Silent Boy (30 page)

He was expecting me. I had made no arrangements to see him but he must have known I’d come. His office door was open and before I had reached the doorway, he was turned around in his office chair. He gestured for me to sit down. I sat. Still wearing my jacket, still with an armload of books and materials, I dropped down into the chair.

Rocking back and forth in his desk chair, Dr Rosenthal regarded me a long time. He knew my questions before I asked them. I knew his answers. Back and forth he rocked. Finally he reached over his desk and took a tissue. Removing his glasses, he cleaned them, examined them, wiped them again. Then he folded them up and put them in his breast pocket. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He loosened his tie. I wondered, as I watched him, what made aloof, intellectual men so attractive. He was a compelling man. Then he took out his pipe. Still without saying a word, he opened the tobacco pouch, extracted leaves, stuffed the bowl of the pipe. Did I make him nervous, that he always smoked when I was here? Or did he always have a private little smoke in his office before he went home to the family who believed he’d stopped? Then he pulled open the desk drawer and lifted out the teapot and the tea bags.

‘I don’t think I want any, thank you,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Yes, you do. Come on and join me.’ And he rose to go get water.

I was sitting in one of his ‘therapy’ chairs, a huge, soft overstuffed rocker meant to relax his clients. I sat with my chin braced on one fist. Tears welled up and came down my cheeks as he gave the warm steaming cup of tea to me. I made no effort to hide them. There was no point. He already knew he had hurt me. I only hoped he felt as bad about my tears as I did.

‘Why couldn’t you at least have told me?’ I asked. ‘I never knew at all.’

‘It wasn’t really your matter,’ he replied.

‘It was. We were sharing cases.’

‘Then it would have been up to Jeff to tell you, not me. It was a personal matter.’

‘But he didn’t tell me. And I didn’t know.’

We fell silent. Dr Rosenthal drank his tea in great, quenching gulps. Then he poured himself another cup. The clinic was absolutely silent at that hour, and so I could hear him swallow.

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t do it. The board did it.’

‘But you could have stopped them, couldn’t you? Why did you let a stupid, stupid thing like that, which had no bearing on Jeff’s work, matter?’

‘Because it did matter.’

‘It didn’t. No more than my sexual preferences or behaviors in my own time interfere with my work. Jeff would never touch a kid. You know yourself that’s a fact. He’d never hurt a kid any more than I would. Or you would.’

‘No, true. But it mattered to the board.’

‘But why did you let it? They’re stupid, uncaring, narrow-minded people.’

Dr Rosenthal lowered his head and regarded the fabric of his suit. He nodded. ‘Yes, they are. But sometimes the stupid are in the driver’s seat. More often than not. Because the smart, caring, broad-minded are too busy out doing.’

For several moments neither of us spoke. He rocked in his desk chair, lit his pipe and then sat, contemplating his fingernails and the backs of his hands. I watched him and tried to make thoughts come out of aching confusion.

Then Dr Rosenthal looked over at me. He said nothing at first but just searched my face. ‘Were you in love with him, Torey?’

‘No,’ I replied and it was true. At least it was mostly true. I hadn’t really thought about it before, and if it never occurs to you, it probably isn’t what you’d call love. But then what is? It’s a barren language, English is, for words like that. There’s only one to cover everything when the nuances of the emotion could use up a thousand different words. I had never considered Jeff for a lover and he had never given me reason to. But we had had a passionate affair of the mind, and for want of a better word, it had made me love him. I was a great one for loving anyway. It was an emotion that came easily to me. I could do it effortlessly and over such an incredible range of people, big and small, old and young, male and female. I savored the emotion; it made all things bright and beautiful to me when in the hard, cold light of day, I knew they really weren’t. But that was always enough, to feel the beauty.

‘Not in love with him, no,’ I said, ‘but I loved him.’

Dr Rosenthal smiled in a sad way and lowered his head.

‘You did a rotten thing to me,’ I said, ‘and to my kids. And a rottener thing to Jeff.’

‘I know,’ he said and I knew he did.

