Wonderland Page 11

  He kept hanging around Mr. Foley, He asked about Dr. Pedersen—did he operate on people? Did he save people’s lives? Jesse half shut his eyes and saw again the big puffy knees straining the material of the trousers. Did Dr. Pedersen have any children? How many children? Where did he live? On the brink of tears, feeling himself skinny and defeated, he followed Mr. Foley around for a week. Dr. Pedersen was a strange man, he kept saying. But Mr. Foley never agreed to this, not really. Dr. Pedersen was so fat, Jesse said, fat. But maybe he was too thin himself. His ribs showed. His wrists were bony. His upper arms were too thin for a boy, weren’t they? He tried to recall Dr. Pedersen’s words for Mr. Foley, but he could not quite remember them. To go as far … as your abilities will take you.… “Do you think he’ll come back?” Jesse asked Mr. Foley.

  On Friday afternoon he went to Lockport by himself, hitching a ride in. This was not allowed but he hardly thought of it, every cell in his body strained forward, eager, perspiring, alert, anxious to get him into the city, the city where Dr. Pedersen lived! He had been hacking away at some dead weeds and near the edge of the field he had simply put down his small scythe and walked away. One of the boys called after him, “Hey! Hey you! Jesse!” Jesse had not bothered to reply. It did not matter what he was called in that place, which name they called him. His name, “Jesse,” was not a word he acknowledged there. They might call him anything and he would not acknowledge it.

  He wandered around Main Street, walking slowly. He had the idea that Dr. Pedersen might come along at any moment. He felt confused, a little frightened. What was going to happen to him? Traffic passed continually and he was impressed with how busy this city was, much busier than Yewville, many more people … small crowds of shoppers on Friday afternoon … many boys his own age, in little groups, glancing at him but not bothering with him.… In a drugstore he looked through the telephone directory and came across Dr. Pedersen’s name. There were two addresses after the name, one for his home on Locust Street and one for his clinic on Plank Road. Jesse was very excited. He memorized the addresses. Then he looked through the Yellow Pages and came across Dr. Pedersen’s name under the heading Physicians; eagerly he underscored the name with his finger: Dr. Karl Pedersen, General Medicine. The same addresses! Jesse wandered out onto the street again and looked at the street sign. He would find Dr. Pedersen’s home. He walked for a while in one direction, but could not find Locust Street. He was not really lost, he believed, yet it would have been difficult for him to find his way back to the Home. After a while he asked someone where Locust Street was; the girl, who was his own age, seemed to look at him strangely. How shameful it was to be so weak, so skinny! He wondered if Dr. Pedersen had forgotten him, if he had decided against him and was making plans now to adopt another boy. Why, why was he so thin, so scrawny? He climbed to Locust Street—Lockport seemed to be built on a number of hills—and was alarmed at how weak he felt when he got there. His brain raced. He argued with himself, snatches of words that made no sense, he even put his fingers around his wrist, nervously measuring it.…

  There, there was the Pedersen home!

  A vast three-story house made of a very dark gray stone. Many windows, framed in white. Yes, many windows; it dazzled Jesse to see so many of them. In front, there were two high pillars and a large front door made of heavy wood, and, just before the steps, two stone animals—maybe lions—that seemed to be guarding the house in their sleep. The lawn was a very bright, neat green, and had evidently been seeded only recently. The grass looked fragile; Jesse could see faint rake marks in the earth through the blades of grass. The house and its large lawn were surrounded by a waist-high iron fence with leafy patterns in it. Jesse stood nervously on the public sidewalk, staring at the house. He was afraid that someone would notice him out here, that someone in the house might glance out the window and see him. What if Dr. Pedersen himself looked out?… Jesse walked by the house several times, staring. He ran his fingers along the iron fence. They came away a little dusty. He was aware of danger, yet he could not leave … he walked by the house again … he wondered what would happen if he went inside the gate, up the steps past those stone lions, what would happen if he rang the doorbell?

