Tom Bedlam

by George Hagen

  ONE AFTERNOON, in his consulting room, Tom heard Charity and Arthur having a bitter argument. Their shrill voices echoed across the garden, distracting him from his notes. He found Arthur playing beneath the dining table while Charity pounded away on the Bechstein, shaking the crockery and glassware. A new yellow canary hopped back and forth across its cage in sonic agitation. When Charity struck a wrong note, Arthur whistled the correct one, provoking a scream of outrage.

  “He's torturing me!” cried Charity, as she kicked the piano pedals.

  “Arthur, I'm trying to work; you must stop whatever you're doing…. What are you doing?” said his father.

  “Nothing,” murmured Arthur glumly, his ginger hair fanned upon the floor.

  Tom knelt beneath the table. The clothespin family was arranged before the boy. The father was wearing a white apron to administer tonic to one of the daughters, while the smallest one was playing a matchbox piano, makeshift keys painted on the rim with chalk and charcoal. A clothespin boy lay under a matchbox table, his little wire arms clutching the sides of his head.

  “Where are your grenadiers, Arthur?”

  “In my room.”

  “You'd have a lot more fun with them. Why don't you get them out?”

  Arthur did not move—it was the most defiant gesture he could muster. Suddenly the clothespins were scooped up. A moment later his father returned with the grenadiers and propped them in a row, their bright red uniforms reflecting on the waxed floor as the Queen's own guards must have appeared on a rainy morning at Buckingham Palace. The doctor's gesture seemed well-intentioned and kindly, but although the boy wanted his family back, he hadn't the will to contradict his father.

  Charity resumed her assault on a Bach prelude while Arthur repositioned the grenadiers so that the sergeant major could administer tonic to one of his men, while a private played a minuet on the matchbox piano; six more writhed beneath the table.

  Tom watched his son play on the floor. Suddenly, he saw pale Arthur Pigeon kneeling at his bedside at Hammer Hall on the morning that he had promised to meet Tom on the peak—the morning he had disappeared.

  Grimacing, Tom took the clothespin figures and threw them into the incineration pail that stood by the door of his consulting room. Immediately feeling a pang of shame, he wondered whether to fish them out. Poor Arthur, he was only playing. But then Tom recalled Arthur Pigeon, shaved to the scalp, taunted and ridiculed, and couldn't shut out the image of a body ravaged by a violent fall.

  Tom's jaw flexed as he wondered about his son's future at school. Arthur must fit in—we must all fit in, or we do not survive, Tom reminded himself. To stand out is to be betrayed by friends and enemies alike.

  Bitterly, Tom seized the incineration pail and tossed its contents onto the embers of the morning fire.

  ABOUT A WEEK LATER, Tom received a visit from his son in the consulting room. The little boy's hands hung by his sides; he bit his lower lip as he fixed his gaze upon his father's polished shoes. “Papa,” he said, “I want my old dolls back.”

  Tom paused to admire his son's courage, but he was not about to relent. “You're a big boy, Arthur,” he replied, “too big for dolls.”

  Arthur's mouth went slack. “Where are they?” he gasped.

  “Lost,” his father replied, and turned his back to his son, surprised by his own cowardice. He had uttered a lie as wretched as Bedlam's nonsense about lemon tarts.

  WHEN THE NEW SCHOOL term began and Arthur's sisters climbed aboard the tram to St. Ruth's, excited, talkative, each wearing a new dress to begin the year, he wept. “I'm all alone,” he told his mother.

  Though Lizzy offered to read to him, then proposed games and walks, nothing seemed to break his melancholy. When she brought out the box of soldiers, Arthur took one glance at them and began to weep.

  “Oh, Arthur,” Lizzy sighed. Casting a glance at the consulting room, where Tom was busy with a patient, she fetched her sewing box.

