by Hersey John.
Mr. RUDD. I do.
TESTIMONY OF MR. PAUL RUDD, MACHINIST, TOWN OF PEQUOT
Senator MANSFIELD. Mr. Rudd, we've taken testimony from your wife about Mr. Cleary coming to your home, last Thursday, and how he broke the news to her about the child buyer, and she informed us under oath that on being told about this visit, you were eager to take up the deal. What I want to know, sir, is, what possessed you? How would a father want to sell his son?
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Senator SKYPACK. Don't you suppose it's possible, Mr. Chairman, that this gentleman was influenced by patriotic motives? Just the way, in time of war, a man is proud to see his son sign up with the service, the colors? The nature of this deal was such—
Mr. RUDD. Yes, sir, that's the way I felt. I felt that way. Proud. I did.
Senator MANSFIELD. But, Mr. Rudd, your wife said you wanted the money.
Mr. RUDD. A son's supposed to earn his keep, he takes over and supports the parents. Is that unnatural? I mean on the other side, my father came from Czechoslovakia, and the thing you tried to do was to give birth to sons, so as they would grow up and support you. Girl children weren't worth anything, except they could have sons. You put in your sweat and earnings for a boy, food, schooling, getting him ready, and then the time comes, and it's his turn. Is that so unnatural?
Senator MANSFIELD. At ten years of age?
Mr. RUDD. They keep telling me he's got the mind of a eighteen-, twenty-year-old. A young fellow works with his body when he's grown into it, the same should go for working with his head. I don't see that that's so unnatural. My father went to work when he was eleven, in a tannery, he put me to work when I was thirteen. I send him money, room-and-board money, right today. Here's this boy, he's got a perfectly tremendious working capacity with his brain. I can't see it's so unnatural to want to make some use of it. Except the schools of today, they say nobody should work, just be happy, just goldbrick along and the world owes you a living. The older generation owes you the works, that's the attitude. My father, after he came to this country, he got to be a butcher, worked in this chain store, and he was a pretty good butcher, but what he liked to do, he liked to cruise around out-of-the-way lumberyards, and find these pieces of
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strange wood, fancy-grained, that would have a sounding-board quality, resonance, he could tell by just looking at them, and he would carve violins. In the cellar. A fiddler in his village on the other side taught him, and he made creditable instruments, I mean this big instrument company would buy them off my father, a hundred bucks, two hundred a throw. He has this knack with his hands, and he always liked it better than the butchering. So now he's retired, and his wife's with him, and right today I send half the money, my brother sends half, and it cats into my own living. This last summer Fred Zimmer and I, he lives across the street, we decided to make this skiff and buy us an outboard for picnics down the Pehadnock, at Sandy Point and above the light-company dam, and I tell you, I had to scrimp and dig up the cash from nowheres, and yet I'm still sending my old man fancy-wood money even though he can't really woodwork worth a darn any more, it's just to keep him from getting ill-tempered. We built the skiff all right, and got the outboard but it was darn hard. So why shouldn't I want my son to bring something in? Here's this offer, a tremendious sum of money right on a silver platter.
Senator MANSFIELD. Then you put your son's talents in a class with a knack for repairing machinery or trimming cuts of meat or so on?
Mr. RUDD. I've been rougher on the boy than his mother, I'll have to admit it. I spent years trying to make a regular kid of him, didn't realize how hopeless it was. I'm mechanical-minded, I like to tinker, and I never read a thing unless if it's the sports news in the papers. I don't understand a boy like Barry, I never have. I like to go bowling, I'm in the Tuesday-night league, and I take the whole family to the lanes Tuesday nights, and the boy sits there either reading a book or lately he's taken up writing mystery stories, then he tears them up afterwards, it's only for his own amusement. I've always tried to get him outdoors, catch
a ball, get tousled and dirty, but it's just made him keep away from me. He hasn't got enough spunk to show resentment, he just keeps his distance, slinks off. He prefers his grandfather— my old man—to his own father. Oh, he dotes on Grandfather Rudd. It's because the old man tells him these legends, folk tales, from the other side. But I show up—the tail between the legs and out of sight.
Senator MANSFIELD. Then it's your view you have a perfect right to exploit this boy's talents in any way you want?
