Wicked Angel (21 page)

She bent her head and they sat in silence and stared sightlessly at the grass. Then with an effort Alice said, “You remember me talking about Kennie? I—I sent him to Miss Simmons’ school, and I thought he liked it. And then he wouldn’t go any longer, and he wouldn’t tell me why. But he’s going to a very nice new public school, with young teachers who are determined really to teach, and he’s doing well and is happy.” She hesitated. Did Mark know anything about what had happened to Kennie? But he had forgotten that she had ever spoken about him that summer day so long ago. He tried to listen with a show of interest. Alice sighed.

“When Jack and Mary are married the end of this month they are going to try to adopt Kennie,” she said. “Jack McDowell. He says he often sees you. In fact, they have already put in an application. It will be wonderful for Kennie; he loves them both.” She had thought that when she herself married she would adopt Kennie. But he was growing up; he needed a home of his own. And now her own hopes of being his adopted mother were gone forever.

“Yes,” said Mark, in his listless voice. “Kathy and I are invited to the wedding, of course.” He closed his eyes involuntarily. Something is terribly wrong, thought Alice, with alarm.

“Mark!” she cried. “Is something the matter? Is there anything I can do?”

“Allie,” he said, not looking at her. “Why didn’t you tell me that Angelo tried to kill you that day at the cabin?”

She put her hand quickly to her lips and looked at him with fear.

“You see,” said Mark, “I went to Jack. I told him about—other occasions. I thought I was losing my mind for years. I wanted to believe that, honestly. I wanted to think I needed treatment or even confinement. Anything but the truth. And then, Jack told me the truth. He told me about you and Angelo, also.”

“He shouldn’t have! That was wrong!”

Mark shook his head. “No, Allie dear. It was right. If you had been the only—one—he wouldn’t even have mentioned it, for kids sometimes do stupid and dangerous things out of impulse. But—there were the others, you see. And I went to Jack for help. And, he told me everything I would rather have died than hear.”

Alice’s face changed, became fixed as if in stone. “Mark,” she almost whispered. “What are you saying? There were—other people?”

“Yes, Allie. And if you had told me the truth that day perhaps these others wouldn’t have been hurt. I would have watched, just as I am watching now. Who knows, Allie,”—and out of his despair he wanted a sharing despair—“but that someone has been maimed, someone I haven’t even heard of, someone I never even knew, an old man or a child or a woman, in an ‘accident.’ I’ll never know. And it’s my fault, and yours.”

Alice began to cry, soundlessly, bending her head to hide the tears she could not stop. “I didn’t tell you, Mark. I didn’t want you to know. I was afraid it would hurt you too much.”

He nodded like an automaton. “Yes, I understand that. I can understand that. I never told Kathy. I shouldn’t have blamed you, Allie. Don’t cry, please. Forgive me; I shouldn’t have talked that way to you. But I’ve come to the end of something—I don’t see how I can go on, knowing my son is a dangerous psychopath, and that unless he is caught at some violence he’ll never be taken away from others he can hurt. Jack tells me he is about to enter another stage of his development, and that he’ll probably abandon even the slightest violence in the future. He’ll be even more careful of himself than ever. But I begin to think of some little girl, somewhere, playing like those children around a pond, or in her backyard, or walking with her mother right now, perhaps, whom he’ll marry. And I’m thinking of the children he’ll have, and all the misery and despair hell spread.”

He struck his knee with his fist. “All the misery and the despair. It’ll widen around him; he’ll destroy his wife’s happiness and love. His children will come to hate him; he’ll make misfits and neurotics of them, and ruin their lives. He won’t be able to help it. He is what he is. He can’t be stopped or changed, no more than an elemental force, or a storm. You know there’s nothing to appeal to, except his own welfare, and he’ll take care of that very well out in the world which can either hate or love him! Yes. And serve him, too. Sometimes, Allie, I wish he’d get out of control, really out of control, and do something, something frightful which he can’t hide, and then, perhaps, there will be a place for him and he’ll be locked away safely.”

Alice could not bear the anguish in his voice, the stifled breathing she heard. She put her hand on Mark’s arm, and tightened her fingers around it. She was horrified at its emaciation.

