Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The potatoes were passed around a second time and Jesse took another helping. Rich, creamy mashed potatoes, with cheese and onion. His mouth watered violently. All the dishes came to rest finally in a little semicircle around Dr. Pedersen, who continued talking about his work at the Clinic. “… oh, and I dashed over to make morning rounds, and Dr. Thorne had to humble himself and ask my advice. Why, everything that man did was routine and unimaginative … I was embarrassed … monitor urinary output, an examination of the intercostal vessels and the internal mammary vessels.…”

  On and on he talked! His pleasant, well-modulated voice filled the room. Jesse ate hungrily and listened hungrily. The tablecloth gleamed with a snowlike intensity, a vista that excited Jesse and made him a little dizzy. He might have been standing on the edge of something, perhaps a cliff. At night he lay on the edge of sleep as if on the edge of this glowing white rectangle, this lovely lace rectangle, and felt how its whiteness filled his brain, his skull. The table fairly rocked now as Dr. Pedersen confided in them: “… the complexities of the case are certainly challenging, beyond any I’ve had for the past month. And I hate to show up a doctor in front of his colleagues, but … but it looks as if his diagnosis is wrong and his treatment may have been tragically mistaken.…”

  They all listened closely. Even Frederich nodded as he ate. Now a large plate of vegetables was being passed around—creamed cucumbers, green scallions on toast points, glazed carrots. And more mashed potatoes. Dora brought out another platter: a small roast surrounded by boiled potatoes and onions. The smell of the roast made Jesse’s heart jump.

  “… it is a joy, how the multiple parts come together, strain together, as if urging me to a premature solution!” Dr. Pedersen said. “But I am purposefully going slowly. It is a test of one’s commitment to medicine, the slowness with which one is able to go when all temptations urge him to rush. I review the symptoms endlessly: loud P2, the second sound of the pulmonary louder than the aortic. Yes. Yes. A back-up in pressure that puts enormous strain on the heart. Yes. Perhaps. Blood pressure one ten over seventy. Breathing at thirty to forty a minute. In heart failure, but we pulled her out; no danger there. Now, now is the time that will test me, my imagination. She lies there waiting for me to pronounce her fate: will she be saved, will her body be corrected and sent back out to live, or will Dr. Thorne summon her husband to the hospital, will he admit defeat …? What a drama life is, every minute of it—sheer drama!”

  Jesse stared at Dr. Pedersen, nodding.

  “Jesse, my boy, you look very serious today. You’re thinking of my work, eh? You’re thinking of how you would approach it?”

  “No.…”

  “No, not really?” Dr. Pedersen said, teasing. “But you are fascinated by my cases, I can see that. I was like that when my own father talked about his work. Yes, I see that in you. I see that in you,” he said slowly. “You alone, perhaps, of my children, will attend school in such a manner as to be licensed by the moronic—but highly necessary—officials of the structure of society, you will conform intelligently though not brilliantly to their demands, you will allow yourself to be educated according to their system, and you will perhaps one day join me in the Pedersen Clinic. I see that.”

  Jesse’s heart pounded. Everyone was watching him.

  “I have been calculating for some time, I have been planning, imagining how you will grow up into my place, into my very being. It is a challenge to me, this shaping of you, Jesse, because you do not have my genes, my flesh has not contributed to your flesh. You are a total mystery to my flesh. And yet I believe I will succeed with you.… Correcting defects of nature, modifying certain freakish twists of fate, has always been my specialty.”

  Jesse could not follow all this. He nodded as slowly and as gravely as Dr. Pedersen himself.

  There was a pause in the meal, as if everyone held his breath: then the meal continued.

  The platter of beef was passed around again. Jesse helped himself to another slice. He poured gravy onto his mashed potatoes, he helped himself to another serving of onions and carrots and cucumbers. Mrs. Pedersen smiled happily down the table to him. More muffins were brought out by Dora, uncovered, and passed from place to place. “Mary, these muffins are superb. Were they made from a new recipe?” Dr. Pedersen asked.

  “Yes. They’re made with sour cream. Are they really all right?”

