The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It is inborn, such cunning. It is as natural as trying to shield your face with your arms, doubling over to protect your belly and groin. It is purely instinct, this desperation to be spared harm.

  And so, I do not look at the other. The other is the one at whom I do not look. It is my cousin Travis from whom I cannot turn away because it is my cousin Travis who has grabbed hold of me and it is my cousin Travis who has the gun.

  3.

  In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term—peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.

  No I do not “believe” in dreams and would not bore or exasperate anyone with the idiocy of most dreams but this is not a dream exactly—for I am not asleep though I am paralyzed as in sleep.

  There is an explanation for why we are “paralyzed” in sleep: a part of the brain shuts down so that when we dream of running, for instance, we don’t actually run—we are prevented from moving our muscles, and waking ourselves.

  Except of course sleepwalkers do “walk”—and remain asleep.

  At such times I am very frightened and yet calm-seeming for it is crucial never to show fear. If there are witnesses who might laugh at you, or bring harm to you. As I knew my cousin Travis Reidl and the boy or young man who’d been with him—(whose face I never saw but whose voice I heard, and it was not a voice I recognized)—would laugh at me, and hurt me. And I was thinking If I don’t move I will not have to know if I am alive or not-alive. It is better not to move.

  It is a delicious paralysis like floating in water so icy-cold, there is no sensation at all.

  Until one of the children wakes me, pulling at my shoulder.

  “Mom-my! Mom-my!”—for children do not like to see their mother lying beneath bedcovers tense and tight as a clenched fist.

  “Mom, wake up”—my daughter Ellen cries in her sharp furious child-voice that pierces the deepest sleep.

  And so within seconds I am awake, and I am sitting up, and I am Mommy again. And I laugh at the children who appear frightened, to assure them that yes of course, Mommy is fine.

  It is the morning of our yearly trip to visit the children’s grandparents in Sparta, 350 miles away in upstate New York in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.

  4.

  Do you recall the gun, I was asked.

  And the answer was No—not the gun but the deafening gunshot, I recall.

  Not the gun (which I never saw clearly, my eyes were blinded with tears) but the consequences of the gunshot.

  In the Sparta Journal the handgun would be identified as a double-action .38 caliber Colt revolver. It was the property of Gordon McClelland of 46 Drumlin Avenue, Sparta, who’d had a homeowner’s permit for it issued several years before, in 1958.

  A homeowner’s permit means that the gun owner must keep his gun on the premises. It is not legal to remove the gun from the house, to carry it in a pocket or in a vehicle as a “concealed weapon.”

  Mr. McClelland also owned hunting guns—two deer rifles, a shotgun. These were locked in a cabinet in his home office that my cousin and his accomplice-friend could not open.

  When the gun went off close beside my head I could not think.

  I did not know what had happened—I did not know if I had been hit. I did not know if my cousin had knocked me down onto the floor—I’d been pushed, or shot.

  I did not know if anyone had been shot. I did not know if the shot had been deliberate or an accident.

  Twenty-six years later! No one asks me any longer but the truth is, I still do not know.

  5.

  Here is a surprise: the McClelland house is still standing at 46 Drumlin Avenue as if it were an ordinary house in which no one had died.

  This is not a pleasant surprise. It is a surprise that grips me each time I return to Sparta, like a claw.

  If I am with others, for instance my children, in this car, I never indicate that I am upset, or even distracted—usually I continue driving past 46 Drumlin without another glance.

  For why have I come here, when there is no need? Why?—my fourteen-year-old self might shout at me.

  “That house—an old teacher of mine used to live here . . .”

  I hear myself speak in a faltering voice more to myself than to my daughter in the passenger’s seat beside me, and to my son in the backseat.

  How strange, and how misleading. To refer to Mrs. McClelland as an old teacher. In fact, I remember Gladys McClelland as anything but old.

