My parents made small talk with Professor Stiles, and he joined the conversation with ease. But his eyes, I couldn’t help but notice, fell upon me time and time again. I said nothing, but I felt that I was expected to, and several times I almost opened my mouth to speak. I resisted, however, afraid of how I might sound. I had already developed a reputation at school as a quiet, studious pupil, not especially socially adept, and I wanted such a man to be impressed by me, or at least to approve. Ultimately I considered it best, then, not to speak at all.
In time, the group moved to the dining room, where a place had been set for my sister. As the meal began, Doctor Stiles glanced at the empty plate and asked, “And so your young lady will not be available this evening?”
My mother reddened, and my father grumbled something about my mother’s inability to keep her in line, but Professor Stiles waved off the question with a graceful, leaflike hand. “It is of no consequence,” he said.
Awkwardly, my parents returned to small talk, and we ate. Professor Stiles complimented the food, and my mother blushed again, this time with pleasure—I could not recall my father ever having complimented her for anything. It was not in his nature. But, seeing that she was under the Doctor’s sway, my father said, “Avery, tell her about your work. Tell her what you’ve been doing.”
“Ah,” Professor Stiles said, setting down his knife and fork, and addressing my mother with disarming directness. “I am interested in modifying behavior, particularly in children, through a form of conditioning that I have devised.”
“Oh!” said my mother, and though her tone was bright, I could tell that it was a put-on, that she didn’t like this visitor and wished he would finish his meal and go away. My father must have sensed this, for he scowled slightly at the tablecloth and gripped his fork a little tighter.
“Forgive me for being obscure, Mrs. Loesch,” the Professor went on. “It is difficult to distill my years of research into a simple explanation, even for a colleague. I’ll put it this way.” He straightened in his chair, lifted his napkin to his face, and daubed at the corner of his mouth. Then he replaced the napkin on his lap, drew breath, and continued. “You have noticed, I should imagine, the social unrest that has overtaken our cities of late, and the reactionary culture that has sprung up in protest of the war.”
“Of course,” my mother replied briskly.
Professor Stiles acknowledged her with a nod. “And so you are likely familiar, as well, with our failures in that war, the losses our armed forces have suffered, and the despair that has spread among our soldiers there.” He did not wait for an answer, but merely went on. “It is my feeling that we have civilized our own humanness out of existence. We are too affluent, and too soft, and many of our natural instincts have atrophied. My research means to explore how the human mind reacts when its comforts have been stripped away. I intend to recover those human skills that we have lost, to create a better soldier, and perhaps more importantly, a better citizen.”
“I see,” my mother said.
The smile that Professor Stiles offered in response was a sad one. He shook his head, turned to me, and winked. Then he reached into the pocket of his sport coat, lunged to his feet, and grabbed me from behind, pinning me to my chair. His arm was crooked around my neck; the tweed was rough against my throat. I felt something being pressed to my skull, just above the right ear.
My mouth was full of food, but I was unable to swallow. I heard my mother scream.
“I’m going to murder your child, Mrs. Loesch,” Professor Stiles said, his voice loud but calm. “What are you going to do?”
She screamed again and again, her hands twisting her napkin, her body curling further and further in on itself, shrinking like a piece of paper thrown into a fire.
I had not yet had time to be frightened—I felt only shock and confusion. I looked to my father for help and was even more baffled to find him sitting back, his arms crossed over his chest, looking on with interest, even amusement. It was clear he was not comfortable with the situation—his mouth was taut, and the veins stood out above his ear—but neither was he frightened, or even angry. Meanwhile, my mother continued to scream.
“I’m going to kill Eric, Mrs. Loesch,” he said. “What will you do? How will you save your son?”
“Please!” she wailed, rocking in her chair. She turned to my father. “Please! Brian! Please!”
“Mrs. Loesch!” Professor Stiles shouted.
“Oh, please!”
“Mrs. Loesch, look at me!”
