Punish the Sinners (7 page)

A moment later a pretty, dark-haired girl came into the room, glanced quickly around, then went directly to the seat on which Janet Connally’s sweater was resting, picked up the sweater, and sat down. She handed the
sweater to Janet, and whispered something in her ear. The two girls giggled, and Balsam wondered what had been said. Sister Elizabeth, he realized, would have found out immediately, probably with an intimidating look. Balsam had neither the assurance nor the technique to make such a ploy work, so he simply pretended not to hear the giggles.

A few minutes later Karen Morton and Judy Nelson breezed into the room, waved at Janet Connally and the dark-haired girl (who Balsam decided must be Penny Anderson) and took two of the remaining seats in the front row. The fifth seat, next to Karen Morton, was stacked with Karen’s books. Balsam wondered whom it was being saved for. Just before the bell rang signifying the beginning of the class period, he found out

Jim Mulvey, his hair a bit too long, and his clothes looking slightly rumpled, slouched into the room, shoved Karen Morton’s books to the floor, and sank into the last seat of the front rank. While Mulvey fixed Balsam with a slightly sullen look, Karen glared at her boyfriend and retrieved her books from the floor. When Jim turned to her, she was all smiles.

Peter Balsam picked up the roster and noted that there was one more name on the list than there were students in the room. Though he was already familiar with almost half the class, he began calling the roll. Before he’d even begun, he knew who was missing. Marilyn Crane. He glanced at the list once more. Yes, her name was on it He looked out at the twenty-nine faces in front of him. Marilyn’s was not among them. He began calling the roll, half concentrating on matching names to faces, half wondering what had happened to Marilyn.

When he was halfway through the list, the door to Room 16 creaked open, and Marilyn Crane crept into
the room and slid into the single vacant seat in the back row. At the sound of the door opening, every head in the room had turned. And then, starting from the point where Judy Nelson and Karen Morton sat together, the whispering and giggling began, rippling through the room, swirling toward Marilyn. Balsam stopped calling the roll, and stared out at the teen-agers, waiting for them to notice the sudden quiet

When the silence finally came, he fixed his gaze on Karen Morton and Judy Nelson. Judy regarded him steadily, with an almost challenging look in her eyes. But Balsam was pleased to see that Karen Morton had the good grace to blush and quickly find something fascinating in her notebook. He resumed calling the roll, taking care to give Marilyn Grane a reassuring wink when he got to her name. In another minute, he was done. He set the list down on his desk, and looked once more at the class.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose we might as well get to it This class isn’t going to be like any of the others, so those of you who think you have me all figured out from Latin classes can forget it.” That should throw them off, he thought, and was pleased to see the looks of consternation he’d produced. There was a rustling in the room, as thirty teen-agers suddenly realized they were going to have to reassess things. The four girls in the front row glanced nervously at each other.

“As some of you know,” Balsam continued, looking at them placidly, “I generally seat my classes alphabetically.” An almost inaudible groan went through the room, and several of the students began gathering their belongings in preparation for the seating shift “However,” Balsam continued, “this class is different. In this class you can sit where you want, and you needn’t fed you have to use the same seats every day. It may make
it a little harder for me to learn your names, but don’t worry about it So, if any of you want to change seats now, feel free.”

About half the class began trading seats. Nobody in the front moved, nor did Marilyn Grane: the front row had already decided where to sit, and Marilyn Crane had no reason to move—no one had invited her to sit by them. Balsam noticed, however, that the boy who eventually did sit next to Marilyn—Jeff Bremmer, if his memory served him correctly—smiled and spoke to her. While they resettled themselves, Balsam wondered how many, if any, of his students had figured out that he had just gotten them to tell him something about themselves without saying a word. He knew they would continue to tell him about themselves as they rearranged themselves through the term. It would be particularly interesting to watch the front row, the four girls Monsignor Vernon had mentioned to him, and the boy, Jim Mulvey, who was apparently Karen Morton’s boyfriend.

