Silent Boy (34 page)

But in the heat of the moment, lucid analysis didn’t matter much. My own emotions continued to run high. It just wasn’t the sort of occurrence that one could be totally rational about. And I wasn’t exactly in a forgiving mood myself, when I had to sit down with Dr Rosenthal and Dr Winslow and then the nursing staff and tell them what had transpired and what I believe led up to it and then answer their questions. I felt nothing but embarrassment and confusion. I was angry with myself for having gotten into such a vulnerable position. I was resentful and suspicious of the other people and their allusions and implications. I was distressed that I had managed to sit behind a book for four weeks and feel all that anger building up in Kevin and still was stupid enough not to do something constructive about it. But most of all I was humiliated, not only because I was forced to sit and talk repeatedly about such personal matters with every passing soul who showed an interest, but chiefly because my professional judgment had taken such a crushingly public blow.

I knew what had to be done. I knew when four-thirty rolled around the next afternoon that I had to return to the hospital and see Kevin. It was like falling off a horse. One has to get right back on again then and there or one never will. So, gritting my teeth to get by the nurses’ station, I went back.

Kevin was in his room under the blankets of his bed. He had pulled them so high that not even the top of his head showed. Well, I said, and sat down in the orange chair, that was that. We goofed. But it was over and we were best off forgetting that it had happened. I wasn’t angry, I said to him when he still refused to come out from under the covers, and immediately I realized I was. The hurt was too new. When he lay there and wouldn’t talk to me and wouldn’t even come out from under the stupid blanket and look at me, I exploded. He’d ruined everything I’d tried to do for him, I said. He’d betrayed me, more in heart and spirit than in body.

Kevin for his part let me have my little bit of scream therapy. He just lay there and never moved a muscle.

Back at the clinic the next morning I was called down to Dr Rosenthal’s office. He wasn’t alone. Dr Winslow sat, like an aging Adonis, and smiled sweetly.

‘We’ve been talking,’ Dr Rosenthal said, ‘and we’ve come to the conclusion that it would be best to close the Richter case. Dr Winslow and I have discussed it and it seems the best for all concerned if you and I pull out of it and leave it to them at the hospital.’

I looked at him.

Silence.

‘I can get myself out of this,’ I said. ‘It was stupid. I know it was my fault. But it’s over now.’

‘No,’ he replied.

‘The worst of it’s behind us,’ I said. ‘I went over to the hospital last night and Kevin and I, we can survive it. I’m quite sure. If we just have a little time.’

‘No,’ said Dr Rosenthal.

‘Why?’ I looked from one man to the other. Abruptly all my emotions, all the anger and embarrassment and humiliation, gave way to panic. Of course the possibility of closing down the case existed when something like this occurred. The possibility always existed. But I’d never given it much thought.

‘Couldn’t I just try for a little longer?’ I asked. ‘Maybe if you wanted to supervise the case … if you wanted to come in yourself personally …’ I said, first to Dr Rosenthal and then when he did not respond, to Dr Winslow. Desperately, I searched their faces for some negation of what I now was realizing was inevitable.

Dr Rosenthal shook his head. ‘I’m afraid this just isn’t the best case for you, Torey. Kevin’s had a traumatic life. You’re young; you’re good looking; you’re awfully female, whether you mean to be or not. It makes it too easy for things to happen.’

For the first time since the whole crazy episode had started, I began to cry. Was this going to be it? Was one and a half whole years of my life going to end like this? So suddenly? So simply? So stupidly? Just because of all the millions of times I had had to guess with this kid, this one time I had guessed wrong?

‘We’ll get a male therapist in,’ Dr Winslow said. His tone was comforting and he leaned toward me.

‘Yes,’ Dr Rosenthal agreed. ‘Look how well Kevin did with Jeff Tomlinson. That’d be better. Don’t you think? Now, honestly? You yourself were talking about all the bad feelings Kevin had for his mother. Maybe a woman therapist just is not a good idea for him, period. He’s too unstable.’

