which he had turned on, and yet he did seem a singularly sensitive young man who could understand such a loss. But then Charles had not seen, actually seen a loved one appear, magically and fully alive…. Oh, Vic, he thought, stopped the image and closed his eyes tightly a second. He looked at the tall, solemn boy again. Mr. Boldhuis could not know the exact cause of the changed expression he now saw on Charles’s features, or that these changes were prompted almost wholly by resolves being made concerning Charles’s own survival rather than by sympathy with the victims of the world’s causeless cruelty. Charles shook his head sadly and shut his eyes too for a moment, an action Mr. Boldhuis took to be a quite sensitive response, so that he felt a warmth and was about to put his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “No, it was real,” Lucille Boldhuis’s voice came sharply out of the quiet conversation she was having with Miss Wrigley. Victor Boldhuis turned, prepared for a role he had performed many times these three years. But Lucille met his eyes, and her expression told him to be silent, that this time sympathy and strength were out of place. He felt stricken as he watched her eyes, heard her voice with that painful tone of hope he had worked so long to reduce, to replace.

  “Did you see how he looked at us?” Lucille said, her voice lifting. “He wanted to join us. Oh, Jessie,” she went on gladly, “they are alive somewhere. I know they are.”

  Miss Wrigley looked at Mr. Boldhuis, she looking over Lucille’s shoulder, he gazing back over Charles’s.

  “We have to admit, though …” Mr. Boldhuis began, but his wife cut him off.

  “I know, Victor. I know. I’m not going to be ridiculous,” she said, her eyes bright. “It’s enough,” she added mysteriously.

  She rose from the bench. “I’ll get the liqueur,” she said, and slipped from the room while they all looked at her with varying degrees of concern.

  After a long silence and the handing around of the tiny liqueur glasses, they talked of school, of Charles’s progress which was little less than phenomenal, and some careful filling in of his background by Charles who found he must remember what stories of his past he had told Miss Wrigley so as not to contradict himself. He found Mrs. Boldhuis watching him from beneath half lidded eyes as she sipped the green liqueur and was flattered by her attention until he realized that she must be seeing that vision in the dim hallway again and wondering what connection he could have with it.

  “Jessie tells us you will be in the last half of fifth grade after Christmas,” Mr. Boldhuis said. “At the rate you are progressing, you may well be in high school in a year or so. Have you thought about whether you might want to pursue a college oriented curriculum?”

  Charles looked blank. “A college what?”

  The adults laughed suddenly, and Mr. Boldhuis said kindly, “We aren’t laughing at you, Charles. It’s just that you are such a literate young man that I forgot I was not talking to someone of seventeen or eighteen, and my vocabulary got away from me.” He smiled his smile at Charles in such a friendly way that Charles laughed.

  “I guess I forget how old I am myself sometimes,” Charles said. “I started out this fall reading about Happy and Sally, and now I’m trying to figure out the difference between legislative and judicial branches of government.”

  “How remarkable,” Mrs. Boldhuis said, looking straight at Charles over the rim of the tiny liqueur glass. “How old are you, Charles?”

  “Thirteen, I guess,” Charles said, feeling uncomfortable at all the attention to what he felt was an oversized and overly awkward body.

  “And not only that,” Miss Wrigley said, getting up and smoothing her gray wool skirt, “you would hardly believe how Charles has grown physically since he began school.” She walked to Charles’s chair and took his hand. “Stand up, Charles. I want to show them how much you’ve grown.”

  Charles stood, felt awkward and bent over, and Miss Wrigley put a hand firmly in the small of his back, making him stand straight.

  “Look at this,” she said, placing Charles on the floor like as potted plant and standing so that her back was against his. “He’s almost as tall as I am, and when he signed up this fall I distinctly remember that I could look at the top of his head.”

  Mr. Boldhuis stood up to look at the two and murmured that if Jessie were to take off her heels, Charles might be just a bit taller than she. Miss Wrigley slipped off her low heels and stood in stocking feet.

