A Good and Happy Child (19 page)

“That’s part of it.”

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“Can you help keep me out of Forest Glen?” I asked. “The home?”

They exchanged wary glances.

“We want to keep you from harm, George, put it that way,” said Tom Harrris. “We can’t make promises.”

“But . . . ,” I said, perplexed by their seriousness. What was it they knew? And why did they
care
? These were grown-ups, with families, careers . . . houses to clean. “What do you want to do?”

Tom Harris laughed. “To start, just talk! To be more specific—to hear you talk.”

Clarissa cut in. “We’ll need you to tell us everything, George.
Everything.
”

“About what?”

Uncle Freddie spoke up. “Those visions you’re having, sonny.”

“Visions can be dangerous for people who don’t understand them,” said Tom Harris, reading my puzzled expression. “Your father understood that. He would have wanted us to help you if he knew you were going through this, on your own.”

The intensity of their gazes magnified. I felt a collective pulse beating in the room, bump, bump, bump, as they waited for me to respond. Through their continued silence, I understood the implication:
those people are treating only one part of you; we want to help you
with something else.
What was that something else? They needed my approval, my sanction, before telling me more—that much was clear. And they wanted it from me now. Their faces hovered in the half-light as if carved in soft stone: statues gazing down from an archway, either warning me, or welcoming me, to pass through. A few months ago, I realized, my father would have been a fourth face in this group.
Your
father would have wanted . . . your father would have wanted
. . . Tom Harris had said it twice now. How did he know so well what my father would have wanted? They had been close friends, I knew; but I now felt sure this strange club of grown-ups had shared more than the bond of friendship. And because of what had happened to me, I, too, was being offered initiation.

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“What do you want to know?” I whispered.

“Tell us about what you’ve been seeing,” said Clarissa. “Whatever it is, we’ve heard a lot worse, I promise you.”

“What about Mom?” I asked. “I haven’t been saying anything to her. Do you think she’ll be mad if I talk about it?”

I thought I noticed Clarissa freeze.

“Joan wouldn’t approve,” muttered Freddie.

Tom Harris jumped in. “Your mother wants to help you, just like you said.”

“Okay,” I said, willing to be convinced. “One more thing.”

Tom Harris nodded. “Go ahead.”

“If I tell you, you have to promise to tell me about my dad.”

Tom Harris’s eyes softened. He nodded his long shaggy skull. “We will, George. I promise.”

“Okay.” I meant to sound upbeat, willing, heroic; but it came out hoarse. A little boy’s voice, afraid.

I began at the beginning. With the first night, the feeling of swimming through space.

Clarissa sat back with hands folded in her lap, as she might, I presumed, sit with a patient. Uncle Freddie fidgeted in the background, fingers tapping out a phantom piano piece on his thigh, sometimes standing and pacing, his lower lip pouting from beneath his mustache, eyebrows furrowed. Tom Harris merely sat and stared at me, immobile, as if I were a complex math problem scratched on a blackboard.

With my Friend it had been, I struggled to explain, a
thought
space, a place where I felt welcomed and at home and accepted. I told them about the strange images: the undersea battleship; the Beacons. At mention of this Tom Harris sat up as if he’d been electrocuted.

“What did you say?”

Freddie and Clarissa started.

“Take it easy, Tom.”

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“Please, George . . . just repeat that,” he said urgently, waving them off.

“He told me Beacons were . . . people. Someone who’s interesting. Any . . . anyone,” I stammered, feeling strange quoting back these odd, private phrases, “who takes an interest.”

“Good Lord.” He fell back in his chair.

“Tom, are you okay?” asked Clarissa.

“Yes. Of course,” he said. But his face remained pale, his expression distracted. I hesitated. “Should I go on?”

“Please do, George,” said Clarissa.

The next encounter: seeing my father. The conversation so real, I told them, I could have been as close to him as I was now to Clarissa on the sofa.

Then I described the voices in the night—whispering, tantalizing, bewildering—and the pinching fingers.

