Brain Child

by Andrew Neiderman

  A year after his stroke, when Lois was just a tenth grader, he had found it more and more difficult to keep up with her scientific discussions. She’d be practically lecturing to him. At first he had blamed his slowness on the stroke, but lately he had come to the conclusion that his daughter was just too far beyond him.

  The Wilsons lived in a renovated two-story house built in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The last owner had been the grandson of Dr. Fleur, the original owner. Fleur was a renowned physician who was said to have been called to President McKinley’s side after he had been shot. In any case, he was one of the most celebrated local residents, having married the daughter of George Mortimer Pullman, the man who had improved and developed the use of the sleeping car on railroad trains.

  The house was set a little more than two hundred yards off a side road just outside the small hamlet of Sandburg in the resort region of the Catskill Mountains. Its secluded location made it nearly impossible to spot until a traveler was right at the property line. On this particular road, Turtle Creek Road, there were no bungalow colonies or hotels. Four miles down the road there was a twenty-five-room tourist house, but that brought little traffic past the old Fleur mansion. The nearest home was a quarter of a mile back toward Sandburg.

  Because of the two large weeping willows in the front of the house and the thick woods on both sides of it, the mansion often took on a melancholy and foreboding appearance. The Wilsons had tried to overcome that by replacing the gray wooden shingles with bright white aluminum siding and glossy black window shutters. However, this modern face-lifting gave the house a kind of freakish look because the architecture placed it clearly in the nineteenth century.

  Even on the brightest days, the weeping willows and surrounding maples threw long shadows over the front of the house. There was a rather large porch the full width of the building. Every six feet, a wide hand-sculptured column rose to the roof of the porch. Four concrete steps led up from the walkway to the front entrance. The door was a thick oak with a hand-carved circular design on the front of it. The old knocker had long since broken off, but its hinges still remained. Now there was a* buzzer with a tiny light just to the right of the doorknob. Under it was a small rectangular nameplate that read Gregory and Dorothy Wilson.

  The large window of the sitting room faced the front. Although the long lace curtains were kept drawn open most of the time, the mixture of shadows and glare turned the glass into a mirror reflecting the gleam of automobiles that passed along Turtle Creek Road. Whenever Dorothy Wilson stood on the road and looked across the front lawn at her home, she was invariably dissatisfied.

  “No matter what we do, it always has that deserted look,” she complained. “Sometimes, when we come home at night and the house suddenly appears in the darkness, I get the chills.”

  Gregory listened attentively but offered no new solutions.

  Lois tried to get her mother to analyze her feelings. “It’s the weeping willows and the slanted roof. You’ve got these horror images imprinted in your subconscious. What you’re doing is called association, the ability to draw inferences from past experiences and relate these past impressions to present situations.”

  “Huh?”

  “Actually, it’s a form of conditioned response. Repetition of the stimulus and response binds the two together so that the activity becomes nearly automatic. In this case, your fear of the house at night is a response to hundreds of stimuli given to you through movies, television, books.”

  “Greg, what the hell is your daughter talking about? All I said was … oh, what’s the use?”

  When Dorothy gave overall consideration to the house, she agreed that it had been a good buy. It was so very roomy. Above the sitting-room window were the two windows of each upstairs bedroom. There were two bedrooms at the rear of the house on the first floor and three bedrooms upstairs. After entering the front door, one could either go to the right and into the sitting room or go straight and eventually enter the kitchen. The dining room was just off the kitchen. From it one could go into the sitting room as well.

  Dr. Fleur had converted a large downstairs bedroom into his main office. Now it served as another study, the shelves filled with old books, collections of Dickens, Cooper, Guy de Maupassant, books inherited with the purchase of the house. Most had yet to be pulled off the shelves.

  The stairway rose from the end of the corridor and turned at a thirty-degree angle into the upstairs portion of the house. A dark walnut-stained banister, also hand-carved, ran along the carpeted wooden steps. All of the carpeting in the house was a thin nylon material, much of it worn-looking but weathered with personality. Gregory and Dorothy were considering investing a few thousand dollars to replace all of the downstairs carpeting.

  The walls of the house had been painted recently, but the crevices and cracks formed over the years seemed to work their way out through the newer coats of paint. Dim lights revealed them, making them look like the arteries and veins of the building. Lois often sarcastically remarked that the house suffered from varicose veins. Dorothy talked constantly about paneling the place, but Gregory thought that would take away from the house’s distinct personality.

  Actually, the poor condition of the shelves and walls of the walk-in pantry had been the primary reason that Dorothy didn’t resist Lois’s desire to turn it into her personal laboratory. Now the worn and chipped wood walls were covered with charts and graphs. Wires ran up and down two sides as part of Lois’s method to improve on a lack of light and a lack of outlets. The shelves that remained were filled with her paraphernalia: small cages, wires, transformers, prongs, some chemical compounds, jars filled with pickled fetuses, and a small microscope. In the center of the pantry was a long table that usually held Lois’s current experiment. It was a long metal picnic table she had found in the basement. There was only one small chair in the pantry, and it was kept in the far right corner so Lois could move about her experiment table more freely. She despised her cluttered and crowded conditions, but she recognized that her mother would fight her acquisition of any other room in the house. For the time being, she would have to make do. Ever since her father’s stroke, it was futile to get into any all-out arguments. Her mother would simply refer to his condition as a reason to end “the tension.”