  “Excellent,” Dr. Pedersen said. “By the way, Mr. Brewster was in to see me this morning, and he has drawn up the contract for the apartment building. I will check it through and sign it this afternoon. On Friday I’ll have to have luncheon with that Mr. Young, who’s flying in from Detroit. So I won’t be home. You remember my mentioning Mr. Young from General Laboratories? He’s going to discuss my patent of that vagotomic instrument—you remember—”

  Mrs. Pedersen had just discovered a spot on her white linen dress and she was rubbing at it. She looked up attentively.

  “I’ll repeat what I said, since you were distracted. Mr. Young, from Detroit, is coming on Friday to discuss the invention I’ve been working on. But there’s no need for me to go into details if you’re not interested.”

  “Oh, of course I’m interested.…”

  “I suspect you don’t really recall my work on this little device. It’s been in the back of my mind for years, and last week I finally took time to draw up plans.”

  “Yes, I think so,” Mrs. Pedersen said nervously.

  Dr. Pedersen held her gaze sternly, then with a brief explosive laugh turned to Frederich. “Women cannot concentrate. Even gifted women, even women singled out for exceptional histories, cannot concentrate. Is this why they are so charming?”

  “Father, I concentrate all the time!” Hilda cried.

  “Even you, Hildie, with your enormous talents, even you must be carefully disciplined. The discipline must come from other people,” Dr. Pedersen said with a wink.

  And now dessert was served: peaches and cream, and chocolate cake with a stiff, white frosting that had been shaped into tiny points, like the surface of a stormy sea. Jesse was surprised to find that he was still hungry. He accepted both kinds of dessert; he recalled vaguely the night he had spent in the empty house outside Yewville—that empty house his parents had once owned—sleepless and weak with hunger. Now his stomach strained against his belt—since coming to live with the Pedersens he had grown through three sizes of clothing—but still he was hungry and thought it a good idea to eat.

  Luncheon finally came to an end. It was one-thirty, With reluctance, Dr. Pedersen got to his feet. “Well, Mary, in spite of the many distractions of your life, this was an excellent meal. What have you planned for dinner tonight?”

  “I thought I’d keep it a surprise.…” Mrs. Pedersen said.

  “Fine, good. A good idea,” Dr. Pedersen said cheerfully. “And Frederich, this afternoon you are devoting yourself to …?”

  “The same composition,” Frederich said. He spoke slowly and distantly, as if he had answered this question many times. Jesse had the idea that he found it difficult to hide his contempt. “I am in the fourth movement now, the presto. It seems to be evolving into a kind of double fugue. I had not intended this, in fact, I have tried to resist it, and to resist as well variations on my theme that seem to me obvious and melodramatic. But the variations are relatively restrained. There are two strongly contrasted sections, one fast and one more rhapsodic, but I find them bearable.…”

  “Ah, I see you’re working very hard, as usual,” Dr. Pedersen said.

  “I have no choice about it,” Frederich said coolly. It was astonishing how much he resembled his father at times—a triangle of features inside a bulky expanse of face. But he seemed to possess none of his father’s youthfulness.

  Dr. Pedersen returned to the Clinic. Hilda and Frederich returned to their work. Jesse went out with Mrs. Pedersen to help in the garden. He had begun to worry about his book on the Erie Canal—it wasn’t suitable for a report and he had little time
to substitute another book. Mrs. Pedersen slowly drew on work gloves, straining to get them on her pudgy hands. She was strangely silent. On top of her head, perched there, was a new, greenish straw hat that looked as if it might fall off at any moment. She moved slowly, sadly. She went to look out over the rose garden and stood with her back to Jesse, in silence.

  Jesse was dazzled by the roses. So many of them! Their lovely petals moved gently in the breeze, he had never seen such beauty; for some reason he felt a little hungry.

  Mrs. Pedersen had begun shaking her head.

  Jesse did not know what to do—should he say anything? He waited. When she turned to him her face was damp with tears. “I can’t do this. All this,” she said faintly.

  “What—What’s wrong?” Jesse said.

  “I can’t go on,” she whispered.

  She had put on another work-apron over her white dress and she looked enormous, sad and enormous in the sunlight.

