Hazards of Time Travel Page 20

  Impossible! I could not.

  Could not send such childish pleas, Wolfman would be repelled. Wolfman would laugh at me.

  Had I lost my only friend in Wainscotia? Like a sleepwalker I continued with my “life”—attended classes, wrote papers and took exams—worked fifteen hours a week in the Museum of Natural History. Would not have wished to confide in anyone how Wolfman’s harsh words had hurt even if there’d been someone in whom I might confide.

  One evening, Miss Steadman invited me to dinner in her sitting room, with another girl—another girl without friends. What did we think about the SANE protesters?—Miss Steadman asked; the other girl had much to say (“My father knows all about Communists—he’s a Korean War veteran”) but Mary Ellen Enright only just listened, politely.

  So lonely, several times I had meals in the dining hall with my roommates. Since Betsy had (mysteriously) withdrawn from school we had a new roommate named Millicent who’d had a single room in Acrady since the start of the fall term, and had grown to hate being alone; and so Miss Steadman had allowed her to move upstairs into our room.

  Yet, Millie was still lonely. Sulky, easily vexed, and lonely. Millie was a plain, somber, stern-faced girl from a Wisconsin dairy farm, a scholarship holder like the rest of us; she’d hoped to major in something called agriculture education but her fall semester grades had been mostly C’s, which put her scholarship at risk. Often when I returned to our room there was Millie sitting at her desk, blankly staring at an opened textbook. Sometimes she sat slouched on the edge of her bed, eyes welling with tears.

  Millie was enrolled in Psychology 102 which, she complained, was too hard, and boring. Her quiz section instructor was Dr. Wolfman—“He doesn’t like me. He looks right through me. He’s a hard grader—I think he’s unfair. He’s sarcastic. He’s mean.”

  When I didn’t respond Millie said, hissing, “People say—he’s a Jew. From New York City.”

  When I still didn’t respond with anything more than a vague sympathetic Uh-hmm Millie said, with a harsh little laugh, “—What Daddy calls Jew York City. That’s where.”

  Never would I ask Millie about “Dr. Wolfman” for I would not betray my interest in Wolfman, and I did not want to encourage Millie to talk to me.

  Yes, it was cruel of me. Yes, I am sorry.

  For I might have been the one to tell the new, so very unhappy roommate the somber wisdom I’d acquired at Wainscotia/Zone 9: You can live a life even if it is not the life you would have chosen. You can live breath by breath. You can live.

  The Lonely Girl II

  Returned to the Film Society. Not that I expected to see Ira Wolfman there but that in my loneliness I had to be somewhere.

  This time, a “classic” Alfred Hitchcock film, Rear Window.

  And this time too, though it was billed as a suspense film, the film moved with excruciating slowness. The actors were so obviously acting. The film was so obviously a film. Serenely blond Grace Kelly was very beautiful and not so made-up as actresses in the John Wayne western, and James Stewart was sympathetic and winning, but it was impossible to take them seriously as anything other than glamorous movie stars going through the paces of an improbable story, again to heavy-handed background music that made me so restless, I had to press my fingers against my ears.

  Midway in Rear Window, I had to slip away. My head had begun to ache, I felt so—exiled.

  How was it possible, the other viewers were totally absorbed in this movie! I could concede that it was superior to the western, and not so garishly colored, but each scene ran for a predictable length, always too long—my mind skittered ahead of the dialogue, and it made me restless and resentful to wait for the dialogue to catch up. Bewildering to me, how in the flickering light of the screen the viewers’ faces were rapt as children’s faces . . . I felt trapped, as in a child’s cartoon-world. I felt as I did those several times when I’d tried gamely to watch television at Acrady Cottage, not sitting on the sofa with the other girls but standing close by, tentatively; wanting to be drawn into the stilted comic sketches, or the melodramatic scenes.

  Wolfman had had a name for it—intellectual insult. Yet he’d been entertained by the John Wayne western and would have liked the Hitchcock suspense film even more, as it was more cleverly plotted.

  There is terror in such revelations. You can’t be deceived. You can’t “suspend disbelief.” You are trapped inside your own head.

