by Bruce Duffy
As for his queer high-pitched laugh and the way he squirmed in his seat during the interview — well, Russell did notice this, but he didn’t find it especially alarming. The boy did seem a little shy around the other children, but this wasn’t so unusual either, especially for a heavy boy with a game foot. Still, the foot wasn’t all that severe, and Mrs. Peck did not fail to add that Rabie had two extra pairs of special built-up shoes, as well as a third pair specially made for athletics. She was ecstatic when Russell said, rather officially, that they would want to put the boy on a diet, providing, of course, that they decided to take him. Why, I agree with you one hundred percent! said Mrs. Peck. Then, unable to contain herself, she said how much she admired Marriage and Morals and his thought-provoking articles. Say what you will, Mr. Russell, she added impulsively, forward-looking Southerners are listening to you.
Wonderful! said Russell. Perhaps in that case they’ll enact an anti-lynching law. That would certainly be very forward looking.
Forward looking, agreed Mrs. Peck carefully, but not very likely, I’m afraid.
They talked for a while about the South and the Scottsboro lynching case. Then Dora met with Mrs. Peck and the boy, but she was feeling unwell again and, after a few minutes, had to excuse herself. Russell, meanwhile, was too preoccupied with fantasies of Lily to spend much time weighing the decision. And really, Russell didn’t have deep feelings either way about the boy. Actually, he thought he was being rather coldly practical about the matter. Summer was coming, and they would be short of students and short of money. The truth was, he was too strapped to be turning down a paying prospect.
Rabe cried when his mother kissed him good-bye. Mrs. Price also kissed the boy — pointed a warning finger at him, too. Later, Russell would find himself thinking about Mrs. Price, remembering how much more refined she seemed than her mistress, as if it had fallen on her to care for tarnished custom in the way she did the family silver. Then again, the family silver was probably in hock, because two weeks later Mrs. Peck’s London bank returned her check for insufficient funds.
For a couple of weeks, the boy did a fairly good job of fooling everyone — everyone, that is, except Miss Marmer.
His bed-wetting was the first sign. Rabe had been there three days before it was discovered, but once discovered, it quickly worsened with the stress of discovery and the taunts from the other children. And soon there were other signs: the anger and manipulativeness, the fibs, fantasies and implausible stories.
Almost from the first, Miss Marmer felt there was something not right about him.
I’ll say it again, she said out of the blue one night when she and Russell were making love, I think you’ve made a terrible mistake with that boy.
And I think you’re being typically hasty, said the headmaster, undulating over her.
Au contraire, she insisted. You’re the hasty one — as usual. Slow down!
She could be acerbic and a know-it-all, Miss Marmer. Whatever her deficiencies in dealing with adults, though, she did know children. But Rabe wasn’t the issue here; what Miss Marmer was really miffed about, Russell saw, was his growing preoccupation with the girl. Not that Miss Marmer ever would have overtly expressed jealousy, let alone emotional need. She was far too proud and independent for that. From the start, Miss Marmer had said that she knew there could be nothing enduring between them, and that that was exactly how she wanted it. Hadn’t she told him that she shuddered at the thought of spending a weekend alone with him — with any man? She would feel as if she were suffocating.
But if Miss Marmer was not the marrying kind, neither was she, at thirty-eight, a celibate spinster. She loved sex, and by her account had had many affairs. She said she preferred being a mistress, which seemed so much more sexy and knowing, so much less claustrophobic than being some man’s “cow.” It seemed to Russell that being a mistress — a temptress — better fit Miss Marmer’s exaggerated romantic image of herself. No one knew what she really felt, she seemed to say, implying that within her small bosom there welled a vast gulf of solitude and great unknown passions that she would carry to her grave without ever divulging to anyone, especially a man. She adored the gush of opera. She was Madame Butterfly, she was Carmen and Isolde. She likewise adored the so terribly apt poems of that literary lioness Edna St. Vincent Millay. And, perversely, like many intensely private people, Miss Marmer was prone, in spite of herself, to say some queasily revealing things. Entering her claustrophobic, candlelit room late one night, Russell found her reclining in a long negligee with bowed sleeves, reading Poe’s “Ligeia.” Oh, why did Poe, such genius, have to die so wretchedly, in a gutter? she asked rhetorically. Then, with a queer, self-satisfied smirk, she closed the book, confidently saying, I could have saved him.