Mr. RUDD. Why not? I slaved for him for years. I been sitting at a machine over at Trucco eight hours, seven hours a day for years. I fed him, put shoes on him. Why shouldn't he do something for me? Before this deal came along, I was after his mother to put him on TV, get him on a quiz program, exhibit the master mind. Bring in some dough. God knows I tried first to make him regular. I spent months at a time balancing him on a two-wheeler, but the minute I let go, whammo! Off he falls. I'm good with my hands, I'm keeping a one-seventy-two average in my league in the bowling, it gives me the creeps to see him take aholt of a piece of bread at the table.
Senator SKYPACK. I just wanted to say, Mr. Rudd, you've been taking some rather hostile questioning here, but I feel you should know that some of us applaud your position, your patriotism. I mean, a decent father's instincts . . . I'm just surprised how lenient—
Senator MANSFIELD. All right, Mr. Broadbent, I've asked all I want to ask. Have you any questions?
Mr. BROADBENT. Nothing at present, sir.
Senator MANSFIELD. Then I think we should pick up with the boy. Thank you, Mr. Rudd.
Mr. BROADBENT. Please fetch Master Rudd.
Senator SKYPACK. Brother, I hope my blood vessels don't rupture on me.
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Senator MANSFIELD. All right, sonny, you're sworn. Please just take your seat.
TESTIMONY OF BARRY RUDD, MINOR, TOWN OF PEQUOT
Senator MANSFIELD. Just pick up where we broke off, Mr. Broadbent.
Mr. BROADBENT. So after Mr. Cleary left, your parents told you the situation. What was your reaction?
BARRY RUDD. At first I had a feeling of elation, a sudden lift, because somebody important was interested in me. But I've learned to distrust euphoria. I once thought it was a priceless state of ecstasy, a rapture, like a moment when Blake had one of his visions, say, or when Archimedes in his bath realized he could find out whether the tyrant Hieron's crown was pure gold or alloyed, by a simple displacement test. But I've come to understand that it's not a time of revelation—not for me. My moments of inspiration come when I least expect them, when I'm abstracted, walking up the public-library steps, playing gin rummy with Flattop. It seems as if it's the absent mind that solves the problems of this world—for me, anyway.
Mr. BROADBENT. What did you do?
BARRY RUDD. My homework.
Mr. BROADBENT. Where?
BARRY RUDD. No, we had supper first, then Momma and Father and the Monster stayed in the kitchen and I went in the other room to do my homework. I turned the main-room light on by a Rube Goldberg device I'd made. A string is attached to the doorknob, a system of pulleys and weights, and—
Senator MANSFIELD. I think we can picture it, sonny.
BARRY RUDD. There were two problems in connection with
the device. First, the lamp has a revolving switch rather than a chain pull. Second, turning the light on and off every other time, to allow for departures from the room, presented—
Senator MANSFIELD. Yes, sonny, go on.
BARRY RUDD. I went under the lamp, still burning (I was burning, I mean, not the lamp—though it was, too, in its way) with this euphoria—somebody powerful wanted to buy me!— and I began a childish game, very regressed, of playing with my shadow under the lamplight. I'd make my shadow, my other self, first bigger, then smaller; try to jump away from it, disconnect it; try to stamp on it, scare it away. I had thought o
f my shadow, when I was small, as a gauze thing that could be folded and put in a bureau drawer. Of course you know where that fantasy came from?
Mr. BROADBENT. Then?
BARRY RUDD. I suddenly needed advice, needed to talk with someone I trusted. I saw Grandpa Rudd's picture on the bureau. For years I believed that I could make pictures of people, snapshots, come to life if I could only find the key. I wanted to have a small man, about three inches high, to keep my desk neat at school, tell me stories; he would ride in my book bag. For a long time I thought the key might be to hold my breath and count, forwards or maybe backwards. I realize that this, too, was babyish, but I've clung to a feeling that the pictures, even if they couldn't come all the way to life, could think and see. So I took the picture of Grandpa in my hands, and I asked him what I should do, and something made me drop him, and I had a moment of unrealistic fear that I'd hurt him.
Mr. BROADBENT. What happened then?