  Later in the afternoon, Tom saw Arthur playing with the grenadiers. Pleased, he knelt beside him and listened to the murmur of a child immersed in make-believe. But it was not soldier talk he heard: “There, there, little one, you can have your own piano lessons if you want…. Thank you, Mother…. Quiet now, it's time to eat your brussels sprouts. There once was a sprout named Jill, who made the entire family ill…”

  Tom drew nearer and saw that the grenadiers were wearing new uniforms. One had a skirt of yellowed muslin, another a red velvet gown. Two more were draped from collar to boots in flowing garments of cotton gauze.

  “Arthur? What's going on?”

  “Nothing,” replied the boy. “That's the mama, and those are the daughters.”

  “Arthur, you can't have girl soldiers.”

  A voice piped up from the cushions of the sofa. “Joan of Arc was a soldier.”

  Tom addressed the cushions directly. “Iris, she always wore a suit of armor.”

  The lump of cushions shifted. “She must have worn dresses sometimes.”

  Tom lowered his voice in an attempt to confine the conversation to the ears of his son. “Anyway, grenadiers shouldn't wear dresses.”

  “Yes, Papa,” came the earnest response.

  “What about the Mongol hordes?” said Iris. “They wore skirts.”

  “The Mongols were not heroes,” snapped her father.

  “They were to other Mongols,” Iris replied.

  “That's enough, Iris!”

  In deference to his father's fury, Arthur solemnly removed the soldiers' new clothes. But the difference he observed in his parents' sympathies fueled his growing conviction that he had no choice but to assume one character in his father's presence and another in his mother's, just as he had once pleased Charity as the baby Jesus and the Horvaths as a piglet.

  MARGARET'S EYES

  IN THE AFRICAN RAINY SEASON, WHEN THE DOWNPOURS WERE SWIFT and violent, the residents of Gantrytown emerged from their houses to find the geography altered. Islands of silt appeared in the middle of a thoroughfare. Streets were jammed by the detritus of a torrential rain— branches, huts, henhouses, and heaps of sodden vegetation. Landmark trees were wrenched from the earth, and houses were flattened like cards.

  The wetter months also brought malarial fever. The anopheles mosquito had only recently been identified as the carrier, and it flourished in such weather. Children were the most susceptible. The Chapels draped their beds in netting and tried to keep their children inside on those days when the air was still and sunless—the hardest time to keep a child in the stuffy confines of a house. The symptoms were familiar enough: lethargy, headaches, and recurring fever. In serious cases, delirium was the last stage before death. There was no effective treatment.

  A February rain brought the worst floods in ten years, but the topography of the Chapels' world was changed in an entirely unexpected way. Ever since the limerick incident, Iris had regarded her older sister with equal portions of envy and scorn. She witnessed every glance her sister received from the boys and, as she shared a bedroom with her, gave Margaret's physical development equal scrutiny. Watching Margaret dress one morning, Iris couldn't contain her surprise. “Gosh, Margaret, your breasts are huge!”

  “Oh, be quiet,” muttered her sister.

  “But, it's true. No wonder the boys stare at you. Do you think I'll get ones like yours?”

  Margaret didn't grant Iris the satisfaction of a reply. Now that she was sixteen, her face had her mother's high cheekbones and small mouth. It was reminiscent of one of the saints featured in the chapel at St. Ruth's. The nuns even asked her to play Mary in the Christmas Nativity play Thus blessed with a saintly face and a sinner's body, Margaret presented every boy on St. Peter's playing field with something new to dream about.

  Her bosom eclipsed her mother's by two sizes in late 1906, and her parents became concerned. They began to discuss their daughter's breasts as though they were a separate entity, with their own history and ambitions.

  “I don't underst
and where they came from,” said Lizzy. “Nobody in my family—”

  “Perhaps on my father's side,” Tom suggested.

  “You don't think they'll grow any bigger, do you?”

  “If they do, they'll have to pay rent,” the doctor replied. “Next they'll be wanting their own education.”

  “Shame, Tom,” chided his wife. “She's so self-conscious about them. I wish you wouldn't stare at them so.”

  “I don't!” protested the doctor. “They stare at me. She should train them to look in different directions.”

  His wife frowned.

