The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  She couldn’t take the boy to Mr Harkness again. Not only did the memory of that scene in his office the day before make her shudder, but a repeated visit would be an admission that after thirty-eight years of teaching she was not up to the mark as a disciplinarian.

  But for her sake, if for nothing else, Robert had to be put in his place. With a gesture, Miss Gildea ordered the rest of the class to their seats and turned to Robert, who remained standing.

  ‘Robert,’ said Miss Gildea, ‘I want an apology for what has just happened.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Miss Gildea,’ Robert said, and it looked as if his eyes would be brimming with tears in another moment.

  Miss Gildea hardened her heart to this. ‘I apologize, Miss Gildea, and it will not happen again,’ she prompted.

  Miraculously, Robert contained his tears. ‘I apologize, Miss Gildea, and it will not happen again,’ he muttered and dropped limply into his seat.

  ‘Well!’ said Miss Gildea, drawing a deep breath as she looked around at the hushed class. ‘Perhaps that will be a lesson to us all.’

  The classroom work did not go well after that, but, as Miss Gildea told herself, there were only a few days left to the end of the term, and after that, praise be, there was the garden, the comfortable front porch of the old house to share with neighbors in the summer evenings, and then next term a new set of faces in the classroom, with Robert’s not among them.

  Later, closing the windows of the room after the class had left, Miss Gildea was brought up short by the sight of a large group gathered on the sidewalk near the parked buses. It was Robert, she saw, surrounded by most of the Sixth Grade, and obviously the center of interest. He was nodding emphatically when she put her face to the window, and she drew back quickly at the sight, moved by some queer sense of guilt.

  Only a child, she assured herself, he’s only a child, but that thought did not in any way dissolve the anger against him that stuck like a lump in her throat.

  That was on Thursday. By Tuesday of the next week, the final week of the term, Miss Gildea was acutely conscious of the oppressive atmosphere lying over the classroom. Ordinarily, the awareness of impending vacation acted on the class like a violent agent dropped into some inert liquid. There would be ferment and seething beneath the surface, manifested by uncontrollable giggling and whispering, and this would grow more and more turbulent until all restraint and discipline was swept away in the general upheaval of excitement and good spirits.

  That, Miss Gildea thought, was the way it always had been, but it was strangely different now. The Sixth Grade, down to the most irrepressible spirits in it, acted as if it had been turned to a set of robots before her startled eyes. Hands tightly clasped on desks, eyes turned toward her with an almost frightening intensity, the class responded to her mildest requests as if they were shouted commands. And when she walked down the aisles between them, one and all seemed to have adopted Robert’s manner of shrinking away fearfully at her approach.

  Miss Gildea did not like to think of what all this might mean, but valiantly forced herself to do so. Can it mean, she asked herself, that all think as Robert does, are choosing this way of showing it? And, if they knew how cruel it was, would they do it?

  Other teachers, Miss Gildea knew, sometimes took problems such as this to the Teacher’s Room where they could be studied and answered by those who saw them in an objective light. It might be that the curious state of the Sixth Grade was duplicated in other classes. Perhaps she herself was imagining the whole thing, or, frightening thought, looking back, as people will when they grow old, on the sort of past that never really did exist. Why, in that case – and Miss Gildea had to laugh at herself with a faint merriment – she would just find herself reminiscing about her thirty-eight years of teaching to some bored young woman who didn’t have the fraction of experience she did.

  But underneath the current of these thoughts, Miss Gildea knew there was one honest reason for not going to the Teacher’s Room this last week of the term. She had received no gifts, not one. And the spoils from each grade heaped high in a series of pyramids against the wall, the boxes of fractured cookies, the clumsily wrapped jars of preserves, the scarves, the stockings, the handkerchiefs, infinite, endless boxes of handkerchiefs, all were there to mark the triumph of each teacher. And Miss Gildea, who in all her years at District School Number Three had been blushingly proud of the way her pyramid was highest at the end of each term, had not yet received a single gift from the Sixth Grade class.