When they were finally settled in their new seats, Balsam began telling them what he hoped to accomplish in the psychology course. He would not, he told them, be spending too much time on the field of abnormal psychology, though he would delve briefly into some of the more exotic forms of madness. That earned him an appreciative laugh.

But what he was most interested in, he told them, were the possibilities the course offered for them all to get to know themselves, and each other, better. In this class, he announced, he intended to stay as far away as possible from the formalized teaching methods that were the norm at St Francis Xavier’s. Instead, he hoped the students would learn from each other as much as from him. At the same time they were teaching each other, he told them, they would be teaching themselves.
If they all worked together, it should prove an interesting and valuable year.

Balsam glanced at the dock, and saw that he had only fifteen minutes left Behind him, where it had been for forty-five minutes now, a map of the Holy Roman Empire covered much of the blackboard. Balsam now directed the attention of the class to the map.

“Behind the map,” he told them, “there is a picture. I’m going to raise the map for just a second, then pull it down again. Then we’ll talk about what you saw.”

Quickly, before the students could begin buzzing among themselves, Balsam raised and lowered the map, exposing for not more than a second a large black-and-white print, done with a pen in great detail

“Well?” he said, turning back to the class. “How about it? What did you see?”

In the front row, Judy Nelson’s hand slowly rose.

“Judy?” Balsam said, then, as she started to stand up, he waved her down. “Not in this class,” he said, smiling. “Let’s save the calisthenics far Latin, shall we?”

Judy’s eyes widened in surprise; this had certainly never happened at St. Francis Xavier’s before. Not only she, but the entire class seemed to relax. She sank back into her seat.

“Well?” Balsam prompted her.

Judy started to speak, then giggled self-consciously, “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just not easy to answer questions sitting down. None of us has ever done it before.”

Again the class laughed, and Balsam was pleased. So far, everything was going exactly as he planned it.

“That’s all right,” he said easily. “You’ll get used to it Now, if you haven’t forgotten completely, what did you see in the picture?”

“Well,” Judy said slowly. “I think it was a skull. At least that’s what it looked like to me.”

Balsam nodded. “Anybody else see a skull? Raise your hands,” All the hands in the room went up, except one. Marilyn Crane sat, her hands folded on the desk in front of her, her face betraying the shame of having missed out on something.

“We seem to have a dissenter,” Balsam said, trying to let Marilyn know with a smile that it was all right with him if she hadn’t seen a skull. “What did you see, Marilyn?”

The girl looked as if she was about to ay. She didn’t want to be the only person who hadn’t seen what everyone else had seen. But she’d seen something different, and she wasn’t going to pretend she hadn’t.

“I—I suppose it sounds silly, but all I could see was a woman looking at herself in a mirror.”

Another ripple of laughter passed over the class, but it was derisive, not happy. Before it had died away, Balsam had reached behind him and let the map roll upward into its case, exposing the picture. And then, as they studied it, the class stopped laughing, for Marilyn had been right A second look revealed that the picture was, indeed, a highly detailed drawing of a woman peering into a mirror. It was captioned “Vanity.” Balsam let them absorb the lesson in silence for a moment

“You see?” he said at last “Nobody was wrong, and nobody was right” The class looked at him, baffled, and Balsam realized he had presented something totally new to them—a situation in which there was no wrong and no right

“What you’ve just seen,” he told them, “is what we call an experiment in stimulus response. As you may have noted, not everyone reacts to a given stimulus with the same response. How one responds to a given stimulus depends on one’s psychological make-up.” And then, realizing that only Marilyn Crane had responded
differently from the rest, he decided to add something for her benefit. “The fact that only Marilyn didn’t see the skull is interesting, isn’t it? You must be an awfully morbid group.” He winked at them, so they would know he was only kidding. But he’d made his point; no one turned to stare at Marilyn. Instead, they stared at each other.

Balsam glanced at the clock; there were still five minutes left

“You know,” he said, directing his attention to the class once again, “you all surprise me. For fifty minutes now, I’ve had something carefully concealed on the desk. And not one of you has asked me what it is.” The students looked at each other uncomfortably. “I hope that will change by the end of the term,” Balsam continued dryly. “A little curiosity may have killed the cat, but it never hurt a student. So gather round.”