“He used to have such awful rages,” the girl stammered. “But Kathy writes me that now he seldom loses his temper, hardly more than once a month, and he’s easier to calm. Perhaps we can hope a little.”

Mark shook his head again. “His rages are fewer, yes, and sometimes he gets over them quicker; he doesn’t throw or smash things as he used to do. But he looks Wild and mad when he is in a rage, Alice, not with a child’s wildness and madness, but a man’s. I don’t care what Jack says, Alice. Angelo’s insane when he’s in a rage. I can still take hold of him forcibly, and hold him until he subsides. But the day will come when he will be too big and too strong. What then?”

“But Jack,” said Alice insistently, “has said he’ll control himself better and better as he grows older—for his own sake. You must hope, Mark!”

“For what?” he said drearily. “For the day I die? That’s all I have to look forward to. And always, I’ll have to watch Angelo until he’s a man, and has left home, and then I’ll just be waiting, waiting for any day—”

“Don’t, Mark!” she cried. “You’ve forgotten. Kathy is going to have another child! Think of that child, Mark. I know it will be a wonderful child, and that it will make you happy, and help you to forget Angelo.”

He sat, slumped, on the bench and looked at his crossed ankles. And then Kennie Richards was there, concerned at what he saw. He went to Alice and put his hand on her shoulder, and she tried to smile at him, but could only sob.

Kennie had known who Mark was from the moment of introduction, but with his kind subtlety he had also known that Alice did not want him to identify himself as a former classmate of Angelo’s. He turned his sorrowful and understanding eyes on Mark, as he stood with his hand on Alice’s shoulder, and some intuition told him that they had been speaking of Angelo Saint, and were devastated in consequence.

Alice rose, brushing away her tears. “I have a train to make in less than two hours,” she said. “And I have to take Kennie home first. His foster parents will be worried about him; they moved back into the City, so I won’t have to take him far. Mark,” she added, “did you hear what I said?”

He looked up at her from the depths of his gray agony, and then got to his feet. “Alice,” he said, “I wish you’d visit us. I wish you’d come, sometime.”

“I will,” she replied. “I honestly will. I expect to be with Kathy when the baby is born in October.”

He watched the tall girl and the tall boy walk away together, and it seemed to him that only they were real and that his wife and his son were half-remembered dreams without reality. He went back to his lonely house. He was not hungry. He made a large drink for himself, and then sat in the gathering darkness until the whiskey quieted him. Then he took another drink, and then another, in a sort of frenzy, until he slept, stupefied.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jack McDowell had told Mark Saint that psychopaths were absolutely unable to feel any deep and genuine emotion of love or liking for anyone but themselves. All their apparent life-serving virtues and sympathies were imitated, their love, facile though it was, was given but to those who could serve, flatter or be of value. But, Jack had said, there was as much difference among psychopaths as there was among all other natures. Some were homicidal, and these were responsible for a series, over a long period of time, of secret inexplicable murders committed for no apparent reason, not even for gain. Some were afflicted with paranoia, and in consequence were suspicious and hostile and incorrigible, never making the synthetic adjustment to society that the more intelligent of their kind accomplished, for their intelligence was inferior. Some never physically injured anyone in their lives; their attacks on others were mental and spiritual, with a complete refinement of cruelty. Some suddenly so lost all control of themselves—and absence of control when feeling one of their few genuine emotions, rage, was typical of them—that they committed mass murders in their berserk frenzy, and often within a short period of time. “Such as that seventeen-year-old-boy in Philadelphia, recently, who got a gun somewhere and killed five people whom he had never seen before, in as many minutes.” Some were actually insane, but no more than in any other group.

But all were distinguished by a passionate narcissism, a monstrous and overwhelming vanity, and by an eternal watchfulness that that vanity was never threatened and that their power over others was never diminished. Keep the average psychopath assured of unswerving adoration, convinced that not only was he in the very center of his own world but in the very center of others, and he was comparatively harmless except to those who helplessly loved him. There, he was ruthless; there he spared no exploitation; there he had not even a superficial pity; there he exerted all his power for delicate torture. Oppose him never—and this was true of all psychopaths—except when showing him that it was to his material or immediate benefit. Psychopaths were raw cynics.

