by John Gardner
“This writing he does,” I began, groping.
He shied away. “We used to send him to school, or have tutors in. He’s extremely bright. You might not think it, to look at him. Most people, one glance … Freddy’s problem, when it’s endocrinological, goes along with slow-wittedness. You see a boy like Freddy, you naturally assume … But in Freddy’s case it’s genetic. He’s smart as a whip and painfully sensitive. That’s why we keep him home.” He shook his head crossly, and his voice, when he spoke, was close to breaking. “You’ve no idea what it’s like out there, for a boy like mine—the nastiness, the torment not to mention the danger. Not that it’s so wonderful here, you understand.” He shot me a look. “I don’t fool myself. I was fifty when he was born. His mother was younger, of course. She was killed when he was nine—a highway accident.” He raised his hand abruptly, as if saluting the Führer. What the gesture meant I have no idea.
When he drew back his hand I leaned forward slightly, forehead lowered. “I don’t think you mentioned what’s wrong with him,” I said.
“No.” His pale lips jerked back. “No, not yet. I’m sure you’re curious!” He pressed his hands to his knees and leaned forward, about to stand up.
I looked down, puzzled at his suddenly turning on me again. “Remember, I came because you asked me, Professor.” Now both of us were rising—stiffly, formally.
“Yes, I know. Also for other reasons.”
I kept silent a moment. “The world’s not perfect,” I said at last.
“Yes. Not perfect,” he said. He pushed up his glasses and touched his eyelids with the index finger and thumb of one hand. He whispered something, wincing, arguing with his demons, then moved ahead of me, turning back to see that I followed, toward the door he’d gone through for the tea and then later the wine. It did lead, as I’d supposed, to the kitchen, a large, gray-walled room like the kitchen in a home for the aged or some hospital in the slums. The appliances—refrigerator, stove, washer-dryer—were thirty years old if a day. The pots on the stove were large, the kind used by restaurants.
He took me through another door that led to a pantry, scented with rat-poison and general decay, white discoloration like lichen on the walls, then down a high, narrow hallway leading to what had once been, apparently, the servants’ quarters, a section of small rooms that he now kept locked off—a nightlatch on the door, which he opened with a key from his small, cluttered ring. The ceilings were lower here, the rooms sparsely furnished, the wallpaper less gloomy—cheap and plain—a sitting room, bedrooms, a bathroom, a doorway that led, as I was soon to learn, to the narrow back stairs. At the first of the servants’ rooms I stopped in my tracks. Pieces of wallpaper hung down like stalactites, the windows were partly boarded up with plywood, and in the walls there were holes, as if someone had stood in the center of the room firing cannonballs. Bits of lath showed like dry, broken ribs; in one place even the flooring had been broken. I went to the window—a few of the windowpanes were intact, barred but not boarded—and I stood for a moment fingering my cooling pipe and looking out. Snow and desolation, dark trees, then nothing, a shifting wall of gray.
Professor Agaard stood with his head thrown forward, lips clamped together, his small hands clasped behind him. “Freddy was ten,” he said. “He’d been naughty, and to punish him we locked him in his room.” He gestured. “This room. He has another room now, upstairs. They’d told us at school he had terrible tantrums, but of course we had no idea; this was the first we ever saw of it. Not that we hadn’t seen signs, of course. … It was a hard time for him. Needless to say, they tried to force me to institutionalize him. He was at that time still a child. Not a ‘small child’—baa. But the teachers he’d have had there, and the creatures he’d have been locked up with, day after day! Idiots, crazy people …” He closed his eyes. “But the teachers above all. Those fools you talked with at the party last night, they’re risen saints by comparison!”
“Surely you’re just a little hard on them,” I said. I reached out, without thinking, and touched his arm. He stiffened as if in fear of me. “You should try to get to know them,” I said, drawing my hand back, “talk with them a little.”