  Later that week I went to a poetry reading in the university chapel given by the distinguished Wainscotia poet Hiram Brody on the occasion of his seventieth birthday and the publication of The Collected Poems of H. R. Brody. At first, because poetry is a more subtle art than Hollywood movies, I was intrigued by the poet’s words, and by the musical cadences of his poems, which rhymed in the way of Robert Frost’s, whom we’d been studying in my American literature class; there were echoes too of Archibald MacLeish, another revered American poet whom we’d been studying. At the front of the large audience H. R. Brody performed brilliantly, you would have thought for the first time though in fact (it seemed) he had committed much of his poetry to memory and recited it, rarely glancing down at the page. For his age he was youthful, silky-white-haired, with a white beard that looked as if it had been lovingly brushed and combed; his manner was sly, self-effacing and elfin. The audience loved his poems and applauded after each as I did as well, though I began to realize, after about fifteen minutes, that the poems were essentially the same poem, of familiar “rural” subjects, presented with a sort of self-righteous coercion, and invariably rhyming—like a music box that strikes only the same notes, repeatedly. You could tell when the poet was concluding a poem by the expression in his face, and by the cast of his voice.

  There were echoes of Robert Frost, I had to think others heard—though possibly not—for the applause continued with uncritical ardor, like a narcotic that must dull the poet’s senses.

  Overhead the snow-boughs sweep the sky.

  Our promises to keep are bye-and-bye.

  And:

  Nature never will betray

  A heart that cherishes each living day.

  At the end of the hour-long reading the poet’s eyes shone with tears. Several times H. R. Brody bowed low, his silky-white hair falling into his face so that it had to be brushed away. The crowded university chapel was deafening in applause. The audience sprang to its feet with uplifted hands, excitedly applauding.

  I felt so sad! I’d tried to be swept away with these others, but had failed.

  Clapping until the palms of my hands smarted. And thinking—If I am being watched they will see how I belong here.

  SOON THEN I ATTENDED a lecture given by a historian of science from Michigan State University, introduced by Professor Myron Coughland; the thesis of the lecture seemed to be that Homo sapiens is comprised of distinct races and these races are genetically determined in all things, including I.Q. According to “historical data,” certain races (Caucasian, Asian) are superior to other races (African, Australian aborigines).

  I tried to listen but for the distracting words of Ira Wolfman muttering in my ear—Nothing they do will have the slightest value to anyone. No one is “original” here—no one is “significant.”

  Wolfman wasn’t at the lecture. Wolfman would have held the lecturer in contempt, perhaps.

  Gamely I tried to take notes. All serious students take notes. For it seemed to me an important gesture, to try to learn something—anything.

  SO LONELY FOR WOLFMAN!

  Even for Wolfman’s disapproval, contempt.

  In my restlessness drifting through the Fine Arts Building, peering into the high-ceilinged studios whose doors to the hall were all flung open—studios of painting, figure drawing, sculpting. There was a sharp smell of paint here, and turpentine. There was an air in this building of risk-taking, and bravado.

  I was envious of the art students, who didn’t have to concern themselves with “ideas” or “data”—who weren’t doing
work that could be shown to be “mistaken.” I resolved that, the following year, if I was still in Exile, and still at Wainscotia, I would take a course in art.

  Yet, the paintings which the students were working on, and the canvases displayed on the walls, were not very promising. Most of the paintings were meant to be “realistic”—awkward attempts at landscapes, sunsets, old barns, covered bridges; awkward attempts at sketching the human figure, or the human face. It did not seem to occur to the artists that these subjects had been done before—many times before. A few of the more daring paintings were “abstract”—bold swirls and streaks of color in the style of European expressionists of the early twentieth century, or maybe it was the large paint-splattered canvases of the late Jackson Pollock whose radically experimental work had been featured in Life magazine.

  It seemed to be true, as Wolfman had said: there were no new ideas here in Wainscotia. No originality, no—surprise. Everything they undertook had been done already, and done more beautifully by others. Or it was wrongheaded.

