Wonderland Page 10

  They had left him and were buried in a cemetery outside town. But they were spying on him, about to giggle at his loneliness, his sitting in this back room—why wasn’t he in school? why had he left school at noon? But he did not move. He felt his father watching him, but he did not move. Let his sister Jean run in and tease him, laughing at him the way she always did—he didn’t mind—she would say Jesse couldn’t go to the lavatory before assembly, oh no, he had to wait until it began and then he excused himself.… Let her tease, he didn’t mind.

  The house slowly darkened. He felt how cleverly he was camouflaged in it, like an animal in the woods, like one of those carcasses he and the dog had discovered at the end of winter. From time to time he saw the flash of headlights and, for an instant, he understood that it was his family coming back—they had gone out shopping late and were just coming home. But the car never turned up the drive. He sat on the crate, feeling how the room was so much smaller without things in it—how the floor seemed to slope—it seemed to slope toward the rear of the house, toward the woods out back, and he had to brace himself firmly against that tugging, his feet out in front of him in his muddy winter boots.

  4

  Jesse lived for a while with his aunt and uncle in Yewville. They had one son, Fritz, who was a year older than Jesse and who had always seemed to like Jesse well enough. But now, thrown together, the two boys were unwieldy and self-conscious; Jesse was aware of Fritz’s trying, trying hard, to act as if nothing had gone wrong. Everyone talked to him, as if fearful of silence. Fritz came home from school and talked to Jesse about what was going on—rapid, nervous chatter about people who had become hardly more than names to Jesse now—and Jesse began to nod quickly, without hearing, his face slack and peaceful, as if on the verge of perpetual sleep. He had the habit now of sitting without moving for long periods of time. His brain operated slowly, without agitation. He liked to sit in the kitchen while his aunt prepared food, and not even her chatter and the radio above the sink with its music and news broadcasts could keep him from a dark, pleasant drowsiness. He could feel the darkness rise at the back of his head, coming up from the mysterious thick vessels in his throat; sometimes, while his aunt talked toward him, he put his head down on his arms and fell asleep. His uncle came in late from work—he worked at a planing mill—kicked off his shoes, opened a bottle of ale, talked loudly and heartily to Jesse, with the boisterousness of a man not accustomed to talking to children, and then, as if puzzled by Jesse’s silence, he would suck in air and blow it out again, slowly, thoughtfully, so that his cheeks belled and his eyes moved cautiously about his own kitchen, not quite recognizing it. Jesse slept in Fritz’s room, a small attic room with a sloped ceiling, and even at night Fritz would try to talk to him in the dark, a questioning, brotherly, gentle murmur punctuating the chilly dark of the room: “Hey, Jesse, what do you think of Barbara Stanley, huh? What do you think of Agnes Stanley?”

  But when he was not with them he could hear them talking softly together, sometimes whispering. So careful. So cautious. He hesitated to enter a room because it would break them up—his aunt and uncle drawing apart, smiling nervously over at him, even Fritz, who resembled Jesse a little, with the same red-blond wavy hair and the same tall, thin frame, drawing away from his mother as if to show that they had not been talking about anything at all. Jesse sensed how he altered their lives, stirring the air of any room he entered. He sensed their kindness, the pity in his aunt’s eyes that might have been pity for any freak—Jesse a boy of fourteen with no family, a boy who was not going to school, who moved about in a kind of daze.… One evening in the kitchen Fritz slammed the icebox door and the noise startled Jesse, who was easily startled by noises now, and his aunt said angrily: “Fritz, were you born in a barn? Don’t you have any manners?” Fritz looked at her, baffled. It occurred to Jesse that she was saying words she had never said before, before Jesse’s coming to live here. She was speaking in a voice, staring at her son in a way that Jesse himself had caused. Don’t you have any manners? It was not something she would ordinarily have said, just as her dead sister, Jesse’s mother, would not have said it to Jesse.…