“I saw the welts,” said Clarissa to the others.

“They’re still there!” I raised my shirt like I was showing off a cool scab in the playground and pointed out the now yellowed bruises on my ribs. “Here and here.”

Uncle Freddie drew a breath.

“Thank you,” said Tom Harris coolly.

“There’s not much else,” I sighed. “You were there on Halloween.”

“Is there more you can tell us about that night?” Clarissa probed.

“I don’t remember much,” I said. Then I remembered the anger I felt, the shame. “I didn’t want my mother to . . .” My voice trailed away again, but my eyes shot involuntarily to Tom Harris.

“No one wants to think of his mother as having a romance,” he recited evenly, as if reading my mind. “The vision painted me as a lothario,” he explained to the others, rolling his eyes. “Not an especially credible idea.”

Clarissa and Freddie looked at me in surprise. Then the room fell silent.

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“That’s all, George?” asked Clarissa, as my testimony came to an end.

I considered telling them about the voice in my room, the one I heard while the drugs kicked in. But no, I remembered what my mother told me—I would need to be
perfect for a month.
I needed to help my new allies keep me out of Forest Glen—not make their job harder.

“All of this could be explained as wish fulfillment,” Clarissa declared, after a moment. “Paul giving George a reason for his death—

children need a reason. The friend, so-called, a replacement for real friends at school.”

“I have friends,” I said, defensively, lying; but I was ignored.

“But those marks,” said Uncle Freddie. “I hadn’t known.”

Tom Harris then asked some questions. Had my mother mentioned my father’s letters to me before? Specifically the ones that had been sent to the three of them? I shook my head.

“In your kitchen,” he said, “when I was babysitting, you made . . . a kind of a face. Do you remember?”

“Mmm. Maybe.”

“If I asked you to, could you make that face now?”

“How can I if I don’t remember?” I pointed out.

“Fair enough,” he smiled. “On the same night,” he went on, “you claimed I knew why your father went to Central America. Do you remember that?”

I nodded.

“What did you mean?”

I shrugged. “My Friend told me to say it. He never said what he meant.”

Finally, continued Tom Harris, those phrases I had mentioned. The ones with references to “beacons.” Had I heard my father use those phrases before?

“Never.” I shook my head with certainty.

“Ahhhh,” said Tom Harris, with a long sigh. He closed his eyes, reclined into his chair, folded his hands across his stomach. Clarissa and Freddie, puzzled by his behavior, prodded him—
Tom, what’s going on?

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Are you awake?
—but he remained silent. Slowly a smile crept over his face—not a happy one. A one-sided smile of resignation. “How about some tea?” he said at last, opening his eyes. “Anyone who can walk without pain feel like putting on the kettle?”

After the bustle of boiling water and finding mugs (clean ones) and tea bags and discovering who wanted what type of tea and sweetener, Tom Harris announced, “You’re not the first in your family to have visions.”

I was sucking on my teaspoon when he said this—I had just finished swirling a dollop of honey into my mug of hot water. The steam misted my glasses.

“You mean, my hallucinations?”

“That’s the doctor’s term,” interjected Clarissa heatedly. “A judgment out of context.”

“My father had them, too, didn’t he?”

“He never told you? No reason to, I guess. And you’re young. But he had them. Potent ones. Your father, I’d venture to say, was a real mystic.” He looked to the others for disagreement, but they were nodding. I blinked, imagining my father in dark purple robes and a wand.

“What’s a mystic?” I asked.

“A mystic is someone whose faith in God is more intense than most people’s,” offered Clarissa. “It’s personal, emotional. They love God so much, they are
in
love with him.”

“More to the point,” broke in Tom Harris, “mystics
see
and
feel
spiritual reality, the way normal people see and feel material reality. Sometimes with visions. Hallucinations,” he added drily.

“Sensitive, creative people, generally,” added Clarissa.

“Joan of Arc was sensitive?” interjected Freddie.

“I said
generally,
Freddie.”

“There are mystics . . . in Preston?” I asked with such sincerity they all laughed.