The worst, perhaps, was Charity.

She was late coming over. Her mom was having troubles recently, and so Charity was having to spend more time minding her young brothers. She arrived after I had already eaten. I heard her coming down the sidewalk. It was a dark, frigid night and Charity came skipping through it, singing ‘Silent Night’ at the top of her lungs.

‘Guess what I did today!’ she hollered from the front door as she let herself in. ‘Hans? Are you here, Hans? Guess what I did at school today, Hans.’

I came into the hallway from the kitchen.

‘Where they at? Where’s Hans?’ she asked, her voice cautious. She knew already something was wrong.

‘Come into the kitchen, Charity. Would you like a mug of hot chocolate?’

‘Where they at? They always come on Mondays. Every Monday. How come they’re not here?’

Carefully, I tried to explain that Hans and Jeff would not be coming back. Charity was sitting on the stool beside me as I made her chocolate. When I handed it to her, she stared into it, her mouth pulled back in a tight, mordant expression. When I finished explaining, she looked over at me without really raising her head. Consequently, I saw her dark eyes through a fringe of bangs.

‘They divorced us, didn’t they?’

I smiled in sympathy. ‘No, Char, it wasn’t anything like that.’

‘Yes, they did. Just like my pop divorced me.’

‘But parents don’t divorce kids, either. Adults divorce other adults. Parents don’t divorce kids. Friends don’t divorce friends.’

‘How do
you
know?’

I studied her face. Her expression was hard and knowledgeable. ‘Divorce is something only adults do,’ I said. ‘It’s a grown-up thing. But friends never do it and Jeff and Hans were our friends, Charity. Things might change between us, but it isn’t divorce.’

‘It’s the same thing.’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Yes sir. Your pop goes away and you never see him again, really. I mean, he isn’t family anymore, like, he doesn’t give you baths or play hide-the-thimble when your friends come over. Just like Hans isn’t ever going to take me skating again. It’s over and I’m never going to see him or Jeff again. Maybe it isn’t divorce. Maybe it isn’t because they divorced us. But it’s the very same thing.’

I paused from hugging her and tried to think of a very honest answer to sort things out. With tears on her cheeks, Charity caught me at my thinking and gave me a small, sardonic smile.

‘It
is
the same, Torey,’ she said with gentle finality. ‘I’m right. I know. Believe me, it is.’

O
n Tuesday evening Jeff came over to my house with Hans, and we sat around and talked for a long, long time. Interestingly, we managed to avoid the very thing that I think we all meant to talk about, and so our conversation was filled mostly with the future and the past. We all got amnesia about the present.

On Wednesday Jeff came into the office and cleared out his things. That evening when I went to see Kevin, Kevin told me Jeff had been around to talk to him and say good-bye.

‘Why should I care?’ Kevin said morosely. ‘I couldn’t care less what happens to Jeff. He can jump right in the Pacific Ocean when he gets to California for all I care. In fact, I wish he would, only it’d pollute the ocean.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘I hope they have an earthquake. I hope the whole stupid state of California falls in the ocean too.’

I was sitting on the edge of Kevin’s bed and I leaned over to rummage through my box of things for a new cartoon book I had brought him. Feeling a little like a weekend parent buying her kid’s silence with a gift, I searched in terse, impatient motions through the box. Junk. That was all that was in the box. A bunch of two-bit crap. Why didn’t I ever clean it out so that I could find something?

Kevin looked over. There was a poignant moment when he caught me at my frantic searching and both of us knew how vulnerable I was. And he was.

I saw Jeff on only one other occasion, and that time was by accident. After work on Friday I stopped into a local watering hole with some friends. It was one of those convivial places where people gather but was not frequented much by my colleagues from the clinic, which was what I wanted. Apparently Jeff had as well, because as I sat there drinking beer and eating peanuts, I saw Jeff across the room. I rose and went over.

He was at a table with other people whom I did not know but, when he saw me, he got up and met me partway across the room. We went up to the bar and he bought me another beer. Together we stood, side by side, and we said nothing.