  In May his uncle drove him to the Niagara County Home for Boys, outside Lockport. It was a large building of dark red brick, set back from the road and surrounded by a wire fence. The front yard was bumpy—grass and lumps of weeds and bare, rutted earth, as if trucks and tractors had been driven back and forth over it. A circular drive was made of cinders. The front of the building was weathered, the bricks beginning to chip, like the bricks of the old high school back in Yewville. Jesse’s uncle talked with the supervisor and the welfare worker, who had a manila folder open on her lap, papers that referred to Jesse, to Jesse Harte. She consulted these papers now and then. Jesse did not bother to listen to most of what they said, these three adults who conferred together, deciding his fate. He sat politely in his new suit, which was a rather bright blue, bought at Montgomery Ward’s a few days ago. His aunt, who had been nervous for a week, took him shopping and bought him the suit as a “going away” present. She had wept that morning while making them breakfast. Her face had a stricken, thin, witch-like look about it that frightened Jesse. She stood at the stove, her shoulders slumped, and the smell of the frying bacon and eggs and the way his aunt stood there, weeping, made Jesse think of his own mother. He was grateful to be leaving. He had to leave. His aunt had wept, but she had not come along with Jesse and his uncle to Lockport.

  Everyone stood. The discussion must have come to an end. The welfare worker, a woman whose name Jesse had forgotten, shook hands with him and said good-by. The supervisor, Mr. Foley, led Jesse and his uncle up to the dormitory where Jesse would sleep. It was a long room with a high ceiling. Two rows of beds. Everything empty, too quiet. “We have school-age boys here only,” Mr. Foley was saying. “The others, you know, the younger ones, are sent to the Clinton Street Home.” Jesse was unpacking his suitcase and he moved self-consciously, taking out underwear and socks. The suitcase was not his; his uncle would be taking it back to Yewville with him. He felt that the two men were watching him closely but absentmindedly, as if they had nothing else to look at.

  “… and in addition to Sunday School there are weekday instructions, Wednesday afternoons. The public schools in Lockport dismiss classes early so that children can go to these instructions. Jesse will be going to the Methodist Church …? And we have a busy schedule for this spring. There is a softball team, and the Episcopalian Women’s Association is going to take the boys to the Buffalo zoo.…”

  Jesse’s uncle kept nodding and saying, “Yes. Yes, is that so? Yes. I didn’t know that.”

  He was awkward here, in his working clothes, unaccustomed to the kind of intense talk Mr. Foley was giving him. He seemed to be perspiring. Jesse wanted to tell his uncle that it was all right. It was all right, he knew he had to leave, he couldn’t live with them. He would not hold it against them. Anyway, when he was eighteen he could leave this place and this part of the country.

  But when his uncle was about to leave, Jesse tasted panic.

  “I better be starting back, Jesse,” his uncle said clumsily. “It’s a long drive.”

  He shook hands with Jesse, something he would never have done ordinarily, and Jesse felt again the contamination of his own presence, how he ruined things, made people jumpy and awkward.

  “Well … I better start back. We’ll come up to see you on Sunday, Jesse. And sometimes you can come back with us, if it’s all right with Mr. Foley, you can stay overnight with Fritz … he’ll like that a whole lot.…”

  His uncle was leaving him here?

  They went back downstairs. Mr. Foley showed Jesse and his uncle one more room, a large dining room. There seemed to be nothing to say about it. Jesse’s uncle tried to say something, to make a comment, but there was nothing to say. Several rows of ordinary tables, chipped a little; ordinary chairs; windows that looked out upon the cinder drive. A smell of dishwater. It was in this room th
at Jesse’s uncle shook hands with him a second time, gravely and miserably. “It’s a long drive back. I better get started,” he said.

  At about quarter to four the Home’s bus brought the other boys back from school. Jesse felt panic at the sight of them—boys piling off a battered orange-yellow school bus, a noisy group, not the kind of boys Jesse had imagined. He had thought of orphans as being weak, slight, sickly. But these were ordinary boys. Ordinary shouts, scuffles. He was not going to be equal to them.

  What had he to do with these people?

  It was too late in the year for Jesse to start school, so he stayed at the Home every weekday while most of the other boys left. Two other boys also stayed behind—they were twins, large, stooping boys with bumpy faces, older than Jesse but evidently retarded, and the three of them worked around the Home with the handyman, or cleared away dead grass in the fields and orchard, or helped unload supplies of food from delivery trucks. Jesse liked the work, which was tiring and kept his mind occupied. When his mind was not occupied it kept thinking, plotting the route back to Yewville, skimming along the highways and roads to Yewville and to that intersection, the gas station, the house, the FOR SALE sign. Jesse slid in and out of dreaming, awakened by someone jabbing him in the ribs.