  After the class was dismissed that afternoon, however, the spell was broken. Only a few of her pupils still loitered in the hallway near the door, Miss Gildea noted, but Robert remained in his seat. Then, as she gathered together her belongings Robert approached her with a box outheld in his hand. It was, from its shape, a box of candy. Automatically, she reached a hand out, then stopped herself short. He’ll never make up to me for what he’s done, she told herself furiously; I’ll never let him.

  ‘Yes, Robert?’ she said coolly.

  ‘It’s a present for you, Miss Gildea,’ Robert said, and then as Miss Gildea watched in fascination he began to strip the wrappings from it. He laid the paper neatly on the desk and lifted the cover of the box to display the chocolates within. ‘My mother said that’s the biggest box they had,’ he said wistfully. ‘Don’t you even want them, Miss Gildea?’

  Miss Gildea weakened despite herself. ‘Did you think I would, after what’s happened, Robert?’ she asked.

  Robert reflected a moment. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if you want me to, I’ll eat one right in front of you, Miss Gildea.’

  Miss Gildea recoiled as if at a faraway warning. Don’t let him say any more, something inside her cried; he’s only playing a trick, another horrible trick, and then she was saying, ‘Why would I want you to do that, Robert?’

  ‘So you’ll see they’re not poison or anything, Miss Gildea,’ Robert said. ‘Then you’ll believe it, won’t you, Miss Gildea?’

  She had been prepared. Even before he said the words, she had felt her body drawing itself tighter and tighter against what she knew was coming. But the sound of the words themselves only served to release her like a spring coiled too tightly.

  ‘You little monster!’ sobbed Miss Gildea and struck wildly at the proffered box, which flew almost to the far wall, while chocolates cascaded stickily around the room. ‘How dare you!’ she cried. ‘How dare you!’ and her small bony fists beat at Robert’s cowering shoulders and back as he tried to retreat.

  He half turned in the aisle, slipped on a piece of chocolate, and went down to his knees, but before he could recover himself Miss Gildea was on him again, her lips drawn back, her fists pummeling him as if they were a pair of tireless mallets. Robert had started to scream at the top of his lungs from the first blow, but it was no more than a remote buzzing in Miss Gildea’s ears.

  ‘Miss Gildea!’

  That was Mr Harkness’s voice, she knew, and those must be Mr Harkness’s hands which pulled her away so roughly that she had to keep herself from falling by clutching at her desk. She stood there weakly, feeling the wild fluttering of her heart, feeling the sick churning of shame and anguish in her while she tried to bring the room into focus again. There was the knot of small excited faces peering through the open doorway, they must have called Mr Harkness, and Mr Harkness himself listening to Robert who talked and wept alternately, and there was a mess everywhere. Of course, thought Miss Gildea dazedly, those must be chocolate stains. Chocolate stains all over my lovely clean room.

  Then Robert was gone, the faces at the door were gone, and the door itself was closed behind them. Only Mr Harkness remained, and Miss Gildea watched him as he removed his glasses, cleaned them carefully, and then held them up at arm’s length and studied them before settling them once more on his nose.

  ‘Well, Miss Gildea,’ said Mr Harkness as if he were speaking to the glasses rather than to her, ‘this is a serious business.’

  Miss Gildea nodded.


  ‘I am sick,’ Mr Harkness said quietly, ‘really sick at the thought that somewhere in this school, where I tried to introduce decent pedagogical standards, corporal punishment is still being practiced.’

  ‘That’s not fair at all, Mr Harkness,’ Miss Gildea said shakily. ‘I hit the boy, that’s true, and I know I was wrong to do it, but that is the first time in all my life I raised a finger against any child. And if you knew my feelings—’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr Harkness, ‘that’s exactly what I would like to know, Miss Gildea.’ He nodded to her chair, and she sat down weakly. ‘Now, just go ahead and explain everything as you saw it.’

  It was a difficult task, made even more difficult by the fact that Mr Harkness chose to stand facing the window. Forced to address his back this way, Miss Gildea found that she had the sensation of speaking in a vacuum, but she mustered the facts as well as she could, presented them with strong emotion, and then sank back in the chair quite exhausted.