‘You know, it’s a funny place, this world,’ he said at last. ‘If I were a Nazi, someone would defend my constitutional right to hate Jews. If I were a Klansman, someone would defend my right to hate blacks. It’s a funny place, this world. Hate has rights. Love has none.’

And that was it. He left.

The phone rang at twenty minutes to three in the morning. I had been sound asleep, and it was only after I hung up that I was finally awake enough to fathom what it had been all about.

A nurse from Mortenson had rung. Could I come immediately? Kevin had been locked in seclusion, and even that had failed to calm him down. He was clinging to the door and had a piece of metal railing in his hand.

In the early morning darkness I sat shivering. The telephone still lay in my lap as I sat on the stair. Consciousness slowly fought through to the surface. Rising tiredly, I put all the lights on and went back upstairs to dress. I was cold from waking up in the chilly house, so in addition to my shirt, I put on a woolly pullover, something I never normally wore except when hiking.

The car coughed to life in the bitter midwinter darkness, and I headed downtown to Mortenson Hospital. Only twenty minutes had passed from the time the call came until I left the driveway, but coming out of midnight grogginess made it seem forever to me.

I could hear Kevin screaming. Even before I managed to negotiate the first half of the security system on the unit, I could hear his high-pitched banshee wail. Let me out, let me out, let me out, he was crying. What other patients in the hospital must have thought I could not imagine. It was an eerie, unearthly noise, audible a long ways.

Waiting for a nurse to let me through the second set of doors, I could hear the panic of the staff as well. They chattered anxiously beyond the door as someone fumbled with the keys.

Kevin was in the seclusion room, which was no more than a bare cell. Unlike the room at Garson Gayer, it was not padded. Out in the hallway were Kevin’s bed from his other room, his sheets, his bathrobe, his pajamas and a litter of other things he had ripped from the bedstead, the walls, the lighting fixtures and the window.

He was suicidal, said one of the nurses, and showed me things Kevin had tried to hang himself with. She demonstrated how he had tried to stab himself.

Three male personnel were at the seclusion-room door, peering through the small window. Kevin still had his bit of bedstead because he had become so violent that they had been unable to restrain him and get it away. So now they stood gawking through the unbreakable glass, unsure whether he was more likely to kill himself or them.

My adrenaline was up. I could hear it forcing the blood fast through my ears. My hands did not shake yet but I could feel the crawliness under my skin. And as always happened, it made me absolutely fearless. All other stimuli around me were blocked out. I could only think of Kevin.

‘Kev? It’s me, Kevin. Can you hear me?’ I hollered through the seclusion-room door. I pulled the bolt out and let myself in, then I heard it slide back into place behind me.

He was at the far end of the room when I entered. He froze momentarily upon seeing me, then screamed without words. There was a minute’s frenzied panic to follow when he tore around the room, doubling and tearing back the other way, all the while crying out. I only stood and watched.

Kevin was far beyond being able to talk. I suspect he was even beyond hearing me when I spoke. His anguish superseded every other sense. So he screamed wordlessly, tore at the walls, bashed himself into the concrete blocks, scratched his bare skin, ripped his hair out in patches.

Yet he never came near me. He never threatened me. I might have been invisible. In one hand he clung to a familiar weapon, a piece of bed. He had a way with knives, did Kevin. Anything could become one. But thus far he did not use it. He only held it as he flailed his way around the room.

In my scramble to get dressed and down to the hospital, I had neglected to put my watch on, so I had no idea how much time was passing. It seemed an eternity to me as I stood there, motionless, but then it would have. Only when my legs began to grow tired from standing and my back started to ache did I realize that the minutes must have drawn into hours. But I remained without moving, just inside the door. I feared to sit because Kevin’s motions were so uncontrolled that even by accident he might hit me if I couldn’t move quickly enough. Yet I did not think it was wise to move about needlessly. He was too incoherent to perceive things well. God knows what he might interpret my actions as, if I moved around. So I stood. And I stood. And I stood.