The Child Buyer (14 page)

Senator MANSFIELD. Mr. Broadbent, I don't believe you're authorized—

Senator SKYPACK. We think if the general public had any idea of the patriotic and beneficial nature of the experiment your company is conducting, that the sympathy that has been drummed up in the press for this boy, largely because you happen to come from out of State—

Senator MANSFIELD. Senator Skypack, we'll follow good order here, please. You may take up the questioning, Mr. Broadbent.

Mr. JONES. I wonder if I could make a modest suggestion before you kick off, gentlemen?

Senator MANSFIELD. Please.

Mr. JONES. I always make it a habit, when I become interested in purchasing a specimen, to visit the public library patronized by the child. You'd be amazed at what turns up in a library. I have done so in Pcquot, and the suggestion I would make is that you invite Miss Elizabeth Cloud, the librarian, to testify here in these matters. Miss Cloud is a hunchback; she has a sufferer's face and a most intriguing forehead. I'm inclined to be attentive to foreheads, and hers is truly a collector's item. Lines that seem to have been cut by a sensitive etcher's acid run every which way on it, and each one seems to express a feeling or a fate: one might almost read her fortune in those lines, the way a gypsy can read a hand. At any rate, I doubt if anyone in Pequot knows Barry Rudd better than she does, and she can give you insights through his choice of reading—

Monday, October 28

Senator SKYPACK. She dig out the pornography for him to read? Paperbacks?

Mr. JONES. I think you should talk with her, gentlemen.

Senator MANSFIELD. Mr. Broadbent, will you follow up on this Miss Cloud?

Mr. BROADBENT. I've already passed a note out, sir. We're phoning our investigator in Pequot, and he may be able to drive her right up this morning.

Senator MANSFIELD. Alert of you, Mr. Broadbent, thank you. Proceed.

Mr. BROADBENT. Now, Mr. Jones, about your visit to Miss Per-rin's class. Please just start right in and tell us in your own words.

Mr. JONES. I've done enough visiting to make allowances for the sudden change of atmosphere that took place in Miss Per-rin's room on my entrance. It's remarkable what an upheaval will take place in a classroom when a visitor enters. Children the teacher can barely control when she's alone in the room suddenly become goody-goody because they have an outsider to impress, and others who are usually docile sense her nervous abstraction and see a chance to slide out from under her thumb. I spent the first few minutes, before I even began to watch the Rudd specimen, weighing this shifted atmosphere. Miss Perrin has a deep sense of her own unworthincss, and she reacts badly to being watched. I saw her speaking sweetly to a boy named John Sano, a friend of the Rudd specimen, but at the same moment secretively pinching him alongside a shoulder blade.

Mr. BROADBENT. What was the class doing?

Mr. JONES. It being the beginning of the school day, the class had a weather session, and very soon I could sec the Rudd specimen's dominance of the classroom. He's the teacher there, and it's a sign of a curious combination of brokcn-spiritedness and magnanimity in Miss Perrin that she doesn't resent him. In the midst of the usual cliches of weather forecasting, with the

THE CHILD BUYER

little girls especially trying to inject a whiff of pre-pubertal sex into their talk of fronts and precipitation, in unconscious imitation of TV weather queens, the Rudd boy, perhaps for my benefit, slipped in radiosonde, hygrothermograph, psychrometer. It was just a lot of talk, excepting his part. Anyone could see that it was raining outside. But your average school, you know, is like a daily television program these days, and the children are at once actors and audience. Rudd breaks that pattern, however, from the opening minute in the morning: that's my first impression. He's there not just to imitate and watch, but to learn and teach.

Mr. BROADBENT. Any other impressions?

Mr. JONES. Yes. He's bored within an inch of his life: this we'll eliminate at United Lymphomilloid, believe me. . . . Miss Perrin droned along with a standard brand of old-fashioned mother's-milk classroom courtesy. 'Excuse me, Paul, I didn't see your hand. . . . I'm pleased to see this group working so well —especially pleased to see Molly working so well. . . . Let's see who's wide awake. I know friend Jock isn't wide awake, because he watched Meet McGrmv and Divorce Court again last night, didn't he? What was it, Jock? Ten thirty? Eleven? . . . David didn't hear what I said a minute ago, I guess. He still— doesn't—hear. . . .' And the Rudd specimen sitting there obsessed, it seems, with clocks, watches, calendars. Time fleeing from his voraciousness! Once his impatience came vomiting out: Miss Perrin was pressing Jock, a slow one, to connect a word in a reader with the literal-minded family-magazinish illustration above it, and Rudd blurted out, Tor goodness sake, Jock, hurry up! Ars longa; vita brevis!' 'My gracious,' Miss Perrin said. Want to know what it means?' Rudd asked. The tactlessness of a quick one. He was just trying to push Jock off the can, I think.

