by Sarah Smith
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . .
It was March, when the snow is piled high on the railways. New Hampshire was cold. The Federal Hotel was closed for the season, its shutters tugging and groaning against each other in the gale. The rocks of the Little Spruce were slicked with ice, and the house rose above pines and barren fields, dark as granite, infernal. It was the time of dusk when window lights would have shone across the lake, across the fields, if anyone else had spent any part of winter in their summer houses; but all down the shore of the lake, for miles and miles, no light showed, nothing but the black-shrouded pines.
“I have come to see my patient.”
They had not expected him. They brought the child out. Sturdy, solemn, his hair still in a little boy’s short curls. He was dressed in deep black mourning, like his grandfather’s black broadcloth and the secretary’s black. There was a deep bruise on his cheek.
“The boy bruises easily.”
There were welts across the backs of both small hands.
“The boy requires discipline,” Jay French said.
William Knight said in a distant voice, “The boy will get his education.”
The two men had chosen the best doctor for Richard they could find—four hours away.
Richard did not complain. Children his age want sticky bandages over the slightest scrape or cut, but Richard, whose hands must have hurt terribly, simply looked off into the distance with a grown man’s reserve while Charlie touched them. There were other bruises on his small bony chest, some old and some newer, and old welts across the buttocks.
No more than the child did, did the old man notice how badly the boy was hurt. This was normal to them: to the man, and his secretary, and the child.
So many Saturdays, so many Sunday afternoons. Charlie came to visit his patient often. The old bruises faded and were replaced with fresh ones. The summer of 1885 came: Charlie took Richard fishing (this could happen only on Saturdays, because William Knight was strong on properly observing the Sabbath). Charlie took Richard on walks and taught him the names of trees and flowers. Charlie showed Richard the families of animals around his lake: ducks, beavers, owls, and foxes. The autumn came and the leaves fell.
“My parents are in Heaven. They don’t take an interest in me if I disobey.”
“Even in Heaven, those who love us look out for us. Do you pray for their souls and ask their intercession?”
The leaves fell and the snow fell. Richard’s room had no fireplace. Charlie came as often as he could, knowing that while he was with Richard, the boy would be warm. They played endless games of checkers and chess in the cheerless sitting room.
“I am in mourning for my corrupt nature. I am a child of sin,” the little boy said. “Grandpapa tells me so. My parents weren’t married when I was conceived, and that’s a sin. I must work much harder than other boys to subdue my natural temper to the discipline of Christ. Redemption is barely possible for me.”
Is love a matter of taking time? Charlie Adair chose to spend more time in New Hampshire with Richard, rather than keep up the constant work in Boston that success demanded. He became less visible, taking his coloration from Richard himself, who depended on being nearly invisible. He would not have called it love. It was so much less than what he should have done.
In the spring they hunted frogs in the marshes while the iris bloomed. Richard would catch frogs, hold them for a while as if it were important to him to protect them, then let them go.
“Doctor Charlie, is Grandpapa right about religion? Christ forgives more than Grandpapa does. Christ would not whip me.”
William Knight got worse.
A five-year-old will cringe from a blow; a seven-year-old will fight it. Charlie taught Richard that God was love, not discipline without relief. He would have done better to say nothing, because he taught the child to understand that what his grandfather was doing was not love. William, who thought that love disciplined the soul, caned harder. Just past Richard’s seventh birthday, he caned Richard into unconsciousness for the first time; two months later, Richard ran away as far as the next town, and when he was caught, William handcuffed the boy to his iron bed and beat him with a fireplace poker.
For the first time, Charlie realized that William might kill Richard.
He spoke to the man. “You should send the boy to a good school. If he is difficult, they will reform him.”
“You don’t agree with my methods, Dr. Adair. But I’d send no boy of mine to school. Would they teach my boy what I’m teaching him? Deportment, eh? Business? Languages? My boy will run rings around them all. My boy’s sturdy, he can hike as long as I can. Will they toughen him? Will they teach him my company? Will they do the most important thing for him, will they look after his soul?”
Richard slept curled up because the pain was too great for him to straighten out. All the skin was discolored over his stomach and liver and spleen, as if he had bled internally. His skin was grey and dusty-looking. But he sat at his little desk, by the side of his grandfather’s big desk, sitting upright because if he did not he would be punished.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . .
God, how could such things be? How could he hate a man so?
In dismay, Charlie Adair’s well-connected confessor sent him to Father Peter O’Connell, the South End priest. In Father O’Connell’s turbulent parish, the confession boxes smelled like urine, cabbage, and potatoes; and Charlie Adair sat in the dusty, malodorous dark, feeling like a failure for the first time in his life. This was the kind of Catholicism he didn’t want to know about.
“The man will kill his grandson, I know it. He has great wealth. I don’t want this job. Why did the grandfather choose me?”
Father Peter’s answer came through the screen between them, tired and ordinary words charged with loving.
“God chose you to prevent the child’s death and save the man’s soul.”
Father Peter and Charlie Adair sat up in the kitchen of the parish house, drinking tea laced with whiskey, and talked about what Adair could do.
