Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery

  There was an intensely private man whose fate was to become, as year followed year, something of a public figure and a model for others. Nothing astonished R more, and alarmed him! Relatively young, he’d achieved renown as a writer of popular, yet literary novels; his field was the psychological suspense mystery, a genre in which he excelled, perhaps because he respected the tradition and took infinite care in composition. These were terse, minimally plotted but psychologically knotty novels written, as R said in interviews, sentence by sentence, and so they must be read sentence by sentence, with attention; as one might perform steps in a difficult dance. R was himself both choreographer and dancer. And sometimes, even after decades of effort, R lost his way, and despaired. For there was something of horror in the lifelong contemplation of mystery; a sick, visceral helplessness that must be transformed into control, and mastery. And so R never gave up any challenge, no matter how difficult. “To give up is to confess you’re moral, and must die.”

  At this apparent misstatement R paused in confusion, peering at his manuscript as if it had deceived or betrayed him; but a moment later he regained his composure, and continued—

  “To give up is to confess you’re mortal, and must die.”

  Forty-five years ago! I wasn’t yet R but rather a fifteen-year-old named Roland, whom no one called Rollie, skinny, gawky, self-conscious, with a straight-A average and pimples like hot little beads of red pepper scattered across my forehead and back, lost in helpless erotic dreams of my high school sweetheart, a beautiful, popular blond senior named Barbara, whom everyone at Indian River High School called Babs. Now that I am no longer this boy I can contemplate him without the self-loathing he’d felt for himself at the time; almost, I can feel a measure of pity for him, and sympathy, if not tenderness. Or forgiveness.

  My high school sweetheart was two years older than I, and, I’m ashamed to confess, didn’t realize that she was my high school sweetheart. She had a boyfriend her own age, and numerous other friends besides, and had no idea how I secretly observed her, and with what yearning. The name “Babs”—unremarkable, yet so American and somehow wholesome, makes me feel faint, still, with hope and longing.

  In high school, I came to dread mirrors as I dreaded the frank assessing stares of my classmates, for these confronted me with a truth too painful to acknowledge. Like many intellectually gifted adoelscents I was precocious academically and retarded socially. In my dreams, I was freed of my clumsy body and often glided along the ground, or soared, swift as thought; I felt myself purely a mind, a questing spirit; it was my own body I fled, my base, obsessive sexual yearning. In actual life I was both shy and haughty; I carried myself stiffly, conscious of being a doctor’s son in predominantly working-class Indian River, even as I saw with painful clarity how my classmates were only polite with me when required, their mouths smiling in easy deference even as their eyes drifted past me. Yes, you’re Roland the doctor’s son, you live in one of the big brick houses on Church Street, and your father drives a new, shiny black Lincoln, but we don’t care for you anyway. Already in grade school I’d learned the crucial distinction between being envied and being liked. Where there was laughter, and the magical joy and release of laughter, there, Roland the doctor’s son was excluded. Of course, I had one or two friends, even rather close friends, boys like myself, brainy and lonely, and given to irony, though we were too young to grasp the meaning of irony: where heartbreak and anger conjoin. And I had my secret dreams, which attached themselves with alarming abruptness, and a terrible fixedness, at the start of my sophomore year in high school, to beautiful blond Babs; a girl whose father, a carpenter and stonemason with a good local reputation, had worked for my father.

  Why this fact filled me with shame in Babs’s presence, while Babs herself took no notice of it at all, I can’t explain.

