Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (287 page)

“I think Barbara wouldn’t want her private thoughts published to the world. You have to draw the line somewhere.”

Midbin put his head on one side and looked at Ace as though he were difficult to see. “Now that’s interesting, Dorn,” he said; “I wonder what turns a seeker after knowledge into a censor.”

“Are you going to start exploring my emotional pathology now?”

“Not interesting enough; not nearly interesting enough. Diagnosis while you wait; treatment in a few easy installments. Barbara now—there’s a really beautiful case. Beautiful case; years of treatment and little sign of improvement. Of course, she wouldn’t want her thoughts known. Why? Because she’s happy with her hatred for her dead mother. Shocking to Mrs. Grundy; doubly ditto to Mister. Exaggerated possessiveness toward her father makes her miserable. Thoughts known, misery ventilated: shame, condemnation, fie, fie. Her fantasy—”

“Midbin!”

“Her fantasy of going back to childhood (fascination; adult employs infantile time sequence, infantile magic, infantile hatreds) in order to injure her mother is a sick notion she cherishes the way a dog licks a wound. But without analogous therapy. Ventilate it. Ventilate it. Now this girl’s case is bound to be simpler. Younger if nothing else. And nice, overt symptoms. Bring her around tomorrow and we’ll begin.”

“Me?” I asked.

“Who else? You’re the only one she doesn’t seem to distrust.”

It was annoying to have the girl’s puppylike devotion observed and commented on. I realized she saw me as the only connection, however tenuous, with a normal past; I had assumed she would turn naturally after a few days to the women who took such open pleasure in fussing over her affliction. However, she merely suffered their attentions; no matter how I tried to avoid her she sought me out, running to me with muted cries which should have been touching but were only painful.

Mr. Haggerwells’s telegram to the sheriff’s office at York had brought the reply that a deputy sheriff would visit the Haven “when time permitted.” He had also telegraphed the Spanish legation who answered they knew no other Escobars than Don Jaime and his wife. The girl might be a servant or a stranger; it was no concern of His Most Catholic Majesty.

The school uniform made it unlikely she was a servant but beyond this, little was deducible. She did not respond to questions in either Spanish or English, and it was impossible to tell if she understood their meaning, for her blank expression remained unchanged. When offered pencil and paper she handled them curiously, then let them slide to the floor.

I wondered briefly if perhaps her intelligence was slightly subnormal, but this was met by a firm, even belligerent denial from Midbin, whose conclusion was confirmed, at least in my opinion, by her apparently excellent coordination, her personal neatness and fastidiousness which were far more delicate than any I’d been accustomed to.

Midbin’s method of treatment smacked of the mystical. His subjects were supposed to relax on a couch and say whatever came into their minds. At least this was the clearest part of the explanation he gave when I rebelliously escorted the girl to his “office,” a large, bare room decorated only by some old European calendars by the popular academician, Picasso. The couch was a cot which Midbin himself used more conventionally at night.

“All right,” I said, “just how are you going to manage?”

“Convince her everything’s all right and I’m not going to hurt her.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “Sure. Only how?”

He gave me one of his head-on-shoulder looks and turned to the girl who waited apathetically, with downcast eyes. “You lie down,” he suggested.

“Me? I’m not dumb.”

“Pretend you are. Lie down, close your eyes, say the first thing on your tongue. Without stopping to think about it.”

“How can I say anything if I’m pretending to be dumb?” Grudgingly I complied, fancying a faint look of curiosity passing over the too-placid face. “‘No man bathes twice in the same stream,’” I muttered.

He made me repeat the performance several times, then by pantomime urged her to imitate me. It was doubtful if she understood; in the end we nudged her gently into the required position. There was no question of relaxation; she lay there warily, tense and stiff even with her eyes closed.

The whole business was so manifestly useless and absurd, to say nothing of being undignified, that I was tempted to walk out on it. Only ignoble calculation on Midbin’s voting for my acceptance in the Haven kept me there.