He pulled a cloth away, and the students clustered around his desk to see what it was that they should have asked about. It was a wooden box, with a glass top, known as a Skinner box. Under the glass was a white rat. As the students looked on, Peter Balsam flipped a switch on the side of the box, and the rat began pounding at a small lever inside the box. Bach time it hit the lever, a small pellet of food fell into the box. The rat promptly gobbled it up.

“Conditioned response,” Balsam told them. “The rat has learned that the food will only come out when the light is on and he presses the lever. So every time the light goes on, he presses the lever.” He switched the light off; the rat sat still.

Around him, the students were talking among themselves, and speculating on the possibilities of the experiment. In the middle of their discussion, the bell rang. Immediately, the discussion ended, and the students began
moving back to their seats to gather up their books and notebooks.

“And that,” Balsam said loudly enough to attract their attention, “is another example of conditioned response. See you tomorrow.”

They stared at him for a moment, then burst into spontaneous laughter. As Balsam watched them drift out of the room, he decided it was going to work. The psychology class was a success.

He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, and took out the brown bag that contained his lunch. Then, as he began slowly munching on a sandwich, a vague discomfort came over him. At first he couldn’t pinpoint the cause of his anxiety, but as he continued eating his lunch it all came clear to him.

It was the picture, and the way the class had reacted to it. Why, out of thirty students, had all but one of them seen the image of death? Why had only Marilyn Crane, of all the students, seen a woman and a mirror? The ratio was wrong—the class should have been fairly evenly split in their initial perception of the picture.

But they weren’t.

Inez Nelson heard the telephone ring, and glanced toward her husband. His eyes remained fixed on the TV. It rang again, and Inez glanced at the ceiling, as if expecting to be able to see Judy running toward the upstairs extension. When it rang for the third time, Inez sighed, got up from her chair, and walked into the kitchen, half-expecting it to stop ringing before she could pick it up. It didn’t

“Mrs. Nelson?” Inez immediately recognized the voice as Karen Morton’s. “Is Judy there?”

“Just a minute,” Inez said. She laid the receiver on the kitchen counter and went to the foot of the stairs.

“Judy!” she called. “For you! Karen Morton!”

“In a minute,” Judy’s muffled voice called back. Inez walked slowly back to the kitchen and picked up the receiver. “Shell be here in a minute,” she said. She stood by the phone, idly waiting to hear her daughter’s voice before she hung up.

“Karen?” Judy’s voice came on the line. “I was just going to call you.” Her voice dropped slightly, and her tone became confidential, “I saw him today. I mean he
spoke
to me.”

“Who?” Karen asked without much interest

“Lyle,” Judy said, as if Karen should have known. “Lyle Crandall. Isn’t he gorgeous?”

“If you like that type,” Karen said. She was not about to admit that she agreed that Lyle Crandall was, indeed, gorgeous.

“I think he’s neat,” Judy went on. “He looks just like Nick Nolte, only better. Is he coming to your party?”

“I suppose so,” Karen said, sounding bored. “I mean, I guess he’ll show up with Jim Mulvey, and you better believe Jim’s coming.”

“But he’s not coming with any of the girls?” Judy asked.

“It’s not going to be that kind of party,” Karen said. Then, after a slight pause, she added, “At least not at first. But you never know what might happen, do you?”

Judy felt a wave of anticipation run over her, and wondered if the party was really going to turn out the way Karen had implied. “What about your mother?” she said. “Isn’t she going to be there?”

A slight snicker came over the wire. “She has to work Saturday night,” Karen replied. “At first she told me I couldn’t have a party if she couldn’t be here, so I told her I was only going to have some girls in. She thinks we’re going to make fudge or something.”

“What if she finds out boys are going to be there?” Judy wanted to know.

“She doesn’t get off till midnight” Karen said confidently. “By then we’ll have gotten everybody out of the house.” Then, in a near whisper: “Did you tell your mother you were coming over early?”