The Wapshot Scandal (27 page)

“Is it true that you beat him so cruelly with a cane that he had to be taken to the hospital and kept there for two weeks?”

“As I have said, my life is highly disciplined. If I should relax my disciplines I would expect to be punished. I treat those around me in the same way.”

He replied with dignity but the damage had been done.

“Dr. Cameron,” the senator asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you ever remember employing a housekeeper named Mildred Henning?”

“That’s a difficult question.” He put a hand to his eyes. “I may have employed this woman.”

“Mrs. Henning, will you please come in.”

An old, white-haired woman dressed in mourning came through the door and when the formalities of recognition had been established she was asked to testify. Her voice was cracked and faint. “I worked for him six years in California,” she said, “and toward the end I just stayed on to try and protect the boy, Philip. He was always after him. Sometimes it seemed like he wanted to kill him.”

“Mrs. Henning, will you please describe the incident you mentioned to us earlier.”

“Yes. I have the dates here. I had to call the county health officer and so I have the dates. It was the nineteenth of May. He, the doctor, left some change, some silver, on his bureau and the boy helped himself to a twenty-five-cent piece. You couldn’t blame him. He never had a penny for himself. When the doctor came home that night he counted his money, he was very methodical. When he seen that he was short some he asked the boy if he took it. Well, he was a good, honest boy and he owned right up to it. So then the doctor took him to his room, the boy had a room at the back of the house and there was a closet and he told him to go into the closet. Then he went into the bathroom and got him a glass of water and he gave him the water and then he locked the closet door. This was about quarter to seven. I didn’t say anything because I wanted to help the boy and I knew if I opened my big mouth it would only make things worse for the boy. So I served the doctor his dinner with a straight face and then I listened and I waited but I didn’t go near the closet where the poor boy was locked in the dark. So then I went to the closet in my bare feet and I whispered to him but he was crying so, he was so miserable that he couldn’t do anything but sob and I told him not to worry, that I was going to lie down there on the floor by the closet and stay all night and I did. I lay there until dawn and then I whispered good-bye to him and I went down and cooked the breakfast. Well, the doctor went to the site at eight and then I tried to unlock the door but it was a good strong lock and none of the keys in the house would open it and still the poor boy was crying so that he couldn’t speak hardly and he had drunk his water and had nothing to eat and there was no way of getting any water or food in to him. So when my housework was done I got a chair and sat by the door and talked with him until half-past six when the doctor come home and I thought he’d let the boy out then but he didn’t go near the back of the house and ate his supper just as if nothing was wrong. Well, then I waited, I waited until he started to get ready for bed and then I called the police. He told me to get out of the house, he told me I was fired and when the police come he tried to get them to throw me out but I got the policeman to open the closet and the poor little fellow—oh, he was so sick—come out but I had to go although it broke my heart to leave him alone and I never saw the doctor again until today.”

“Do you recall this incident, Dr. Cameron?”

“Do you suppose, with my responsibilities, that I can afford to entertain such recollections?”

“You don’t recall punishing the boy?”

“If I punished him I only meant to teach him right from wrong.” His voice still had its edge, still soared, but he took no one with him.

“You don’t recall locking your son in a closet for two days with nothing to eat or drink?”

“I gave him water.”

“Then you do recall the incident?”

“I only wanted to teach him right from wrong.”

“Do you visit your son?”

“From time to time.” Something was carrying him on, some energy. He smiled.

“Do you remember the last time you visited him?”

“I can’t recall.”

“Would it have been ten years ago?”

“I can’t recall.”

“Would you recognize your son?”

“Of course.”

“Daddy, Daddy.”

The man who spoke from the open door seemed older than his father. His hair was white; his face was swollen. He was crying and he crossed the hearing room, knelt where his father sat, awkwardly for he was not a child, and put his head on the doctor’s knee. “Daddy,” he cried, “oh, Daddy. It’s raining.”

“Yes, dear.” It was the most eloquent thing he had said. He no longer saw the hearing room or his persecutors. He seemed immersed in some human, some intensely human balance of love and misgiving as if the feelings were a storm with a circumference and an eye and he was in the stillness of the eye. “It’s raining, Daddy,” the man said. “Stay with me. Don’t go out in the rain. Stay with me just once. They tell me you’ve hurt me but I don’t believe them. I love you, Daddy. I’ll always love you, Daddy. I write you all the time, Daddy, but you never answer my letters. Why don’t you answer my letters, Daddy? Why don’t you ever answer my letters?”

“I don’t answer your letters because I’m ashamed of them,” the doctor said hoarsely but not as if he spoke to someone childish or insane but to an equal, his son. “I send you everything you need. I sent you some nice stationery but you write me on wrapping paper, you write me on laundry lists, you even write me on toilet paper.” His voice rose in anger and rang off the marble walls. “How in hell do you expect me to answer letters when you write them on toilet paper? I’m ashamed to receive them, I’m ashamed to see them. They remind me of everything in life I detest.”

“Daddy, Daddy,” the man cried.

“We’ll go now, Philip. We have to go.” There was an attendant with him. The attendant took his patient by the arm.

“No, I want to stay with Daddy. It’s raining and I want to stay with Daddy.”

“Come along, Philip.”

“Daddy, Daddy,” he cried, all the way to the door, and when it closed he could still be heard as Mrs. Henning must have heard his voice in the closet so many years ago.

“I move,” the old man said, “that we propose, if that lies within our power, a suspension of Dr. Cameron’s security clearance.” The proposal seemed to be within their power. The motion was passed and the meeting was adjourned. Cameron remained in the witness chair and Coverly went out with the others.

