Wild Heart (5 page)

These studies had begun as tests of his sense of territo-riality, but eventually they'd shifted—when it became clear that he either had no such sense or no intention of showing it—to observations of "aversion and attraction vis-a-vis proximity," as her father put it. While he or Charles watched through an ivy-covered chink in the brick wall fifteen feet to Sydney's left, the lost man was repeatedly sent into the empty garden—empty but for one other person. Philip, Sam, Charles, Sydney, Aunt Estelle, even Inger, the downstairs maid—they'd all had their turns at the game, and now Sydney, because she happened to be still around (everyone else, even Sam, had tired of it and gone off to take a nap), was having a second turn.

She heard a faint sound, maybe a footstep. Maybe not. How quietly he moved—she hadn't realized it before today. Seconds passed. Complete silence now; he could be sitting under the rose trellis ... or he could be standing right next to her. Looking at her. Her eyelids began to flutter from the effort to keep them closed.

Did he think she was sleeping? She tried to moderate her breathing, slow it down and make it deep and even. Her skin tingled, and she felt a flush creeping up her neck. She became acutely aware of her whole body, everything about herself—her low-waisted yellow frock; the angle of her elbows as she clasped her hands in her lap; her knees, just touching. The dryness of her lips, which were not quite closed. Where was he? There was no sound, none at all. Was he even here?

Then it was impossible; she couldn't stand it another second. She opened her eyes.

There he was, not three steps away. Hands at his sides, body bent slightly toward her. Her sudden wakefulness didn't startle him—he had known she wasn't sleeping.

They stared and stared, and she thought,
This should be worse, this should be intolerable,
but it wasn't. The tension was gone, and there was only interest, hers the equal of his, and a new kind of acceptance. They were .. . they were
greeting
each other. Another moment passed, and Sydney said, "Hello," quite naturally. His smile came slowly, full of awareness. In one more second he would have spoken to her, there wasn't a doubt in her mind.

"Why did you open your eyes?" Her father shuffled through the gate, notebook under his arm, his querulous voice spoiling everything. "He might've gone closer, who knows? Confirms my hunch, though. Try it with Philip next. It's eyes; eyes are the thing. Go up and get West, will you? Want him to see this." He started scribbling furiously in his book, no longer aware of her.

She had stood, but when she took a step toward the lost man, he backed away from her. She couldn't read his face; the emotions passing over it moved too swiftly. She wanted to touch him, tell him—something, she didn't know what. That she wasn't in on this, it wasn't her idea. She was filled with dismay, and she thought he was, too. She reached out, but he moved then, not seeing her hand, and retreated to the low-branching willows at the end of the garden. Gone; no getting him back now.

"Excuse me," she muttered to O'Fallon, who was blocking the gate. He grinned and shifted, but not enough; she would have to brush his body to pass through. Hot anger boiled over with no warning. "Damn it, get out of my way!" she said succinctly, and he fell back, guilty, amazed, glancing toward her father to see if he'd heard. She pushed past him and sprinted for the house.

15 June 1893

Personal Notes

We progress. Goading O.M. to anger and testing his potential for violence do not interest me; West overruled. What I'm after is reconciling with this blank slate, this tabula rasa, the contradiction between survival of the fittest and acts of apparent selflessness, even self-sacrifice. Ants confounded Darwin; only species that seems to thrive on altruism. Altruistic behavior means benefiting another individual at some cost to oneself. According to survival of fittest theory, the bully, cheat, or cannibal ought to prosper, conquer all. So how to account for ants? Darwin eventually explained them away as members of one family, then applied natural selection to the family as a unit, as if it were an individual.

What about an unsocialized human being? How much would he sacrifice for the good of the "family"? But perhaps O.M. is no longer uncivilized; despite precautions, perhaps our "kindnesses "—feeding, clothing, housing him
—
have corrupted the essential thing in him, his wildness, that we wanted to exploit. Should know soon. Any rate, too late to go backward. Unfortunate, ironic, etc. But all's not lost. Plenty to do, and we can still get a book out of him.

