Was_a novel

by Geoff Ryman

  In summer the corn came up and they would lie down between the rows. Henry brought a sack along for her to lie on. So the dirt wouldn’t show, and she would look away from his face and up at the underside of the corn and see the fluted ridges of its leaves, the dance of the low afternoon sun through them. The hiss and rattle of the wind in the corn seemed to call her name.

  Sometimes he would call her back. He would try to make her speak. She couldn’t even hear what he said. You stink, Henry, she thought. You got wrinkles all over. You farmer. You stink like a hog.

  “Do you love me, Dorothy?” he asked her.

  “Course I do,” she told him.

  Manhattan, Kansas

  1882

  In a show of rebellion, Adolf decided to run away from home. Somehow Alois learned of these plans and locked the boy upstairs. During the night, Adolf tried to squeeze through the barred window. He couldn’t quite make it, so took off his clothes. As he was wriggling his way to freedom, he heard his father’s footsteps on the stairs and hastily withdrew, draping his nakedness with a tablecloth. This time Alois did not punish him with a whipping. Instead, he burst into laughter and shouted to Klara to come up and look at the “toga boy.” The ridicule hurt Adolf more than any switch, and it took him, he confided to Frau Hanfstaengl, “a long time to get over the episode.”

  Years later he told one of his secretaries that he had read in an adventure novel that it was proof of courage to show no pain. And so “I resolved not to make a sound the next time my father whipped me. And when the time came—I can still remember my frightened mother standing outside the door—I silently counted the blows. My mother thought I had gone crazy when I beamed proudly and said, ‘Father hit me thirty-two times!’”

  —John Toland, Adolf Hitler, as quoted in

  For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing

  by Alice Miller

  Dorothy and Emma, her little ally, came to be called the Furies, or the Kindly Ones. The schoolteachers called them that. The schoolteachers knew Greek.

  The teachers made sure no other children sat near the Furies. If a child did, and she had nice long hair, it would be tied to the back of her chair in so many knots that the hair would have to be cut off. Pockets were found full of ink. Cowpats were placed on the seats of chairs. The Furies talked to each other, loudly, while the teacher, Mr. Clark, spoke. At least Mr. Clark was better-looking than Henry. Dorothy hated him, too. The Furies developed a horrible screeching laugh that they used together. The other children went still with fear.

  The schoolteachers knew Greek and that gave them the right to beat children. The boys, that is, were regularly beaten. It was thought to be good for them. Toughen them up. Some boys, the timid ones, were very difficult to beat, because they didn’t do anything wrong. Even the teachers thought they were sissies.

  “Can’t stand a kid without any gumption,” they might say. “That Jenks needs a hiding, just to wake him up.”

  And the chance would finally come. Somebody would throw a spitball, and blame Jenks. Mr. Clark would pretend to believe him. Mr. Clark was kind. He believed that beating Jenks would be for his own good, to make him less different from the other boys.

  “Why did you do it, Jenks?” Mr. Clark asked, silkily. The other children squawked with laughter. The Furies screeched. They all knew the game that was being played.

  “I did not do it, Sir,” said Jenks, appalled.

  “Did he do it, class?” asked Mr. Clark.

  “Yes!” the class shouted.

  It was very gratifying. Jenks began to cry. “But I didn’t, Sir. I didn’t do it!”

  “Why should you be treated any different than anyone else, Jenks?” Mr. Clark asked. “Jenks, I think we better go to the Principal’s office.”

  There was a theatrical gasp from the children. Jenks was going to get the Strap. The children terrified themselves deliciously with tales of the Strap. They said it had spikes on the end. It was a dark and terrible thing. Jenks began to blubber with fear. “Mr. Clark,” he begged, his voice a whine.

  “Angela. Take charge of the class, please.” Angela was Class Monitor, a two-edged sword, who led the mayhem when he was out of the room, and then organized the tidying up before he came in, so that he did not have to deal with it. He knew that. The class knew he knew that. The class knew he secretly approved of a bit of mayhem as long as it was kept absolutely hidden.

