"I can't see it! I can't see it!" Jonathan cried.
As if infected by him, the rainbow disappeared for Helen as well. She walked backward, scowling. "Maybe you can't see it from here," she said. She led him running back to her house, back to the place where she had seen it. They ran up her drive and around the back and up the wobbly, unpainted wooden steps that led to the back door. The steps formed a kind of landing, high off the ground, above the deep foundations.
"There it is," said Helen, her arm pointing over Jonathan's shoulder. She jabbed her finger at it over and over. "There! There! There!"
Jonathan was being stupid again. How stupid could he get? He scanned the sky, trying to see something very short, an arch made of paint-set reds and greens and blues, all in sharply defined bands, as he remembered them.
"Cantcha see it, Jonny?" asked Helen's mother, Mrs. Quicke. She came out of her kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She leaned on the railings, a thin, worn woman with long hair pulled back in the fashion of ten years before. She wore glasses and had bad teeth.
"It's there, just keep lookin'," Mrs. Quicke said, with the rough, kind foreignness of someone else's mother.
"I can't see it," whispered Jonathan, as if in exile. Later, he would recall seeing dimly a wispy yellowish trail across the sky, like smoke.
Jonathan couldn't see the red or the orange; he couldn't see the green or the mauve. He could only see a brownish streak of mist and the blue beyond it.
Jonathan had become color-blind.
For him, green and red were muddled into a grayish brown. He no longer played with his box of fifty-two Crayola crayons. Color no longer sang to him. He could see no difference between blue and purple, between pink and gray. The world had become as dim for him as Oz on TV.
Jonathan became a good little boy. He did everything he was told. He called people "Sir" and said "please" and "thank you." Old ladies were enchanted. He went to school for the first time in autumn and was badly beaten up the first day by a gang of older boys. They had been waiting for him. It was the price of feeling superior.
In the photographs taken after that, Jonathan looked watchful and wary, suspicious and very adult. The good little boy only looked good in photographs in which he was scowling. His smiles were twisted, cheesy and false.
In life, he was timid and silent around others, embarrassed and awkward if made the center of attention. He was always ashamed of himself-of his clumsiness, of his many fears, of his fantasies, of all the things that made him inadequate. The things he enjoyed, he did in secret. He rocked surreptitiously at night. He dreamed surreptitiously, after memorizing his homework. He earned straight A's. His teachers wrote in his reports that he was socially backward.
Jonathan became a fan of horror movies. He watched them on TV every Saturday afternoon with another boy who eventually grew up to be a sadomasochist. The other boy would beat Jonathan, even at age eight, across the bottom, and Jonathan would bear it, for the same reason that he would bear the horror movies.
It was one more way of being a good little boy. He was proving he was no longer afraid of the Witch. He was proving he could take the pain, as the other boy butted him with his head or took a switch to his backside. Being beaten was no different from watching television. The role of entertainment is to toughen us up and whip us into line.
Jonathan wanted to be tough. Above all, he wished he could stop feeling things. He wanted to be a machine. He despised himself. When Jonathan was alone, hidden in his room or, even better, far away from the village, he would visit Oz in secret. He knew it wasn't real, he knew Oz couldn't help him, so he gave no outward sign and hated himself for it. But alone on his good-little-boy holidays, away from school, his mind would begin to wander. He would start to imagine things. Jonathan would walk through Canadian evergreen forests, up the sides of Canadian mountains, or across shelves of rock beside still Canadian lakes, and he would hum the songs of Oz. There were no Canadian songs to fill the silence. Jonathan would imagine the four companions ahead of him on their way through Oz. He saw their backs. The Emerald City would rise up over the brow of a Canadian hill in another part of the story that had been left out.
The story kept on growing. Jonathan imagined a new ending to the movie. Dorothy looks up at her bedroom walls in joy, as before. Then Aunty Em holds up a pair of slippers, slippers that should have been red but now look gray. Aunty Em says, "But Dorothy. Where did you find these shoes?"
And Jonathan would look down at his own gray feet.
Zeandale and Pillsbury's Crossing, Kansas-1883
The Fields were Full of Life
Title of a diorama in the Kansas State Historical Society Museum, Topeka, Kansas. A rather small area is shown full of native grasses and taxidermic wildlife, including one large, hunched, stuffed buffalo. On the rail around the exhibit there is a block of wood covered with a worn hide. A sign beside it says:
BUFFALO HIDE-PLEASE TOUCH
Of course there was a scandal. All the children had heard, and told their parents what Dorothy Gael had said. There was a queasy moment in each Manhattan household as minds seesawed back and forth from shock and indecision.
Nothing is hidden, but some things are blocked out. Everyone in Manhattan knew, really, what was wrong with Dorothy Gael. It was revealed in every twisted movement, each bitter and angry smile, each horrifically knowledgeable look, in the hefty size of her body, in the grimness of her aunty's face, in the child's rages and the way in which she could brook all pain and insult. They all knew, really, what it meant.
But nice people were not supposed to be able to recognize certain things, because they were supposed to be so untainted that they couldn't even think about them. People sincerely believed that they were shocked and surprised and that they had had no idea such things happened. They sincerely thought they found it difficult to believe. There were veiled preachings from the pulpit. The Devil was here, in Kansas, but how to recognize his terrible face? The Devil, the Preacher said, could lurk within each of us. To recognize the Devil, we had only to look into ourselves. Let the other folks alone.
No one would tell Em what it was exactly that Dorothy had done to be expelled. "Some things are best left unsaid," the Principal had told her. "But she has told some wicked lies, and is something of a bully."
It was beyond Emma Gulch. It did not sound like her Dorothy at all. Her little Dodo, a bully? Quiet, shy little Dodo? At first she could not believe any of the stories. What could have been happening? Emma found that people would not speak to her unless she spoke to them. They murmured without looking at her and she began to realize that Dodo, little Dorothy, had been lying about Henry and about her.