BARRY RUDD. As I put my grandfather's picture back, there came over me a feeling of inadequacy—the thought that my heredity was deficient, that I came from a thin line. I thought of some verses of Horace that Dr. Gozar reeled off once when she
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was showing me a few basic facts of heredity through fruit-fly demonstrations: 'In steers, in steeds, appear the merits of their sires; nor do fierce eagles beget timid doves/ My euphoria drained away as I thought of familial talents: how Adams, the son of a president, became president; how vivid the two cousin Roosevelts were; that the Bachs were musical for three generations; that Addison was the son of a Royal Chaplain, Bulwer of an ambitious army general, Hugo of a king's aide, Boyle of a Lord High Treasurer of Ireland. And I remembered: Training increases inborn worth/ Horace went on to say; and I thought of the good fortunes of Mill, Pitt, Mozart, Michelangelo. Then I had to struggle to jack up my spirits, and I thought of unexpected greatness: of Lincoln; of Bunyan, the son of a tinker, Carlyle of a mason, Winckelmann of a cobbler, Canova of a stonecutter, Jansen of a peasant, Kant of a strapmaker. And I thought of my father, who'd said he wanted to let me go if he could get a good enough price, in the next room, watching Maverick on television.
Senator VOYOLKO. Great program.
BARRY RUDD. I finally got down to work. In order to ensure the success of my report on nomenclature, I first followed a ceremony that had helped me a great deal in the past: I sharpened my pencil, pointed the sharp end successively toward the north, east, south, and west, and then, holding it upright, tapped its eraser end repeatedly on the table while, with the fingers of my left hand, starting with the pinky and moving toward the thumb, I flipped the lobe of my left ear. The pencil, incidentally, was John Sano's. He got an A on his last research report, on bread mold, and I'd borrowed it from him, because a pencil that had written so well for him was bound to write well for me.
Senator SKYPACK. Pinky! My God!
BARRY RUDD. My tapping got out of phase with my earlobe flicking, and I began the whole deal over again, even to sharpen-
ing the pencil, to make sure. I know, Senator Skypack, you think this is foolish, you think reliance on this sort of thing—
Senator SYKPACK. You're damn tootin'.
BARRY RUDD. Momma has always dinned into me that leaning on luck, magic, is foolish, and I fenow, in the higher associa-tional and reasoning centers of my cortex, that she's right. Still, just in case. Deep down. But don't get me wrong. I work. I work long sessions. I've observed Dr. Gozar—I watch her by the hour, in her natural habitat, the lab, as if I were on a zoological field ramble, Homo sapiens, a noble specimen, and I've seen her marked willingness to stay at a task, to withstand discomfort, go without food, disregard fatigue and strain, forget a cold or a headache—above all, to face the possibility of failure, and facing that chance seems to me the first prerequisite of success, or completion. And I've learned concentration. I closed the shouting of Bart Maverick out of my mind. I fought the pencil across the page—how I hate the act of recording! But Til tell you something: no matter how awkward I may be at stickball or volleyball, no matter how much I'm the butt of the beefers on the playground—and no matter how jaggedly I write, nevertheless when I get in the lab, next to Dr. Gozar, and we're sorting Pro-methea, Cecropia, and Polyphemus moth larvae, or we're mounting beetles and bugs on pins, I can feel an unusual grace flowing into my fingers, like an electric current. I'm transformed.
Mr. BROADBENT. Is there a connection—
BARRY RUDD. Yes. You asked my reaction to the news about the child buyer. All through my preparation of the report, even thought I was concentrating fiercely, like a horse racing with blinders on, I felt an underlying malaise, but at the same time a remnant of my earlier lift. My unnatural delight was mixed now with a slow sinking feeling. I finished my work and got ready for bed. The Monster was already tucked in: I have to sleep on half
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the rollaway with her. Momma turned the lights out, and I lay on my back and rubbed my eyes, and I saw a sort of glowing head, a ghost head. I knew it was a mere phosphene, from the rubbing, but I connected it with the child buyer; it seemed threatening. I read for a while with a flashlight under the covers and ate some dried apricots. I've been hit by science fiction lately. My favorite at the moment is James Mull's The Moon-Skaters, and somehow the tartness and roughness of the apricots is just right for science fiction. And—Mr. Broadbent, I know you're worrying about the relevance—underneath I had this growing feeling of oppositcs, joy and fear, partly stemming from the reading but partly not.