  “Yes,” Mr. Boldhuis said, placing one soft hand on the woman’s head and bumping the boy’s head with his fingers. “Charles has an edge of about half an inch. Isn’t that remarkable.”

  Miss Wrigley turned around and swung Charles about with her hand as if he were a museum exhibit. Charles felt like a prize ox and was more than a little flushed at Miss Wrigley’s bumping her buttocks against his during the height comparison. He was finding with some surprise that it was more than Miss Wrigley’s learning and kindly ways that was attractive to him. Charles swallowed and looked at his teacher solemnly, pushing all other thoughts out of his mind and wondering if he was in danger of becoming a sex maniac.

  “Charles,” Miss Wrigley said, looking slightly up into the boy’s serious eyes, “how can you have grown so fast?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” Charles said, “but it’s something all right.”

  “Three inches in three months?” Mr. Boldhuis said, laughing. “Why at that rate, one might sit around on dull days and simply watch Charles grow!”

  They all laughed at that, and the topic went on to colleges and degrees and questions to Miss Wrigley about when she was returning to Champaign to take her four-year degree from Normal, a conversation that Charles found so opaque that he lost the thread of sense entirely at many points and contented himself with examining the bookshelves beside his chair. Many of the titles Charles had trouble with, and he realized that all of these authors whose names appeared on the spines of the books like cabalistic symbols must be famous and well known to the three adults who had attended college and now moved above the earth in their minds instead of mundanely upon it as did the farmers Charles lived among. Some of the titles were in what must be a foreign language, for even sounding them out, he could make no sense of them. There were two that he supposed must be some sort of humorous books because they had a word like comedy in their titles, but when he opened them, he could see at once they were in languages he didn’t understand. One was called Divina Commedia by a person named Dante something, and the other was La Comedie Humaine by somebody Balzac, and although they were not in English, they were not in the same language either. Charles felt stunned at the erudition necessary to read three languages as these people must do when he was making su
ch slow progress, as it seemed to him, in mastering one. He felt as he had felt on that day when, having suddenly understood the intricacies of division, he knew the elation of having mastered the four processes of mathematics at last, only to have Miss Wrigley say, “Yes, but there is so much more. Algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry.” So that he was stunned again by the endless vistas of the mental world.

  Later, in the dining room after they had eaten pie and whipped cream until Charles felt once more sweetly stuffed and a bit sleepy, Mr. Boldhuis read poetry from some thin books, some clever ones by Edna St. Vincent Millay, some brusque ones by Ezra Pound, some silly ones by e. e. cummings, and finally a sad one by the classic Tennyson, some of whose poems Charles had read in his school texts.

  Riding back along the highway toward the widow Stumway’s house, Charles sat in the back seat of the old Ford listening to the muted conversation of Mr. Boldhuis and Miss Wrigley in the front seat while the snow whipped at the windshield like storms of arrows, and the cold crept into his shoes. He thought about how large the world really was, and how much there was that he wanted to learn about it. And he resolved to holclon to his piece of the world, to never let it disappear from him at any cost.

  (5)

  Mrs. Stumway’s house had a coal furnace down the basement, but she liked to economize on all but the coldest winter days by using the tall, ornate iron and nickel stove in the dining room. That and the cooking heat from the kitchen kept the two rooms comfortable, and the big parlor had been curtained off with a double thickness of patchwork quilts and bedspreads hung in the archway from hooks that her late husband had installed many years ago. This kept the upstairs bedrooms in a condition of arctic frigidity relieved minutely by opening the floor registers an hour before bed time. Consequently, Charles and the old lady in her aviator’s helmet sat in the dining room each night after supper like some oddly assorted characters out of a fairy tale, the tall, blond boy hunched over the table at his homework, the old gaunt woman in her rocking chair, head tilted to one side as she read in her dusty books or leafed through magazines neighbors would sometimes send over as a kindness. She never read newspapers and had little interest in what the rest of the world was doing, so that Charles depended on school and Miss Wrigley for his contact with life, thinking of his home with Mrs. Stumway as a sort of deep freeze in which he was preserved between the times when he could escape to live in the real world.