“Excuse me,” she said finally, “Mr. Van Dancer asked me to stop in between classes.”
“Oh. Just a moment,” Mrs. Stanley said. She turned back to slip a few more sheets into the file. Just to keep me in my place, Lois thought. “Now, then, I’ll buzz him and let him know you’re here.”
“That would be very nice,” Lois said. Her blank expression confused the secretary for a moment. She quickly buzzed the guidance counselor and sent Lois in.
“Well, now,” Mr. Van Dancer said, actually standing up behind his desk, “you’ve made quite a hit over at the community college, it seems. And in such a short time.”
“I’ve only had contact with one teacher and a librarian over there.”
“Well, he’s spread the word.” Van Dancer slapped his hands together and turned a page on the desk before him. “Now, through their dean of students, Professor McShane has requested that you be permitted to audit the remainder of his course in abnormal psychology. Quite an honor, quite an honor. I hope you appreciate it.”
“We’ve discussed it. I understand his objectives.”
“Yes, well … still, you should appreciate the honor. …”
“I don’t consider it an honor to do what I’m capable of doing. I consider it an obligation,” she said dryly. He stared at her a moment. Her gaze was steadfast, her posture stiff. She held her books against her right side. He felt himself becoming intimidated and resented it.
“It’s still an honor to have the opportunity,” he insisted. She could see he was intent on having the last word, so she remained silent and looked to the side. “Now, then, what we will do for you, not because we are obligated to do it, but because we want to do it,” he added, “is rearrange your gym class so you can have the sixth period free and go to the college in time to make Professor McShane’s afternoon class. Starting tomorrow, report to Mrs. Fini’s third-period gym class instead of your usual study hall. That’s a tenth-grade class, but there’s no other way to do it.”
“With something like this, I should be able to waive my physical-education requirements.”
“Well, you can’t. There are state regulations.”
“Do you think the time will ever come when we’ll stop dealing with one another as items and start dealing with one another as people?”
“I’m doing the best I can. Look, Lois, this is all in the way of a favor for a college teacher who is cooperating with our new program and a favor for you. I don’t see—”
“I’m sorry. Thank you, Mr. Van Dancer. I’ll take the third-period physical-education class.” She walked out of his office before he could reply. Mrs. Stanley was typing at her desk.
“I need a late-to-class pass,” Lois said, this time in a more demanding tone of voice. The secretary stopped immediately and began writing the pass. “Thank you.”
As she left the office she considered the way the secretary had become instantly obedient. It was as though she had pushed the right button. Manipulating people was really only a matter of utilizing the right combinations. People are really a lot like the machines they operate. The idea struck her as ironic. It also made her feel superior, for she knew something few people knew: anyone could be controlled.
She resolved that from this time forward she would submit to no one’s authority unwillingly, including her parents’.
During the weeks that followed, Lois developed a closer relationship with Professor Kevin McShane. She remained after class on just about every Tuesday and Thursday night to continue discussing a question or concept brought up during the class session. For the most part, he enjoyed the extended periods. He began to see their discussions as a sort of intellectual sparring, realizing that Lois Wilson was searching him out, looking for his soft spots. Where did he weaken in his view of the world as deterministic, filled with patterns that led to inevitable and predictable results? Was he corrupted by any sentimentality? He was amused by her relentless pursuit. It was as though she were testing him to confide some great secret.
On the other hand, he could put her on the defensive easily, simply by asking her personal questions in an attempt to discover what her family life was like or how she enjoyed school and other students her age. Her answers were always quick, offhand, monosyllabic. She never hesitated to indicate how insignificant all that was.
“Your parents don’t object to this career interest of yours?”
“My father’s a scientist.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. Your mother?”
“You talked about auditory discrimination yesterday.”
“You simply shut her out, is that it?”
“Yes. Now, you didn’t answer my question today.”
He smiled widely. This was one helluva clever kid, he thought and sat back in his seat. He pressed his fingers into a cathedral and pressed the point of it under his chin.
“Go on.”
“You said if the subject can be made to believe the ends justified the means early on in the process, he will rarely go back to question his first step. And once he does something he considered evil, he will do something else he considers evil or even more evil?”
“Sure. The first act reinforces the second and the second reinforces the third … so on, so on. That extract on the Nazi SS trooper. After he had helped gather up the Jewish family, an act he actually deplored, he was willing, even eager, to see them shipped to the camps. Remember his quote about getting them out of his sight so he could place the blame up the ladder. Someone else would be more guilty and diminish his own responsibility for what happened.”
“So in obedience control, the first step is the most important and the most significant.”
“Absolutely. The greater the degree of evil, or rather negative action, you can get the subject to commit, the better is your prognosis for control and success. Those people who were paid to participate in that obedience experiment—you know, the ones who were told to deliver an electrical shock to the subjects in the other room when those subjects gave the wrong answers—they’re a prime example. Those who continued to give the shocks, up the voltage, defended the experiment afterward, said it had importance and significance.”