“You’ll have no luck with the police. When it’s a drunken Irish washerwoman, you’ve a chance of getting the boy away legally; but a man with money? Nothin’ like this ever happens to rich children.”
That was why Charlie had his practice among rich children.
“Is there anyone the boy can go to?” Father Peter asked.
“There’s an uncle.”
“Talk to him. Come to see me again, day or night.”
Charlie traced the itinerant peddler, Gilbert Knight, to a lodging house down by Falmouth. Gilbert Knight was a reed-thin, nervous man with a droopy mustache and glasses, happy only in the company of his horse and cart. Still, he understood, though it was only with a kind of intellectual, unbelieving, guilty understanding. “Father wasn’t like this when we boys were young,” he kept saying over and over.
Gilbert did not know what to do. But he would do what he could. He would certainly take in Richard. “Whatever I can do,” he kept repeating. “Here is a book for him. Tell him I love him.”
Charlie wasn’t sure that Gilbert was the right man until he read the first lines of the book, which was The Coral Island. “Roving has always been, and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of my heart, the very sunshine of my existence.” Gilbert understood too that they needed to get the boy away. In his own way he had passed Richard a lifeline.
The summer came again. Pirate and adventure books were popular then, and Charlie passed one after another from Gilbert to Richard, who read them somehow in the no-leisure of his regimented life, as if they were promises of escape. Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Through the Looking-Glass, books too immoral, fantastic, unsuitable for William Knight’s heir. The little boy did not run much that summer; he was pale and sat too often rigid in his chair, sweating with pain. Internal injuries, healing too slowly, perhaps not healing at all.
How to get the boy away from William? And how to make
sure that, once Gilbert had Richard, William wouldn’t get him back? That would be the end of Richard’s life.
“I will change my name,” Gilbert wrote, “go with Richard to a place where no one can know us.” They talked about the West, even about foreign countries. Father Peter corresponded with a bookseller in Dublin. Charlie told Richard little about this, not wanting to get the boy’s hopes up or betray something.
“Talk to the grandfather,” urged Father Peter, and Charlie talked to William Knight about his soul. Somewhere inside, he knew, the man wanted his grandson alive. It was faith alone that kept that knowledge clear.
“Do you deny that the Bible says that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, eh? Unto the third and fourth generation? Will indulgence root out those sins? The lazy child is beaten and becomes industrious. The stubborn child is beaten and becomes respectful. The love of the flesh is strong in this child, as it was in his father. But he shall be strong to combat it!—strong to survive!—and I’ll have no weak-minded Catholic doctrine interfering in my power to make it so. You will cease to bother me or mine with your religion, Sir, or I’ll make sure that you bother no others.”
In some parts of Boston, Catholics were still supposed to be under the direct orders of their priests, who were in communication with the Pope, and the Pope in league with the Devil. If Charlie got the reputation of a Catholic who tried to make more Catholics, he would never work among children again.
“The boy isn’t well,” he ventured.
“You are his doctor, Sir! Your incompetence shall not be blamed on me.”
Charlie talked privately with Jay French. His resemblance to William Knight seemed more marked, the look of a man who spent too much time in discipline.
“Surely you know what your employer is doing.”
Your father is killing your nephew, he thought but would not say.
“It’s my business to know everything, as a servant of the household.” Jay French’s pale, mocking eyes were turned up to Charlie. They were the same clear grey as Richard’s, touched with the same unidentifiable color. “It is also my business, Sir, to do exactly as I am told.”
Then Richard found Washington, his dog.
August sixth, 1887, was a hot Saturday, a terrible day. Both William Knight and Jay French had been away for the week, something almost unprecedented; for once Richard was safe, alone with the servants, and unforgivably the doctor stayed down in Boston. So there was no one to tell Richard that it was wise not to play hooky and go wandering in the woods, that a little lost black-and-white puppy should not be fed or given water, should certainly not sleep in that cheerless room where Richard had spent four years. So when Charlie Adair came up to visit that Saturday afternoon, there was Richard, playing in the rose garden with a dog named Washington.
Charlie had brought a camera, training William to the idea that he had become an amateur photographer, as everyone else was doing that summer of 1887. He had hoped to get some evidence of Richard’s condition on film, but Richard was unmarked that day, Richard was playing with the dog Washington; and Charlie Adair took shots of a puppy chasing a stick, a little boy throwing it, a little boy sitting in the rose garden, his arms around a black-and-white dog. And Charlie had just put the camera back in his doctor’s bag, and the man and the boy were about to go inside for lemonade, when William Knight and Jay French arrived.
William Knight told Richard to hold the dog, and Richard picked up the dog and held him in his arms, the little dog squirming because Richard must have held him so tight. Richard must have thought that maybe it would all be all right, that his grandfather might let him keep the dog after all. William said something to Jay French, who nodded and went to find something. Charlie stood by Richard’s side, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. William Knight looked into them and through them with his staring black eyes, his long white hair wild around his collar and his hand clasped white around the knob of his lead-weighted cane. No one said anything until Jay French came back. He had in his hands a short length of thin, flexible rope.
And a gun.