I felt the object press harder into my scalp, and I tried to lean away. But the Professor’s arm held me tight. I struggled to swallow, failed, and coughed horribly, spitting the food across the table. My father frowned.
“Look at me, Mrs. Loesch! If you want your son to live, look at me!”
I believe that lifting her head was the most difficult thing my mother had ever done. Slowly, as though she were terribly old, she turned to face the end of the table where the Professor stood over me; she gazed into my eyes and I recognized that something in her had toppled over and shattered. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, and wrinkles fanned out from the corners of her mouth. A bubble appeared at a nostril, grew, and popped.
“Look at me, please, Mrs. Loesch.”
With a final, desperate effort, her eyes rolled up to meet his.
“Do you want me to kill your son, Mrs. Loesch?”
“No,” my mother whispered.
“Mrs. Loesch, I want you to look at my hand.”
She blinked, and blankly gazed at his left hand, which rested on my shoulder, holding me to the chair with casual, implacable force. I could feel the long fingers there, pressing painfully into my flesh.
“No, Mrs. Loesch, the other hand.”
Her jaw trembling, she shifted her gaze to the Professor’s other hand, the one holding the weapon to my head.
“Mrs. Loesch, I want you to tell me what I have pressed to Eric’s head.”
Fresh tears began to run down my mother’s face. “A g—,” she stammered, “a g-g-gun.”
“Mrs. Loesch. Cybele. No. What do I have pressed to Eric’s head?”
A curious transition played itself out on my mother’s features. Though she was wracked by fear and despair, she must have found within herself some well of resolve, for she focused her glassy pink gaze and concentrated on the Professor’s weapon. After a moment, her eyes flew open, and her head jerked back an inch; the first stirrings of anger were visible at the corners of her mouth.
She looked up at the Professor, then at my father, who had slid down in his chair and was staring at his hands, folded on his belly. Some of the food I’d spat out had struck his shirtsleeve just above the elbow. He did not appear to notice it there.
Finally my mother’s eyes returned to mine. Her gaze was cold.
“Mrs. Loesch? Tell me what you see.”
She did not look at him as she spoke; her eyes remained on my face, but she appeared to be looking elsewhere, someplace far from this room. Her cheeks were still wet, but her eyes were dry now, as if the tears had been burned away. She said, “A train.”
With the pronouncement of these words, Professor Stiles released me from his grip. I slumped in my chair, coughing, and found suspended in front of my face, gently held by the Professor’s long pale fingers, a die-cast toy locomotive. After a moment, his face appeared beside it.
“For you,” he said.
This train was something I wanted very badly. I had seen it, in fact, just that week, at the toy shop in downtown Milan, displayed in the front window along with a collection of cars that linked to it. But it was the locomotive I wanted the most. Sleek, black, with windows of real glass and a precise red and white stripe running down its flank, it was a marvelous toy. It looked nothing like a gun, of course.
It is difficult to remember what, precisely, was going through my mind at that moment. I had just been through an unprecedented experience, but I cannot say that I was ever act
ually frightened, in spite of my mother’s apparent breakdown. This may seem like a strange thing for me to say, but it is true. My father, of course, had never moved from his chair, and had never once seemed worried as events unfolded. And there was something about Doctor Stiles’s hand, the particular way it gripped my shoulder—firm, of course, nearly to the point of injury, but also somehow reassuring. I was not often touched by my parents; ours was an undemonstrative family. Perhaps I was simply unaccustomed to this kind of contact and relished it for its novelty. At any rate, I was not afraid, merely puzzled. I had no idea what had just happened, or why, and understood only that, in the wake of an unpleasant minute, I was being offered something I wanted.
I raised my hand to take the train.
“Don’t touch that, Eric,” said my mother.
I looked at her, my hand frozen in the air, waiting for her to change her mind. Her anger was fully realized now, enveloping her face like a mask.