  Gregory Wilson had always had a persistent but relatively controlled blood-pressure problem. He was reasonably careful about his diet and up on the best possible medications. Nevertheless, in late May of Lois’s sophomore year, he had suffered the worst head pain he had ever known and then gone unconscious.

  Dorothy didn’t realize what had happened. When she didn’t see him standing in the prescription window, she looked out to see if he was talking to someone. It was not like him to leave without first telling her, because someone could come in for a prescription.

  He was nowhere in sight. She went back to the rear of the store. He wasn’t in the bathroom—the door was wide open.

  “Greg?”

  She didn’t see him until she walked around the counter. She was so shocked when she confronted his collapsed form that she couldn’t speak or utter a sound for a few moments. She didn’t bend down to see what was wrong; she ran out of the store and stood on the sidewalk screaming until Patty Morganstein, the town cop, came running up from the restaurant. They got the volunteer ambulance squad in minutes.

  Dorothy was going to follow in her car. She went to the phone instinctively to call Lois and tell her. She wanted her to come along. Later, she would sit in the hospital lobby and resent her daughter’s rational and calm responses, even if they were the right ones.

  “Well, you don’t want to leave Billy here alone, Mother, and you certainly don’t want him to come along.”

  “He could wait in the lobby.”

  “It would probably frighten him to death, and what difference could his presence make anyway? We’ll wait here. You go along and call when you learn something specific. It usually takes a while before they
’ll give you a diagnosis anyway, Mother. He’ll be admitted to the emergency room and they’ll check his vital signs and—”

  “I don’t want to hear all that.”

  “Get a grip on yourself, Mother. The best thing to do is take care of the paperwork while you wait. There’s always so much paperwork at a hospital.”

  Whenever Dorothy Wilson recalled that phone conversation she’d grit her teeth. Her daughter had treated her as though she were the child. What hurt so much was that Lois had been right about everything: the paperwork, the waiting, the procedures.

  Dr. Bloom, their family physcian, finally came to tell her the diagnosis.

  “He’s had what we call a CVS, a cardiovascular stroke. Blood didn’t get to the brain. Fortunately, this was a pretty minor one, and he’s young and strong. It’s an early warning.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s got to watch himself, even out his temperament, stay on his diet, keep to his medications. Maybe he should take on some help this summer in the prescription department.”

  “Oh, there’s not enough work for two druggists in our store, Doc.”

  “There is if the druggist has to slow down,” he warned.

  That first CVS had had a major effect on the Wilson family. Billy was too young to relate to it, of course; but Dorothy developed all sorts of new phobias, and Greg began to baby himself. Lois found it an interesting subject for a new study: the physical ramifications of emotional stress. When she went to visit her father in the hospital and told him about it, her excitement took him by surprise. At first he thought she was excited because of him. Then he realized she was treating him as though he were a specimen.

  That made him think about Lois more in the way Dorothy perceived her. He did compare and contrast her to other teenage girls. Sometimes he secretly longed for her to have less intelligence and more attractive physical features. Sometimes he wished she’d be silly and more like a teenager. Once, he came to the conclusion that the one thing he disliked about his daughter was that she had denied herself a youth and therefore denied him and his wife the joys that should have resulted from that youth. They couldn’t delight in her growing up, because she was always grown up. When had it happened? Somehow, she had jumped time, skipped an entire period of growth.

  Where were the tears for him to wipe away? What had happened to the laughter and the charming confusion of adolescence? He thought about his sister and the way his father had built her into his little princess: the daintiness, the softness, the aroma of roses and lilacs. There was no way he could envision Lois as his little princess. It was easier to imagine her taking and analyzing his blood than taking his love. In fact, the only times he felt any deep bond or strong communication between her and him were the times he took an interest in her projects and work.

  “You see,” she said to him one day while he was convalescing at home. He had looked in on her in the pantry converted into laboratory. ‘There are fears that are acquirable. Caution in an animal doesn’t necessarily have to be interpreted as fear. When you get too close to a bird and it flies away, that’s simply an intelligent act, a logical choice. You don’t see one bird trying to act braver than another in order to gain the admiration of the flock, as you see with people.” She pronounced people as though it designated a lower form of life. It occurred to Gregory that his daughter enjoyed working with animals more than she enjoyed working with people.

  He noticed she wasn’t even looking at him when she spoke. She projected a certain intellectual arrogance, and that annoyed him.

  “People aren’t birds. It’s not very scientific to compare them.”