Monday, October 28

Senator SKYPACK. Sounds just like him, pushing normal young men around.

Mr. JONES. I didn't say 'pushing around/ Senator. And I don't think it's necessarily 'normal' to be Jock. I mean the Jock I saw that day.

Senator MANSFIELD. I gather, in fact, sir, that you were favorably impressed by the Rudd youngster.

Mr. JONES. I was, I must say, favorably struck, I mean from a U. Lympho point of view, by his reaction to something that happened during social studies.

Mr. BROADBENT. Would you describe it, please?

Mr. JONES. I don't know whether you gentlemen are aware of the unusual relationship that exists between Rudd and Dr. Gozar, the principal of Lincoln Elementary. . . .

Mr. BROADBENT. Yes, we know about that.

Mr. JONES. About the early-morning lab work?

Mr. BROADBENT. Yes, yes, we've heard.

Mr. JONES. But a really deep attachment, on both sides . . , Well, Miss Perrin's social-studies class was going along in a humdrum way when suddenly Dr. Gozar irrupted into the room, with a wrinkled nose and her leathery lips drawn up with a string. She was holding high in her hands a soaked textbook that had obviously been left out in the rain, and she handled this object as if it were the carcass of a pet, already putrescent yet bitterly mourned, and she delivered a short speech, a sort of funeral oration. Every time she uttered the word 'book' it seemed as if she meant to use another word—'life,' or 'fire,' or 'spirit.' I watched Rudd's face closely. Most of the children, who couldn't be expected to feel anything but joy over the ruination of a textbook, were just made rebellious by the threatening tone of her words. Rudd wore a mask. Only when the word 'book' came again and again out of the old iron jaws did

THE CHILD BUYER

a sign show on it—a sort of pulling. It was his book. He had left it out of doors. I found this out later, but I also found out that Dr. Gozar knew it then. And she was an ogre. Relentless. She wound up her speech saying, 'The pupil who is responsible for this negligent act—he knows who he is—will remain after school today and will write one hundred times the following sentence: "I must learn to respect town property." He will write neatly and legibly, please. Here, I'll put the sentence on the board for all of you to see/ What was most interesting was to see how Rudd performed after Dr. Gozar left.

Mr. BROADBENT. How did Dr. Gozar get ahold of the book? The boy told us about leaving it in the woods, on a log by the millpond of an abandoned knife works.

Mr. JONES. That's right. I got him to tell me about recovering the book in the afternoon, when I called at his home; he told me the story without a hint of emotion. Do you want me to break in with it now?

Mr. BROADBENT. All right with you, Mr. Chairman?

Senator MANSFIELD. Yes. Go ahead.

Mr. JONES. When he first waked up that morning, he told me —he'd had a fearful night, terror-struck, in consequence of Mr. Cleary's taking things into his own hands—he looked out the window of the kitchen, where he and his sister sleep; it's on the street, River Street, and he saw it was raining, and his first thought was that the leaves would no longer be dry for a weasel he'd been observing in the forest to use to reline its nest. That made him think of his book. He wheedled his father into driving him to school early, when his father went off to work at Trucco. At the school he thanked his father for the ride, walked at a leisurely pace to the front door of the school, entered, let the door slam behind him, glanced over his shoulder to make sure his father's car had pulled out of sight, then turned and burst out of the school and went at a run up the hill and out the