“They were easing their own sense of guilt.”
“Right. Now it would be much easier to have them do a second experiment which supposedly complements the first, even though the second experiment might be more cruel and more sadistic. You’ve been thinking a lot about obedience control lately. Are you planning to change your topic for the paper?”
“No,” she said quickly—too quickly, he thought. “But I am interested in the subject. I think it holds the key to a great deal of what goes on in society.”
“No doubt. If you want to get into persuasion, though, you’d better start with The Image Makers.”
“I took it out just before I got here.” She revealed the book in her carryall bag.
“That’s a nice bag. A present?”
“My father sells them in his store.”
“Sounds like a big store.”
“It isn’t. It’s crowded … cluttered, I should say.”
“You know, I’ve never really stopped in Sandburg. I’ve driven through it, but I haven’t stopped and gone into any of the stores.”
“There’s nothing to stop for.”
“Outgrown your hometown, huh?”
“The day I was born,” she said. She began to thumb through her notebook.
Kevin McShane found himself growing more and more determined to know this girl. She was so good at hiding her feelings and beliefs that he began to see it as a challenge for himself. They had met privately a half a dozen times, besides all her classes with him, and he had yet to see her smile or laugh. He watched her when he joked. She acted as though she were thinking, This is something he has to do to keep the attention of the others. In fact, that’s the way he began to feel about it. Her attitudes and her intensity infiltrated his subconscious to the extent that he felt guilty for wasting class time. He
told himself that was ridiculous. After all, she’s the student; I’m the teacher.
“Do you know,” he told Sherry when they met for lunch at the Old English Pub, two blocks from campus, “it’s as though this kid’s beginning to possess me, manipulate me toward her goals.”
“I’m beginning to think so. Should I tell you how much time you spent talking about her last night? I don’t want to say I’m growing jealous, Kevin dear, but when I spend a good part of my afternoon getting the duck a l’orange as crisp as you love it and I spring for your favorite rose, you could at least leave your classroom behind.”
“Was I like that?” She nodded, smiling. “Why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you shut me up? Why—”
“Because you were obviously so wrapped up in her. I didn’t have the heart to bring you down. I’ve never seen you so interested in your students and your work. It was refreshing for a while. After all, you know how I’ve been criticizing you for treating this more like a nine-to-five job than a profession of love.”
“Well, until now … with the students they’ve been sending me, it has been a nine-to-five grind. Even though I don’t work nine to five. I wish you could meet this girl and see for yourself. I’ve been attempting things I never dreamed I’d do.”
“Well, I might just pop into your next class. I am free that period on Thursdays. Maybe I’d intimidate her, though.”
“No, I think not. The president of the college could come in and she’d behave and speak the same way.”
“Do I detect something negative in your tone of voice? You didn’t sound as though you were giving her a compliment just now.”
“It’s not exactly a criticism, I suppose.”
She could see his mind drifting.
“Then what is it? Tell me, O most stable, well-adjusted man of science.”
“I deserve that. This will sound like a humanist talking, not a scientist.”
“You’ve got my complete attention.” Her hazel eyes dazzled him for a moment as she leaned forward on her elbows, her lips inches away from his.
“I’m losing my train of thought.”
“Sorry.” She sat back and folded her arms across her breasts. “Proceed.”
“It’s an irrational feeling of gloom. At times she’s exhilarating, but at times she’s depressing as hell. Then there are times when she’s simply …”
“What?” Sherry’s smile froze. McShane shook his head.
“Simply neutral, like something nonhuman, an objective, unbiased force.”
“That sounds like your definition of God, Kevin. Are you sure you’re not confusing the two?”
“I’m serious.”
“Well, from the way you’ve described her, she looks like some stiff, puritanical schoolmarm.”
“Yeah, but it’s more than just that … something.”
“Are you sure she’s not infatuated with the handsome young professor, just as so many other coeds are, and she’s not just trying to impress you? It’s a unique approach, I know, considering the scholastic achievement of some of our students, but—”
“No, no, she doesn’t appear driven by any of those motives. I wish she were,” he said, his eyes widening. “It would make her more … more … human. She needs that.”
“You’re not going to give it to her, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, I’m just going to have to meet this girl. There are no two ways about it. You’ve succeeded in getting my interest up, but in the meantime, can we order some lunch?”
“Huh? We haven’t ordered yet? Damn, I’ve got to meet Fred Madden in a half hour to discuss our negotations position on salary. Damn.”
“This girl really has gotten to you, McShane,” Sherry said, “and for a behavioral scientist, that’s a sin.”
He met her eyes for a moment and then smiled. They talked of other things after ordering and during their meal, but Lois Wilson’s questions, comments, and insights peppered his mind increasingly during his quiet moments. He was finding it more and more difficult to escape.