  “How come you never talk? How come you just stand there?” one of the twins would ask Jesse curiously.

  On Sundays they all went to church in Lockport. Jesse disliked church because it gave him too much time to think, but he looked forward to the bus ride. He was fascinated by the bridges and the canal in Lockport. He had never seen anything like the canal. He asked the bus driver questions about the canal—the Erie Barge Canal—and he yearned to stand on the widest of all the bridges and wait until a boat came through the locks. But there was never any opportunity. He had to stay with the other boys. In church he sat without fidgeting, wearily sensing himself an adult already, too old to bother with the whispered jokes and scuffling of the other boys; and he had no interest in, could not bother with the church ceremony itself. His brain retreated to an area about the size of a walnut.

  One day Mr. Foley brought Jesse to his office after breakfast.

  “Jesse, there is a gentleman from the city, Dr. Pedersen, who would like to have a talk with you,” Mr. Foley said.

  Jesse had already been examined by a County doctor and for a moment he thought this must be the same man.

  “Dr. Pedersen has expressed an interest in your case. He and his wife have been considering the adoption of a child for some time … he has been in contact with me before but …”

  Jesse leaned forward as if someone had struck him between the shoulder blades.

  Adoption?

  “I have set up a tentative meeting for Sunday afternoon,” Mr. Foley said. He showed Jesse a pleased, rabbity smile. “Dr. Pedersen is a very busy man and Sundays are his only free day. You have probably never heard of Karl Pedersen, but he is very well known in the city. He and his father and two of his brothers, and even his wife’s father, I think, are physicians who have made quite a name for themselves here. They’re wonderful, wonderful people. Of course, as you know, it’s a little unusual for a boy of your age to be adopted; in fact, very few of the boys here are ever considered for adoption … but … Dr. Pedersen spoke to me several times over the telephone, in person, and he has assured me that this is what he would like.…”

  Jesse sat, numb.

  “Jesse, you haven’t said anything. I know how strange this is, in fact, I … I find it very strange myself, and I wonder … but … Dr. Pedersen assured me … What do you think, Jesse? Would you like to meet him?”

  Jesse nodded yes.

  Yes.

  He met Dr. Pedersen in Mr. Foley’s office. Mr. Foley introduced them nervously. Dr. Pedersen was a tall, fat man who stared frankly into Jesse’s face, as if trying to place him. “Yes. Jesse Harte. How do you do,” he said. His face was large and pale and moony. It seemed to give off a subdued, clammy light. “Well, my boy. We must talk alone now. Sit down. Please sit down. Mr. Foley, you won’t mind if this young man and I talk alone together?”

  Jesse looked to Mr. Foley in a panic, Don’t leave.

  But once they were alone Dr. Pedersen smiled at him and settled back in his chair. A wait of several seconds. Then he said, in a very kindly voice, “My boy, you are fourteen years old?”

  “Yes,” said Jesse.

  “When is your birthday?”

  “October third.”

  “You did not attend school this spring, I was told. Why was this?”

  “I’ll be going back. I was sick for a while.”

  “Oh. Yes. You were sick for a while,” Dr. Pedersen said. He smiled slightly, as if to encourage Jesse to speak. Relax, Jesse. Smile. Jesse was conscious of sitting very straight.

  “You are interested in school, aren’t you? You enjoy it?”

  “Yes,” Jesse said.

  A lie. But maybe it would become true.

  “Which subjects do you prefer?”

  “I don’t know.…”

  “You don’t know,” Dr. Pedersen said flatly. “You don’t know?”

  “Well … science.…”

  “Science,” Dr. Pedersen said. “Which branch of science?”

  Jesse had no idea. He stared at the floor.

  “Are you primarily interested in living things or in dead things?”

  “Living things.”

  “Ah, then—biology! You are interested in biology.”

  Jesse could not bring himself to say yes. He nodded vaguely.

  A big man, this Dr. Pedersen—an immense torso, an immense stomach that bulged out against the front of his suit coat, straining the material. Enormous thighs. Knees that strained the material of his trousers so tightly it looked as if it might rip. Jesse could not help but stare at the man’s large ankles, the size of an ordinary man’s knees, swelling out against his black socks. His feet, though, were rather short. His hands were pudgy but rather short.

  “You intend to go to college, of course,” Dr. Pedersen said.

  Jesse raised his eyes miserably to the man’s face.