Monday, October 28

Treehampstead Road into the wooded countryside. He got a stitch in his side—he's candid about his gawkiness and flabbi-ncss—and he had to walk awhile, but when he came to the dirt track cutting through the forest downward to Chestnut Burr Creek, he forced himself to run again. Underfoot, he said, there was a shining wet carpet of leaves of many colors. Here and there branches whipped their loads of water drops off onto his chest. He walked past the ruined knife works and along the edge of the millpond to the log at the upper end. His book lay just where he had left it. He picked it up. The cover was slimy, the cloth of the binding had come unstuck and had curled away from the cardboard underneath, and the cardboard itself was warped; many whole pages and edges of other pages were wrinkled and soaked. The boy said he stood for a long moment staring at the pond, which was smooth and iron-black, with myriad tiny circles of raindrops 'like a celebration of water stridcrs dancing on it'; then he ran away back. When he reached the school the playground was empty. He ran to the front entrance and opened the door cautiously and turned to ease its closing so it wouldn't slam. He was panting, and his chest hurt, and his legs felt, he said, as if they had a deep-sea diver's boots on. He turned away from the door. Dr. Gozar was blocking his way. She stood looking down at him. He said her hips were wide, her shoulders looked narrow, her head seemed very small; she had a towering, trompe-l'oeil perspective; she seemed to him enormous, looking down at him from a great height, her neck bent so her head wouldn't press against the ceiling. But her face was not so far away that he could lose sight of its icy sternness. Mind you, these two people are in love. Passionately. 'What is that you have in your hand?' Dr. Gozar asked in a horrified whisper.

Mr. BROADBENT. You spoke of Barry's behavior in the classroom after Dr. Gozar left.

Mr. JONES. Yes. It was remarkable. As if nothing had hap-

THE CHILD BUYER

pened. As if that sentence, that crazy nineteenth-century punishment, weren't scrawled reproachfully across the blackboard. I think he was showing off for me in a curious way r and at the same time scrutinizing me—though I never actually caught his eyes on me. His eyes never seemed to rest on anything; they seemed to be looking inward at the shelves of the busy supermarket inside his head. Yet he was right there every second. 'Homer's father earns two hundred fifty dollars a month/ Miss Perrin said once. 'How much does Homer's father earn in a year? 7 Three or four hands went up, including Rudd's. Fact is he keeps his hand up most of the time: holds up the elbow of his right arm with his left hand and just keeps it there because he knows all the answers. Miss Perrin called on Jock. Twelve months times two fifty dollars/ he said. Two times zero equals zero. Two times five equals ten. Carry one . . .' And so on, crunching along, step by step. The answer finally came out at three thousand. Then Rudd spoke out. 'There's an easier way/ he said. What's that?' Miss Perrin said. Tour times two hundred fifty is one thousand. Three times a thousand is three thousand/

Senator SKYPACK. Wait a minute, now.

Mr. JONES. He broke the twelve into two elements.

Senator MANSFIELD. Yes, I see that. Four times the two hundred fifty and then—

Mr. JONES. Wouldn't have been too remarkable, except I had the feeling he discovered the short cut just then, on his own. Washington was mentioned at one point, George Washington as a youth. Like an electronic scanner, Rudd riffled off contemporaries of young Washington: Johann Bach, famous organist in Leipzig; Vitus Bering, sailing all the way from the Baltic to the strait that has his name; Ch'ien Lung, poet-warrior emperor of China; Voltaire producing Merope; Watt working in his father's shop . . . and so on. Rapid-fire. He certainly did

Monday, October 28

dominate the room, in spite of Miss Perrin's efforts to hold him back. It was evident to me, after some time in the class, that the boy had met and fallen under the influence of a first-class mind, which had dealt with him as if he were an adult. His fantastic inner powers are leashed, disciplined. I felt from the way he opened up each thought and even each rote memory for use that he was always reorganizing, that he has at base one of those minds that can never be satisfied with things as they are. That's the kind we want at United Lymphomilloid. Of course the top-notch mind that had influenced this specimen belonged to Dr. Gozar—the old crank who'd ordered him to write a stupid sentence a hundred times.

Mr. BROADBENT. Anything else of interest in the classroom?

Mr. JONES. One thing. They had a recess, and after the recess Rudd gave a so-called research report on the system of binomial nomenclature for plants and animals devised by Carl von Linn6. It was synthetic on the whole, tailored, I would judge, rather to get a good mark than to please himself. One touch, though. You remember a few minutes ago I spoke of schools nowadays copying television? I may have had this notion for some time, or I may have gotten it from Rudd, who not only senses it but plays on it to the hilt, though he himself, as I said earlier, is in school to be schooled. He was using an opaque projector, and at one point, being clumsy, he got his thumb caught in the reflector and it showed on the screen. In a pompous network voice he said, 'One moment, please. The picture will be off the air for a few seconds because of technical difficulties. The audio portion of the program will continue. . . .'