One night he dreamed about her eyes. They were pools of blackness with a candle burning in each. The tiny flickering flames fascinated and hypnotized him. Her face drew closer. He could feel the small sensations of heat. It grew hotter and hotter until he awoke with a start, his own eyeballs aching. He pressed his face with his palms. His forehead was so warm he thought he might have a fever. It took him a long time to fall back to sleep. It was almost as though he were afraid of it.
9
Lois sat across from the couch and stared at Billy’s cherub face. He had fallen asleep halfway through the story, just as he always did when she read in that deliberately soft tone of voice. Her parents had gone out—her mother finally talking her father into a movie “just to get the hell out of the house.”
Watching Billy in sleep always fascinated her. There was just the smallest, almost imperceptible movement of his eyeballs against his closed lids. His little chest rose and fell under the pajama top. His fingers were curled slightly inward on each hand, and his lips were parted just enough to reveal the tops of his lower teeth.
It would begin tonight. The idea had been boiling in her for some time, but she had always kept it repressed out of the moral considerations. They weren’t as important anymore, especially when placed against other priorities. Her parents thought she was a freak anyway. Why should she consider their feelings, their beliefs? They didn’t have the capability of understanding the things she was able to do.
But someone like Professor McShane did; he could appreciate her fully, and in time, when he learned about this experiment, he would appreciate her even more. Perhaps even respect her as an equal, as more than an equal. Would it not be wonderful, be—and she hated to use the word because it really was a distortion —be romantic for both of them, she and the professor, to work together on a project of equal importance someday? Maybe, when he learned to respect her more, he would confide in her and tell her his ideas, his secret concepts and thoughts. It was something to look forward to.
Her idea was based on two observations: for as long as Lois could remember, her mother had eagerly passed off her maternal responsibilities in relation to Billy to her, thus diminishing Billy’s dependence on his mother and increasing his dependence on Lois; and secondly, both of Lois’s parents offered her rewards in front of Billy for caring for him. Consequently, Billy envisioned himself as a burden.
Could she actually get him to hate his mother because of this and then take some negative action? Wasn’t it possible, as Professor McShane explained, to build the intensity of the negative acts by causing him to feel less and less guilty only when he became more and more committed? Each succeeding act would justify what came before.
She got up quietly and walked softly out of the room and down to his bedroom. She snapped on the lights and stared coldly at the twin black-and-white teddy bears on both sides of his Star Wfars-pattern pillow. There was only a moment’s hesitation, a twinge of conscience emanating from the hitherto dormant memory of her first rag doll. At the age of eight, she had destroyed it with one deep incision from the neck to the pelvis in a search to discover what gave it a stiff form. She actually thought it might contain a spinal column.
Scooping both teddy bears up quickly, she put them under her left arm and walked out of Billy’s room. She took the stuffed animals upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, opened the master closet, and hid them securely behind a carton of her mother’s old shoes, which she was forever promising to donate to the Salvation Army.
Billy was still asleep when she returned to the living room. She waited a few moments and then nudged him gently. His eyes flicked open and he sat up quickly, rubbing his cheeks.
“It’s getting late,” Lois said. “You’ve got to go to bed before Mommy gets home and finds you still up.”
“OK.” He swung his feet around and put them in the Mickey Mouse slippers. He stood up and started out of the room. Lois fol
lowed closely behind. The second he entered his bedroom, he noticed his teddy bears were missing.
“Where’s Mick and Nick?”
“Gone.”
“Gone?” His sleepy, thin voice cracked, so he repeated the question. “Gone?”
“Mother says you shouldn’t be sleeping with baby toys anymore. She says that might be why you wet the bed last week.”
“Where are they, Lois?” He rubbed his eyes to get himself more awake. “I want them.”
“She took them away. I don’t know. She might have thrown them in the garbage for all I know.”
“But I want them.”
“Well, what can I do about it? They’re gone. You’re just going to have to forget them. And I wouldn’t ask her about them either. I promised her you would start acting grown up.”
“I don’t want to act grown up.”
“Just get into bed. They’re thinking of sending you to sleep-away camp this summer. You’ve got to act grown up. You couldn’t take two baby toys with you, could you?”
“I never go to sleep without Mick and Nick,” he said. His face was collapsing quickly, his cheeks lifting and his forehead wrinkling. His eyes watered and he pulled the corners of his mouth back.
“What do you want me to do? Mother’s the boss, isn’t she?”
He started to cry. She pushed him firmly but gently toward the bed. He got in obediently, but he didn’t stop crying.
“Listen,” she said, sitting down on the bed, “if you stop crying, I’ll sit here for a while until you fall asleep.”
“I want Mick and Nick.”
“Um. Well, you know how mothers are. They want their children to be grown up and on their own, then they don’t have to do much for them.”
“Can’t I be grown up and have Mick and Nick?”
“No. Do I have stuffed animals to sleep with?”
“Where did she put them?”
“I told you, she might have thrown them out.”
“Can I go see?”
“What if you found them? She’d only get mad.” He started crying again.
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