  Angela sat on the teacher’s desk. “Jenks, getting the Strap. I never. I never would.”

  “They won’t give him the Strap,” someone said, knowingly. Jenks’s grades were too good.

  “They have to now, Mr. Clark said he would, and it would look too bad if he didn’t. Who else do we want to have the Strap?”

  Dorothy barked out a laugh and stood up. She looked at them all with undisguised scorn. “All of you. All of you little smarty-pants. You all think it’s so great. I’d like to take you all and whip your asses.”

  Silence.

  Jenks came back into the room with a face the color of sandstone from weeping. He couldn’t sit down. But the class didn’t laugh at him or tease him. They didn’t lean forward whispering out of the corner of their mouths, asking him about the exploit. Something was wrong. The class looked cowed and silent. “Thank you, Angela,” Mr. Clark said. He thought perhaps that Angela had simply kept them firmly in line.

  Or maybe, maybe they hadn’t thought it was right. Well then, if Jenks didn’t do it, they should have told me the truth.

  That Dorothy Gael, the children thought. We got to do something about that Dorothy Gael.

  But the terror of the Strap meant there was one unbreakable rule: You never told, you never snitched. They couldn’t snitch, and if they did, what would Dorothy do, what revenge would she extract? What, what could they do about Dorothy?

  One day in spring term, her ally, Emma, said something. That was what broke it. Nobody knew for certain what it was that Emma said. She whispered it, but it sure was something Dorothy Gael didn’t like. Em had trusted Dorothy a bit too much and grown too familiar. She teased her about something, her size, maybe, or her shoes, her dress. Maybe it was something about her family. Evangeline Thomas claimed she heard Emma whisper the word “Henry.”

  There was the word “Henry” and Dorothy Gael’s face twisted up like a painting of the Devil, and her lips pulled back in concentrated hatred, and she slapped Emma across the face. The noise was so loud that Mr. Clark dropped his chalk. Emma wailed in shock.

  “Dorothy Gael. Did you hit her?” Mr. Clark knew that this was his chance.

  Dorothy said nothing. Her face was puffed out like an adder, arrested in an expression of utter rage and turmoil that unmanned Mr. Clark for a moment. He had never seen an expression like it on a child’s face.

  “Did anyone see what happened?” Mr. Clark asked.

  That’s when it broke. “No,” said Angela, the two-edged sword. Her arms were folded. She had decided. The time had come. “But Dorothy is always doing things like that.”

  “She picks on people.”

  “She makes Amy Hugson give her money, and if she doesn’t she hurts her real bad.”

  “She put cowpat all over Tommy’s face.”

  “She hits people all the time.”

  In chorus, like a Greek tragedy.

  “Dorothy Gael, is all of this true?”

  The terrible head turned toward him. Not a Fury, he thought. A Gorgon. A glance turns to stone.

  “Why are you asking me, Clark?” the child said. No “Mister,” just a hard, blunt last name like in a bar room.

  The child was smiling at him. “Everything I say is a lie. I got to lie all the time.”

  Mr. Clark was thinking he had never seen the like of it for pure evil.

  Dorothy was thinking: My uncle does
that to me every day in the dirt. Is that the truth you want to hear?

  “Dorothy. You’re going to come with me to the Principal’s office.”

  There was no gasp, just silence. The children were almost sorry then. Girls did not get the Strap. This was a real change. Girls keenly felt the distinction of Straplessness both as a privilege and a penance. In part, they wanted to be beaten because it was an approved achievement that was denied them. But now that it was happening, the change, the revolution, was shocking. They were too young to have seen many changes.

  “Let’s go then,” said Dorothy Gael. She almost sounded bored. As she walked up the aisle, she bumped her hips from side to side to say, That’s what I think of you all.

