Though I did not, of course, reply, I felt an upwelling of pride and personal satisfaction at the Doctor’s words, even as I felt a deep anxiety about what he was asking me to do, whatever it might be.
“Is there anything you would like to say, Eric?”
This was not a question he had ever asked me before. I cleared my throat.
“You may speak,” he said.
I hesitated before replying, “Thank you, sir. No, sir, I have nothing to say.”
He nodded once. “Good. I will speak with your father, then.”
SIXTEEN
There was a fight. It seemed to me at the time that it was my mother who was being unreasonable, and who threw the first punch. Or perhaps it was a slap. In my mind’s eye, I can see her strike my father, open-handed, on the face, and my father recoil in shock and surprise. In fact, I remember him stumbling backward across the living room, tripping over the ottoman, and banging his head, hard, against the mantel. I also remember seeing him with bandages around his head, and a limp.
However, I also remember coming home from school to find my mother missing and my father waiting in her place, and hearing from him that Mother wasn’t feeling well, and they had had an argument while I was at school, and she had forbidden me to spend the summer at Doctor Stiles’s. My father, however, had extracted a promise from her that I would be permitted to attend sessions with the Professor twice weekly for the entire summer, beginning the week school let out.
In my memory, my father was unharmed during this conversation, and I recall not being allowed to see my mother for several days due to her illness. And that, when I did see her at last, it was she who had a limp, and her face was purple and swollen, and she didn’t speak for quite some time.
It is difficult to reconcile these memories, I’m afraid. Perhaps I am recalling a different injury of my father’s, one he sustained at work. I vaguely remember something about a fall from a ladder. And, rationally speaking, it seems unlikely that I would have been present for this fight. Yet I am struck by the vividness of this memory — the balletic grace in my mother’s slap, the studied athleticism. I see the slap being delivered with the same strength and precision I imagine her golf swing to have possessed, back before she married my father.
In any event, a fight did occur, the result of which was that I would be given over to Doctor Stiles’s care twice weekly, from sunrise to sunset. Though I expressed disappointment that I wouldn’t be there for the entire summer, I was privately relieved, as I had been looking forward to spending time alone as I usually did, wandering through the neighborhood and exploring the swamp and woods. I felt mildly guilty, harboring this desire, and chastised myself for my weakness.
In the final week of June, on a Friday morning, my father woke me before dawn and told me to get dressed. When I came down into the kitchen, he was waiting there with a cup of coffee. “It’s time you tried it,” he said.
I took the hot mug into my hands and blew on the oily black surface. I had sipped my mother’s coffee once, and found it peculiar but nonetheless appealing. That coffee, however, had had cream and sugar added. I looked at my father.
As if reading my mind, he said, “No sugar and milk. That’s for women.”
I nodded, and sipped. The coffee scalded my mouth. I surprised myself by suppressing my cry of pain, and realized that it was because of Doctor Stiles’s training that I was able to do so. The thought made me proud. I was a person who could endure pain. I wondered, idly, if any of my acquaintances at school could say the same, and I surmised that none could. There was no time to drink it all, though — my father soon led me out to the car, and we took to the road in the pink light of sunrise.
My father, true to form, did not speak as we drove. It occurs to me now to wonder what it must have felt like to him, to be so uncomfortable in the presence of his own son. Most likely his own feelings of low self-worth — his fear that he was, or was perceived as, stupid — came into play here. I know that he considered me to be intelligent, because he once wondered aloud how it was possible I was so smart, as I didn’t get it from him, and I sure didn’t get it from my mother, and my sister sure as hell didn’t have it, either. Of course he underestimated my mother as well as himself, and perhaps even my sister, too. At any rate, I was now under the tutelage of a “famous professor,” as I had heard him tell the man at the hardware store, and this fact must have both intimidated him and filled him with pride, two emotions that tended to have the effect of silencing him entirely.
Over the next twenty minutes, we wended our way out of town and out into what appeared to me at the time to be untrammeled wilderness. My family was not “outdoorsy” and rarely left the house except to run errands in town, so this trip had the flavor of the exotic and new. I gazed into the dark woods, imagining what might be in them. Soon we had crested a hill and there, in an intersection, stood a white house.
The house was two stories, clapboarded, and surrounded by what must once have been a lovely flower garden and arboretum, with curved paths running through it, and trellises and gates, and low stone walls. It was obvious to me, even at the age of ten, that the garden had not been tended to for some time; the plants were shaggy, crowding one another, and wild grapevine had begun to overwhelm the whole.
We parked on a gravel drive and were met at the door by Doctor Stiles. Here, at his home, he looked very different. He wore torn and discolored khaki pants and a khaki shirt with four pockets, two on each breast. His boots were heavy and worn, and his eyeglasses were absent. I had dressed much as I had for the office visits, in dress shoes and pants, and a plaid short-sleeved Oxford shirt, and I suffered a moment of embarrassment as he glanced pityingly at me.
“Good morning, Eric.”
“Good morning, sir.”
He turned to my father. “That will be all, Brian,” he said.
My father’s hand had been resting on my shoulder. Now it tightened, as though nervously, and slipped away.
“All right then!” my father said, drawing a deep breath. “So I should see you here at…?”
“Sundown.”
“Eric,” my father said, “I’ll see you later.”
I stood very still, and did not speak.
“Son, I’m heading out.”
Doctor Stiles faced me, his brow creased, his hard eyes boring into mine. I blinked and tried to look past him, at the house. I hoped my father would understand that I was not able to speak. But he persisted.
“Son, turn and say goodbye to your father.” He was angry, to be sure — he grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me around to face him.
“Goodbye, Eric,” he said, in a tone that would brook no argument.
Quietly, as if there were some chance that Doctor Stiles wouldn’t hear, I said, “Goodbye.”
“Speak up,” my father answered. “I can’t hear you.”
At last I gave up all pretense. I stood straight and barked out a second farewelclass="underline" “Goodbye, Father.” My father smiled, less at my words, I think, than at the fact of his having retained authority over me. My goodbye extracted, he shook Doctor Stiles’s hand and drove away.
As soon as the car was out of sight, I heard the faint crack of Doctor Stiles’s shoulder, and the whisper of his sleeve against his arm, and a moment later I found myself lying on the gravel, my right ear exploding in pain.
My instinct was to get up, but I remained on the ground. I heard the Doctor’s footsteps as they climbed the front stoop, and the sound of the door being opened. A few minutes later, I heard him emerge.