  “Oh, no, Daddy, you miss the point. There are bonds, common paths all living things follow. We branch off according to our sophisticated development, but there are basic patterns. For example, all living things retreat from painful circumstances.” She looked away again when she said that, and he considered that she had just given a rationale for her own retreats: she submerged herself in her private world of science to escape painful experiences, whether they were her failure to live up to Dorothy’s expectations or her own frustrations in relation to her peers. At that moment, he felt sorry for her.

  When she paused, he could almost hear her mind behaving like a typewriter carriage going to another paragraph.

  “The simplest form of protoplasm has irritability. Reflexive action is irritability carried to a higher level. Now, putting aside instinctive behavior for the moment, it is possible to come to a better understanding of man’s basic behavior by studying the animal world.”

  “Yes,” he said, thinking he had caught her, “but people, at least, will on occasion endure pain to achieve a higher goal.”

  “Only because of something they’ve learned or acquired, which takes in emotions as well. If two Homo sapiens develop an intense love relationship, one might endure pain for the other.”

  “Two Homo sapiens?”

  “But listen,” she said, moving out of the way so he could see the rat in the cage. “I had a rat here I simply called Eighteen because it was the eighteenth rat I had. I began a project. Whenever I fed it, I gave it an electrical shock. After a few times, it wouldn’t go near the food. What I did through conditioned response was create an unnatural fear of food in the rat.

  “But when it became very hungry, it began to endure the pain and the fear so it could eat. When I increased the voltage, it stayed away for longer periods until its physiological demands overcame its acquired fears. In fact, it began to build up some resistance, so I had to increase the voltage even more. Eventually, I killed it.”

  “You killed it?”

  “Well, actually it killed itself, in a sense. So, you see,” she went on, “it is possible to effect a change or a ramification in a pattern of behavior. Of course, it’s more difficult to change instinct. Very little human behavior can be classified as purely instinctive. I don’t think we have instinctive fears; we have acquired fears. There is no instinctive fear of the dark, for example. If other people didn’t demonstrate that fear to you when you were young and impressionable, you wouldn’t have it.”

  “Very interesting,” Gregory said. He was beginning to feel overwhelmed.

  “Now, Bergson has an interesting theory,” she said, oblivious of her father’s loss of interest. “Primitive man, like primitive animals, depended on his instincts for survival. As man developed and organized societies, his need for those instincts diminished and the instincts dulled. Modern man has replaced it with something known as ‘creative intuition.’”

  “I think I’d better go back to—”

  “Take a puppy dog and place it on the windowsill of a high building and it will whimper and cower in fear, but put a human baby on that windowsill and it will giggle and gurgle right over the edge. That’s because its instinct is dulled and it hasn’t developed creative intuition. Creative intuition is simply the ability to foresee, and that comes from experience. You learn that height can be dangerous, you see yourself falling, you know what can happen, you cower like the dog when you come to the edge. I bet you think the dog has a definite advantage, then,” she said, changing the tone of her voice as though she were talking to a fourth grader. Gregory Wilson could only stare at his daughter in amazement. She seemed unrecognizable. It was as though she had changed into someone else right before his eyes.

  “I guess you really like this stuff.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” The question appeared to have thrown her off for a moment. That pleased him.

  “Yeah, why? What do you get from all this?” He gestured toward the latest rat. It was on its hind legs, its forelegs against the wall of the glass cage. It sniffed at the barrier. Lois looked at it for a moment and then smiled.

  “Power, Daddy,” she said. “It gives me a sense of power.”

  3

  Billy Wilson sat on the living-room floor and eyed Barbara Gilbert, who looked as though she were hypnotized
by the homemade chocolate chip cookies on the plate set on the small round table by the couch. They were waiting for Lois to bring in the tea. Barbara was the only friend Lois had, if she could be termed a friend. She came over occasionally on weekends. Lois never invited her to sleep over and Lois never slept over at her house.

  Barbara, a heavy girl who still suffered from acne, wore a faded blue sweatshirt and jeans that strained at the seams. Her heavy bosom lifted the shirt away from her body so that when she reached across the couch she revealed folds of fat along her waist. Her obesity contributed to what developed as distorted facial features—wide nostrils with a wide bridge, small eyes lost in the soft, pudgy inflated cheeks, large swollen lips that continually pressed against each other, and a protruding forehead. From time to time her tongue would surface and wash along her lower lip—a nervous habit that had encouraged other kids at school to nickname her Snakeface.

  Lois didn’t seek Barbara’s friendship. More often than not, she was annoyed by her presence. But on occasion, she welcomed her because she was a good audience: attentive, idolizing, pliable. In school they seemed to gravitate toward each other naturally because both were alien and obnoxious as far as the general student population was concerned.

  Of course Lois was aware that the two of them were the butt of continual jokes. It was a favorite pastime of many students to come up with names for them, names like Batman and Robin, Mutt and Jeff, Starsky and Hutch. It was Marlene Bockman who came up with the most popular: Amoeba and Protozoa.