“Why not? It’s a long tradition, going back centuries, George,” said Tom Harris, “John the Apostle wrote the book of Revelation . . . in the a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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Middle Ages, there was Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena . . . but there are hundreds of others, thousands, in other places, all over the world—and in other religions, I should add. Mystics—people who have religious visions, who see and feel spiritual truth—are among us everywhere. Step into any church, and two or three may be kneeling there, who knows?” He shrugged. “Why not Virginia, or Preston?” He paused. “None in the Early College faculty, I think.”

“No,” piped in Freddie. “They’d have to be creative or sensitive.”

Clarissa made an exasperated gesture.

“You’re right to point out, George,” continued Tom Harris, “that it’s not an accepted thing to discuss publicly. Smacks of poor mental hygiene. Instability. You see what happened when Joan told the doctor about your father?
We
trust one another to discuss it because we have a common intellectual interest, and a common faith.”

I looked at the three of them in turn. This was the special bond, I guessed—this speaking freely about secret things, or things that caused suspicion. It was hard to imagine a discussion about
being in love
with God
at the country club, or Fort Virginia.

“Your father trusted us,” added Clarissa. “We helped him when he needed us.”

Once again I felt my father’s presence in the room. I saw him pacing before this window in Tom’s house, gesturing with his long, sinewy hands, his long nose and his deep-set eyes downcast, searching to interpret some troubling image or dream as his three friends sat in shadow, just as they did now, listening intently. For an instant I perceived Tom Harris, Clarissa, and Freddie as three lonely students before an empty podium.

“But what about me?” I said. “I didn’t have visions of God. At least I don’t think so.”

“No,” agreed Tom Harris, growing somber.

“Your father’s visions,” Uncle Freddie spoke now, in his lecturing tone, “were what tradition would call visions of the
intellect.
An awakening of the head as well as the heart. Instead of painting him a picture, his vision gave him an idea, deeper understanding. And, as such, he could apply his own critical faculties to it: Is this truly holy? Is this
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something I believe may be divine in origin?
Do I believe it?
” Freddie boomed. “The true mystic must ask all of these questions before
begin-
ning
to accept what his vision is telling him. I should add, this is easier when the vision is an idea—when it’s a vision of intellect.”

“You make it sound like there are different kinds,” I said.

“Two, in fact. The type
you’ve
had are called ‘visions of pure sense.’”

“Pure sense,” I repeated. “Pure. That sounds okay.”

Uncle Freddie winced. “Think ‘pure nonsense’ or ‘pure balderdash.’”

“Oh.”

“Generally Christianity is friendly to the senses,” said Freddie, now on a roll and pacing alongside an old rustic table laden with papers and magazines. “A divinity who is human, who physically dies, with blood and bodily pain. But with mysticism the relationship to the senses is trickier. It’s a matter of optics.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I come up and whisper in your ear, ‘Your house is on fire,’ how would you know whether I’m telling the truth or not?”

“I don’t know,” I answer.

“Right! All you have is what you’ve heard, through your senses—

which ain’t much. Now if I were the chief of the fire department and said the same thing, you would believe me. You’d go running off to pull the fire alarm. Correct?”

“Sure.”

“But what if all you have is sensory information. I put on a fire chief’s hat,
then
tell you your house is on fire . . . would you pull the alarm then? I
look
like the fire chief. But how do you know? Who is
really
sending the message?” Uncle Freddie’s eyes were bright. I saw the pedagogue at work as he paced.

“George,” joined Tom Harris, “it’s very important you understand this. Answer Freddie’s question.”

“How do I know who’s sending the message?” I struggled. “I see them.”

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“Precisely, George! But it’s just an image. And there’s the danger. In a vision, you only have sensory information.
Pure sense.
Can you trust the information? ‘Your house is on fire’? It’s just data. The man in the fire hat? Just optics. How do you know
who
is sending you the message?

What’s their identity, their intent? Do they mean you harm or good?

Should you do what they tell you before you know the answer to that question?”