  “I feel dizzy. I have to lie down,” she said.

  Jesse helped her back into the house. She pulled off one of the gloves and dropped it on the flagstone terrace; the other she pulled off and threw a few feet away, as if it had angered her. The straw hat fell off her head as Jesse helped her up the back stairs. She was weeping quietly now. From the kitchen came the smell of something frying—hot fresh fat—and from the music room in back came the sound of Frederich’s piano playing, several clear sharp notes in sequence, one-two-three, one-two-three, the same notes played again and again. “Help me upstairs. I must lie down,” Mrs. Pedersen said. Jesse was alarmed at her quick, shallow breathing. He wondered if she could be having a heart attack. She leaned heavily against him. Near the top of the stairs she swayed, and he was afraid she would fall back on top of him—and both of them would fall downstairs—“Jesse,” she said, “help me, please help me—Will you take a message to my father? Will you?”

  He helped her to her room. He had never been in it before—a large pink room with several mirrors. She sat at a writing desk and wrote a note quickly. Droplets of perspiration fell onto the paper.

  “And don’t say anything about this to anyone,” she whispered.

  Jesse hurried with the envelope to his Grandfather Shirer, who lived in a large home about a mile away on Willow Street. He was a tall, heavyset man, a retired surgeon, who sat at one end of a sun porch; a nurse, reading a paperback novel, sat at the other end. Jesse gave him the note and he opened it and read it at once. His head was totally bald, a clean, pinkened, gleaming area of scalp; his face, like his scalp, was clean and fresh and shrewd. He sat with his daughter’s note in his fingers. For a while he said nothing. Then, lowering his voice so that the nurse wouldn’t hear, he said, “Thank you for bringing this, Jesse. And you understand you must not talk to anyone about it?”

  “I think so,” Jesse said.

  “Not to anyone. Not to your father, or to Hilda or Frederich.”

  Jesse looked down.

  “Not that there’s anything in this note that your family should not know—of course not—but … but … it is advisable that my daughter and I have a correspondence that is confidential, do you understand? Your mother’s privacy is an important issue, though what she does with it is perhaps not important. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Jesse said.

  “You know that your mother loves you very much,” Grandfather Shirer said, focusing his gaze upon Jesse now as if he had only discovered that this particular boy filled a blank slot in the air before him. “You know that …?”

  “Yes,” Jesse said.

  He went back home. He felt obscurely weary, soiled. A secret from Dr. Pedersen was bad, perhaps a mistake … he might regret it.… But he could not refuse. He had no choice.

  Only four more hours to read and prepare his report on the Erie Canal.

  7

  That voice.

  It was with him everywhere.

  At the edge of sleep, fearful of surrendering himself to its emptiness, he heard Dr. Pedersen’s voice pronouncing his name. Jesse. Jesse. The voice seemed to call him back from a deep, dangerous emptiness where anything might be dreamed, anything might be remembered. It was loving, stern, watchful. Walking to school, pausing at the edge of a curb, he seemed to hear the voice, pronouncing his name clearly, cautioning him as if the curb were the edge of a cliff and he was in danger of falling to his death. Sometimes when he studied in the evening upstairs in his room, he heard the words of his books pronounced in his head in Dr. Pedersen’s voice, so that he would not forget anything he read. It became permanent once it was heard in Dr. Pedersen’s voice. It became sacred.

  He had never really heard his name pronounced until Dr. Pedersen pronounced it.