  Yet former seems too deliberate, too formal. In speaking to my children I speak an unadorned language which is the language of maternal affection. I don’t want to impress my children, or even to teach them vocabulary words—I want them to trust me.

  So they will think that their mother is someone like them, an adult but essentially a friend, whom they can trust as they can’t trust other adults.

  For I remember vividly, when I was a little girl, understanding that the loyalty of adults is to other adults, not to children. You dare not tell a parent your innermost thoughts. You dare not betray secrets.

  My daughter Ellen asks what kind of teacher was Mrs. McClelland.

  For a moment I am struck by was. I know that the McClellands moved away from Sparta a long time ago but I have no idea if they are still living—probably yes, since they were only just middle-aged in 1961.

  “‘What kind of teacher’?—a very good teacher. An excellent teacher. We all loved Mrs. McClelland . . .”

  “What did she teach, Mom?”

  “Mrs. McClelland taught social studies. And she was my ninth-grade homeroom teacher also.”

  Was. Impossible to avoid was.

  You might expect Ellen to ask something more—why did I love my ninth-grade teacher, what was so special about Mrs. McClelland, and what became of Mrs. McClelland—but she has lost interest; it is an effort for even a courteous eleven-year-old to care about a mother’s memory of an old teacher. In the backseat, eight-year-old Lanny is peering out the window at something that intrigues him, in the opposite direction, as indifferent to his mother’s chatter as if it were the droning of a radio voice.

  “She was—Mrs. McClelland—someone special. In my life . . .”

  I am gripping the steering wheel with both hands. I am staring at the dignified old Colonial with its soft-red aged brick looking just slightly weatherworn, and dark green shutters in need of repainting, and steep shingled roof with an antique weather vane at one of the peaks, the figure of a leaping deer. Has anything changed? Is this really the house? Each time I visit Sparta, each time I drive past this house, my senses are aroused as if with a whiplash to my bare back.

  Only you, Hanna. No one else.

  I don’t think that I need to tell you—do not bring anyone else to this house. Do not let anyone else inside.

  Of course strangers live at 46 Drumlin Avenue now. If I were to ask my mother who lives here, which I would never do, she would likely stare at me, and say, with a hurt, defensive little laugh, “Who lives there? I have no idea.”

  Within a few months of the shooting the McClellands moved out. At school it was known that Gladys McClelland could not bear to live in a house in which a “young person” had died.

  Do you promise, Hanna?

  Yes. I promise.

  At my parents’ house on Quarry Street in a very different neighborhood of smaller houses and smaller lots I turn my car into the familiar driveway with a flood of relief. But then the flood keeps coming, a rising pressure inside my head.

  The children rush from the car, eager to run into their grandparents’ house after the tedium of the long drive. But I am feeling too weak to move—leaning against the steering wheel weak-armed,
dazed. Waiting for the pressure in my brain to subside. Waiting for the sensation of terrifying fullness to subside.

  It had to be, what happened. There was no choice.

  “Hanna? Dear, is something wrong?”

  Someone has opened the car door, and is shaking me. My mother, leaning over me. Her anxious face is too near, like an unmoored sun. And behind her, my father looking grayer-haired than I recall.

  My parents are concerned that I’d turned into the driveway—braked the car—the children ran inside the house—but that I’d remained in the car.

  They’d hurried outside to see where I was and found me at the wheel—“Looking like you were asleep, but with your eyes open.”

  But I am all right now, I tell them. I am out of the car, and hugging my parents, and it is true, I am fully recovered from whatever it was that had gripped me fleetingly but terribly.

  “Hanna, so good to see you! Welcome home.”

  6.

  Helping out. Both my mother and I were proud of the fact that, during her husband’s hospitalization in Syracuse, I’d been asked to help out my teacher Mrs. McClelland.

  My responsibilities were to drop by the McClelland house once a day after school to bring in the mail and newspaper, to feed Mrs. McClelland’s cat and to water her plants as needed—“Of course I will pay you, Hanna.”