“Talk with them!” he exploded. “Look there, Mr. Winesap!” He pointed to the window where I’d just stood looking out, and after a moment I realized that he meant me to notice the bars. I suppose, having noticed them earlier, I was not as impressed as he’d hoped I’d be. He turned toward the door to the back stairs and pointed. “And look there!” On the door there were three heavy locks. I remembered the big iron locks I’d seen on the front door and nodded, suspending judgment. “Talk with them, you say?” he yelped. “Shall I leave that poor odd child in the care of the cleaning girl—supposing I could get a cleaning girl? Is that what you suggest? You look at me harshly!” His scornful smile twitched briefly, then failed, sagged toward panic. “You’ve misunderstood. It was Freddy who put those bars on the windows and locks on the doors, not I!” He jerked his head back and woefully laughed.
I squinted, fingering my pipe, trying to understand. “Are they frequent, these tantrums?”
He looked puzzled, then annoyed, as he would at a dull, persistent student. “He hasn’t had a tantrum in years.” He peered into my face as if wondering at the depth of my stupidity. “Come,” he said at last, “come up and meet him.”
To my surprise, the latches on the door to the stairway were not locked. As Agaard started up the steep narrow steps ahead of me, I asked, “Are you saying he locks people out, that is, locks himself in?”
“That’s what he does all right!”
I hesitated, feeling duped, trifled with. But I said, still moving cautiously, “I can see that would be worrisome. Do you know what sets him off?”
He glanced back guiltily. “Anything! Everything! A knock at the door, a truck in the driveway—my telling him to turn off his light—”
“You mean if no one bothers him—”
“Exactly!” he exclaimed. He’d reached the top of the stairs now. He stood catching his breath, his fist clenching the railing. “Leave him to his miserable little paradise of books, his cave of old maps and print”—he gestured with his left hand, strangely childlike, exactly as if the spirit of a child had taken possession of him—“leave him alone and he’s happy as a clam! But rouse him out of it—even let him imagine you’re about to rouse him out of it—he begins to lock things. Seals himself off. Not in bad humor! All very quiet and methodical. And he’ll open them again if you insist—though Lord knows he doesn’t like it! You’ll say I’ve spoiled him, but believe me, it’s more complex than that. I don’t mean I’m not to blame—how could any child grow up normal, living with an odd duck like me? In any case—” He put his hand on the top of his head, apparently hunting for the thread he’d lost. He said, “You see, Professor Winesap, he’s made a world for himself—and why not? The outside world frightens him—not that he shows it much: simply gets his locks out, maybe prays a little, or buries himself in his books.”
“Prays?” I said.
Agaard sighed, looking down at the old worn carpet between us. “When he was small we had a woman who took care of him, a Mrs. Knudsen, one of those hellfire fundamentalists. I’m afraid she put the fear of the Lord into him. The hellfire part’s behind him now—we’re Presbyterians. But he still gets down on his knees sometimes and …” He gestured vaguely. “He was very fond of her—for good reason. She was as kind as she knew how to be, a far cry better than the people who got him later—the school he went to, the hospitals—”
“Surely the university hospital—” I suggested.
“Worse than the snakepits!” He laughed angrily and began again to make his way down the hallway. It was long and windowless, lit by three bare bulbs. He touched the wall with the fingertips of his right hand as he walked. “He was happy there at first, but then he began to break things. They took a dislike to him—understandably, I suppose. He was difficult at the time, didn’t speak much Engli
sh. …”
“You’ve tried private psychiatrists?”
“Psychiatrists,” he hissed, half turning. “You use the plural, Mr. Winesap. I see you know about psychiatrists.”
“Just the same—” I began. With a part of my mind I was musing on his various uses of my name: “Winesap,” as to a student; “Mr. Winesap,” as to an underling; “Professor,” never without a sneer.
“It’s gotten out of hand,” he was saying when I returned my attention to him. “Utterly out of hand.”
“I can see that,” I said—not so much a lie as a stalling action.
He raised his left arm, a gesture again oddly child-like, or puppet-like, pointing nowhere. He spoke more softly now, hurriedly; we were apparently close to Freddy’s room. “As I’ve said, I think, he reads day and night. There are very few books in this house he hasn’t read, and of course I bring him whatever he wants from the library. I act as his teacher—it’s been a great pleasure, in many ways. I don’t mean to sound like a boastful father, but …” He scowled, then changed direction. “As I mentioned, I think, for some time now—more than a year, close to two years—he’s been working on a book of his own.”