“I would say,” Jack had stated, “that perhaps all infants are partial psychopaths in their way, but as they grow into childhood, their moral nature, endowed by God, begins to assert itself. This never happens in the true psychopath.”

When exposed by others for what they were, they were never ashamed. They were only monstrously affronted and outraged; they never forgave. They waited for their opportunity to avenge the insult to themselves. For the intelligent psychopath was quite aware he was not like other men; this did not embarrass him or cause him any guilt. For he always considered himself the superior one, who must never be scorned or reviled, judged by the standards! of others, or expected, in his emotions, to be as contemptibly “soft” and stupid and weak as others. He was, above all else, his own law.

“Would you say it was infantilism?” Mark had asked.

“No. Many people retain infantile traits, such as dependence, bad temper, weakness, constant demands to be assured that they are loved, resentment of authority and responsibility, without being at all psychopathic. If you mean infantilism only in the sense that some are atavists,! born without a moral sense and conscience, throwbacks then that is an entirely different thing.” He added, “Infantile people can often become comparatively adult, and they are capable of real and genuine love and emotional concern for others, and often feel guilty, honestly guilty. And they can often rise to heights of self-abnegation, to the astonishment of others. These are not true of the psychopath. It is an odd thing, too—infantile people frequently become alcoholics. Psychopaths rarely do, for they want, at all times, to be in command of their power over others. But, I warn you; it is very hard to detect a psychopath; sometimes even the best of psychiatrists can’t do it, for they’re very clever and their disguise is almost perfect and they have learned the jargon of normality.”

“And there is no doubt that Angelo is a psychopath?”

“None whatever. I’ve told you he is the prototype of them all. I’ve never seen a better specimen, if you want to call it ‘better.’”

So Mark, in his talks with his son when Kathy was not present, urged improvement in some overt behavior, “because you don’t want people to think you’re stupid or foolish, do you, Angelo? You—you have to deceive people; they’re easy to deceive, and when you deceive them you can get what you want from them. You understand?”

Angelo, at those moments, admired “the old man.” Perhaps he wasn’t as stupid as he, Angelo, believed. He did not know that Mark hated himself for this gross materialism which he did not believe in for a moment; he hated himself for being a part of Angelo’s crafty and astute cynicism and self-serving—for the sake not only of the boy but of others.

Sometimes, in his stricken despair, Mark wanted to cry out against all caution and advice: “I’m lying to you! The man who serves only himself has no right to live among human beings; he has no right to be a part of the human community! The man who exploits others, without mercy or guilty compassion, is a tiger, and should be destroyed! The man without God is a fierce animal, and should be exiled as they once exiled lepers, for he is a spiritual leper!” But he always restrained himself. He knew that a sly and amused amber gleam would come to Angelo’s eyes, and that Angelo would completely despise him, and that his danger to others would become stronger. For, though Angelo might say, as he said when he was younger, and with demureness, “Yes, Daddy,” he would not understand a single word, and what little real influence his father had over him would be lost.

One late July weekend Mark came to the cabin to see his family. It had been very hot all these weeks; Kathy had decided it was best for Angelo not to return to the City as they usually did, coming to the cabin only for the weekends. “We’ll have an extra month, darling, though we’ll miss you,” she said to Mark, on whom she was leaning these days. “But you can come up every weekend; after all, it isn’t far. Besides, I do feel so good and lively up here.”

She did not drive her own car any longer, but Betty, the placid maid, could drive, and could go down to the village for replacements of food and supplies. Sometimes Kathy and Angelo would go with her. Angelo stayed very close to his mother; there was some threat, somewhere, his preternatural senses told him, and he watched his mother sharply. But she was more loving than ever, more sedulous. It was only that sometimes she had a dreaming expression in her eyes, and a slight, faraway smile, which Angelo suspected did not concern him. These were infrequent, but enough to alert his powerful animal senses.

The family was to return to the suburb this Sunday night, Betty following in Kathy’s car, for it was time for the periodic examination and attention to Angelo’s teeth before the new term of school began. On Wednesday, Kathy and Angelo and Betty would go back to the cabin. “You’ve got to tell him this time, Kathy!” said Mark, on Sunday. “Even your skirts and your elastic waistbands aren’t going to conceal the truth much longer.”