  Tom was hardly laughing. He remembered his fantasies about Sissy; and while he could forgive the boys of St. Peter's (after all, they were boys), he spent most of the Christmas play wondering if the staff and half of the audience were wishing they were in the place of the Jesus statuette that Margaret held close to her breast.

  It was different for Iris; small and flat-chested at fourteen, she fully hoped to wake up one morning blessed with her sister's proportions. In the meantime, she watched the effect of Margaret's figure on the opposite sex with fascination. Peter Carnahan caught a cricket ball right between the eyes because he had been staring at Margaret's breasts during a game. The lump on his forehead swelled to the size and color of a plum and remained for a week. This inspired Iris to compose a poem. Since she wasn't allowed to recite it at home, she submitted it to the school periodical, St. Ruth's Weekender:

  Pete Carnahan got struck in the head today,

  Serves him right, for the boy was so cocky!

  It wasn't the batter that led him astray,

  But the sight of my sister at hockey,

  Some are as tiny as thimbles,

  But my sister's are bigger than cymbals.

  Even though Iris had protected herself by titling the poem “Margaret's Eyes,” everybody knew what it was about. The girls recited it at hockey matches. St. Ruth's had the lowest place in the league, but when Margaret's breasts became the unofficial school mascot, boys from St. Peter's began to turn up at the games. Soon both faculty and parents showed up to see what all the fuss was about.

  They were not disappointed. As cheers erupted whenever Margaret bounced up the field, the team began to play more aggressively, and in 1907 they reached the semifinals.

  Iris liked to think that her poem was responsible for more than a surge of morale at St. Ruth's. The St. Peter's boys' choir grew threefold simply for the privilege of being invited to St. Ruth's to sing Handel's “Hallelujah Chorus.” As all male eyes rested on Margaret, Father Johan-nesson remarked that he'd never seen such sublime exaltation on the faces of those young lads. Then the annual Shakespeare production was announced, and fistfights among prospective Romeos erupted when it was announced that Margaret would play Juliet.

  Lizzy wrote of these events to her sister. She hoped they might remind Eve of their own school days in Edinburgh and perhaps affirm their bond. “I'm not surprised by the boys,” she wrote, “but the sight of all of these openmouthed fathers with their eyes glued on Margaret is appalling!”

  Lizzy took her daughter aside to discuss her “gift.” “My sweet, boys and men may be counted on to behave like fools in the presence of a well-endowed woman. Believe little of what they say and none of what they promise.”

  If anyone was guilty of overestimating the power of Margaret's breasts, it was probably Margaret herself. She believed they were a barometer of lust, and if a boy's eyes strayed below her collar, she immediately judged him shallow. A more cunning girl might have exacted favors or tortured her admirers, but Margaret was looking for love; unfortunately, her breasts only hindered her capacity to trust any friendly boy.

  In time, the boys learned to moderate their stares. Some gathered in a contingent by the lamppost outside the Chapels' house in the evenings. They serenaded Margaret with sweet voices and three-part harmonies.

  Tom couldn't stand them. He refused to allow them to cross the no-man's-land between the garden fence and the house. Like Rapunzel, Margaret was compelled to accept tribute from a distance of sixty feet. She looked forward to the serenade, but wouldn't associate with the boys in person.

  “What the devil is wrong with them?” said Tom, watching from the curtains. “Have they nothing else to do?”

  “They're only boys,” said Lizzy to her husband.

  “Boys,” Iris echoed wistfully. She was beginning to feel differently about them now.

  A round of applause sounded as Margaret slipped outside to hear a rendition of the St. Peter's rugby song.

  This drew little Arthur to the window. He watched his sister sigh and shake her hair over her shoulders so that the moonlight could properly outline her figure. Each boy strutted, preened, and pecked at his friends with insults and broad gestures in an attempt to show Margaret that he was the fittest among them.

  Although he was only seven, Arthur recognized actors in a pantomime of desire. The last act of this nightly performance always brought Tom to the veranda, whereupon father and daughter argued until Margaret was banished to bed. Tom would remain where he was, hands on his hips, while Margaret's admirers dispersed in languid and unwilling steps.