My father spoke now, sitting up straight with a little grunt. His voice was quiet, cowed, and strained. “Oh, now, how about—”
“Don’t touch it, Eric,” she said again, and then shifted her gaze over my shoulder, to where Professor Stiles was standing. “And you get out of my house.”
“Now, Cybele,” my father began with a sigh.
“Out!” she spat. “You’re sick. You’re a sick man.”
“Mrs. Loesch,” the Professor said quietly, taking a step away from me. The train went with him, and I watched it slip back into his jacket pocket. “I was merely illustrating that—”
“I don’t care what you were illustrating,” my mother said. “I want you to leave. You’re terrible, horrible. How could you do that to a boy?”
“Look at him, Cybele, he’s fine!” It was my father, his open hand thrust out toward me. “He knew it was a trick, you were the only one who was fooled!”
She scowled at me, as though I had betrayed her. But I had done nothing other than sit there, waiting for it to end.
“He might have choked to death on his food,” she offered weakly.
“Come on,” my father said with a nervous chuckle. “There was never any chance of that.”
My mother leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, and I watched as her anger and fear gave way to exhaustion. She let out a long breath. The battle was over; she had lost.
But Professor Stiles did not return to his seat. Instead, he apologized to my mother. “Mrs. Loesch, I’m sorry. I never dreamed that this demonstration would have such an effect on you. Of course you’re right; it was rude of me. I’ll leave you to finish your meal in peace.” My mother opened her eyes to stare at him, and for a moment I thought that she would actually insist that he stay—would get up, take him by the arm, and lead him back to his chair. But she could not capitulate so completely. She stayed where she was. Perhaps she was just too tired.
Professor Stiles patted me on the head, then walked around behind me to shake my father’s hand. My father rose and accompanied him to the door. A few moments later, he returned to the table.
There was no question of finishing our meal. No one had any appetite anymore. We sat in silence as we listened to Professor Stiles’s car start up and drive away.
During this interval, I watched my father change. He had sat down a defeated and humiliated man, the architect of a crashing failure. But he crossed his arms over his chest, as if gathering together the parts of himself, and began to concentrate. His brow furrowed, his lower lip stuck out, and his jaw first twitched, then trembled, and finally settled into a slow grind. As the minutes went by, his eyes regained their luster, and the angles came back into his face, and I could see that he was to emerge from his trance in a state of righteous indignation.
The transformation filled me with both pride and unease. I did not like to see my father defeated, and it pleased me to watch the life return to him. But I understood that it was my mother who would be forced to bear the brunt of this new vitality. It had only taken perhaps ninety seconds—he began to shift his body and to emit small, outraged grunts. My mother, hearing them, stiffened in her chair, sat up a bit straighter, stared with greater intensity at a meaningless spot on the tablecloth.
“A professor,” was the first thing my father said.
“A distinguished professor of psychology,” he elaborated a few seconds later. “Run out of our home.”
He waited a long half minute to speak again, this time to the ceiling, his head tipped far back, the tendons on his neck sticking out in sharp relief. “That’s who she decided she was smarter than, Doctor Avery Stiles. She decided she knew better than Doctor Avery Stiles. Because, after all, she is a brilliant professor with many advanced degrees, isn’t she? Isn’t she?
“Oh, that’s right,” he went on. “No. No, she’s not. She’s a plain old regular housewife who didn’t even finish high school. But of course she knows better anyway.
“Maybe she’s just embarrassed that she didn’t catch on? Maybe she’s upset because Professor Avery Stiles proved how stupid she is? Maybe that’s why she threw him out of her house. Because he told her a truth that she didn’t want to hear.
“Well, Doctor Stiles is used to that. Perhaps that’s why he was so polite, even after being told to leave our humble home. Because he’s used to telling people things they don’t want to hear. That’s why his colleagues have abandoned him. With their communist ideas. They don’t like being told they’re weak. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to admit that the enemy is them.”