‘He’s
not
unstable,’ I protested. ‘It wasn’t because …’

Dr Rosenthal raised his shoulders in a shruglike motion. It was a pathetic little movement, and then he looked away. He couldn’t meet my eyes any longer. ‘It’s a tragic way to end a case, Torey, I know that,’ he said to his fingers. ‘But maybe it’ll all be for the best in the end. When everything’s said and done.’

‘But couldn’t I just …?’

Without looking up, Dr Rosenthal shook his head and I knew it was all over. Eighteen months. And this was all there was.

I went home shattered. I was filled with that sodden, half-sick sort of depression too heavy for tears. Was this it? After all those months of work, was it going to be killed so unceremoniously by twenty unfortunate minutes in an art closet? The horror of what Kevin had tried to do had seemed at the time like the worst thing a kid had ever tried to do to me, but now it was superseded by something that seemed even worse. We could have survived it. Horrible as it was, I knew Kevin and I could have come to terms with it. After all, I was hardly an innocent victim. This was part of the risk one took in this type of profession. I had always known that and I had accepted it the day I chose to go behind the locked doors.

We could have worked it out. But what now? All I had managed to do in the end was to prove Kevin right. No one wanted him and sooner or later, everyone would walk out.

Late that night an old, old friend from my college days showed up. I had not seen Hal in ages, not since the Vietnam War days when we spent our evenings together in dark, smoky coffee houses and planned the Brave New World to the strains of Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Despite its being late and my being terribly out of sorts, I accepted his invitation to dinner. We went to one of those funky, fashionable places where the music is too loud and the hanging plants trail in one’s food. We sat in the dark and chatted, a little uneasy with one another because so much had happened in ten years and we were both such different people now.

I went out that evening, I think, to get away from Kevin, away from the present. In his day, I had loved Hal. He’d been the Idealist. Of all of us who’d grown up during those turbulent years with fire in our hearts to change the world, it was he who was really going to do it. No day job for him. No ordinary Establishment life. While I had gone on to graduate school and teaching, Hal had drifted. He’d become an actor, a halfway successful one at that, had been through two marriages and a lot of hard living. But now, a decade on, the smell and feel of the sixties still clung to him. He still spoke with the vocabulary of our lost generation and his dreams were not entirely faded. I sat in the darkness and listened to him and drifted back myself to what seemed a gentler, more hopeful time.

Then Hal began to cry. There had been a reason for looking me up. It hadn’t been just a random chance. He pulled out pictures to show me. There was his daughter. And his son, a red-haired, freckle-faced imp. That’s Ian, he said to me. Ian was autistic. He had just been committed to a state institution because he had already torn apart two families and Hal just couldn’t keep him any longer. Ian was seven.

As Hal wiped back embarrassed tears, neither of us mentioned the irony of Hal’s being given a child who had made him leigeman to the most dehumanizing of all society’s establishments. Neither of us mentioned the Brave New World either. But the silence yanked me mercilessly back into the here and now.

So in the companionable blackness we quaffed too much Blue Ribbon together and dallied with food neither of us wanted. Finally, I told him about me and Kevin, just to take his mind off things. Both of us ended up crying in our beer, weeping for a world that never was, save dreams.

L
ife went on. The cold months of winter turned to spring. March came without daffodils that year because it was too dry. April came with the heavy, wet snowstorms, which should have been in February. And May at last brought sun.

There was a new doctor sharing my office with me. He was an older man named Jules. He wasn’t much to look at, short, fiftyish, balding and somewhat overweight, but he had such a sweet and self-effacing manner about him that all the women in the clinic were at least a little in love with him at one point or another. In his spare time Jules was quite a serious sculptor and he spent a lot of his evenings and weekends at shows and galleries. Indeed, I suspect Jules had more the heart of an artist than a doctor. So much of our office conversation revolved not around our cases, as Jeff’s and my discussions had, but around our artistic pursuits.