  The children had another shock. Mr. Clark boxed her ear. “You stop acting up,” he said. The child stared back at him stony-faced. What else you going to do? the expression seemed to ask, as if she were invulnerable.

  Mr. Clark marched her to Professor Lantz’s office. There had to be a Principal and he had to be a man, so that there could be a Strap.

  “I think the time has come to give Dorothy Gael what she’s been asking for,” said Mr. Clark.

  The Principal was older, fatter, with ridiculous gray whiskers that went form one end of his face to another. He wore checked trousers. He leaned forward in his chair and adopted a smooth and soothing voice that was supposed to sound wise.

  “Dorothy. I think you know why this is being done. You know the sorts of things you’ve been doing. This is happening because the other children have finally decided that they have to turn to us to discipline you. Are you sorry for what you have done?”

  “No,” said Dorothy.

  The Principal sighed and looked at Mr. Clark and his female assistant, Mrs. Warren.

  “You’ve brought this on yourself, Dorothy.”

  “Can we just get it over with?”

  There had to be a woman present. The Principal had already taken legal advice. And he could not beat a little girl across her bottom. The proprieties had to be observed. It had to be across the hand—or the wrist if the child tried to pull away. The wrist was far more painful. All the children knew it was up to them not to pull their hands away.

  “Hold out your hand.”

  Dorothy presented it. Mrs. Warren grabbed the fingers and held them flat. The eyes behind Mrs. Warren’s spectacles were like tiny pebbles. The Principal struck, using a one-inch-wide leather Strap. It sounded worse than it was. He didn’t strike too hard at first. He looked into the child’s eyes for some sign of contrition. All he saw was rebellion. He struck again, looking this time for pain. The face went red, but there was no surrender. He hit her ten times. The hand was released.

  Her eyes were full of heart-stilling hatred.

  “One day,” the child whispered, “I’m going to be bigger than you are and I’m going to break your nose.”

  “The other hand,” said the Principal. He got more satisfaction this time. The face went red on the first stroke, and involuntarily, Dorothy tried to pull away. She decided she could not absorb the pain after all. She began to struggle; her hand and wrist darted about. All right then, be it on you, thought the Principal. The Strap lashed her about the wrist. Welts and little purple dots showed on the skin. He had to stop after another ten. They had never given more than ten to any child.

  Dorothy Gael’s face was puffed out like a serpent’s, but she held her tears. Her hands were claws. Professor Lantz looked at her, panting. They all looked at her. With immense effort, Dorothy Gael managed to smile.

  “What do we do now?” asked Mr. Clark, who realized that the punishment had done no good.

  The Principal shook his head. “Take her back.”

  The child walked ahead of Mr. Clark down the hall. He could see her hunched and tense, determined not to cry. He had to hand it to her. She was tough. They made them tough in Kansas. She stopped just outside the classroom door.

  “Open the door, Dorothy,” he said.

  “I can’t,” she answered him with mere impatience. How stupid are you? she seemed to say. My hands have been beaten raw.

  Mr. Clark understood then that they had made a terrible mistake, a tactical error. They had not punished Dorothy Gael. He saw her gather herself in. He opened the door and watched her enter in triumph.

  She was smiling, beaming, and she held up both hands in triumph, both arms raised so that the class could see the welts and the blood.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked them all in a silky voice she had learned from the teachers. “There’s nothing they can do to me. There’s nothing any of you can do to me.”

  The class and Mr. Clark understood then that they had created a monster. And monsters have to be appeased.

  Little Emma, the ally, had been whipped into line. She had learned never to tease Dorothy again and she knew that she was nothing without Dorothy. The second Fury was more than content to be Dorothy’s lieutenant. And the teacher and the class let the Furies talk, and they let the Furies laugh. Angela began to lose power. Mr. Clark was helpless. Teaching became impossible. He dreaded going into the classroom. He knew he had failed the children, failed to protect them, and they saw no reason now to take him seriously. They all began to call him Clark, last name only. He became ill.