  But he hadn’t the nerve for this. So he hesitated on the sidewalk, looking around. And he saw a very fat woman approaching him from the corner. She walked with her shoulders slumped forward and her head bowed, so that her thick, babyish chin was squeezed against her throat. She wore a white blouse out of which her thick upper arms pushed, like pale sausages, and a dark cotton gathered skirt that billowed out about her wide hips. Jesse backed away, seeing her. She looked familiar. But she did not seem to notice him, she hardly glanced up as she approached, and when she came to the Pedersen house she turned up the walk, moving slowly, wearily, as if she were very old. But Jesse had been mistaken about her age—she was not even a woman, but only a girl about his own age, or younger, with a very fair, luminous skin, eyes that were heavily lashed and almost shadowed, but a small prim pink mouth that resembled Dr. Pedersen’s.

  He stared at her as she walked so slowly and laboriously right up to the Pedersen house, entering it as if it belonged to her, so naturally and easily entering it, coming home. His heart beat with a terrible yearning. He wanted to call out after her. But he only stared, and after a few minutes he backed away, across the street to the other side, backing away from the big stone house, amazed at its size, at the spread of elms and oaks and bushes around it. He kept measuring his wrist nervously, absentmindedly.

  That evening Dr. Pedersen and his wife came to see him.

  He escaped being punished because of their visit. Good luck, what good luck, he thought greedily, dizzily, as Mr. Foley led him to the office. Dr. Pedersen shook hands with him as if they were old acquaintances and introduced him to his wife. She was a short woman with an immense body, though not as large as her husband’s, but squat and soft and strangely lifeless, as if the weight of her flesh were a burden she was not accustomed to. Her face was high-colored and strained, the cheeks flushed, the eyes very bright. Out of the soft, inert ripeness of her flesh her features stared with a bright, hectic alertness. Yet beneath the face, beneath the plump chin, her body seemed to ooze without shape, inertly. She smiled at Jesse and was too shy to extend her hand when Dr. Pedersen introduced them.

  “Well. It is a warm evening,” Dr. Pedersen announced.

  Mrs. Pedersen nodded at once, smiling at Jesse. Jesse imitated her and nodded. His heart was pounding very hard and he wondered if Dr. Pedersen could sense his nervousness.

  “Well. Jesse Harte. We must sit down together, commune together.” They sat. Dr. Pedersen seemed larger than Jesse had remembered. He wore a gray suit of fine, expensive material, and a silvery-gray vest, and a dark tie. He crossed his legs with care, raising one leg and easing it over the other, then drawing it back slightly so that his ankle rested on the knee of the other leg, and the large sole of his shoe faced outward, facing Jesse, a blank smooth gray sole. Jesse could see his flesh above the top of the black socks. Dr. Pedersen looked at him gravely. His face was prim, pursed. He drew in his breath slowly, not opening his mouth but widening his nostrils. It was a luxury, the way he breathed—he seemed to be tasting, assessing the very air.

  “Yes. Jesse Harte is our subject,” Dr. Pedersen said, as if he were addressing Mrs. Pedersen. But he seemed unaware of her existence; he was staring only at Jesse. “It is a matter of fate that we are together, in this room this evening. It was ordained to take place. We are going to establish precisely the nature of our several relationships, we are going to attempt to organize the future so far as it is possible. We imagine that we exercise freedom of will, but beneath all gestures, beneath all desperate assertions of the self, there is the stratum of fate, hard as the hardest rock.… Well, Jesse, what is your opinion?”

  Jesse stared.

  “I—”

  Dr. Pedersen waited politely. But when Jesse did not go on, he said in his prim, courtly way, �
��Is the world a mystery to you, Jesse?”

  “I … I think so.…”

  “Yet you were brought up in a conventionally religious household?”

  “Yes, I think so.…”

  “You attend church now, with the other boys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you pray very often?”

  “I don’t know … maybe.… Maybe I do.…”

  “What do you pray about?”