For close to a year now, it had been almost perfect. Dora looked the other way and the solitary, faintly sibylline Miss Marmer asked only that he be punctual and adagio, then andante, then presto! Also, that he bite her rear end. Yes, Higgins aside, it had been rather all right until that girl had come along.
The boy, meanwhile, was exhibiting more disturbing signs. For instance, there was the way he would bite his arm when he was excited, gnawing it and shaking it like a flipper and laughing with wild glee. Then there was the way he liked to talk about death, especially gruesome death — fires, automobile wrecks, dismemberments and the like.
On the other hand, Rabe genuinely craved affection, and he was no fool in knowing where to seek it: once they put him on his diet, he attached himself like a barnacle to the cook, Mrs. Bride.
Mrs. Bride told Russell that she liked the boy, but there was an incident with him one day that she said had certainly made her wonder if the poor lad was not, well, troubled a bit. It happened in the kitchen. Watching Mrs. Bride sharpen her knives, Rabe asked if he might test the blade on his thumb the way she did.
I should have known better than to give it to him, Mrs. Bride told Russell. Oh, he was just aquiverin' with excitement, you know, like — like a dog about to get his supper.
Finally, reluctantly, well-meaning Mrs. Bride gave in, but for all her warnings, he immediately — and she thought purposely — drew the blade across his thumb. It cut me, it cut me! he squealed. OWWWwwwww … It was not a serious cut, but Mrs. Bride remembered how his eyes gorged at the bright beads of blood, then how he stared at her, almost drunkenly, as if the cut symbolized some special bond between them. Nor could she forget how he had thrust the thumb in his mouth, mournfully sucking it like a sour candy, before he jerked his head around to gnaw at his other arm, which had begun flopping uncontrollably. Well, sir, said Mrs. Bride, concluding her tale to the headmaster. I told him to stop — oh, I scolded him, I did. Well, I ran to fetch the gauze. It was awful. When I got back, his poor arm was covered with red teeth marks. I didn’t know what to think, sir. I thought it must be the pain.
Mrs. Bride told Russell this only after several other incidents had surfaced. One day a teacher had found Rabe in the garden, sticking pins into slugs and singeing them with matches before melting them with salt into bubbling pools of mucous. To the now seasoned headmaster, this cruel behavior, though certainly disturbing, was hardly unprecedented. Russell prided himself on his ability to talk — and listen — to children. He took the boy into his office and asked him why he had tortured the slugs and what he was angry about. After all, Russell said, trying to catch the boy’s downcast eyes, one didn’t torment innocent creatures because one was happy. There were tears. The boy said he was sorry. He said he was mad at his mother for leaving him, said he was mad about his diet and all the teasing. This much was true. The boy also gave his solemn word that he would come speak to the headmaster if he felt such impulses again. Russell was no sentimentalist about children or the powers of a good old-fashioned talk, but he guardedly thought the session might have done some good. Yes, he thought, with work the boy might turn out all right.
But that good feeling quickly evaporated as the bed-wetting continued, along with the ta
ntrums, fighting and destructive behavior. Then a week later, there was real cause for alarm: one of the smaller boys ran in hysterically one afternoon, saying that Rabe had held him captive for an hour in the bushes as his “nigger slave,” jabbing at him with a sharpened weed fork, forcing him to eat weeds and dirt and threatening to kill him if he told anybody.