  That’s how they got the Substitute Teacher. The children knew the Substitute was not a real teacher because he was so soft. He had a round and smiling, handsome face, and he was young, only about ten years older than them. He had a lovely voice, very warm and soft and beguiling, and his movements were small and neat and quick. He wore a straw boater. He was like nothing the children of Kansas had seen.

  He was, it turned out, an actor from New York. He told them about a play he had written called The Maid of Arran and he was touring with it and playing the lead role.

  “Of course,” he chuckled, “the handbills can’t say written and directed and starring all the same person, so the posters say that the actor is called George Brooks.”

  What is your name? What is your name? all the children asked in chorus.

  He chuckled, pleased. “Frank,” he said.

  You couldn’t call a teacher by his first name!

  “No! the class chorused, laughing. “What’s your last name?”

  He told them, and Dorothy misheard. She thought his last name was Balm. Frank Balm. It was a meaning name.

  “Honest Ointment!” shouted Larry Johnson, as if it were a quack medicine, and the actor bent forward with laughter.

  “The original and genuine article. Every bottle is signed,” grinned the Substitute. He sounded just like a hawker.

  He lit a cheroot. In class, he lit a cigar. He sat on the desk and crossed his legs at the ankles, and he leaned back to let a serpent of cigar smoke rise up from his lips. There was a frisson of real excitement from the class, and the children looked at each other, eyes goggling.

  “My other occupation,” he continued, satisfied with the progress of the smoke, “was inventing chickens. I would breed new kinds of hen. My hens won awards. I even wrote about them. My new kind of Hamburg hen.” He made a certain motion that may have been like a hen, or like something else. The children weren’t sure what, except that it looked a little racy and made them laugh.

  The Substitute had dash. He smelled of New York, he smelled of money, and he didn’t care that teachers weren’t supposed to smoke. He was small, what the children called a squirrel, but he was a nice squirrel. An unspoken agreement passed in silence around the class. As long as he doesn’t try to make us do anything stupid, we’ll be nice to this one.

  Dorothy fell in love with him. My parents were actors, she wanted to tell him. They were like you.

  She whispered the name to herself, all the way home. Frank, she thought, Frank, Frank, as her uncle put his
hands on her and then moved them away again in fear. In summer evenings, there was too much light; they could be seen from too far away. Sometimes Uncle Henry didn’t do anything, except smile and pat her knee. Tonight was one of those nights. All the trees seemed to whisper in gratitude. Could she plant a tree and call it Frank?

  Frank, she whispered as she fried sausages. She thought of him, and she thought of her own unworthiness, and tears stung the lower edge of her eyes. It was as if she were in a boat cast adrift, never to come ashore to some green and happy land, where people laughed and everything was beautiful. She herself had cast the boat adrift, and there was no going back. Now she would never get home. Now she would never be where Frank was. He was too good for her. She began to hate him just a little. And said his name again.

  The next day, the Substitute brought in a thick red book.

  “How many of you,” he asked them, “can speak Ottoman Turk?”

  The class looked back at him in silence.

  “Well, this is a book called the Redhouse Osmanli-English Dictionary, and it tells me what words are in Turkish. How many of you know anything about Turkey?”

  Stupid question.

  “Uh—you eat them at Thanksgiving,” said Larry Johnson. The class laughed, somewhat shyly, because they knew they were ignorant. The Substitute smiled, too, lightly, happily.

  “Turkey is a wonderful country,” said the Substitute, his blue eyes going pale with wonder. “The Turks worship in huge domed buildings called jamis, bigger than any cathedral. Vast domes, with pigeons flying around inside and carpets on the floor and fountains where the faithful wash before worshiping. They have wonderful tiles on the walls, all blue and green. And the sultans have many wives and many concubines, so many that they all live together in beautiful prisons which no man may enter—or he’ll be killed. In the palaces there are special fountains where executioners wash their swords.”