Mr. BROADBENT. I see.
BARRY RUDD. When I had grown tired of reading I cut off the flashlight and I lay on my back thinking about a girl in my class, about her thigh area just above her kneecap.
Mr. BROADBENT. Florence Renzulli?
BARRY RUDD. No, Mr. Broadbent. You're strict about relevance; she wasn't in any part of this. I don't like to give names here, so I'll just say it was another girl in my class. You see, Flattop and I had been talking about the stickleback, and I was wondering about applying certain elements of the ritual— something in the book I'd been reading triggered—
Senator SKYPACK. Smut, I knew it was smut. These paperbacks . . .
BARRY RUDD. —but then I got thinking about moving her skirt up, centimeter by centimeter, just to the top of her stocking—picturing Sunday clothes, I mean. Excuse centimeters; from the lab I carry the metric system over into much of my thinking.
Senator SKYPACK. Scandalous.
BARRY RUDD. Then suddenly I was thinking about the child buyer's proposition. The G-man had told Momma that the
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child buyer was hunting for geniuses. I thought of the refrain Dr. Gozar had put in my head: work! work! She was forever quoting the authorities. Flaubert: 'Genius, in the phrase of Buffon, is only long patience. Work/ Button's sentence actually was: 'La genie n'est autre chose qu'une grande aptitude a la patience. 1 Carlyle: 'Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains/ Michelangelo: 'If people knew how hard I work to get my mastery it would not seem so wonderful after all/ Padcrcw-ski: 'Before I was a genius I was a drudge/ I thought of going, being bought and going away to Arizona for the vague unclear experiment on me. I thought hard about it, because I habitually think the opposite of what I want in order to get my way. Then for some reason I thought about my grandfather; I wanted to make a dream about him.
Senator MANSFIELD. You wanted to make a dream?
BARRY RUDD. I have long believed I could make myself dream about the last person I thought about before falling off to sleep. I think of dreams as substances of light that are out in the room around me at night. The room is full of dreams, which possibly are tiny lights that come from the moon or stars. They come from the sky, the night makes them, and they get in the room, crowding around, and they sort of look at you, watching for an opening, and if you think about one of them, it can get in. I think of light as looking at you. A street lamp can see eve
rything that passes; a candle sees the flickering room; a match sees the end of a cigarette. I think of human eyes as giving light. Did you ever see a cat's eyes beside the road?
Mr. BROADBENT. For a boy with a scientific bent of mind—
BARRY RUDD. I know, I know. The cat's eyes reflect your headlights. A street lamp has no optic nerve. I fenow all that, but these arc holdovers from a very early age. Sometimes I have a strange feeling, almost a sensation of being on an escalator or perhaps a treadmill, or of slipping or gliding—from one age
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level to another. An adult thought one moment, a babyish thought the next.
Mr. BROADBENT. And did you dream about your grandfather?
BARRY RUDD. No, I'm often disappointed. I fell into a deep sleep, and the next thing, I woke up with a start—saw the light going across the ceiling when a car passed outside. I knew which way it was going. I figured that out by logic one night a couple of years ago, and then to verify my conclusion I propped a mirror in the window sill and saw that Yd been right. The opposite way. As I lay there I was hit, as if by a blow, by the thought of my father's wanting to sell me. Suddenly I had the feeling that he was the most august yet compassionate creature on earth—a gentle king. I loved him. I wanted him to teach me. I thought of Montaigne's father, educating his son with utmost delicacy and consideration, even going so far as to waken the boy each morning with instrumental music. I thought of Jeremy Bentham learning Latin at three and the Greek of Lily's Grammar at four and five on his father's knee. Coleridge, Schelling, Pascal, Goethe, Leibnitz—all systematically taught by their fathers. Then my thoughts began subtly to shift toward the notion of fathers' exploiting their sons to gratify ambition or avarice: Robert Peers father consciously determining that he would mold his son into another Pitt; Mozart's father putting his son's absolute pitch and extraordinary powers of improvisation on display as if the child were a puppet. I thought of Samuel Johnson saying that in order to avoid being put on show as a prodigy he used sometimes to 'run up a tree.' Don't mistake me. I don't put myself in a class with ... I aspire but I don't arrogate. ... It only helps to make my own feelings clear if I ...