After Dachau

FORGOTTEN

Bodies do not always stay buried.

ALL CHILDREN OF
the rich and famous grow up believing they were switched at birth for the infants their parents
really
wanted, and I’m no exception. I’m Jason Tull—but not the rich and famous one, obviously. That’s my father.

Had my parents been given the infant they wanted, he would have grown up behaving exactly like a rightful heir, which is a thing I understand perfectly well but have never been able to do (and have rarely seen anyone else do). Perhaps it’s something genetic. Rightful heirs have special genes that kick in and take over at age five or six, and the rest of us don’t.

Naturally Mom and Dad assured me that nothing at all was expected of me just because I happened to be their son. They loved me for myself, and so on. But as one nears the
end of school life (in my case, in the year 1992), the people close to you begin to hold their breath—to see if you’re possibly going to begin acting like a rightful heir after all. I didn’t, and before long everyone began to breathe normally again.

Instead of behaving like the rightful heir, I conceived an eccentric interest. This was the way my relatives perceived it, not the way I perceived it. Having nothing else in particular to live for, I found a hobby (they must have thought)—and a bizarre one to boot, just to prove I’m special. It irked me that they thought this way about it, but I know I might think the same in their place.

In my sophomore year
at prep school I spent spring vacation with another son of rich and famous parents. My friend’s mother was a gaunt and melancholy person who whiled away her days reading. Mornings she spent in the morning room. After lunch she moved to one of several rooms that counted as living rooms. When the sun began its decline, she donned a sweater and moved to a shady spot by the pool. In the evening, before taking her book to bed, she seemed to feel obliged to spend an hour or two with the young master and his friend—a period that was painful to get through, as she was so clearly bored to stupefaction by the two of us.

All this leads up to the fact that I took a fancy to one of her books, which she’d left unguarded for a moment on the arm of a chair. I only had time to read the dust-jacket notes, which heightened my interest, and I began to wonder how I could get hold of it when she was done. She was the sort of
person who would think it an impertinence to suggest that I might read the same books as she. A sort of sumptuary thing, like only kings wearing purple. She somehow gave the impression that the books she read had been written on commission for her exclusive use.

It was an impertinence even to ask what I actually asked, which was (in a very offhand way), “What do you
do
with all the books you read? Do you keep them somewhere here or donate them to a library or what?”

She was instantly on her guard—against what, I can’t guess.

She explained that her maid took them to a used-book dealer who evidently had the royal entitlement to resell all her paper castoffs. The rich mostly know very well how to pinch a penny.

The next day I angled in on the maid. You never know. Some servants are even haughtier than the people they serve, but I was lucky with this one, and a few hours later the book was delivered into my hands. It didn’t occur to me at the time that this book (or any book) was going to shape the direction of my life. At this age I didn’t even know that lives can
have
a direction.

IT WAS A STORY
—purportedly a true story—about something that happened in a small midwestern town in the middle of the nineteenth century. I suppose it’s silly of me to be cagey about this. I later learned that this case was well known to people interested in such things, but at the time I not only didn’t know it was a well-known case, I didn’t even know it was a case—meaning an instance of a phenomenon. I thought I was reading about an event unparalleled in human history, completely unique.

In Vettsburg, Missouri, a little girl by the name of Mary Anne Dorson surprised her mother one day by starting to gossip about some people who lived on the other side of town, the Prescotts. The reason this surprised Mrs. Dorson was that the Dorsons didn’t know the Prescotts, though they
were vaguely aware of their existence. She asked Mary Anne if she had met the Prescott children at school, and the little girl explained that the Prescott children were much grown up, no longer in school, though still living at home. So how did Mary Anne know them?

“I guess I know them from my dreams,” Mary Anne said.

This didn’t please her mother, who liked to think she was bringing up a child with her feet planted on the ground. She didn’t pursue the subject, but this didn’t end it either. Mary Anne not only went on talking, she began bringing forth details she couldn’t possibly know by any means whatever, which could only suggest she was making them up, fabricating them—lying, in short. Mrs. Dorson told her daughter very firmly that she didn’t intend to hear any more of this nonsense, not another word of it.

Stunned, Mary Anne fell silent. It was the beginning of summer in her eighth year. By the middle of the summer, the entire family was engulfed in her silence, which oppressed them like the still air before a thunderstorm. Mary Anne’s dresses hung on her like rags. She was losing weight, melting before their eyes. They took her to the family doctor, Dr. Jansen (telling him nothing of the Prescott business, of course), who found nothing in the world wrong with her. For her parents’ sake, he prescribed a tonic, told them to make sure she spent time playing outdoors every day, and so on.

Neither the tonic nor the sunshine helped. Finally, beaten, Mrs. Dorson begged Mary Anne to tell her what was wrong, praying she was not going to hear a single syllable of the name Prescott. The girl’s eyes filled with tears.

“I miss Mommy and Daddy,” she said. “I miss Connie and Francis” (those being the Prescott children).

Mrs. Dorson thought her heart would stop or her mind would explode from her head like a bird frightened from a tree. She was starkly terrified. She summoned her husband home from his office on the double, but even when he’d heard it all, he had no better idea what to do than she did.

Was their little girl insane? Devil-possessed? They almost would have preferred the latter. They took her back to Dr. Jansen, not to be examined this time but because they didn’t dare leave her at home or with a neighbor. When the doctor finally heard everything he should have heard in the first place, he didn’t waste time worrying about insanity or demonic possession. Though he didn’t know what was going on, he knew what had to be done, and that was to bring Mary Anne and the Prescotts together.