Looking at the form stretched out so rigidly, I could not but admit again that the girl was beautiful. But the admission was dispassionate; the beauty was abstract and neutral, the lovely young lines evoked no lust. I felt only vexation because her plight kept me from the wonders of Haggershaven.

“What good can this possibly do?” I burst out after ten fruitless minutes. “You’re trying to find out why she can’t talk, and she can’t talk to tell you why she can’t talk.”

“Science explores all methods of approach,” Midbin answered loftily; “I’m searching for a technique which will reach her. Bring her back tomorrow.”

I swallowed my annoyance and started out. The girl jumped up and pressed close to my side. Outdoors the air was crisp; I felt her suppress a slight shiver. “Now I suppose I’ll have to take you where it’s warm or find a wrap for you,” I scolded irritably. “I don’t know why I have to be your nursemaid.”

She whimpered very softly, and I was remorseful. None of this was her fault; my callousness was inexcusable. But if she could only attach herself to some other protector and leave me alone…

As one about to be banished I tried to cram everything into short days. I realized that these autumn weeks, spent in casual conversation or joining the familiar preparations for rural winter, were a period of thorough and critical probation. There was little I could do to sway the decision beyond the exhibition of an honest willingness to turn to whatever work needed doing and to repeat, whenever the opportunity offered, that Haggershaven was literally a revelation to me, an island of civilization in the midst of a chaotic and savage sea. My dream was to make a landfall there.

Certainly my meager background and scraps of reading would not persuade the men and women of the Haven; I could only hope they might divine some promise in me. Against this hope I put Barbara’s enmity, a hostility now exacerbated by rage at Oliver Midbin for daring to devote to another, particularly another woman, the attention which had been her due, and the very technique used for her. I knew her persistence, and I could not doubt she would move enough of the fellows to insure my rejection.

The gang which had been operating in the vicinity, presumably the same one I had encountered, moved on. At least no further crimes were attributed to it. Once they were gone, Deputy Sheriff Beasley finally found time to visit Haggershaven in response to the telegram. He had evidently been there before without attaining much respect on either side. I got the distinct impression he would have preferred a more formal examination than the one which took place in Mr. Haggerwells’s study, with fellows drifting in and out, interrupting the proceedings with comments of their own.

I think he doubted the girl’s dumbness. He barked his questions so loudly and brusquely they would have terrified a far more securely poised individual. She promptly went into dry hysterics, whereupon he turned his attention to me.

I was apprehensive lest his questions explore my life with Tyss and my connection with the Grand Army, but apparently one’s mere presence at Haggershaven indicated an innocence not unrelated to idiocy, at least so far as the more popular crimes were concerned. My passage of the York road and all the events leading up to it were outside his interest; he wanted only a succinct story of the holdup, reminding me of the late Colonel Tolliburr in his assumption that the lay eye ought normally to be photographic of the minutest detail.

He was clearly dissatisfied with my account and left grumbling that it would be more to the point if bookworms learned to identify a man properly, instead of logarithms or trigonometry. I didn’t see exactly how this applied to me, since I was laudably ignorant of both subjects.

If Officer Beasley was disappointed, Midbin was enchanted. Of course, he had heard my narrative before, but this was the first time he’d savored its possible impact on the girl.

“You see, her pseudo-aphonia is neither congenital nor of long standing. All logic leads to the conclusion that it’s the result of her terror during the experience. She must have wanted to scream, it must have been almost impossible for her not to scream, but for her very life she dared not. The instinctive, automatic reaction was the one she could not allow herself. She had to remain mute while she watched the murders.”

For the first time it seemed possible there was more to Midbin than his garrulity.

“She crushed back that natural, overwhelming impulse,” he went on. “She had to; her life depended on it. It was an enormous effort, and the effect on her was in proportion; she achieved her object too well; when it was safe for her to speak again she couldn’t.”

It all sounded so plausible it was some time before I thought to ask him why she didn’t appear to understand what we said, or why she didn’t write anything when she was handed pencil and paper.