  It was then that the Horvaths' bored parrot chose to repeat for Tom's sole benefit the rhyme it had heard all evening:

  Some are as tiny as thimbles,

  But my sister's are bigger than cymbals!

  LETTER FROM HOLLOWAY

  AUDREY'S LETTERS ALWAYS CONTAINED A RAY OF HOPE. TOM ADMIRED her spirit, for she was now in her seventeenth year of incarceration. Newgate had been closed down and razed. Her last five years had been spent in a new prison near London, named Holloway

  Dear Tom,

  I have had good news from Elsie; my son, Jonah, has joined the Australian Army. It is my dearest hope that he will find some sense of satisfaction as a soldier, more so, at least, than getting into scrapes for petty crime.

  Oscar has published a biography of General Kitchener, which, I understand, is selling well. It has been featured in the Weekly Standard, in serial form—the first time Oscar has been published in a newspaper in almost ten years. Perhaps you may even find a copy in Gantrytown.

  Poor Oscar! He visited me last week. He walked into the visitors' room, and was as startled by the inmates on either side of us as he was by his fallen sister.

  He and his wife make a reasonable living; they have a son now, but it is expensive in London. Most of all, he misses the urgency of writing for a newspaper and confesses that his biographies are sterile portraits of their subjects. His publisher demanded that he remove any mention of Kitchener's scorched-earth policy and all references to the Boer concentration camps, claiming that although people will happily read about scoundrels in the newspapers, they refuse to purchase bound volumes on the same subject.

  Bronson Mansworth died last month. His son, Geoffrey, claimed the first four pews at Westminster Abbey for his soldier friends, dignitaries, and his father's industrialist peers, while his closest relations, Penelope and Oscar, were placed far back in the cathedral, with the press, ironically.

  It seems that your old friend from Hammer Hall has not changed, Tom: Geoffrey is determined to claim his legacy, political and otherwise. He has contested his father's will, putting Penelope's inheritance in jeopardy.

  He claims that Oscar and Penelope have violated the terms of Bronson Mansworth's marriage agreement. You may recall that Oscar agreed to refrain from journalism to marry Penelope. Now, ten years after they received their dowry (with which they bought their house in Bloomsbury), Geoffrey claims that because Oscar's book was published in the pages of a newspaper, Penelope's right to a share of her father's fortune is forfeit.

  It seems, Tom, that the Limpkin name is a curse to all who bear it.

  At times like these, I count myself fortunate to be a ward of the state.

  Audrey

  ARTHUR'S GIFT

  “ARTHUR, IT IS TIME YOUR HAIR WAS CUT SHORT.”

  “Why?”

&
nbsp; “So you will resemble the other boys.”

  “I like my hair.”

  “The others will make fun of you,” his father warned.

  “I don't care,” the boy declared—a tacit acknowledgment that he had, in fact, been the butt of pranks. “If you mean the other boys to be more comfortable with me, I suppose I should cut my hair, but it won't do me any good. I'm different from them,” he said.

  “Of'course you're different,” his father replied. “We're all different! But don't you wish to be accepted as a friend, at least?”

  “Not really.”

  Tom threw up his hands and turned to his wife.

  “Arthur, there's nothing wrong with being different,” said Lizzy, “but it's nice to have a friend with whom you can share your thoughts.”

  “I have Iris and you, Margaret and Charity,” Arthur replied.

  At the dinner table, Arthur passed his time staging romances between his knife and fork or vendettas between the salt and pepper shakers. He sculpted the Alps with his mashed potatoes and the moon's surface on a slice of cheese. He talked to himself as he wrote in class, uttered muffled replies to rhetorical questions at the school's Friday mass, and seemed to cherish his solitude. Tom feared that the boy was becoming as eccentric as his namesake.

  ARTHUR'S FIRST REAL BULLY, however, was not a Mansworth or a Privot but a teacher—Mr. Willard Bench, the grammar and sports master at St. Peter's. Bench believed idleness and contemplation to be the devil's playground—a busy boy was a clean boy. If the pupils weren't running, kicking, or exercising, they were probably up to no good.