There was a stake in the ground, a gardener’s stake. Jay French tied one end of the rope to the stake. He took the dog. He tied the other end of the rope around the dog’s neck. “Shorter,” said William Knight. The dog tried to wriggle out of the rope leash. He was scrabbling frantically back along the path toward Richard. William Knight raised his cane and with one efficient blow broke the dog’s back. The dog began crying, howling, the only sound in the still garden. His back legs didn’t move now, but the front ones were still scrabbling, trying to drag himself along the path. His neck was pulled back by the rope. He moved in a circle leaving a trail of blood. Richard had one hand half forward, as if he were saying, “Here, boy,” but so far inside himself that there was no sound and no movement of the lips, only the half-gesture of one hand. The gun Jay held was a little Civil War rat pistol, a six-shot revolver. Jay rotated the cylinder, making sure there was a bullet in each chamber. Charlie heard the click as the cylinder rotated. Jay gave the gun to William. William gave the gun to Richard.
“You didn’t have permission to have a dog. Put it out of its misery.”
Charlie knew what Richard was going to do; he could feel it in the way the muscles of the boy’s arm tensed to rise, with the gun, toward his grandfather’s face. Charlie clamped his hand on Richard’s shoulder, pushing it down, holding it down, until the boy’s muscles surrendered their will. “Richard, no,” he murmured. The boy looked up at him, once only, and Charlie only looked back, sending his whole heart along the look so that the boy would not be alone. Richard turned back toward the dog. Richard held both arms out in front of him, with the pistol held in both hands. He sighted down the barrel. He must have realized that he didn’t know what he was doing, because he walked slowly forward until he was very close to Washington, and he knelt down and held the pistol close behind the dog’s ear. Then Richard pulled the trigger. The little dog’s front legs scrabbled once and he shuddered and died on the path; blood came out of his nostrils. Richard put down the gun. He knelt down on the path with both arms around the dog, and petted the dog’s back, and the back of his head, and his ears, and lay with his cheek against the dog’s body, without moving, eyes open, like a child on a monument. William raised his cane. Charlie Adair stepped between him and Richard, shielding the boy with his body.
“No,” he said.
He felt the cane above him; it held for a long time. Gilbert and I have waited too long, he thought. The cane slowly descended, just clipping his shoulder; not hurting, just promising.
“Richard, go to your room. Dr. Adair, you will stay to dinner.”
Charlie Adair pushed Richard down the path. Stay in your room, he thought at him. Lock the door: remembering then that Richard’s room locked only from the outside. He started off down the path after Richard.
“Dr. Adair, you will stay here.”
William Knight and Jay French moved slowly off down the path, William leaning on his cane, saying something in a low voice to Jay, who nodded. Charlie Adair sat motionless in a garden seat with a view of the rose garden and the lake.
Eventually the flies began to buzz around the little dog’s muzzle and eyes. Charlie got a spade from the garden outbuildings and buried Washington in a spot down by the barn, remembering where it was so he could tell Richard, covering it over so that William wouldn’t find it. He was afraid of what the man would do. He thought of William Knight digging the body up and using it in some way against Richard. William would do that.
But William wasn’t going to frighten Richard with the soil-covered body of his little dog; not now; he was going to do what he had done so often before.
He was going to beat Richard for disobedience.
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have committed murder.
In his heart he had already done it.
Only Grace could save Charlie now.
And only Charlie could save Richard.<
br />
Sanity
Late the next morning, viciously hung over, Reisden came down to breakfast. Harry was in the dining room, up not much earlier than he; Perdita had talked with him late last night. Reisden poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down, narrowing his eyes against the sun glaring off the tablecloth. Harry ostentatiously continued to read the paper.
It was quiet. Of course: no piano music, not from here, not over the water from the Clinic. Never again, until Harry told Perdita she could play.
I can take you, he told Harry silently. I’m Richard. Richard owns everything you thought you had. Richard has Gilbert. Give your Perdita back her music and you can have all of it. G-d knows I don’t want it.
Adair had been right: One didn’t want the money, but the power.
Leaving his coffee, he went outside. Gilbert had cleared away the broken glass from the porch but had missed a shard by the stair riser. Reisden picked it up, a vicious little dagger of glass. He felt as if he wanted to cut himself, to feel a placid, simple emotion like pain. He had been in this state before; he was afraid of it.
Gilbert came up from the garden. He smiled tentatively at his Richard; Reisden handed him the bit of glass. “I'm going to take the auto out for a while.”
He drove a little too fast over the Knights’ narrow bridge, too fast by far over the twisting unpaved roads outside town. A road he took at random came out at the top of the hills north of the lake. He was far enough away to cover with his hand the view of everything from Island Hill to the railroad station. To the south he could see across hazy green hills the view toward Boston and New York.
If I were truly sane I would drive to New York now. Everywhere but here I can be Alexander Reisden.
And what good would that do him? If being Alexander Reisden had worked, he wouldn’t be here.
Did he in the least want to become Richard? If he decided to try it there would be a long and boring fight, which he had little chance of winning. What would he do it for? Money he had enough of, he didn’t need multiple millions and a full-time staff to manage it. He wouldn’t have children or a wife to leave it to.