  Adolescence! Happiness for some, poison for others. The killer’s heart is forged in adolescence. Sobering for R in his rented tuxedo, gold cuff links gleaming, to recall that forty-five years ago he would have eagerly exchanged his privileged life as a small-town physician’s brainy, beloved son, destined to graduate summa cum laude from the University of Michigan, for that of Babs Hendrick’s boyfriend Hal McCreagh, a good-looking football player with a C average destined to work in an Indian River lumberyard for life. If I could be you. And no more me. Mostly I managed to think not of Hal McCreagh but solely of Babs Hendrick, whom in fact I saw infrequently, and when I did manage to see her, in school, in passing, I was so focused upon the girl that she existed for me in a rarefied dimension, like a specimen of some beautiful creature, butterfly, bird, tropical fish, safely under glass. I saw her mouth move but heard no sound. Even when Babs smiled in my direction and gaily murmured Hi! in the style of popular girls at Indian River High who made it a point, out of Christian charity perhaps, to ignore no one, I scarcely heard her, in a buzzing panic, and could only stammer a belated reply. Half-shutting my eyes in terror of staring at Babs too openly, her small shapely dancer-like body, her radiantly glistening pink-lipsticked lips and widened smiling eyes—for in my paranoia I was convinced that others could sense my yearning; my raw, hopeless, contemptible desire—I imagined overhearing, and often in my fever-dreams I did actually hear, voices rising in derision, “Roland? Him?” and cruel adolescent laughter of the kind that, decades later, reverberates through the “patrician” R ’s dreams.

  For this, I cannot truly blame the girl. She knew nothing of her power over me.

  Did she?

  Babs was a senior; I was only a sophomore, and did not exist to her; to be in close proximity to such a girl, I had to join Drama Club, in which Babs was a prominent member, a high school star, invariably cast in student productions directed by our English teacher Mr. Seales. Onstage, Babs was a lively, very pretty, and energetic presence, one of those golden creatures at whom others gaze in helpless admiration, though to be truthful, and I mean to be truthful in this narrative, Babs Hendrick was probably only moderately talented; by the standards of Indian River, Michigan, she shone. In Drama Club, I was an eager volunteer for work no one else wanted to do, like set design and lighting; I helped Mr. Seales organize rehearsals; to the surprise of my friends, who had no idea of my infatuation with Babs, I spent more and more time with the Drama Club crowd, comfortable in my role of relative invisibility, and happy to leave the spotlight to others.

  In that context, as a kind of young mascot, Roland became Rollie. What a thrill!

  For Babs herself would summon me, “Rollie? Would you be a sweetheart—” (with what ease and unconscious cruelty murmuring such words to me!) “—and run out and get me a cola? Here’s change.” And there Rollie would go flying out of the school, and down the street a block and a half to a convenience store, to bring back a cola for Babs Hendrick, thrilled by the task. More than once I’d run to fetch something for Babs and when I returned to the rehearsal room panting like a good-natured dog, another of the actors would send me out again, and there Rollie would fly a second time, not wanting to protest, for fear of arousing suspicion.

  Once, I overheard behind me Babs’s musical voice: “That Rollie! I just love him.”

  Between Clifford Seales and certain of his girl students, particularly blond, effervescent Babs, there was a heightened electric mood during Drama Club meetings and play rehearsals; a continuous stream of bright, racy banter of the kind that left the girls pink-cheeked and breathless with giggling and Mr. Seales (though long married, and his children grown) grinning and tugging at his shirt collar. Perhaps there was nothing seriously erotic about such banter, only playfulness, but unmistakably flirtatious undercurrents wafted about us, for most of the Drama Club members were not ordinary students but students singled out for attention; and Mr. Seales, in his early fifties, thick-waisted, porcine, with a singed-looking face and wire-rimmed bifocals that shone when he was at his wittiest and most eloquent, was no ordinary high school teacher. He cultivated a brush
-like rufous moustache and wore his hair long, past his collar. He’d been an amateur actor with the Milwaukee Players in his early twenties and he’d impressed generations of Indian River students by hinting that he’d almost had, or possibly had had, a screen test with Twentieth-Century Fox in his youth. Babs daringly teased Mr. Seales about his wild Hollywood days when he’d been Clark Gable’s double. (Mr. Seales did resemble, from certain angles of perspective and in a flattering light, a fleshier Clark Gable.)