  He had begun school and discovered that it was not difficult for him. He was anxious to do well, he studied all the time, he was always far ahead of his assignments. In a way, he felt that he had never attended school before; he had never taken it seriously before. Why that was he did not know. But now he took it seriously, he took everything seriously.… He felt himself an adult among large, chattering children in the school. He had nothing to say to them. They had nothing to say to him. The high school building—with its VNION SCHOOL sign above its front door, the “U” shaped quaintly, like a “V”—was antiquated and ugly, dating from the late eighteen-eighties, and it smelled sharply of disinfectant and polished wood and chalk dust, and the perfume and hairdressing of girls, so many chattering girls. Their voices were hectic and insubstantial and wordless, sounds rather than words, like music too trivial for Jesse to bother with. He moved among them shyly, detached from their perpetual excitement. If they brushed close to him, he felt a sensation like small sparks jumping through his body, sparks of panic. He did not allow himself to stare at them. He did not want to see them, did not want to remember them … there was something about the chunky, hotblooded fleshiness of girls that he did not want to remember.… Their skirts were long, well beneath the calves of their energetic legs, but their sweaters were tight across their breasts and shoulders; their hair, worn long, fell in bangs onto their foreheads or in languid strands into their eyes, to be brushed back impatiently, perpetually. The boys seemed much younger than the girls. They milled around together as if for strength, laughing harshly in the lavatories and on the stairs, smoking, calling out to one another in a language that seemed to Jesse partly code, made up of words he did not really understand. They were children, tall, scrawny children, and he was an adult. Something in him yearned for their childishness … but then he remembered who he was, who he must become, and he looked upon them as if from a height, Jesse already grown into the man he must become, grown safely free of their spurts of friendship and their spiteful little feuds.

  They are not very real, Jesse thought. He was echoing Dr. Pedersen’s remarks about the war in Europe: This war is not very real to us yet.

  No, other people were not very real; there was not time to think of them, to invest them with reality. Dr. Pedersen’s voice was real. It was close, intimate, like the murmuring of his own blood. It was somehow contained inside his skull. Other adult voices were important to Jesse—Mrs. Pedersen’s voice, the voices of his high school teachers—but only Dr. Pedersen’s followed him everywhere. It prodded him on, it gave him courage, it chided him when he was lazy. It was always quizzing him, bringing him up short by saying, What have you just read? Jesse read his textbooks and other books on chemistry, biology, physics, and mathematics; at the back of his mind he could hear Dr. Pedersen saying, Yes, good, but why are you so slow? You have so much more work to do! Hesitant, as if listening for a distant summons, Jesse would pause on the narrow school stairs. His classmates surged impatiently around him, noisy and shrill and prematurely knowledgeable, their legs straining as if ready to leap into a dance where he could not follow them, their voices hard and musical and hectic, yearning for the future. At the end of the school day they burst out of the old building and gathered together on the sidewalk in front of the
Palace Theater or in front of the YMCA building, or they went to join friends who had quit school at Harrison’s Radiator Company, a factory right behind the high school. Or they dawdled on the bridges of Lockport, staring down at the tugboats and the dirty barges, pushing pebbles absentmindedly down into the water with the edge of their feet. Restless. Aimless. They strolled up and down Main Street, eager to be transformed into adults so that they could escape forever the small, maddening confinement of their childhoods. The boys wanted cars, dreamed of cars or of joining the Navy, echoed their parents’ excited fears about the future: What was going to happen in Europe? What was Germany going to do next? The girls chattered about friends who were getting married, or about older sisters who were already married, having babies, always having babies. If Jesse happened to overhear them he felt at times that he had blundered into a crowd, an entire little nation, of strangers.

  He thought of himself as large and vulnerable among them, a tall boy, too serious, soft in the body, with a countrified apologetic look that drew out their puzzled scorn—but they respected him, too; they did not quite know what to make of him, because he was the new adopted son of Dr. Pedersen, Dr. Karl Pedersen, whom everyone in Lockport knew. He seemed to take on for them the gravity of his father’s importance. Glancing at him, they saw Dr. Pedersen instead. He was so serious, with his books and his quiet, stern frown, his manner of walking slowly as if figuring something out in his head, always a problem in his head, always something. He passed among them in silence, grateful for their lack of interest in him. Except for a few remarks he overheard—made up of jargon he did not quite understand, except to know that it marked him as strange—they ignored him, forgot him almost as soon as they discovered him. He was grateful. He wanted only to be left alone by these noisy children, especially by the girls. But one day on the street a group of boys parted and one of them called after him in a voice that sounded familiar, “Jesse! Hey, Jesse!” He pretended at first not to hear, this alarmed him so. Why should anyone be calling after him? When he finally turned he saw his cousin Fritz running to catch up with him.