My father was shaking his head slowly, his face compressed, as though he were crushing his teeth together inside his closed mouth. My mother, for her part, was highly alert, her eyes wide, her body very still.
“I want to tell you something,” he said now, speaking to her directly. He stood up, and his chair slid back and rattled against the breakfront. My mother flinched. “I want to tell you something about that man you kicked out. The man you threw out of our home—who you just expelled from our family. That man has no family, Cybele. You know why? They died. His daughter, his wife—they got sick and they died. He has been alone for five years. What kind of man is that, who can bear the death of his whole family? If it was me, I know what I would do—I would put an end to it all right then and there. I would just put an end to it. And don’t think I haven’t considered it anyway, Cybele, because I barely even have a family as it is. I have a daughter who’s never home, and a wife who doesn’t care, and doesn’t respect me. And I have a son who just sits there”—his arm was thrust out now, pointing at me, and he had raised his voice nearly to a shout—“doing nothing, saying nothing, like some kind of goddam zombie. And whose fault is that, Cybele? Who does he get that from? Who just sits and says nothing, and does nothing, and never shows any sign of life?”
He walked around the far end of the table, past Professor Stiles’s abandoned meal, and stood beside her, his hands on his hips. He was shouting at her hung head.
“It’s you, Cybele! It’s you! And what do you have to say to that, hah? What do you have to say!”
My mother was frozen now, silent, her eyes squeezed shut.
“That’s what I thought,” my father spat. “Eric, go outside.”
I didn’t hear at first—or, rather, I heard, but it was unclear that he was talking to me. I remained in my seat through several seconds of silence.
His head snapped up, the face red and folded over itself like a pug’s. “Go outside!” he screamed, and I jumped down from my chair and ran out the door.
It was a lovely evening in early spring, a bit cold to be out without a jacket, but I intended to keep moving, and would likely feel no particular discomfort. The sun had set, but there was still light in the near-cloudless sky, enough to see by until I reached the streetlights. I walked the three blocks down Jefferson, turned onto Main, and strolled into town; the closer I came to the park, the busier were the streets—there was Pernice’s; there was Old Gerry’s Diner. The marquee above the movi
e theater entrance was illuminated, and high school boys and girls were lined up there for tickets, the boys pushing one another and laughing, the girls huddled into little clusters, whispering to one another. Some kids a little older than I were playing touch football in the park, and I went to a bench and sat down to watch them. On the sidewalk in front of me, a crow was eating a dropped piece of bread.
I woke up shivering to the sound of a man’s voice. “Son,” the man said, but it wasn’t my father. It was a policeman.
“Shouldn’t you be going to bed about now? Where do you live?”
I blinked. There was a bit of drool on my face, which I wiped with my sleeve. “Jefferson Street, sir,” I said.
“Well, what are you doing here?”
“Going for a walk, sir.”
The policeman was short and heavy, and the gray hair underneath his hat was cut close, in the military style. He leveled a skeptical look and said, “You’re not walking, son, you’re sleeping.”
“I just … I fell asleep.”
“Your parents know you’re here?”
“Yes, sir.”
The policeman sighed. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”
“I can walk, sir,” I said, getting to my feet. I began to inch around him. I noticed my shoe was untied, but that would have to wait.
“I don’t think your parents want you walking home in the dark,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and led me to the edge of the park, where his patrol car was parked. He ushered me through the passenger side door, got in behind the wheel, and pulled away from the curb.
I bent down and tied my shoe. The police car reached the end of Main. The radio quietly squawked and spat.
“Left or right?”
“Right, sir.” I hesitated before adding, “Please don’t do the lights and siren.”
He hazarded a sideways glance. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Thank you, sir.”
When my house was still a block away, I asked him to stop. He reached across me to open the door of the car, and I stepped out.
“Anything you want to tell me, son?” the policeman asked.
Castle: A Novel Page 17