Papa made everyone sit in a circle around the little garden pond. They were seven: Sydney, Philip, Sam, Charles, O'Fallon, Inger—the Swedish maid, dragooned into participating after Aunt Estelle had refused—and the lost man.

By prearrangement, Charles opened a bag of apples, took one, and passed the bag to his left. Sydney took an apple, passed the bag to Sam. And so on, until Inger took the last piece of fruit and handed the bag, empty, to the man. He knew it was empty; he could tell by the weight. With disbelief on his face, he reached inside anyway and felt around the bottom of the bag. He pulled his hand out slowly. By now they were all munching on their apples, looking casual, making small talk—as they'd been instructed. No one was supposed to look at him, that was Papa's job, but Sydney couldn't stop herself. Using the low brim of her sun hat for a shield, she glanced sideways at him across Charles's lap.

And wished she hadn't. What was the point of this unkind experiment? To test the "innate sense of fairness and justice," her father claimed, but Sydney thought it was just mean. She wished he would get angry and snatch somebody's damned apple—preferably O'Fallon's—right out of his mouth. Instead he looked bewildered, hurt, and sullen, and he was trying to hide those feelings by staring at the ground, scratching a mark in the dirt with his finger.

In the afternoon it was oranges. Everybody got one except Inger. This time, against the rules, no one could resist sneaking peeks at the lost man's reaction. While they peeled their oranges and murmured to each other about how good they tasted, he glanced uncertainly between his orange and Inger's empty hands, her forlorn face. Copying the others, he began to rip the rind away from the fruit and separate the sections.
Maybe he doesn 't even like oranges,
Sydney found herself hoping; anything to sabotage these distressing "exercises." But no luck; he put a piece of orange in his mouth and chewed it without revulsion, if no particular enjoyment.

That was Inger's cue. She was a full-figured, flaxen-haired girl of seventeen or so, a nonstop talker, if you weren't careful, in a glib mix of Swedish and English. First she heaved a loud sigh, which no one paid any attention to. Next, a soft, high whine. Beside her, the lost man stopped chewing and looked at her. "I wish
I
had an orange," she said to the group at large, who ignored her. "I'm so
hungry,"
she declared, pressing her hand to her stomach.

Philip, on Sydney's left, was having trouble keeping a straight face. She wanted to punch him—how could he think this was funny? She stole another forbidden glance, then had to look down to hide a smile of her own. Well, maybe it was funny, a little. He had such a wonderful, transparent face, and the dilemma he was wrestling with was as plain as if he'd written it on a blackboard.

In the end, he did what she had somehow known he would do: he gave Inger his orange. Not all of it; he kept a slice or two for himself. The maid didn't thank him; she looked confused, as if her instructions hadn't covered this eventuality. And everybody looked sheepish. A little embarrassed. As well they might, thought Sydney.

More tests followed. Using the lost man for a guinea pig grew more and more distasteful to her as the days passed, but she always bit her tongue and kept her opinions to herself.

Until Papa told Sam to pretend he was drowning.

Then she couldn't keep silent. How could he be so insensitive? She couldn't bring herself to say it to him straight out—"Papa, I hate this. Don't do it because it's ugly and it hurts me." Had he
forgotten
that Spencer had drowned? She tried to talk him out of it indirectly, on more general grounds, but her protests sounded confused and inarticulate. They did no good, and her father's new "scenario" proceeded as planned. Until it hit a serious snag.

In the middle of June, Aunt Estelle finally decreed that it was warm enough for Sam to swim in the lake. After that, he was allowed to paddle along the shore but never, ever, even though he was a strong swimmer for his age, to jump into the water from the end of the boat dock, a twenty-five-foot wooden pier to which the old family sailboat,
Runabout,
was tied. There was no particular reason for this rule; but then, there so often wasn't with Aunt Estelle's rules, which gathered authority more from vehemence and longevity than strict logic. Anyway, Sam knew the rule and had never broken it. Now, however, he was being instructed to do so, to further the interests of science, by his father. Needless to say, Aunt Estelle wasn't informed.