  After the tragedy, and the scandal that surrounded it, rumors would fly through Indian River that Mr. Seales was a pervert who’d insisted upon his girl and boy actors rehearsing passionate love scenes in his presence, to prepare them for acting together onstage; Mr. Seales was a pervert who rehearsed passionate love scenes with his girl students, private sessions. He’d “brushed against”—“touched”—“fondled” Babs Hendrick before witnesses, and made the girl blush fiercely. It was claimed that Mr. Seales carried, in his briefcase, a silver flask filled with vodka, and out of this flask he secretly laced coffee and soda drinks to give to unsuspecting students, to render them malleable in his pervert hands. I doubted that any of this could be true, since in the seven months I belonged to the Drama Club I’d seen no evidence of it, and so I would testify to Indian River police in Mr. Seales’s defense (though my father forbade me to say anything kindly about the “pervert” and was furious with me afterward). Yet how strange: never had I witnessed Mr. Seales pouring anything into any drinks, including his own, yet somehow I was inspired to such an action myself, out of despair, out of my obsession with Babs, and out of (how can I explain, without seeming to be trying to excuse myself?) a conviction of my essential helplessness. For never would Roland have believed himself capable of what he dreamed of committing; never would he, who believed himself a victim, have imagined himself so powerful, and lethal.

  Not vodka out of a silver flask, but a heavy dose of barbiturate from my mother’s crammed medicine cabinet. It was an old prescription; I took the chance that my distracted, nervous mother would never notice.

  It was not my intention to hurt my high school sweetheart. For I so adored her, I could not imagine even touching her! In my sickly, fevered dreams I “saw” her vividly, or a female figure that resembled her; beneath layers of bedclothes, as if hoping to hide myself from my father’s suspicious eyes that could penetrate my bedroom walls, I groaned in anguish, and in shame, in thrall to her female beauty. I was the victim, not the girl. I wished to free myself from my morbid obsession, and I became desperate. For had not my father (perhaps reading my thoughts? identifying certain symptoms in my person, my behavior?) warned me with much embarrassment of the danger of “unclean practices”—“compulsive self-abuse.” Had not my father turned aside from me in disgust, seeing in my frightened eyes and inflamed pimply skin an admission of guilt. And yet I could not beg him for mercy claiming I am the victim!

  In actual life, Babs Hendrick existed in what seemed to me another dimension, inaccessible to someone like me; I might brush against her in a high school corridor, or descending a flight of stairs, or I might sit on the floor of the “green room” backstage, six inches from her feet, yet this distance was an abyss. The girl was invulnerable, immune to anything Roland might say or do. At such times I knew myself invisible, and though lowly, in a way blessed. Unlike other, older and more attractive boys, I had not a chance to compel this girl to love me, or even to notice me; thus I risked little, like a craven but faithful mongrel. Even when someone called out “Rollie!” and sent me on an errand, I felt myself invisible, and blessed. During rehearsals on the open, bare stage, which was often drafty, I liked it that Babs might send me for her sweater, or her boyfriend’s jacket; I loved it that, in this place devoid of glamour, Babs yet exuded her innocent golden-girl beauty, which (I came to think) no one really appreciated but me. At such times I could crouch on the floor and gaze openly at Babs Hendrick’s flawless heart-shaped face, her perky, shapely little body, for she was an “actress”; it wasn’t forbidden to stare at Babs Hendrick when she was an “actress”; in fact, and this was a delicious irony not lost on Roland, Babs and the other Indian River stars were dependent upon people like Roland, an admiring audience for their self-display, or what was called “talent.” And so I made myself more and more available to the Drama Club, and to the rather vain, pompous Mr. Seales, as a way of making myself liked, and trusted. How quiet Roland was, and utterly dependable! No one else in Drama Club was either, and this included Mr. Seales the faculty adviser. I was always available if, for instance, Babs needed someone patient to help her with her lines, in the green room, or in an empty classroom. (“Gosh, Rollie, what would I do without you! You’re so much sweeter and a darn sight smarter than my kid brother.”) Because she was a favorite of his, Mr. Seales had cast, or miscast, Babs as the wan, crippled, poetic Laura in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie; this was a plum of a role for an aspiring actress, but one for which Babs’s healthy, wholesome golden-girl looks and childlike extroversion hardly suited her. Her quick, superficial facility for rote memory wasn’t helping her much with the poetic language of the Williams play, and she was continually baffled by its emotional subtext. Even Mr. Seales was beginning to be impatient with her tearful outbursts and temper tantrums, and several times spoke cuttingly to her in front of others.

  These others to be shortly designated as “witnesses.” Even I, who had no choice but to tell police officers all that I’d truly heard.

