The Orphan (12 page)

Vaire served coffee after the children had gone upstairs to play in Anne’s room, and it seemed as if they had been waiting for the coffee to begin the real business of the evening.

“You have to know, Mr. Sangrom,” said Walter stiffly, “that I don’t believe in your work, and I don’t particularly like what you are proposing to do with the child.”

“Mr. Woodson, if everyone believed in what I do,” Mr. Sangrom said sadly, “this world would be a paradise.” And he dropped his gaze to his coffee. “A paradise,” he repeated in a lower tone.

“Did you feel anything during supper?” Aunt Cat said.

“It is difficult with so many contradictory vibrations at the same table,” the medium said in a low voice. “Butt I detected certain emanations, and once I saw a strange glow in the little boy’s aura that was not a natural one. Yes, Mrs. N., I think I can say that this will be a fruitful experiment.”

Walter turned away in disgust, lifting his eyebrows at his wife.

“Mr. Sangrom,” Vaire began in a nervous voice, “just what is it you are planning to do in your experiment? We really can’t allow the little boy to be frightened to death because of some, well ...” She looked at her mother in embarrassment.

“Vaire, you can’t insult me this evening,” Mrs. Nordmeyer said. “Tonight we’re going to see the proof of what I know is true.” Her long, homely face was thinner than her daughter had ever seen it, and her lips did not smile at all, although they turned up at the corners. It was as if her mother had renounced the living, Vaire thought, feeling a chill in the hot, humid August twilight.

“There is no danger to the child,” Mr. Sangrom said with his fixed smile. “I am only proposing that Mrs. N. and I be allowed to ask him a few questions about the terrible incident that culminated in Mr. Nordmeyer’s murder.”

“I think Walter and I should be here,” Vaire began.

“Of course, Mrs. Woodson,” said Mr. Sangrom. “Your presence is essential. After all, it is your skepticism we are seeking to allay.”

Vaire felt relieved, but thought that if he got to calling her Mrs. W., she would throw a coffee cup at him. She looked at Walter who was being stern and realistic and thought that at least none of this had touched his calm strength, but then he had not seen ... anything. And she felt her reserves of strength and love for Little Robert melting away.

It was around eight, the children’s bedtime, when Mr. Sangrom stood up and announced that he was ready to begin the questioning. After putting Anne to bed hastily, Vaire brought Robert downstairs in his nightshirt and asked him to sit at the table with Aunt Cat and Mr. Sangrom. Robert said hello to Aunt Cat and looked at the thin dark haired man with the smile printed on his face who got up as he entered and moved to the other side of the table so that he faced the boy directly.

“If you will turn off the overhead lights, Mr. Woodson,” Sangrom said softly, watching Robert as if he might disappear. “We will have just the one light, that one on the sideboard, if you please,” he said, indicating an ornamental lamp behind him so that from Robert’s point of view the only light in the room was behind Mr. Sangrom’s head.

“Now, young man,” the dark man said in a thin but kindly voice, “you mustn’t be afraid, for we are only going to ask some questions about the day the bad men came to your house.”

Robert sat on top of the big medical encyclopedia which made him feel tall, his eyes widening in the dimness of the dining room. Yes, he could bring back very clearly that day in the farm dining room when he had sat at the table and waited while the men were mean to the family, and waited for what he was not sure, but waiting all the same. He looked across at the face of the black haired man whose smile did not change and whose upper lip remained stiff when he talked. This man seemed dangerous too, but not in the same way, so that the scene began to seem mysterious, interesting, like an adventure. Robert almost smiled as he thought that, and the familiar thrill of goosepimples raised up on his skin. No one could hurt him with Vaire and Aunt Cat and Walter there, so it was going to be all right.

“That’s fine, Robert,” Mr. Sangrom said, stretching his arms out so that his two long, white hands rested directly in front of Robert. “I’d like it if you would put your hands on top of mine, Robert,” he said. “You see, I am able to feel the magnetic currents in your body, and I will be able to understand your answers better this way.”

Robert put his hands on the backs of the long, white fleshed hands that rested before him like plaster casts. They felt soft and wrinkledy and cool, like a toad’s back. He heard Walter make some sort of coughing sound from his chair in the corner of the room, and looked at the window seat where he could see Vaire’s silhouette against the bow windows still gray with twilight. She was sitting sideways with her hands in her lap, and it made Robert feel brave to see her sitting there. He looked at Aunt Cat, but she was in a shadow and was only a tall, angular form like a black paper cutout sitting at the other end of the table.