  When Mrs. McClelland told me what she would pay for each hour I spent in her house, I was stunned—nearly twice as much as babysitting rates.

  It was an emergency situation. The McClellands had not known that Mr. McClelland would require surgery so suddenly, and Mrs. McClelland would be away from Sparta for several days at least, staying in a hotel in Syracuse, near the University Medical Center fifty miles away. A substitute teacher would take her place. And Mrs. McClelland was hoping that I could help out.

  It was April 1961. I was fourteen years old and in ninth grade and in love with my homeroom and social studies teacher Mrs. McClelland who seemed often to favor me—at least, I was one of a number of students whom Mrs. McClelland seemed to particularly like.

  Gladys McClelland was a strikingly attractive woman of an indeterminate age—she might have been in her early forties but she seemed to us much younger, of a generation distinct from our mothers’ generation, as her clothing, hairstyle, intelligence and zestful personality set her apart from other teachers at our school. She wore her shoulder-length blond hair in a “­pageboy” — wavy, shiny, turned under; her face was glamorously made up, like a face on a fashion magazine cover; her shoes were high-heeled, and her stockings were sheer, often dark-tinted. Her girl students had memorized most of her clothing—cashmere sweaters, pleated skirts, tight-cinched belts; we knew her rings, jewelry; we knew several coats of which the most elegant was dark wool that fell nearly to her ankles, with a collar that might have been mink. Her figure wasn’t what one would call slender but rather “shapely”—hips, breasts. She reminded some of us of the Hollywood actress Jeanne Crain—a beautiful woman who was yet nice.

  It was known that Mrs. McClelland lived with her husband in a large, attractive house in Sparta’s most prestigious residential neighborhood. It was known that Mrs. McClelland’s husband was someone important—a World War II war hero, a retired army officer. He was a businessman, or a professional man—lawyer, banker. As Gladys McClelland resembled Jeanne Crain, Mr. McClelland resembled darkly handsome Robert Taylor.

  Why did we love Mrs. McClelland? She wasn’t an easy grader—she made us work—but she was sympathetic with us, and patient. She was often very funny. Her teaching manner was a combination of wit, humor, and seriousness; we laughed a good deal in Mrs. McClelland’s classes, though what we laughed at was difficult to explain or to repeat to others. Mrs. McClelland had a way—almost, it was flirtatious; certainly, it was affectionate—of calling upon students who were reluctant to volunteer answers, and initiating with even the shyest or most awkward a kind of dialogue; one day, I would learn that this was the Socratic method—questions following questions in rapid-fire succession.

  Mrs. McClelland’s philosophy was: we all knew much more than we knew that we knew. The teacher’s job was to draw such knowledge out of us—“Like poking through a grating with a big pronged fork, seeing what’s there and hauling it up.” (Was this one of Mrs. McClelland’s clever remarks? We laughed to hear it.)

  Boys were mesmerized by Mrs. McClelland, we knew. Some boys.

  Others, sulky older boys who disliked school and shrugged off poor grades, biding time until at the age of sixteen they could quit school forever, said things about Mrs. McClelland that were not so nice, we knew.

  By ninth grade a girl has been made to know that she is, in the eyes of (most) boys, her body. Tits, ass. And nastier words, some of us tried never to hear.

  (It was rumored that sometimes, these words were scrawled on Mrs. McClelland’s car in whitewash, or spray paint. And that as a consequence Mrs. McClelland was allowed to park her new-model yellow Buick in the area of the administrators’ parking places, visible from the office windows.)

  In Mrs. McClelland’s warmly musical voice our names acquired a special distinction. I would remember the morning in our homeroom when Mrs. McClelland lightly touched my shoulder saying, “Hanna, may I speak with you?”—indicating that I should follow her out into the corridor.

  I felt my face heat with blood, at this unexpected request. I felt the keenness with which my friends observed me, hurrying after Mrs. McClelland in high-heeled black leather shoes rimmed with ornamental red stitching.