“Interesting,” I said, glancing down the hallway in the direction we’d been heading. “A book about—”
“As I told you, I haven’t seen it.”
I nodded, apologetic and baffled. Something rubbed against my leg and I looked down. The cat, Posey, had found the open stairway door and come up. I looked again at Agaard. “He’s told you nothing about it?” I asked. “That is, he sees no one in the world but you, and for two years he’s been working on a book, and in all that time—”
“Not a word,” the professor said. He crinkled up his lips, his eyebrows jammed together again.
“When you take him his supper,” I said, “or sit in the same room reading, does he—”
“Never,” he snapped. “Not a word, not a hint!”
I nodded, then started down the hall again as if I knew where I was going—perhaps I did, in fact, following the cat—but again the professor caught my arm.
“One other thing,” he said, “he’s read your books.” He tipped his head up, as well as he could, given the stiffness. “He’s a kind of ‘fan.’”
I took my pipe from my pocket, tamped the tobacco, and lit it. When I’d taken a few puffs, I stepped forward abruptly, reached down, and picked up Posey. I held her against my chest with one hand. Professor Agaard looked at me; then we continued along the hall. At the end he bent forward to knock on a door, waited a moment, then called, “Freddy? Unlock your door, Freddy!”
The boy pretended not to hear, though we knew he had to.
“Freddy?” Agaard called. “We’ve got company, son!”
My heart jerked, hearing him say “son.” I’d never used that word on Jack Jr.; it hadn’t been the way we, as they say, “reached out.” The way Agaard used it, it was like a blind man casting a net over the side of what might or might not be a ship. The boy, I was sure, couldn’t help but hear it as I did. How could he not answer?
There was a sound then; some heavy movement. The cat craned her neck. A lock on the door clicked, a dead-bolt slid open, a chain-latch scraped, and at last a startling voice said, “Wait a minute, Dad. I’m not dressed.” The voice was sweet, like a young singers. Agaard saw my surprise but made no comment.
We stood listening and heard him move away across the room; then, softly, the professor pushed open the door, stepped in, and gestured for me to follow. I obeyed, stroking the cat as I did so, the pipe clenched hard between my teeth.
“Freddy?” the professor called again.
The cat tried to jump. I held onto her. It was a large room, plain and clean-swept as a forest floor, bookshelves in rigorous order on every side; against one wall, half blocking the window, an oversized, specially made desk, very plain, with two neat locks on it, and a great sturdy chair to match. Around the chairlegs there were smooth iron bands. The giant furniture threw everything else in the room awry, what little there was—a few pictures on the white walls, framed pen and ink drawings of viking ships, carefully and elegantly done in a slightly old-mannish hand, rendered as if for an expensive picture book. They were signed “F.A.” It came to me only somewhat later—perhaps because they seemed professional and seemed to have been professionally framed—that the pictures were by Agaard’s son. On the prow of one of the viking ships a king in a horn-helmet stood looking thoughtfully at a hawk on his wrist. Agaard, when he saw me looking at it, looked away.
The room was so spare one could see everything at a glance: a closet door with a lock on it, a long table with five perfect constructions—three ships, two dragons—nothing else on the table but a neat stack of stainless-steel razor blades. What defined all the rest, of course, was that immense desk and chair. They made it seem that the room itself was from a picture book, or better yet, a stage-set, for across one end hung a dark green curtain. Beyond that, presumably, the professor’s son crouched, hiding. My gaze stopped and froze on an enormous bare foot that protruded, unbeknownst to its owner, no doubt, from behind the curtain. It was the largest human foot I’d ever seen or imagined; if the rest of the body was proportionate, the creature must stand eight feet tall or more. But it wasn’t just the size of the foot that made my heart race. The thing was visibly unhealthy, bluish gray with red blush-spots; bad circulation, lack of exercise. How the poor creature had gotten to this state God only knew, or God and Agaard. “Out of hand,” the old man had said. I accidentally mumbled the words aloud, causing the professor to glance at me, then look away.
