Dale hesitated, not sure how to respond. He was embarrassed that Hall did not recognize the allusion to “The Jolly Corner.” If his psychiatrist didn’t know Henry James, how smart could he be? Should he tell Hall that Duane hadn’t told him about “The Jolly Corner” when he was eleven—Duane had died at age eleven—but had used that name for his farm when Dale had first moved to Elm Haven in 1956, when both boys were eight? An eight-year-old hick farm kid had known the Henry James story, and now Dale’s $125-an-hour shrink had never heard of it.
“I think Duane McBride is the only real genius I’ve ever met,” Dale said at last.
Dr. Hall sat back in his chair. Dale thought that for a psychiatrist, Hall did not have a very good poker face. He could see the skepticism in the doctor’s slight rise of eyebrows and forced neutral expression.
“I know,” continued Dale, “genius is a powerful word. I don’t use it often. . . hell, I never use it. And I’ve met a lot of powerfully intelligent people in my lifetime—writers, academics, researchers. Duane is the only genius I’ve known.”
Dr. Hall nodded. “But you knew him only as a child.”
“Duane didn’t live long enough to get out of childhood,” said Dale. “But he sure was a strange kid.”
“How so?” Dr. Hall put his yellow notepad on his lap and clicked his ballpoint pen open—a habit that Dale found distracting and vaguely annoying.
Dale sighed. How could he explain? “You would had to have met Duane, I think, to understand. On the outside, he was a big slob of a farm kid—fat, sloppy, lousy haircut. He wore the same flannel shirt and corduroy pants all the time, summer and winter. And remember, this was back in 1960—kids actually dressed up for school in those days, even in little hick towns like Elm Haven, Illinois. Nothing fancy, but we had school clothes and play clothes and knew the difference, not like the slobs in school today. . .”
Dr. Hall’s supposedly neutral expression had shifted to the very slight frown that signaled that Dale had wandered from the subject.
“Anyway,” said Dale, “I met Duane shortly after my family moved to Elm Haven when I was in fourth grade, and right away I knew that Duane was different—almost scary, he was so smart.”
“Scary?” said Dr. Hall, making a note. “How so?”
“Not really scary,” said Dale, “but beyond our understanding.” He took a breath. “All right, summer after fifth grade. The bunch of us boys used to hang around together in a sort of club we called the Bike Patrol, like a junior Justice League of America. . .”
Dale could tell that Hall had no idea what he was talking about. Perhaps male psychiatrists had never been boys. That would explain a lot.
“Anyway, our clubhouse was in Mike O’Rourke’s old chicken coop in town,” continued Dale. “We had a sprung sofa in there, an old easy chair from the dump, the shell of a console radio. . . that kind of crap. I remember one night in the summer after fifth grade when we were bored and Duane started telling us the story of Beowulf. . . word for word. Night after night, reciting Beowulf from memory. Years later, when I read the epic in college, I recognized it. . . word for word. . . from Duane’s storytelling on those summer evenings.”
Hall nodded. “That’s unusual for someone that age, to even know of Beowulf.”
Dale had to smile. “The unusual part was that Duane told it to us in Old English.”
The psychiatrist blinked. “Then how did you understand. . .”
“He’d rattle on in Old English for a while and then translate,” said Dale. “That autumn, he gave us a bunch of Chaucer. We thought Duane was weird, but we loved it.”
Dr. Hall made a note.
“Once we were hanging around and Duane was reading a new book. . . I think it was something by Truman Capote, obviously a writer I’d never heard of at the time. . . and one of the guys, I think it was Kevin, asked him how the book was, and Duane said that it was okay but that the author hadn’t gotten his characters out of immigration yet.”
Dr. Hall hesitated and then made another note. Maybe you don’t understand that, thought Dale, but I’m a writer—sometimes I’m a writer—and I’ve never had a goddamned editor make a remark that insightful.
“Any other manifestations of this. . . genius?” asked the psychiatrist.
Dale rubbed his eyes. “That summer Duane died, 1960, a bunch of us were lying in a hammock out at Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena’s farm, just down the road from The Jolly Corner, it was night, we were looking at the stars, and Mike O’Rourke—he was an altar boy—said that he thought that the world all existed in the mind of God and he wondered what it would be like to meet God, to shake hands with Him. Without hesitating a second, Duane said that he’d worry about that because he suspected that God spent too much time picking His mental nose with His mental fingers. . .”
Dr. Hall made no note, but he did look at Dale almost reproachfully. “Your friend Duane was an atheist, I take it?”
Dale shrugged. “More or less. No, wait. . . I remember Duane telling me one of the first times we hung out together. . . we were building a three-stage rocket in fourth grade. . . he told me that he’d decided that all the churches and temples to the currently fashionable gods. . . that’s what he called them, ‘the currently fashionable gods’. . . were too crowded, so he’d chosen some minor Egyptian deity as his god. Learned the old prayers, studied the rituals, the whole nine yards. I remember him telling me that he’d considered worshiping Terminus, the Roman god of lawn boundaries, but had decided on this Egyptian god instead. He thought the Egyptian god had been ignored for many centuries and might be lonely.”
“That is unusual,” allowed Dr. Hall, making a final brief note.
Now Dale did have to grin. “If I remember correctly, Duane taught himself how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics just for that purpose—to pray to his forgotten little god. Of course, Duane spoke eight or nine languages by the time he died at age eleven and probably read a dozen more.”
Dr. Hall set aside his yellow legal pad, a sure sign that he was becoming bored with the topic being discussed. “Have you had any more dreams?” he asked.
Dale agreed that it was time to change the subject. “I had that dream about the hands again last night.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It was no different than the previous ones.”
“Yes, Dale, that’s more or less the definition of ‘recurring dreams,’ but it’s interesting how one can find slight but important differences when the dreams are actually discussed.”
“We haven’t discussed dreams much.”
“That’s true. I’m a psychiatrist but not—as you know—a psychoanalyst. But tell me about the hands dream anyway.”
“It was the same as always. I’m a kid again—“
“How old?”
“Ten, eleven, I don’t know. But I’m in our old house in Elm Haven. Sleeping in the upstairs room with my little brother, Lawrence. . .”
“Go on.”
“Well, Lawrence and I are talking, there’s a night light on, and Lawrence drops a comic book. He reaches down and. . . well, this hand comes out from under the bed and grabs him by the wrist. Pulls him down.”
“A pale hand, you said last time.”
“Yes. No. Not just pale, white. . . grub white. . . dead white.”
“What else about the hand. . . or is it hands, plural?”
“Just one hand at first. It grabs Lawrence by the wrist and pulls him off the bed before either one of us can react. The hand—the white hand—is weird, long fingers. . . I mean, way too long. . . eight or nine inches long. Spiderlike. Then I grab Lawrence by the legs. . .”
“He has already been pulled under the bed at this point?”