  “College …?”

  “You intend to continue your education beyond high school, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Why are you in doubt?”

  “I don’t know anything about college … nobody ever went that I … I knew.…”

  “But you have a willingness to learn?”

  “I guess so.…”

  “To go as far as you can, as far as your abilities will take you?”

  “I guess so,” Jesse said faintly.

  Silence. Dr. Pedersen’s voice was subdued and lethargic, his face pale, moony, damp. Yet there was a peculiar excitement in him. It had something to do with his clothes, his expensive stylish clothes, and the way his body strained at them so fiercely. He seemed very pleased with Jesse’s last reply. Jesse stirred himself to add to it, to continue. “I … I want to go as far as I can.…” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Dr. Pedersen smiled at him, watching him as if from a distance. He needs a telescope to examine me, Jesse thought dizzily. His face was strained from the small frightened smile he had brought with him to the interview, but he could not relax, there was nothing to take the place of that smile. He felt as if Dr. Pedersen were staring into the hollow spaces of his skull, seeing everything, assessing everything. The doctor nodded from time to time, as if their conversation were continuing in silence, while Jesse sat in an unnaturally straight position, conscious of being very skinny. He had lost about fifteen pounds since winter.

  “Do you believe, Jesse, that there are human destinies just as there are national destinies? That a human being must realize himself, redeem himself, by becoming what he was meant to be?” Dr. Pedersen asked. Jesse stared at him without comprehension. He went on, more gently, as if speaking to a child. “You are perhaps too young to understand the currents that pass between people, the relationshi
ps that are too subtle to be talked about, that elude analysis. Yes, you are very young. These things must be explained to you. There are certain tugs of feeling between people—an almost literal tugging, a pulling—that cannot be predicted or understood, and yet they exist as surely as our material universe exists. Though I am a doctor and a man of science, and as such committed absolutely to the world of the material, the world of measurement, yet I believe also in the world of the spirit as well … I believe that the spirit is very strong, stronger than the body … and that it is our spirits that commune with one another, in silence.”

  Jesse nodded slowly.

  “Well, I will say good-by to you for this afternoon,” Dr. Pedersen said in a more formal voice. He stood and shook hands with Jesse, taking Jesse’s thin hand in both of his and squeezing it.

  All that week Jesse asked Mr. Foley if he had heard anything. Had Dr. Pedersen said anything to him? What would happen? Jesse kept going back over the conversation, angry with himself for not having said more, for having sat so passively, so stupidly.… He had been a child of action, always doing things, running around, getting into trouble; he could remember that part of his life clearly. And yet it seemed to belong to another boy, another Jesse, and he didn’t know how to get back to being that person, that self. Sometimes he felt a flurry of panic, to think that he was nothing at all, that he did not exist. What did that mean—to exist? He tried to remember the strange things Dr. Pedersen had said to him, as if he, Jesse Harte, could understand them. No one in his life had ever talked like that to him. He did not understand. It made no sense. A human being … must become what he was meant to be.… But though the words made no sense, though back in Yewville people would just have laughed at them, Jesse had the idea that they were attached to something real, something invisible and terrifying in its reality.

  He went around arguing with himself. Angry and yearning. Here he was: in an orphanage. The Niagara County Home for Boys. His heart hammered when he thought of Dr. Pedersen, the bulk of the man, the enormous swelling energy of the man.… He had never met anyone like Dr. Pedersen He had never heard anyone talk like that. As the week passed he kept hearing Dr. Pedersen’s voice in his ears, as if he were still close by, talking gently and relentlessly at Jesse. He was baffled, angry. He did not want to remain in this place, and yet there was no way for him to leave except by being adopted, or taken into a foster home. Since he’d come here to live, one boy had already gone out into a foster home and come back again. The boys were scrawny and rat-faced and stupid, most of them. There was a look of quick, evasive cunning to them, as if they were happiest in small packs, mumbling jokes behind their hands … and Jesse was among them, scrawny himself, his face so thin that it, too, had that ratty, sharp, deprived look, and also an expression of vagueness. The boys’ faces were sharp, but they were also vague and anonymous. One of them might turn out to be another one; Jesse often mistook one boy for another, mixing up their names but also mixing up their faces, mixing them up. He lived in the Niagara County Home for Boys. He hated the Jesse Harte who lived here, who was in the files, here, in someone’s manila folder.