Of course Rabe strenuously denied the story, just as he later denied the fire in the shed — that is, until two girls came forth and said they had seen him in there with a cigarette, giggling and showing off as he puffed away. Among the staff there had been considerable debate about what to do with the boy. Professional pride was involved. Beacon Hill was not a school to give up easily on a child, but Rabe soon persuaded them otherwise. The problem now was Mrs. Peck. She seemed to have disappeared. Russell had hired a detective to track her down, but the detective wasn’t having much luck either. Three days before, he had sent Russell the following telegram:
TO: Mr. B. Russell STOP
FROM: A. N. Pip
RE: MRs. Peck STOP
1. Peck’s imports belly-upSTOP
2. Boy’s Farther a fugitive — in Bolivia, biGamy and morals chargesSTOP
3. Boy’s legal guardian, Mrs. Peck’s mother, a senile lOOney in church HomeSTOP
4. Miss March ran school for DEAF STOP Lives at the Home w/old lady Peck STOP
5. RE: Relatives taking the boy STOP Not on yr. life STOP
6. Request yr. further instructs & prompt remit of $250 bal before proceed further STOP
Beft Regards
DAVIS INVESTIGATIONS
A Modest Proposal
IN THE AFTERMATH of Rabe’s latest scourge, the Beacon Hill disaster detail was hard at work. The upstairs resounded with the slap of mops and the bang of pails. Russell had one group bailing, another watching Rabe and still another making inquiries into institutions that might take him — and fast. Russell had a hundred things to do, but now he saw it was nearing 3:30. Wittgenstein and the Moores were due at the station in thirty minutes.
Russell was grateful for an excuse to get out of the house. Finding Miss Marmer, he said with his usual daytime formality, Miss Marmer, I have to pick up my guests, and Dora is feeling ill. Would you mind terribly taking over?
But Miss Marmer wasn’t having this. Don’t you think you ought to stay here? she asked. Why don’t you send someone who’s not so busy to fetch them? Then, as matter-of-factly as she could, she added, Lily. Lily might go.
The school’s egalitarian principles notwithstanding, Miss Marmer was a great believer in the virtues of seniority and dues paying, especially where the Belgian girl was concerned. Lily was pliant and young, and with good cause she feared the brittle Miss Marmer, who was a stickler about what she broadly called “professionalism.” Russell had warned Miss Marmer several times not to be ordering the girl about; for that matter, Russell had told Miss Marmer several times not to be telling him what to do. Still, he saw that his aide-de-camp was right: it wasn’t at all a good time for him to be leaving. Mindful of his male sensitivities in this respect, Miss Marmer was careful then to soften her tone, saying in the soothing voice of an efficient secretary, You’re busy now. I understand. I can tell her for you.
No, he said pointedly. I’ll tell her. You stay here.
And on second thought, Russell rather liked the idea of sending Lily. He felt her attractive presence would express something of himself, of the power and dynamism of a man mostly surrounded by women. But of course, on a more practical level, it was an excuse to talk to Lily. Russell needed an excuse now.
Miss Marmer was not the first teacher whom Russell had slept with, not by a long shot. Among his staff, Russell was notorious for making quick and startlingly frank advances to the new teachers. Successful advances, too: it was a point of considerable pride to him that, with the exception of two or three women (who had left the school soon after), all had readily — and, he thought, happily — accepted his attentions.
Miss Marmer knew this, of course, and she knew, as Dora did, that it would be only a matter of time before he approached the girl. Here Miss Marmer was caught between what she regarded as her sovereign duties as the most senior teacher — duties that called for professionalism and objectivity — and those instincts that had once made her such a formidable competitor in ladies' lawn tennis. At the same time, Miss Marmer was objective about herself. She readily acknowledged that she was plain. She said this the very first time Russell had approached her a year ago. It happened one day when they were alone in his office, arguing about what to do with a certain child. There had always been a certain tension between them. So that day Russell told her that he believed the tension was sexual, and then, like a doctor writing out a prescription, he said that, to reduce this tension, they ought to sleep together. He wasn’t self-conscious in the least about it. How could he spread the light of sexual freedom if he did not first expunge these tensions from his own life and those around him?
By Beacon Hill standards, Miss Marmer was a bit strait-laced, and he thought (and even faintly hoped) that she would be shocked. But instead Miss Marmer managed to shock him. Standing up and smoothing her hands over her blouse and skirt, she turned, so he could get a better look, and said matter-of-factly, like a job applicant, Well, I am pretty good in the sack, whether or not you know it. Oh, I know my face is nothing special, but at least I was blessed with a pretty good figure — don’t you agree?