  There was no more alarming prospect, being asked to speak with a teacher in the corridor out of earshot of classmates. Like hearing your name over the loudspeaker, the dreaded commandment Come at once to the main office.

  In such ways were hapless students informed of family emergencies, sudden deaths. Rarely such interruptions of routine brought good news.

  It was not like Mrs. McClelland to betray unease or edginess. Even now though she was clearly anxious she smiled at me, and spoke calmly to me; she knew that I felt uncomfortable being singled out for attention. She told me about the sudden “family emergency”—her husband had to have surgery in Syracuse the next morning.

  “It isn’t major surgery,” Mrs. McClelland said carefully. “Gordon will be all right. It’s just that—we weren’t prepared for—so suddenly—tomorrow morning at seven o’clock . . .”

  Could I help her out?—Mrs. McClelland was asking.

  Of course, I said Yes. I was touched that Gladys McClelland would select me for such a responsible task. Often in homeroom I assisted her in various small ways, passing out papers to classmates, watering and trimming her houseplants which grew profusely on the windowsills—spider plants, philodendron, cacti. When Mrs. McClelland sprained her ankle in a skiing accident, and came to school hobbling on crutches, I was one of those who helped her get around, carried things for her which she couldn’t easily carry for herself. Girls! Thanks so much. What would I do without you . . .

  Mrs. McClelland had swiped at her eyes, she’d been so moved. Some of us had brought her flowers for her homeroom desk: roses, carnations, and a Get Well card in the shape of a fluffy white cat.

  I knew that my mother would not disapprove of my “helping out” my teacher in her emergency. My mother was often jealous on my behalf when other people’s daughters seemed to be surpassing her daughter, and she was always eager to hear about my teachers’ interest in me as if such interest reflected well upon herself, who’d been born in rural Beechum County in a ramshackle farmhouse, and had dropped out of school in ninth grade.

  The McClellands lived only a few blocks from our house which was on a narrow street literally below Drumlin Avenue, winding along the edge of an ancient glacial hill. Often I baby­sat for neighbors, but I did not think that the McClellands had children.

  I was a quiet, diminutive girl for my age, who wore her sand-col
ored hair in a way that partly covered the left side of my face, to hide a birthmark on my cheek. The birthmark was of the size and hue of a small strawberry and had something of a strawberry’s texture—slightly raised, distinctive to the touch. To me, nothing was more defacing or ugly than this birthmark. As a young child I’d been tormented over the birthmark, mercilessly; even my friends had never let me entirely forget it. And even at fourteen I was sometimes singled out for mockery by crude boys. In any mirror my gaze moved involuntarily there—to check if the strawberry birthmark still existed, or had disappeared miraculously.

  Is it a sign from God? But—why?

  In my dreams even now, decades later, when the erasure of the old birthmark would make not the slightest difference in my life, still I find myself anxious to check my mirror reflection, staring into a cloudy glass as if my very life were at stake. Often in such dreams I am being harassed. Someone is shouting at me in derision, and laughing. But I am not able to see even my face in the dream mirror, let alone the little birthmark. Helplessly I think—How foolish is vanity. How futile.

  I remember myself as a plain girl of no particular distinction, except for the birthmark. Yet, photographs of me taken at this time show a moderately attractive girl—when smiling, I might have been called pretty. I’d felt unpopular, friendless—though in fact I had many friends in school, among them several of the most popular girls in my class. I’d been elected vice president of our eighth-grade class and would be again elected vice president of our junior class in high school. I was involved in numerous “activities” and was always an honors student—but high grades seemed to me a kind of embarrassment, the consequence of hard work as hard work seemed but the consequence of desperation.

  Nothing that I’d accomplished seemed of particular significance, since it had been accomplished by me.

  And so it was wonderful, that Mrs. McClelland liked me enough to entrust me with visiting her house while she was away. This was enormously thrilling to me, I could have wept with gratitude.