  One of my frequent errands was to fetch quart plastic bottles of a certain diet cola, explosively carbonated and artificially sweetened, from the convenience store up the street; a vile-tasting chemical concoction that my father claimed had caused “cancerous growths” in laboratory rats, and that, though I exulted in going against my father’s wishes whenever I could, I found repellent, undrinkable. Yet Babs was addicted to this drink, kept bottles in her locker and was always running out. The fact that the cola was in a quart bottle and not a can, and that I was often the person to open it, and pour cola into paper cups to pass around to the actors, gave me the idea, and an innocent idea it seemed to me, like a magical fantasy interlude in a Disney film, of mixing something in the fizzing liquid, a sleeping potion it might be romantically called, that would cause Babs Hendrick to become sleepy suddenly, and doze, for just a few precious minutes, and I alone might observe her close up, watch over and protect her; if needed, I would wake her, and walk her home.

  Babs Hendrick, walked home by Roland the doctor’s son.

  This was a fantasy that sprang from one of my fevered erotic dreams. I both loathed these dreams as unhealthy and unclean, and craved them; I both wished to rid myself of them forever, and cherished them as one of the few authentic creations of my lonely life. Out of this paradox grew, like poisonous toadstools by night, my compulsion to write, and to write of certain subjects the world designates as morbid. Out of the tragedy of that long-ago time grew my obsession with mystery as the most basic, and so most profound, of all artistic visions. Out of my obsession with my high school sweetheart, the distinguished (and lucrative) career of R , newly elected president of the American Mystery Writers! Though R is far from fifteen years old, he is not so very distant from the fifteen-year-old Roland secretly planning, plotting, rehearsing his deed of great daring. He seemed in his sex-obsessed naïveté to think that he could accomplish his goal without having the slightest effect upon reality, and without consequences for either himself or his victim.

  Of course, fifteen-year-old Roland did not think of Babs Hendrick as a victim. She wielded such power!

  And so it happened, as in a dream, one bleak, gunmetal-gray afternoon in March, in that limbo season poised between late winter and early spring, when the temperature seems frozen at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, that rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie broke off around five o’clock, and Mr. Seales sent everyone home except Babs, with whom he spoke in private, and twenty minutes later Babs appeared in the corridor outside the au
ditorium, wiping at her beautiful downcast eyes; and seeing me lurking nearby (but Babs wouldn’t have thought that her friend Rollie was capable of lurking) eagerly she asked would I help her with her lines? just for a half-hour?

  Murmured Rollie shyly, “Sure.”

  Babs led us back to the green room backstage. As usual, Babs stood as she recited her lines, and moved about restlessly, trying to match her gestures with Tennessee Williams’s maddeningly poetic, repetitive language. She scarcely glanced at me as I read lines, or prompted her, as if she were alone; I was Laura’s mother, Laura’s brother, Laura’s caddish gentleman caller, yet it was exclusively her own image she gazed at in the room’s long horizontal mirror. Even in this fluorescent-lit, stale-smelling room with the shabby furnishings and worn linoleum tile, how beautiful Babs was! Far more beautiful than poor doomed Laura. I loved her, and hated her. For the sake of the Lauras of the world, as well as the Rolands.

  The other day, in my leafy, affluent suburban town fifty minutes north of Grand Central Station, where I live, as the irony of circumstance has placed me, on Basking Ridge Drive, which intersects with Church Street, I was walking into the village to pick up my newspapers, as I do each day for the exercise, and I saw her: I saw Babs Hendrick: a lovely blond girl with shoulder-length wavy hair and bangs brushed low on her forehead, walking with high school classmates. I stopped in my tracks. My heart clanged like a bell. I nearly called out to her—“Babs? Is it you?” But of course, being R , and no longer naive, I waited until I could ascertain that of course the girl wasn’t my lost high school sweetheart, and didn’t truly resemble her. I turned aside to hide my grief. I limped away shaken. I took solace all that day in writing this story, for I no longer have lurid, delicious erotic fantasies by night, beneath heavy bedcovers; the only fantasies that visit me now are willfully calculated, impeccably plotted contrivances of my writerly life.