  Mr Harkness remained silent for a long while, then slowly turned to face Miss Gildea. ‘I am not a practicing psychiatrist,’ he said at last, ‘although as an educator I have, of course, taken a considerable interest in that field. But I do not think it needs a practitioner to tell what a clearcut and obvious case I am facing here. Nor,’ he added sympathetically, ‘what a tragic one.’

  ‘It might simply be,’ suggested Miss Gildea, ‘that Robert—’

  ‘I am not speaking about Robert,’ said Mr Harkness soberly, quietly.

  It took an instant for this to penetrate, and then Miss Gildea felt the blood run cold in her.

  ‘Do you think I’m lying about all this?’ she cried incredulously. ‘Can you possibly—’

  ‘I am sure,’ Mr Harkness replied soothingly, ‘that you were describing things exactly as you saw them, Miss Gildea. But – have you ever heard the phrase “persecution complex”? Do you think you could recognize the symptoms of that condition if they were presented objectively? I can, Miss Gildea. I assure you, I can.’

  Miss Gildea struggled to speak, but the words seemed to choke her. ‘No,’ she managed to say, ‘you couldn’t! Because some mischievous boy chooses to make trouble—’

  ‘Miss Gildea, no child of eleven, however mischievous, could draw the experiences Robert has described to me out of his imagination. He has discussed these experiences with me at length; now I have heard your side of the case. And the conclusions to be drawn, I must say, are practically forced on me.’

  The room started to slip out of focus again, and Miss Gildea frantically tried to hold it steady.

  ‘But that just means you’re taking his word against mine!’ she said fiercely.

  ‘Unfortunately, Miss Gildea, not his word alone. Last weekend, a delegation of parents met the School Board and made it quite plain that they were worried because of what their children told them of your recent actions. A dozen children in your class described graphically at that meeting how you had accused them of trying to poison your drinking water, and how you had threatened them because of this. And Robert, it may interest you to know, was not even one of them.

  ‘The School Board voted your dismissal then and there, Miss Gildea, but in view of your long years of service it was left for me to override that decision if I wished to on my sole responsibility. After this episode, however, I cannot see that I have any choice. I must do what is best.’

  ‘Dismissal?’ said Miss Gildea vaguely. ‘But they can’t. I only have two more years to go. They can’t do that, Mr Harkness: all they’re trying to do is trick me out of my pension!’

  ‘Believe me,’ said Mr Harkness gently, ‘they’re not trying to do anything of the sort, Miss Gildea. Nobody in the world is trying to hurt you. I give you my solemn word that the only thing which has entered into consideration of this case from first to last has been the welfare of the children.’

  The room swam in sunlight, but under it Miss Gildea’s face was gray and lifeless. She reached forward to fill her glass with water, stopped short, and seemed to gather herself together with a sudden brittle determination. ‘I’ll just have to speak to the Board myself,’ she said in a high breathless voice. ‘That’s the only thing to do, go there and explain the whole thing to them!’

  ‘That would not help,’ said Mr Harkness pityingly. ‘Believe me, Miss Gildea, it would not.’

  Miss Gildea left her chair and came to him, her eyes wide and frightened. She laid a trembling hand on his arm and spoke eagerly, quickly, trying to make him understand. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘that means I won’t get my pension. I must have two more years for that, don’t you see? There’s the payment on the house, the garden – no, the garden is part of the house, really – but without the pension—’

  She was pulling furiously at his arm with every phrase as if she could drag him bodily into a comprehension of her words, but he stood unyielding and only shook his head pityingly. ‘You must control yourself, Miss Gildea,’ he pleaded. ‘You’re not yourself, and it’s impossible—’

  ‘No!’ she cried in a strange voice. ‘No!’

  When she pulled away he knew almost simultaneously what she intended to do, but the thought froze him to the spot, and when he moved it was too late. He burst into the corridor through the door she had flung open, and almost threw himself down the stairway to the main hall. The door to the street was just swinging shut and he ran toward it, one hand holding the rim of his glasses, a sharp little pain digging into his side, but before he could reach the door he heard the screech of brakes, the single agonized scream, and the horrified shout of a hundred shrill voices.