CHAPTER XXIII

Emile and Melissa planned to meet in Boston. Melissa told Moses that she had to go north to see her aunt. Her aunt was in Florida but Moses didn’t question her explanation.

She and Emile flew in separate planes. He arrived an hour later than she, and went to her room, where they spent the afternoon. Later they went out for a walk. It was very cold, and, looking at the façades and campaniles of Copley Square, she was moved by the thought that Boston had once thought itself the sister city of Florence, that vale of flowers. The wind scored her face. He stopped to look at a ring in a jeweler’s window. It was a man’s ring, a star sapphire set in gold. The ring did not interest her but it seemed to hold him. She shook with the cold while he admired the stone. “I wonder how much it costs. I’m going in and ask.”

“Don’t, Emile,” she said. “I’m frozen. And anyhow, those things are always terribly expensive.”

“I’ll just ask. It won’t take a minute.”

She waited for him in the shelter of the door. “Eight hundred dollars!” he exclaimed when he came out. “Think of that. Eight hundred dollars.”

“I told you it would be expensive.”

“Eight hundred dollars. But it was pretty, though, wasn’t it? And I suppose if you needed money you could always sell it. I mean, they must fix the price on things like that, don’t you think? It would be sort of like an investment. You know, if I had eight hundred dollars I might buy a ring like that. I just might. People when they saw the ring, they would always know that you were worth eight hundred dollars. Waiters. Like that. I mean they would respect you when you were wearing a ring like that.”

It seemed to her that he was deliberately debasing their relationship and forcing her into the humiliating position of buying him the ring, but she was mistaken; the idea had never occurred to him.

“Do you want me to buy you the ring, Emile?”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t thinking about that. It just caught my eye. You know how things catch your eye.”

“I’ll buy it for you.”

“No, no, forget about it.”

They had dinner in a restaurant and went to a movie. Walking back to the hotel he bought a newspaper, and he sat reading it in her room while she undressed and brushed her hair. “I’m hungry,” he said suddenly. His tone was petulant. “At home I get a bowl of cornflakes or a sandwich, something before I go to bed.” He stood up, put his hands on his stomach and shouted, “I’m hungry. I just don’t get enough to eat in these restaurants. I’m still growing. I have to have three big meals a day and sometimes something in between!”

“Well, why don’t you go down and get something to eat?”

“Well.”

“Do you need money?”

“Sort of.”

“Here,” she said. “Here’s some money. Go down and get some supper.”

He went out, but he didn’t return. At midnight she locked the door and went to sleep. In the morning she dressed, went to the jeweler’s and bought the ring. “Oh, I remember you,” the clerk said, “I saw you last night. I saw you standing outside the door when your son came in to ask the price.” It was a blow, and she supposed she could be seen flinching. She thought that perhaps the winter dark and the pale light in the street had made her seem old. “You’re a very generous mother,” the clerk said when he took her check and passed her the box. She called Emile’s room and when he came down she gave him the ring. His pleasure and gratitude were not, she thought, mercenary and crass but only a natural response to the ancient tokens of love, the immemorial power of stones and fine gold. It was a foggy afternoon, all the planes were grounded, and they went back on the train, sitting in different cars.

He sat by the window, watching the landscape. Somewhere south of Boston the train passed a suburban tract of houses. They were new, and although the architects and the gardeners had rung a few changes here and there, the effect was monotonous. What interested him was that rising in the center of the development was a large, ugly, loaf-shaped and colorless escarpment of granite. The roads must circumvent it expensively. Its sides were too steep to hold the foundations of a house. It seemed, in its uselessness, triumphantly obdurate and perverse. It was the only form on the landscape that had not succumbed to change. It could not be dynamited. It could not be quarried and carried away piecemeal. It was useless, and it was invincible. Some boys his age were climbing the steep face, and he guessed this was their last refuge.

It was late and it was getting cold, and he could remember the sense of the season and the hour when it was time to leave off playing and go home to study. Near where he lived there was a similar rock, and he had climbed it on winter afternoons, to smoke cigarettes and talk with his friends about the future. He could remember grasping for handholds on the steep face, and how the rough stone pulled at his best school clothes, but what he remembered most clearly was how once his feet were on the ground, he had a sense of awakening to a whole new life, the arrival at a new state of consciousness, as clearly unlike his past as sleep is unlike waking. Standing at the foot of the cliff at that hour and season—about to go home and study but not yet on the path—he would stare at the yards and the trees and the lighted houses with a galvanic sense of discovery. How forceful and interesting the world had seemed in the early winter light! How new it all seemed! He must have been familiar with every window, roof, tree and landmark in the place, but he felt as if he were seeing it all for the first time.

How old he had grown since then.

They met ten days or two weeks later, in a New York hotel. She was there first and ordered some whisky and roast-beef sandwiches. When he came in, she poured herself a drink and made one for him, and he ate both the sandwiches she had ordered. She was wearing a bracelet, made of silver bells, that she had bought long ago in Casablanca. She had been given a Mediterranean cruise as a Christmas present by a rich elderly cousin, and in her travels she had never been able to escape a genuine and oppressive sense of gratitude to the old lady. When she saw Lisbon she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see Lisbon! When she saw Rhodes she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see Rhodes! Standing in the Casbah at dusk she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see how purple the skies are above Africa! Remembering this she gave the silver bells a shake.

“Do you have to wear that bracelet?” he asked.

“Of course not,” she said.

“I hate that kind of junky stuff,” he said. “You’ve got lots of nice jewelry—those sapphires. I don’t see why you want to wear junk. Those bells are driving me crazy. Every time you move they jingle. They get on my nerves.”