The worst was that Sydney had let herself be bullied into becoming an accomplice. No,
bullied
wasn't accurate; Papa had simply bypassed her protests by not hearing them, by making himself deaf, an old trick that rarely failed. Her role in the drama was to sit on the beach, hear Sam's phony cry for help, jump up and begin to scream that he was drowning and she couldn't swim.

"Save him, save him," she was to beg the lost man, who, through careful advance planning,would be the only other person within sight.

Words could hardly describe how repugnant she found the. whole scheme. But she agreed to it anyway, because her father wanted her to. She wouldn't have done it for Charles, or indeed for anyone else; but where her father was concerned, she was helpless: she never stopped trying to please him.

It was another blindingly blue afternoon, sunny and hot, the essence of every perfect summer day of her childhood. She sat on a soft wool blanket, a copy of
The Bosto-nians
lying facedown at her side, shading her face from the sun with a lace parasol. Q'Fallon lurked somewhere behind her, but in a few minutes he was supposed to disappear. Across the way, Sam, in his red-and-white-striped bathing costume, sat in the sand with "Lance," showing him his collection of miniature flags. "This is the Argentine," he was explaining, "and this is Rumania. This one's my favorite, Greece, but it's the Mercantile Marine, not the national flag ..."

Cross-legged in front of him, barefooted, sleeves rolled above his elbows, the man listened as Sam rattled on, his expression patient and fond, bemused, not quite fatherly but close to it. The sun had tanned his face a golden brown, and the contrast with his light eyes was more startling than ever. His body was lithe and graceful, his movements smooth and rather slow; he had a habit of slouching when at rest that was very attractive, more a matter of folding himself up than slumping or huddling. "His scarred and calloused hands were quite beautiful, Sydney thought, just the shape of them, long and bony-fingered, very dexterous and clever-looking. He was tall, lean, broad-shouldered and strong-thighed—and it was impossible not to look at him like this without thinking of the photographs. The ones in which he was naked. Thin and pale, his face disturbing because of the fear he was trying to hide, but. . . naked nevertheless. And very much a man.

Sam jumped up. He had put his flags back in their tin box. "Going swimming," he called over to Sydney, widening his eyes in conspiracy. She had thought that Sam of all people would find the trick they were about to play as distasteful as she did. But no; he thought it would be fun. "And anyway," he'd told her, "Lance won't mind, he'll know it was just a game."

Maybe. Watching Sam wet his feet at the shoreline, she could only hope so.

The lost man got up, too. He stood looking out across the lake while the wind whipped ripples across the back of his white shirt and tousled his black hair. She wondered what he was thinking while he gazed at the faraway horizon. Of his home? Just then he turned to look at her, probably drawn by her own stare. On an impulse, she scooted over on the blanket and patted it. "Will you join me?"

He lifted his gaze behind her, looking for O'Fallon. Then, carefully blank-faced, he moved in his silent-panther way toward her and sank down on the very edge of the blanket.

Except for that one brief time in the garden, she had never spoken to him directly. She sat by him now, feeling uncomfortable and unexpectedly tongue-tied. It wasn't that she was afraid of him. And yet, she wasn't completely unafraid of him. He would never hurt Sam, that she knew with total certainty—but—would he ever hurt her? Not in anger, no, and not in some sudden, uncontrollable manifestation of his so-called "animal nature." What about sexually, though? There
was
something wild about him, for all that he wore shoes and ate oranges and played games in the sand with a little boy. Despite aspects of him that were disarmingly innocent and naive, he was still a man. And he knew she was a woman.

She glanced at him then—and caught him in the act. It wasn't the first time. He jerked his gaze away, made a business of straightening the fringe on the edge of the blanket. He wasn't that innocent. How did he know—
this
was a good subject for her father to explore!
^:
—that it was a breach of human etiquette to stare (or rather, to be caught staring) at a lady's breasts?