“Now, Robert,” Mr. Sangrom began in a very steady voice that seemed to be speaking only to Robert so that only he could hear it. “You are very comfortable here with your family, and you are safe here, and it is getting late in the evening, so I would not be surprised if you were to get a little bit sleepy sitting here in this dark dining room.”

Robert felt that he was a little bit sleepy, even though his nose still hurt and he worried about Anne. He did feel safe here, and he was not afraid of the man with the polished hair, and so he listened to what the man was saying. It seemed to be making him more sleepy all the time, but he wasn’t going to sleep really. It was more like he was thinking himself into a dream, maybe letting the words make a dream for him, since that was easier, and then he was really dreaming, but he was still listening to the man’s words which seemed to be taking his hands and leading him along somewhere in the dark.

“You remember that morning when it rained, don’t you. And you remember coming downstairs that morning and the man that grabbed you and made you sit at the table, don’t you, and that there were bad men in the house who were going to hurt your Uncle Martin and Aunt Cat, and then Aunt Vaire was there too and the men were going to hurt her too. You remember it all, don’t you. And you didn’t like those bad men.”

Robert, listening, felt being led back into the farm kitchen, as if he could see the scene again, being grabbed by the chicken faced young man and sitting at the table. Now Vaire was there, holding his hand, and the tramp in the torn coat was making her red in the face, and his blood was pumping hard in all of his body. He wanted something very large and strong and vicious to come and help Vaire because the man was going to hurt her. It was coming, but he was afraid. It was coming and he wouldn’t stop it anymore. But if it came, he would not be able to stay, and Martin would be killed. Robert fought the power for a time, watching the red haired man hurting Vaire. And then all motion slowed as he felt his wanting torn in two directions. He would not let the bad man hurt Vaire. But he couldn’t let the great power come out because then Uncle Martin would get shot. So it all had to stop. But he couldn’t know about that. That didn’t happen yet. So it was all right and he couldn’t help it anyway. The power pushed against his will to stop everything. A voice said, “That’s it. Let it come! Let it come!” And time began to move again. The red haired man pushed Vaire against the table. Things moved faster now, his hesitation gone like a still movie frame lost into the past as the projector started again. Time was moving, and the red haired man was taking Vaire away to hurt her. Someone said, “She needs help! Robert! Help her! Help her!” And now the man is pushing Vaire past his chair. It is really happening. I have to save her. I will bite....

I wake at the shift, feeling disoriented and outside myself as I have never felt before, the room emerging into existence unexpectedly as if I had been wakened from hibernation too soon. Strange people in the room, dangerous people. I cannot be here. I push against the table, where is it? The kitchen of the farmhouse where Rusty, no, the dining room of the Woodson house, who is that dark man with his mouth stretched wide as if he will scream? I push back hard on the chair and forward on the table and think hard, Robert!

Aunt Cat and Vaire screamed in the same key harmonically, the older woman standing up so that her chair smacked backward onto the floor, at the other end of the room Vaire standing at the window seat with her hands over her mouth, Walter knocking his head back against the wall behind his chair and uttering some curse. Now the man with the polished hair pulls his hands out from under something on the table and screams falsetto as the table moves screeching across the polished floor, Robert’s chair crashes over with the weight of something much larger than he.

Mr. Sangrom fell as he pulled away from the table, hitting the sideboard hard enough to knock the ornamental lamp off onto the floor where it smashed and the electric filament went out in a blue glare, leaving the room dark.

“Get the lights!”

“Help! Help! Help me,” cried an unfamiliar voice from the floor beside the table. Mr. Sangrom was on the floor.

The lights went on as Walter got to the overhead light switch. The dining room flooded starkly with light. The two women stopped screaming. Mr. Sangrom lay tangled on the floor with his chair and the shattered lamp. He was wringing his hands tenderly. The two women stood at opposite ends of the table looking at Little Robert who stared across the table blankly as if still in a dream.

“My hands,” Mr. Sangrom said in a pitiful voice, holding his hands up for the women to see. “It has clawed me, the demon has clawed me,” he whined.

His hands were bloody with several long, deep scratches on the back of each one. Walter walked to the table. His face looked stunned as he took Mr. Sangrom’s hands and looked at them wonderingly.

“Jesus,” Walter said stupidly, holding both of Mr. Sangrom’s hands as if he and the other man were preparing to dance. “Look at this.”

Robert sat down weakly on the floor. He was just waking up. What had happened? I too am dazed, wondering if I shifted or not. I have been asleep, and I have shifted in my sleep? I have never done that, and I think it is impossible, but something has startled me into full awareness while Robert is still present. Robert felt light, as if he could drift away on a breath of air. He stood up, looking at the adults in the room. They were all looking at him with horror on their faces, and the dark haired man was waving his bloody hands at him.