  He put his hand on the door, but could not find the strength to open it. A few minutes later, a cleaning woman had to sidle around him to get outside and see what all the excitement was about.

  Miss Reardon, the substitute, took the Sixth Grade the next day, and, everything considered, handled it very well. The single ripple in the even current of the session came at its very start when Miss Reardon explained her presence by referring to the ‘sad accident that happened to dear Miss Gildea.’ The mild hubbub which followed this contained several voices, notably in the back of the room, which protested plaintively, ‘It was not an accident, Miss Reardon; she ran right in front of that bus,’ but Miss Reardon quickly brought order to the room with a few sharp raps of her ruler and after that, classwork was carried on in a pleasant and orderly fashion.

  Robert walked home slowly that afternoon, swinging his schoolbag placidly at his side, savoring the June warmth soaking into him, the fresh green smell in the air, the memory of Miss Reardon’s understanding face so often turned toward his in eager and friendly interest. His home was identical with all the others on the block, square white boxes with small lawns before them, and its only distinction was that all its blinds were drawn down. After he had closed the front door very quietly behind him, he set his schoolbag down in the hallway, and went into the stuffy half-darkness of the living room.

  Robert’s father sat in the big armchair in his bathrobe, the way he always did, and Robert’s mother was bent over him holding a glass of water.

  ‘No!’ Robert’s father said. ‘You just want to get rid of me, but I won’t let you! I know what you put into it, and I won’t drink it! I’ll die before I drink it!’

  ‘Please,’ Robert’s mother said, ‘please take it. I swear it’s only water. I’ll drink some myself if you don’t believe me.’ But when she drank a little and then held the glass to his lips, Robert’s father only tossed his head from side to side.

  Robert stood there watching the scene with fascination, his lips moving in silent mimicry of the familiar words. Then he cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m home, Mama,’ Robert said softly. ‘Can I have some milk and cookies, please?’

  Unreasonable Doubt

  Mr Willoughby found a seat in the club car and gingerly settled into it. So far, he reflected with overwhelming gratitude, the vacation was a complete success. Not a hint of the headaches he had liv
ed with the past year. Not a suggestion of the iron band drawing tight around the skull, the gimlet boring into it, the hammers tapping away at it.

  ‘Tension,’ the doctor had said. ‘Physically you’re sound as a nut, but you sit over your desk all day worrying over one problem after another until your mind is as tight as a mainspring. Then you take the problems home and worry them to death there. Don’t get much sleep, do you?’

  Mr Willoughby admitted that he did not.

  ‘I thought so,’ said the doctor. ‘Well, there’s only one answer. A vacation. And I do mean a real vacation where you get away from it all. Seal your mind up. Don’t let anything get into it but idle talk. Don’t think about any problems at all. Don’t even try a crossword puzzle. Just close your eyes and listen to the world go round. That’ll do it,’ he assured him.

  And it had done it, as Mr Willoughby realized even after only one day of the treatment. And there were weeks of blissful relaxation ahead. Of course, it wasn’t always easy to push aside every problem that came to mind. For example, there was a newspaper on the smoking table next to his chair right now, its headline partly revealing the words NEW CRISIS IN – Mr Willoughby hastily averted his head and thrust the paper into the rack beneath the table. A small triumph, but a pleasant one.

  He was watching the rise and fall of the landscape outside the window, dreamily counting mileposts as they flashed by, when he first became aware of the voice at his elbow. The corner of his chair was backed up near that of his neighbor, a stout, white-haired man who was deep in talk with a companion. The stout man’s voice was not loud, but it was penetrating. The voice, one might say, of a trained actor whose every whisper can be distinctly heard by the gallery. Even if one did not choose to be an eavesdropper it was impossible not to follow every word spoken. Mr Willoughby, however, deliberately chose to eavesdrop. The talk was largely an erudite discourse on legal matters; the stout man was apparently a lawyer of vast experience and uncanny recollective powers; and, all in all, the combination had the effect on Mr Willoughby of chamber music being played softly by skilled hands.