“Communication,” he answered. “She had to cut off communication, and once cut off it’s not easy to restore. At least that’s one aspect. Another is more tricky. The holdup happened more than a month ago, but do you suppose the affected mind reckons so precisely? Is a precise reckoning possible? Duration may, for all we know, be an entirely subjective thing. Yesterday for you may be today for me. We recognize this to some extent when we speak of hours passing slowly or quickly. The girl may still be undergoing the agony of repressing her screams; the holdup, the murders, are not in the past for her, but the present. They are taking place in a long drawn out instant of time which may never end during her life. And if this is so, is it any wonder she is unable to relax, to let down her guard long enough to realize that the present is present and the crisis is past?”

He pressed his middle thoughtfully. “Now, if it is possible to re-create in her mind by stimulus from without rather than by evocation from within the conditions leading up to and through the climacteric, she would have a chance to vent the emotions she was forced to swallow. She might, I don’t say she would, she might speak again.”

I understood such a process would necessarily be lengthy, but as time passed I saw no indication he was reaching her at all, much less that he was getting any results. One of the Spanish-speaking fellows, a botanist who came and went from the Haven at erratic intervals, translated my account of our meeting and read parts of it to the recumbent girl, following Midbin’s excited stage directions and interpolations. Nothing happened.

Outside the futile duty of coaxing the girl to participate in Midbin’s sessions I had no obligations except those I took upon myself or could persuade others to delegate to me. Hiro Agati declared me hopelessly incompetent to help him in the kiln he had set up to make “hard glass,” a thick substance he hoped might take the place of cast iron in such things as woodstoves, or clay tile in flues. He conceded I was not entirely useless in the small garden surrounding their cottage where he, Mrs. Agati—an architect, much younger than her husband and extremely diminutive—and their three children spent their spare time transplanting, rearranging, or preparing for the following season.

Dr. Agati was not only the first American Japanese I had ever met; his was the first family I had known who broke the unwritten rule of having only one child. Both he and Kimi Agati seemed unaware of the stern injunctions by Whigs and Populists alike that disaster would follow if the population of the country increased too fast. Fumio and Eiko didn’t care, while Yoshio, at two, was just not interested.

The Agatis represented for me one more pang at the thought of banishment from the Haven. Since I knew neither chemistry nor architecture, our conversation had limits, but this was no drawback to the pleasure I took in their company. Often, after I was assured I was welcome there, I sat reading or simply silent while Hiro worked, the children ran in and out, and Kimi, who was conservative and didn’t care for chairs, sat comfortably on the floor and sketched or calculated stresses.

Gradually I progressed from the stage where I wanted decision on my application postponed as long as possible to one where I was impatient to have it over and done with. “Why?” asked Hiro. “Suspense is the condition we live in all our lives.”

“Well, but there are degrees. You know about what you will be doing next year.”

“Do I? What guarantees have I? The future is happily veiled. When I was your age I despaired because no one would accept the indenture of a Japanese. (We are still called Japanese even though our ancestors migrated at the time of the abortive attempt to overthrow the Shogunate and restore the Mikado in 1868.) Suspense instead of certainty would have been a pleasure.”

“Anyway,” said Kimi practically, “it may be months before the next meeting.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t there a set time for such business?” Sure there must be, I had never dared ask the exact date.

Hiro shook his head. “Why should there be? The next time the fellows pass on an appropriation or a project, we’ll decide whether there’s room for a historian.”

“But…as Kimi says, it might not be for months.”

“Or it might be tomorrow,” replied Hiro.

“Don’t worry, Hodge,” said Fumio, “Papa will vote for you, and Mother, too.”

Hiro grunted.

When it did come it was anticlimactic. Hiro, Midbin, and several others with whom I’d scarcely exchanged a word recommended me, and Barbara simply ignored my existence. I was a full fellow of Haggershaven, with all the duties and privileges appertaining. I was also securely at home for the first time since I left Wappinger Falls more than six years before. I knew that in all its history few had ever cut themselves off from the Haven, still fewer had ever been asked to resign.