Her figure was decent enough, especially her legs, but he came to realize that she had rather a thing about it. I know I haven’t much up top but … what do you think of my rump? she would ask before lovemaking, hefting it in her hands for his scrutiny. Critical, detached, apprehensive, she was like a woman trying on clothes, holding her body up to herself like an old dress and, with him the mirror, preemptively pointing out her flaws before he had a chance. During sex, it excited her to have him grab at her and praise her body, and she craved this reassurance all the more when the new teacher arrived. Again and again, she would say to him about the girl, Isn’t she pretty? Don’t you think she’s pretty? searching his face for any sign that he thought the girl was more than pretty or, conversely, that she, Miss Marmer, was the plainer in his eyes for the girl’s beauty.
Miss Marmer always took it upon herself to orient new teachers, meaning, implicitly, to tell them what was what and who was boss. She liked to think that she was warm and approachable, though with adults — and especially with rival women — she was neither, being more the Girl Guide leader, trying to uphold a code with which she was at once unfamiliar and profoundly uncomfortable. My door is always open, she liked to tell the newcomer, sounding, for that, a bit forlorn since no one had ever taken her invitation.
Miss Marmer gave Lily the obligatory tour. And she did her duty, telling the girl, as though describing the house ghost, not to be shocked if the headmaster made a pass at her. Miss Marmer made it clear, from her tone, that this was an eccentricity to be humored and fended off — certainly not to be accepted. What Miss Marmer did not know was that the other teachers had already given Lily the lowdown on the headmaster and the arrangement he had with his most senior teacher, whom they waved off as a self-important twit, though they did admit she was good with the children. Derisive, gossipy, all holed up together in a room, they had given Miss Marmer a good hiding, calling her Mother Superior and Miss Glorious Excelsior.
Russell, meanwhile, was on tenterhooks, wondering when to make his plea before the girl. He couldn’t read her. She seemed so innocent, and such a prize, that he felt he had to exercise extreme caution. He tortured himself for two weeks before he finally called her into his office one morning.
Sensing what was coming, Lily was skittish. Russell paid no attention. He interpreted this as mere shyness, perhaps even the flush of anticipation. As always at such times, he came straight to the point. He said that he liked and admired her, and that, though he knew he was not as young or desirable as he once had been, he was a vigorous lover who had much to o
ffer a girl her age in the way of worldly wisdom and friendship. It was a very nice, even touching, little speech, and she listened carefully. God, but she was a beauty! Her knees were pressed together and her toes were slightly turned in like some ungainly girl’s, her breasts huddled protectively between her arms and that randy hay smell wafting off her. His old heart was pounding and his hands were clammy, but he pressed on, telling her how as he grew older he found that the only way he could delve into the psyche of a woman — to really know her in the deepest soul sense — was to sleep with her.
She could not have doubted his sincerity in telling her this. He was not old, he seemed to be saying. The mind was eternally young. There was no shame but in dishonesty, he said, nor was there virtue in celibacy. On the contrary, he said as if he had mounted a public podium, prolonged celibacy was harmful for anyone working around children — witness the Victorians and the sadistic, prurient impulses rampant in the public schools, not to mention the fearful legacy of the various celibate church orders. Russell explained these things with the same rapt and passionate plausibility with which he would have explained asteroids or Kant or the need for world disarmament — as a beautiful and time-proven fact of human existence that he had, as it were, identified like a curious shell he had found on an eternal beach. He was honest. In response to her puzzled, somewhat suspect gaze, he acknowledged that this view presented some problems. Certainly, it did not account for how he might ever get to know a woman whom he did not find physically desirable. Nor did it explain why — Socrates and the Greeks notwithstanding — he did not apply the same standard to men.
Russell freely admitted these problems. It was terrifically hard, he seemed to be saying. The times were so new. She had to understand that he was still pioneering this new life, trying to hammer down provisional solutions to these age-old problems until better solutions came along. And then he also told her, lest she think him a humbug, that he and Dora had an understanding. He quickly added that he certainly did not — and could not — expect fidelity from a girl her age. Yes, he said, he would be quite content to share her with younger men, thinking to himself that here again he was being exceedingly generous and realistic.