While there never was the magic between Jules and me that there had been with Jeff, I liked Jules a lot and was glad someone was back in the office with me. I’d grown very lonely in there with the three phones. Jeff I had heard from a couple of times since he had left, but he never put an address on his envelopes, so I could never write back. I got a St Patrick’s Day card from him, for goodness knows what reason, since neither of us was Irish. And I got another card on my birthday in May. Jeff seemed to have settled into his new work in California and sounded happy. But I didn’t know. Cards don’t say much. He never mentioned Kevin nor the clinic nor whether or not Hans was still with him.

Also during midwinter I met Hugh, and our relationship blossomed over the following months. Hugh was, of all things, a pest exterminator and he drove around in an old VW bus with dead bugs painted all over it. With that kind of sense of humor I couldn’t help but love him.

And of course, Charity still provided excitement in my life. She was changing, however. Just after Christmas she was transferred to the other third grade from the one she had been in. I was never sure why the move was made. Her new third-grade teacher, Mrs Thatcher, had taken special notice of Charity and arranged a lot of activities not only to bring Charity’s shaky academics up to a passing level but also to provide her with some stability during all her free hours. Mrs Thatcher was an older woman, married and with a family of teenagers. She lived on a small hobby farm to the west of the city, and on weekends she took Charity out and let her feed the goats and help in the barn and clean out the chicken coop. The teacher wasn’t the same sort of softy I was; she demanded certain standards of behavior from Charity before she could come, but they were attainable ones. It made all the difference in Charity. For the first time she had genuine ‘older sisters’ and a real ‘mother’ who treated her as a mother should treat a daughter. The change was dramatic.

Of course, I could still expect Charity regularly during the week, but it wasn’t the same old Charity. She had new clothes, including a pair of genuine Levi’s with the little red tag and a jump suit with a fashion-designer’s name. She became a regular clothes horse, looking through my magazines and pointing out what she wanted next. She had also begun a diet to lose weight. Apparently Mrs Thatcher was keeping a chart at school and weighing Charity every week. I was very much in favor of this because, while Charity was not grossly obese, she was overweight for her age and the kids teased her. And I admired the teacher for having the power to get Charity on a diet and to make her stick to it, because I had tried and failed several times. However, now Charity had grown quite self-righteous about the whole matter. She knew what she should and shouldn’t eat, and because Mrs Thatcher’s family ate only health foods, Charity began to sound like Adele Davis as she went through my cupboards. I imagine she must have been a right royal pain at home with her clan, where the meals consisted mainly of junk food.

I was pleased to see the teacher taking such an active interest in Charity, and Charity, in turn, responding so well, but at the same time, I had to admit to feeling a little left out with all Charity’s stories of what went on during the weekends at Mrs Thatcher’s farm. There had always been a sort of primitive charm to Charity, and now I could see her outgrowing it and daily becoming more and more like the rest of us. Undoubtedly, that was the way it should be and I was happy for her because she was so obviously happy, but it was sad, nonetheless.

Around the time of my birthday in May, I went out to New York on a working vacation, and Hugh joined me for the last of it so that we could drive out the length of Long Island, catch the ferry over to New London and go up through New England. I half hoped to see the battered old VW with all its dead bugs waiting outside my Manhattan hotel but instead I found Hugh in a quite respectable Ford rental car. We took off for a week of walks through old cemeteries, picnics in chilly New Hampshire wayside parks and a diet of fried clams and scallops. We returned home to find May touching June with the worst heat wave in fifty years.

In our small, windowless office the odor of rodents and birds was suffocating in the unnatural heat. Jules sat, sweating over case reports. He had his suit jacket off, his sleeves rolled up and his handkerchief tied around his forehead to keep the perspiration from dripping onto the papers. But the way he had the handkerchief done up, its tail hung down on his nose and he looked like a trainee for Jesse James’s gang who had flunked basic bankrobber’s kerchief tying.