  Jesse could not answer. Dr. Pedersen watched him. He breathed slowly, deliberately.

  “Do you give thanks to God that you are alive, a living thing? That you still possess your God-given soul, your unique spirit?”

  “Yes.…”

  “Ah, good. And you believe then in the Incarnation and the Redemption of sinners,” Dr. Pedersen said flatly, “and you believe in the prophecy set down in the Apocalypse, that the cities of the earth will be leveled and the sinful destroyed?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it is all a mystery. And how do you propose to confront that mystery?”

  Jesse did not understand.

  “How do you, Jesse Harte, intend to confront the riddle of existence? How do you intend to organize your own life?”

  Jesse’s brain raced. “By … by going as far as I can go, as far as … my abilities will take me.…”

  “Ah, good. An extraordinary answer. Yes. Good,” Dr. Pedersen said, a little surprised. He smiled and a half-dozen dimples suddenly blossomed around his mouth. “Fourteen years old, Mary,” he said, though not turning to Mrs. Pedersen, “and he gives an answer like that.… It is fate, obviously.”

  Mrs. Pedersen nodded.

  “Now, Mary, if you will please leave us, I must talk more frankly with this young man,” Dr. Pedersen said. He got to his feet, and, with a grave formality, opened the door for his wife. She paused at the door and smiled again toward Jesse, though without really looking at him; she seemed girlish. Dr. Pedersen returned and sat down, his arms folded. He rested. His breathing was contemplative, slow, regular. Jesse found himself keeping pace with it. He was sitting very straight, his eyes burning in their sockets, staring at Dr. Pedersen and waiting for something to be said. It seemed that he had been sitting there, in that position, for most of his life.

  After a wait of a minute or two, Dr. Pedersen took two things out of his inside coat pocket—a leather case with a pair of glasses inside, and a piece of paper. He put on the glasses and his eyes became womanish and even more kindly. “Jesse,” he said, “I have not told you very much about myself or about my interest in you. Perhaps you are curious. I will not trouble you with details that concern the past. I am a scientist, and I believe in the present and in the future. I am first of all a scientist, and then a physician, and then a father, and then a member of the American community. I owe no allegiance to any foreign power nor am I interested in politics of any kind. The delusions of Europe do not concern me at all. I do not think of them. I am a citizen of the world and of the twentieth century. Mr. Foley has perhaps told you that I am considered a dependable physician. Patients are sent to me from all over the country, but my interest is not in establishing a reputation, or in making money, but simply in doing my work. I am a diagnostician by instinct. I cannot explain my talent except in terms of its being a unique gift that has never failed me. Never. My talent is God-given and I do not explain it or exploit it. I am a humble man. I want only to help mankind. I believe that God has given me a gift and that I am responsible for it, and He has given my daughter and my son gifts also, gifts peculiar to them, and I am responsible for them also, for guarding them. I have a daughter who is thirteen years old and a son who is seventeen. No other children. I am responsible for them and I believe that I am responsible for you … I believe that there is something in you, a certain destiny, a certain fate.…”

  He brought one hand to his face, shading his eyes as if Jesse were too brilliant to look at, and once again he was silent. His pale, protruding forehead seemed to brood over the mystery of the boy before him.

  “You must be saved. You must be fed, clothed, sheltered, guarded. Loved. You must be loved. Your destiny is … it is almost clear to me … almost visible to me.… It is in you, in the structure of your bones, and it must be cultivated or it will die with you. Do not be alarmed, but I see this in you: that you will die shortly, in a year or two, unless you are loved.”

  Jesse tried to smile.

  But Dr. Pedersen did not seem to notice. He passed his hand over his forehead again, then over his head. His hair was thin and gray.