  Yet everyone worked energetically, enthusiastically. Everyone was convinced that whatever work they were doing was important; if you’d inquired they’d have surely said with modest bravado—My work will outlive me . . .

  The last studio in the Fine Arts Building into which I peered was a sculpting studio. Here some ten or twelve students were working earnestly in modeling clay, trying to capture the likeness of a model that was in fact a life-sized female mannequin in emulation of a Greek statue, draped in a white sheet. The mannequin had a perfect, symmetrical face with sightless eyes, its arms were broken off at the elbows, and its legs were missing. A quick glance into the sculpting studio told me that the students, mostly male, were not very gifted as sculptors; their dwarf-sized “Greek statues” were subtly misshapen, each with something flawed though it would have been difficult to say what it was. Yet, their instructor appeared to be intensely involved with their work, and spoke passionately to them—not uncritically, but not unkindly—for you could see that he cared.

  “Good work, Mark! Good work, Jonny! Very impressive.”

  In the doorway I stood hesitantly, hoping not to be seen. But no one was interested in me, for the mood of the studio was electric; the instructor spoke rapidly and knowledgeably, making occasional corrections in his students’ clay figures. I wondered what the man had found to say over the years about these diligent amateur efforts—his voice was both critical and comforting. For he did care. You need not be exceedingly talented to feel welcome here.

  Again, Wolfman’s pronouncement murmured cruelly in my ear—Hotbed of mediocrity!

  And then I was astonished to see that the instructor was the broad-shouldered youngish man who’d been one of the SANE leaders, who’d pressed the picket sign into my hand. In a sweeping attack of fraternity brothers I’d lost sight of him.

  So the SANE marcher was a member of the art department at Wainscotia! Evidently he hadn’t been fired by the administration. (Maybe arts faculty were regarded differently from other faculty?) It was touching to see what respect the students felt for their instructor.

  Indeed, James, or Jamie, was an appealing figure, if somewhat ridiculous (as Wolfman might have thought) in bib-overalls soiled with clay, and a tattered T-shirt, and crude sandals worn with gray wool socks; his hair was coarse and gnarly, straggling onto his shoulders, and his beard was scruffy, not at all “sculpted” like H. R. Brody’s beard.

  Quickly I looked away, before he could turn to see me.

  April

  “Hello, Adriane.”

  Adriane! In this place where, not so many feet away, in an adjoining office, Miss Hurly was speaking on the telephone.

  Wolfman had returned, unpredictably. After three weeks of estrangement he turned up in the Museum of Natural History at closing time.

  So often I’d imagined glancing up to see Wolfman, when he did appear it was with the unsettling authority of a vision, or a hallucination.

  He was smiling at me. He extended a hand, to take my hand.

  “Ira! Hello.”

  Outside, it was April: rain-lashed, chilly as winter.

  NEVER WOULD WOLFMAN SPEAK of SANE, nor would I speak of SANE to him. I came to think that he’d been embarrassed not to have joined the marchers, and this had made him unreasonably angry with me.

  I thought—Maybe someday. We will both belong, and we will both march for peace.

  “Terminated”

  Now, I was not sure that I could trust Wolfman.

  I loved Wolfman more than ever.

  SOMETHING HAD GONE WRONG in Wolfman’s life. Or perhaps in Wolfman’s career, for Ira Wolfman scarcely seemed to have a life.

  He was preoccupied, moody. He frowned a good deal, until the furrows in his forehead didn’t fade. Then, his laughter was quick, loud, and inappropriate. As Millie had said, he was sarcastic.

  Compulsively he lit a cigarette and took several quick puffs then left the cigarette burning in one of the ashtrays scattered through his apartment.

  I waved away smoke. I tried not to cough. I thought—Has he forgotten all that we know about smoking, and cancer? Has he forgotten who he is?

  When I was in the kitchen preparing a meal or cleaning after a meal I was likely to hear Wolfman, in an undertone, speaking on the phone in his bedroom. And if the phone rang, he asked me please to wait in another room while he answered it.

  That woman, Cornelia. “Nelia.”

  I had to think that she was as desperate for Wolfman as I was. And that she knew much less about Wolfman than I knew.