“Freddy,” he called, “remember I told you Mr. Winesap might visit us? Well, he’s here. I’ve brought him to see you.” There was a pause. “Freddy?” Agaard glanced at me, then moved over to the curtain to poke his head in and talk with his son. Though he talked as loudly as ever, the heavy curtain muffled the sound; I caught only one phrase from Agaard: “I want you to.” Freddy answered with only a polite syllable or two, his voice low, so that I couldn’t catch the words. I continued to look around. There was a typewriter on the desk, spotlessly clean, a very old electric with a thick gray cord, a cord heavy enough, one would have thought, for a welding machine. Beside the desk stood a large wooden box, no doubt a wastepaper basket, with a wooden cover, locked.
The professor drew his head back outside the curtain now and, whether or not with his son’s permission, reached up and snatched the curtain open. The look on the professor’s face was like mingled anger, fear, and triumph. There before us, half-turned away, sat a monstrous fat blushing baby of a youth, his monkish robe unbuttoned, his lower parts carefully covered with a blanket. All around him, neatly stacked, lay papers and innumerable books, some closed, some open, arranged about him in a perfect fan. The skin of his face and arms and chest was pink-splotched, shiny. He was as big as some farmer’s prize bull at the fair, big as a rhinoceros, a small elephant. I exaggerate grossly, but such was my impression that first instant.
The brute effect of encountering him there—suddenly shown forth as the curtain gasped on its old metal rings—was, if anything, greater than my images suggest. His eyes, when he turned to glance at me, just perceptibly nodding, were red-rimmed, huge behind the gold-rimmed glasses, his childish pink lips were drawn back from his teeth in what I recognized only after an instant as a sheepish smile. His expression was pitifully eager, yet at the same time distrustful, alarmed, not unlike his father’s when he’d met me at the door.
One side of the giant’s upper lip was slightly lifted, delicately trembling with what might have been disgust—perhaps disgust aimed at himself. He pretty well knew, no doubt, what a strange sight he was, there in his cell. His pallet was a king-sized mattress with a steel-gray blanket over it, behind it a stern brass lamp on a low wooden table buried in carefully stacked books. From a string tacked to the ceiling above his head hung a red paper-and-balsawood dragon with extended wings and a queer thick belly.
�
�Freddy doesn’t make paper dragons anymore,” Agaard said proudly, as if Freddy weren’t there.
The giants blue eyes stared straight at me for a moment, the lashes blond, like his frail beginning of a moustache; then he began to move—all of him at once, it seemed—his arms rising as if lifted by some external force, the fat, dainty hands clenching a book as if to hurl the thing in rage. But he didn’t hurl it—had never intended to, I saw—only drew the heavy white arms and the book up nearer, as if to dismiss us, free us to go back to our presumably more interesting adult pursuits, and bent closer to the page. The cat, clamped against my chest, struggled.
“I’ve brought you a friend,” Professor Agaard said, moving closer to the boy, pretending he thought Freddy hadn’t heard. “Mr. Winesap, this is Freddy.”
With a jerk of my free hand I snatched my pipe from my mouth. “How do you do?”
Freddy sat motionless, not breathing, it seemed, his face and neck red, his eyes still eager, the rest of his face guarded. Fat bulged everywhere, blue-shadowed. The whole rounded body was as sickly as the foot, surely too heavy and weak to stand up, I thought; he couldn’t have stood anyway in this low-ceilinged room. I felt a flash of anger at the professor beside me—the idea that a father could allow this to happen to his son!—but I struggled to quell it. I knew, I told myself, nothing whatever of how it had happened, for all the father’s talk.
I remembered the cat I’d been clutching all this time, and carefully lifted her from my bosom and set her down on the mattress like an offering. She ran around beside him and stood there, back humped, just out of Freddy’s reach.
“Aren’t you going to say hello to Mr. Winesap, Freddy?” Agaard asked.
“Good afternoon,” Freddy brought out, looking down, almost a bow.
“I’m glad to meet you,” I said heartily, and thought of reaching out for his hand, but then—from cowardice or fear of embarrassing him further—did nothing.