  “I am a scientist, yes, but I rely upon intuition. I was born with a gift of prophecy, whatever you like to call it. Men have tried to analyze me, assess me, but they have come away puzzled. I am a puzzle to myself.… To speak quite frankly, Jesse, my private life is incomplete. My family is incomplete. My daughter, Hilda, is a remarkable child but, so far as I can foresee, an incomplete child who will grow into an incomplete woman. My son, Frederich, is also something of a disappointment to me. My wife, Mary, is a most generous woman, religious and good, an excellent wife and mother, though rather spoiled by her father … but she has failed to give me the child I had foreseen for myself, it has not worked out quite the way I imagined it would twenty years ago.… Not that my marriage is an unhappy one,” Dr. Pedersen said slowly, “but that it is somehow incomplete. I want more. I need more to nourish me. I need another son. Jesse, I will show you something.”

  Jesse waited, staring.

  “I will show you a certain clipping from a certain newspaper. It is the basis of my interest in you. It dates back several months. I will not go into the sequence of ideas that this clipping began in me, in my imagination, I will only show you the clipping. And then, when you have read it, you will tell me your feelings quite honestly and frankly.”

  “Yes …?”

  “You are prepared?”

  Jesse nodded. The roof of his mouth tasted of panic—dark, dank, acrid.

  Dr. Pedersen smoothed out the clipping and Jesse read:

  BOY ELUDES GUN-TOTING FATHER

  Yewville, New York (UPI)—Fourteen-year-old Jesse Harte, who ran from home when his father opened fire on him with a 12-gauge shotgun, was the only survivor Friday from his family of six.

  His parents, two sisters and brother were dead in what police have called a quadruple murder-suicide. State Police said that Willard Harte, 35, shot his wife, Nancy, 31, and three children, Jean, 16, Shirley, 11, and Robert, 5, then turned the shotgun on himself in their home outside Yewville. Harte died in the hospital.

  The murders were apparently committed in the morning or the early afternoon, because Harte was seen in Yewville with his son, Jesse, late Wednesday afternoon. He picked his son up at a store where he worked after school. Jesse ran from the house after his father brought him home. He fled to a neighboring farm, wounded, and was driven to the Yewville Memorial Hospital, where he is in critical condition.

  The mother and children were found dead in the living room of the small house, which is adjacent to a service station run by Harte.

  Harte was found in critical condition just outside the house, the gun beside him.

  Niagara County Prosecuting Attorney Virgil Block ordered an inquest as police completed their investigation.

  Jesse read the article through once. Then again. He felt his spirit skimming back across the miles of road to that house, that intersection of roads, that clump of trees, that junkyard … and at the same time he felt how solidly he sat where he was, how awakened he was now, how real, how vivid to the man who sat watching him through those round, gleaming glasses. How real this moment was!

  It was the only fact.

  Jesse handed the clipping back to Dr. Pedersen. He said nothing.

  “Ah, yes. My boy. Yes,” Dr. Pedersen said, nodding. His head bobbed with sympathy. He took off his glasses and, like a girl, began to weep. Jesse looked up at him fearfully, himself girlish and suspended and astonished. Dr. Pedersen took Jesse’s hand in h
is and shook it. “Yes, you have said nothing. You simply hand it back to me. Yes. You have dignity. You will grow beyond that, that terror. Already you are pushing into the person you will be, the future that belongs to both of us. Yes, already, already the future has begun.”

  His tears fell onto Jesse’s hand.

  5

  In this way he became Jesse Pedersen, the third child, the second son, of Karl and Mary Pedersen of Lockport, New York.

  6

  One morning in August, 1940, Jesse was standing at the railing of the largest bridge in Lockport, high above the Erie Canal. He was gazing down at the locks. He held a library book tightly, as if fearful it might somehow fall; he was fascinated by the depth of the bridge, the steep damp sides of the canal, the different levels of water. So he was here at last, standing here alone.… Everything in sight was illuminated with a hazy, pearl-like glow because of the humidity and the brilliant, glazed sunlight, and Jesse saw how his arms glistened with minute particles of dampness, the pores of his skin like tiny eyes, the red-blond hairs rising delicate and yet powerful from his flesh. He had survived. He was here. His hands were no longer so bony; his knuckles were not so prominent.