  More frequently now, I was the one to hold Wolfman in my arms. As he lay on his back, on his bed, smoking, staring at the ceiling, wracked with thoughts like sharp-serrated waves that worked their way through his flesh.

  Given to saying recklessly, he might just walk away.

  (From Wainscotia? But where would Wolfman walk to?)

  Given to saying he had new, radical ideas for experiments, of which A. J. Axel would not approve.

  For much of the time, A. J. Axel was an (invisible) presence in Wolfman’s life. In the sparely furnished apartment, at Wolfman’s table, there were three chairs of which one was (invisibly) occupied by the white-haired professor.

  As if pleading his case Wolfman said, to me: “I’m not making a break with behaviorism. I want just to stretch the concept. I want to postulate a ‘mind.’ I want to manipulate and expose a ‘mind.’ This is a post-Holocaust era, you know, Adriane, though no one at Wainscotia is likely to talk about it—the Nazi death-camps, the ‘Final Solution’ of the Jews, experimentation with human beings. Eichmann—the seemingly ordinary man who was ‘only following orders.’ None of this is taught in the history department there, still less is it spoken of. America is founded upon amnesia—denial. Conscience cannot keep up with acts. I want to investigate the mind of the ‘ordinary’ man—and woman. I will devise a series of experiments that replicate, in miniature, the Nazi experiment—for Nazism was a social experiment of a kind unique in history. Skinner has led the way—now, others will continue. There is a ‘cognitive’—and ‘moral’—revolution soon to erupt. I envision experiments that are, to the uninitiated, theatrical events. Experimenters would wear uniforms of authority, like Nazis. But more clever than Nazis, we would wear white uniforms that suggest medical or clinical authority—professorial authority. We would involve our experimental subjects in decisions of a moral nature. Not the equivalent of rats running mazes, or pigeons pecking for seeds, but the equivalent of a ‘good German’ complying with the Nazi agenda. In the experiment there will be a ‘captain,’ and there will be a ‘private.’ The figure of authority, which will be the psychology professor, will instruct the ‘captain’ in the necessity of punishing the ‘private’ who is slow to learn, or doesn’t obey orders quickly enough. The ‘captain’ will administer to the ‘private’ a sequence of escalating punishments, as the figure of authority bids him. The figure of authority says he will accept ‘all responsibility.�
� The intention of the experiments will be to investigate to what length a seemingly ordinary, ‘moral’ human being will go, if he’s told what to do by a figure of authority. I envision punishments that escalate, ending in ‘death’ . . . of course, it’s just an experiment: no one is punished, no one dies. But the subject will be revealed to himself, irrevocably. When I publish these results, American psychology will be changed forever.”

  Wolfman spoke excitedly, as I had rarely heard him.

  How complicated, Wolfman’s proposed experiment! I had to wonder uneasily if in fact it was an experiment that Wolfman was remembering, out of his past; an experiment, or a series of experiments, devised by another psychologist; if the filtering device in Wolfman’s brain had failed to block this forbidden knowledge . . . The Instructions forbade all EIs to “remember” anything that had not (yet) occurred in their places of exile. Wolfman was putting himself at risk with such ideas.

  Yet, his experiment was not so very different, in essence, from the experiment I’d suggested to him after the Film Society evening. For it was the pursuit of the elusive “consciousness” that underlay behavior, whose shadow behaviorists shunned.

  I did not know what to tell Wolfman. Since the SANE episode he’d become edgy and impatient; feeling the need, it seemed, to explain himself, defend himself in a way he’d never done before. Almost, another Wolfman was emerging, insecure, argumentative.

  In a faltering voice I told Wolfman that the experiments sounded “very exciting”—“important”—but would be controversial. There was the “moral question”—for instance.

  “What ‘moral question’? Jesus!” Wolfman laughed derisively.

  Diligently I continued: Was it fair, was it ethical, to so deceive the subject—the “captain”? After the experiment was over, this person would feel very bad about himself, and bitter at being used . . .

  “Also, from what I know of behavioral psychology, which admittedly is a small fraction of what you know, Ira—Professor Axel will certainly not approve.”