“Now will you believe me?” Aunt Cat said, standing very straight at the end of the table. “Now that you’ve seen with you own eyes?”

“Look what the demon did to me,” Mr. Sangrom wailed, his smile turned upside down, his polished hair in sticky disarray over his forehead. “This is not work for a spiritualist,” he said in his high, hurt voice. “You need a wild animal trainer, Frank Buck, a cage.” He kept walking back and forth, holding his wounded hands up for everyone to see while Walter turned back and forth mechanically, like a tin, target in a shooting gallery.

“Here, Mr. Sangrom,” Vaire said, coming back from the kitchen where no one had seen her go. “Wrap your hands in this wet towel. I have some mercurochrome upstairs. I’ll get it.”

But Mr. Sangrom wrapped his hands and did not want to stay in the house. He walked unsteadily to the front door, making a wide detour around Little Robert who stood beside his fallen chair in his nightshirt which had a long tear down the front.

“No. No, thank you, Mrs. Woodson,” Mr. Sangrom said. “I am finished with this case. Mrs. N., I am afraid I am not the one you want. I am a spiritualist and a worker with hypnotism. I am not an exorcist, I am not a dealer with such things as I have seen and felt tonight. I am not accustomed to dealing with such physical, such
awful
things.” He continued to stand at the door, aware that Mrs. Nordmeyer’s car was his only hope for quick escape, and yet wanting to bolt away from the house as if it were on fire.

Robert was awake now, looking from Aunt Cat to Vaire to the discouraged Mr. Sangrom, now so different from the suave, dark man who had put his white hands on the table for Robert’s own hands to rest on. He felt sad, looking at these people, at beautiful Vaire who looked sideways at him but not directly, at Walter, whose head was cocked on one side with his face drooping as if he were still stunned and who did not look at Robert at all; and at Aunt Cat who looked him in the eyes with a hard, impenetrable stare, as if she were trying to hate him. He understood what had happened and also that he could not stay here, perhaps could not stay himself, understood that perhaps this was the same as his last night on earth, for only with these people could he be himself. And he had done something unforgivable to these people. He wanted to cry, but he could not. He stood there watching the people wake up to themselves, begin to be their own personalities again after such a shock as he had accidentally given them. Walter’s eyes came back into focus, and he began to speak in the old way, the confident, masculine way he had, of mass hypnosis, and how Sangrom had put them all under, and Aunt Cat began to shout at him, cursing as Robert had never heard her do, and Vaire speaking comforting words to Mr. Sangrom who was still standing in the doorway, wanting to get away and looking with fear at Robert. And Robert listened to all of this, his fingers feeling down the long rip in the front of his nightshirt, a rip he could not have made with both little hands, knowing how that rip had happened, and knowing it was not his fault. He began to be angry, very angry at these grownup people who would now do something terrible to him when he had only wanted to live among them and love them and learn about what it was to be a little boy growing up with other children, wanting to be a little boy and be loved. He grew angrier so that his face suffused with blood, and he thought about Mr. Duchamps getting hit with the hail and about Willie crying over him and the big shouldered man getting up in the icy grass and hitting Willie and knocking him down on the ground and Willie hurting Anne, and Martin’s face with the rain streaking his gray hair across his dying eyes, and Aunt Cat staring at him in horror, and the need he felt to come back to them all, to his beautiful Vaire and brave Anne, and how he wanted to love them if he knew how, if only he could know how to do it, and now he would not ever be able to do it, and he must run away in the night and hide again, and he thought about the dirty men under the railroad bridge and their sickness and cruelty, and about the dogs on the farm and the snakes in the chickenhouse and being in the cowbarn with Martin and the cats getting squirted with milk and now it was all gone, and about Rusty and the smell of him and his cold hatred that smelled like rotting fish, and remembered what it was like in the cold rain dancing with Willie and the sandwich game and Anne reading to him from the book about Happy, and now he had to run away again, be something else, someone else, forever, because they had made him do something he didn’t want to do, and that Mr. Sangrom, he was glad of the claws that had sprung out by accident, because there was no way now to get back into the family again, no way for them to know him, Little Robert, because they had pushed him into something else, no way for it not to be; there was no way to go back even to this afternoon and not go to the hideout and not want ever again to play the game with Willie, and not even come in to supper but run and hide under the porch so Mr. Sangrom would go away and it all would not have happened, no way for it to be anything but right now with all these suddenly strange people hating him, afraid of him, no way for it to be anything but now, NOW!