“A what, doctor?”
“A trauma. A wound to the psyche, the mind. Possibly in the case of pyromania, the suffering caused by a severe burn. You’ve heard the old saying, Mr. Smith, ‘A burned child fears the fire.”
And the psychiatrist smiled condescendingly and waved his wand—I mean, his pince-nez glasses on the black silk ribbon—in a gesture of exorcism. “The truth is quite the converse, of course. The burned child loves the fire. Was young Wally ever burned, Mr. Smith?”
“Why, yes, doctor. When he was four he got hold of some matches and—”
There’s the scar in plain sight on his arm, doc. Didn’t you notice it? And surely a burned child loves the fire; else he probably wouldn’t have been burned in the first place.
The psychiatrist failed to ask about pre-fire symptoms—but then he would merely have deprecated them had Mr. Smith remembered to tell him. He’d have assured you that such attraction toward flame is normal and that it didn’t achieve abnormal proportions until after the episode of the burn. Once a psychiatrist is in full war paint on the traumata trail, he can explain such minor discrepancies without half trying.
And so the psychiatrist, having found the cause, cured him. Period.
“Now, Darveth?” ‘
“No, I’m going to wait.”
“But it’d be fun to see that schoolhouse burn down. It’d burn easily, too, and the fire escapes aren’t quite big enough.”
“Uh-huh. But just the same, I’m going to wait.”
“You mean he’ll get a whack at something bigger later on?”
“That’s the idea.”
“But are you sure he won’t wiggle off your hook?”
“Not him.”
“Time to get up, Wally.”
“All right, mamma.” He sat up In bed, hair rumpled, and reached for his glasses so he could see her. And then: “Mamma, I had one of those dreams again last night. The thing that was all fire, and another one like it but different and not so big talking to it. About the schoolhouse and—”
“Wally, the doctor told you you mustn’t talk about those dreams. Except when he asks you. You see, talking about them impresses them on your mind and you remember them and think about it, and then that makes you dream about them again. See, Wally boy?”
“Yes, but why can’t I tell you—”
“Because the doctor said not, Wally. Now tell me what you did in school yesterday. Did you get a hundred in arithmetic again?”
Of course the psychiatrist took keen interest in those dreams; they were part of his stock in trade. But he found them confused, meaningless stuff. And you can’t blame him for that; have you ever listened to a seven-year-old kid try to tell the plot of a movie he’s seen?
It was hash, the way Wally remembered and told it: “—and then this big yellow thing sort of—well, it didn’t do much then, I guess. And then the big one, the one that was taller than the other and redder, was talking to it something about fishing and saying he wouldn’t wiggle off the hook, and—”
Sitting there on the edge of the chair looking at the psychiatrist through his thick-lensed glasses, his hands twisting tightly together and his eyes round and wide. But talking gibberish.
“My little man, when you sleep tonight, try to think about something pleasant. Something $ you like very much, like…uh—”
“Like a bonfire, doctor?”
“No! I mean, something like playing baseball or going skating.”
They watched him carefully. Particularly, they kept matches away from him, and fire. His parents bought an electric stove instead of their gas one, although they couldn’t really afford it. But then again, because of the danger of matches, his father gave up smoking and what he saved on tobacco paid’ for the stove.
Yes, he was cured all right. The psychiatrist took credit for that, as well as cash. At any rate, the more dangerous outward symptoms disappeared. He was still fascinated by fire, but) what boy doesn’t chase fire engines?
He grew up to be a fairly husky young man.
Tall, if a bit awkward. About the right build for a basket-ball player, except that his eyes weren’t good enough to let him play.
He didn’t smoke, and—after an experience or two—he decided that he didn’t drink either. Drinking tended to weaken that barrier that said,
“Thus Far, No Farther,” across the blocked passage of his mind. That night he’d almost let go and set fire to the factory where he worked, days, as a shipping clerk. Almost, but not quite.
“Now, Darveth?”
“But, master, why wait longer? That’s a big building; it’s wood and its ramshackle, and they make celluloid novelties. And celluloid—you’ve seen celluloid burn, haven’t you, Darveth?”
“Yes, it is beautiful. But—”
“You think there a bigger chance coming?”
“Think? I know there is.”
Wally Smith woke up with an awful hangover that next morning, and found there was a box of matches in his pocket. They hadn’t been there when he’d started to drink the night before, and he didn’t remember when or where he’d picked them up.
But it gave him the willies to think that he had picked them up. And it gave him the screaming meamies to wonder what he’d had in his mind when he’d put that box of matches in his pocket.
He knew that he’d been on the ragged edge of something, and he had a very frightening idea of what that something had been.
Anyway, he took the pledge. He made up his mind that he’d never, under any circumstances, drink again. He thought he could be sure of himself as long as he didn’t drink. As long as his conscious mind was in control, he wasn’t a pyromaniac, damn it, he wasn’t. -The psychiatrist had cured him of that when he was a kid, hadn’t he? Sure he had. But just the same there came to be a haunted look in his eyes. Luckily, it didn’t show much, through his thick glasses. Dot noticed it, a little. Dot Wendler was the girl he went with.
And although Dot didn’t know it, that night put another tragedy into his life, for Wally had I been on the verge of proposing to her, but now—
Was it fair, he wondered, for him to ask a girl I like Dot to marry him when he was no longer quite sure? He almost decided to give her up j and not torture himself by seeing her again. That was a bit too much though; he compromised by continuing to date her but not popping the question. A bit like a man who dares not eat, but who stares into delicatessen windows every chance he gets.
Then it got to be December 7th in the year of 1941, and it was on the morning of the 9th that he tried to enlist, in three recruiting stations and was turned down in each.
Dot tried to console him—although down in her heart she was glad. “But Wally, I’m sure the factory you work for will switch over to defense work. All the ones like it are changing. And you’ll be just as helpful. The country needs guns and…and ammunition and stuff just as much as it needs soldiers. And—” She wanted to say, and it would give him a chance to settle down and marry her, but of course she didn’t say it.
It was early in January that she was proved right. He was laid off during an interim period while the factory changed over. There was two weeks of that; the first week a happy vacation because Dot took a week off work, too, and they went everywhere together. She took the week off without pay, just to be with him, but she didn’t tell him that.
Then at the end of two weeks, he was called back to work. They’d made the change-over rather quickly; it doesn’t require as much changing and retooling for a factory working with chemicals as for one working in metals.