THE M.D. A Horror Story

by Thomas M. Disch

“I would like to know why I got an F on my term paper.” He took the term paper in question from his knapsack and placed it on the desk before Miss Gerhart.

  Miss Gerhart placed her fingertips symmetrically at the back of her jawbone and craned forward in her chair to look at the term paper with an expression of polite curiosity tinged with repulsion, as though she’d been asked to examine a collection of insect specimens.

  “I can see that I’ve written comments just beside the grade. In what way do you find them unclear?”

  “For one thing, the comment on the front seems to contradict the shorter ones at the end of the paper. On the front you say I refuse to take a moral position, but on page seven where I talk about triage, you say, ‘Repugnant,’ and on the last page you wrote, ‘This is cynicism pure and simple.’ It sounds to me like I took a moral position, but you don’t happen to agree with it.”

  She could see that she would have to be careful. The real reason for his F was that all but the last two pages of his paper had been copied verbatim from a reference book. She had seen too many such plagiarisms over the years to be mistaken about that, and the topic William had chosen to write on, “The Population Explosion,” was one well calculated to expose such deceits, since the writers of children’s reference books became more than usually bland and euphemistic on subjects with a potential for controversy. She’d spent an hour in the library trying to track down his source, but he’d had the foresight to copy from a book the school didn’t possess, which meant that she had only her suspicions to go by. Had she been able to prove him a cheat, the boy would have had a lot more to regret than his C+. Lacking such proof, she’d had to content herself by giving the paper a failing grade. Her grounds for that grade were not indefensible, but she had been distinctly relieved when Mr. Paley had rejected the boy’s stepfather’s suggestion that he read the paper and judge its merits for himself.

  “If there seems to be a contradiction, William, it is in your paper. The first several pages, in which you define the problem, struck me as simplistic and not at all up to the level an ‘exceptional’ student like yourself ought to be aiming for. You go to great lengths to explain the difference between an arithmetic and a geometric progression, but when it comes to the actual social issues involved you get very fuzzy and vague. What were your principal sources for your paper, by the way? There are no footnotes, and no bibliography.”

  “I used the Encyclopedia Britannica mostly. Though I didn’t just copy it out. I put it into my own words.”

  “Did you, indeed?” She smiled knowingly, as though inviting him to share her amusement at his lie, but he was not that easy a nut to crack. “Well, you’ll remember, when I spoke in class of what I expected in your term papers, I emphasized the need to deal with the ethical dimensions of the topics you chose. And through most of your paper you seem to be exerting all your intelligence to do just the opposite. But then, when you begin to talk about ‘triage’ and you suggest that medical assistance be withdrawn from Third World countries that don’t achieve Zero Population Growth at once, it’s as though another writer had taken over. And that is where my first response was simply to say ‘Repugnant.’ That doesn’t mean, however, that your paper constitutes a moral position. If anything, it’s amoral, and it doesn’t represent a ‘position’ at all, since your conclusions don’t follow logically from your first statement of the case.”

  “But they do,” William asserted loftily. “I’m not saying anything Malthus didn’t say almost two hundred years ago. If famine doesn’t get them, then epidemics will, or they’ll kill each other fighting for dwindling resources. All that is already happening. Would Malthus have got an F, too?”

  “If Malthus had written this paper”—she dipped her head toward the offending document—“he would have. You simply didn’t work hard enough, William, and you know it. When your first project for a report on the operation of the Hennepin County Courthouse proved to be too much for you to handle, and there were only two weeks left till your term paper was due, you changed horses in the middle of the stream, thinking that you could recycle someone else’s prose through your word processor and add a few paragraphs of cheap cynicism and that I wouldn’t know the difference. But I’m not that dumb, William. I’ve been teaching a long time, and I know when a preadolescent Machiavelli is trying to pull the wool over my eyes.” She concluded this peroration with a triumphant smile, leaned back in the swivel chair as far as its spring permitted, and waited for one of two possibilities: his surrender or his retreat.

  “I don’t think there’s another teacher in this school who would have read this paper and given it an F.”

  “Thank you, William, I consider that a compliment. But in fact I think there may be a few others who can detect a rotten egg when it’s put right under their noses. I expect you’ll have ample opportunity in the next two or three years to discover for yourself whether or not that’s so.”

  “You really have it in for me, don’t you, Miss Gear-heart?”

  “I think our discussion is over, William. I’m not obliged to sit here and listen to childish epithets. You can go now.”

  When he was halfway to the door, she said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He turned around. “Am I? What?”

  “This.” She picked up the term paper between thumb and forefinger and held it out at arm’s length, as though it were a source of contagion. “You seem to value this much more than I do. I think you should keep it for future reference.”

  William took the paper and hesitated a moment, as though expecting her to say more. When she did not, he left the room.

  There was a strange, tingling sensation in her hand, the kind of pins-and-needles feeling one gets when a limb goes to sleep from being held too long in an awkward position. She flexed her fingers until the sensation went away. “Pig piss!” she exclaimed with a vehemence that coated the desktop with a fine spray of spittle. She pursed her lips with distaste and looked about for her purse, in which there was always a packet of Kleenexes, but of course her purse was back in the principal’s office.

  She got up from the desk, pulled at the seams of her dress to smooth away any wrinkles, and stuck out her tongue at the framed photograph of John Dewey, the great philosopher of education. Then she went back to the principal’s office, where Mr. Paley had just begun to perform the ritual pencil sharpening with which he began his day’s work.

  “Good morning, Miss Gerhart. I see that, as usual, you’ve got a head start on me.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Paley. Eat shit and die.”

  Mr. Paley put down the pencils beside the pencil sharpener and regarded Miss Gerhart with alarm. She could not have said what he thought she had said, it was simply not in her nature. He tried to imagine what she could possibly have said that could be confused with such an obscenity.

  She had sat down at the worktable on which she had already spread out an array of three-by five cards, each representing a particular schoolroom and period of the day. She had explained her system, but Mr. Paley had not given the explanation much attention at the time. As she sat there, studying the cards, her thin red lips suddenly retracted from her teeth and the muscles about her nose and eyes convulsed. The effect was uncannily like the snarling of a dog, except that it was soundless.

  She became aware of his attention, and looked up with a sunny smile. “Yes, Mr. Paley? Do you have a question?”

  “I was wondering if you were feeling… entirely all right.”

  She sighed. “In fact, I have just had a rather trying encounter with the Michaels boy, who I was telling you about yesterday. Poopy-pot! Or I should say ‘whom,’ shouldn’t I? About whom I was telling you. I’m afraid he became rather rude.”

  Mr. Paley did not know what to make of Miss Gerhart’s behavior. He’d been warned by the assistant principal, and by his predecessor as well, to expect a certain amount of eccentricity from Miss Gerhart, but surely this went beyond the bounds of eccentricity.

  �
��My colleague Miss Milman has a saying: ‘Hell hath no fury like a straight-A student the first time he gets a C.’ That’s so true, isn’t it?”

  Mr. Paley nodded.

  Then Lilah Gerhart leaned forward, clutching the sides of the desk, and began to bark. It was a high pitched yapping bark, like a terrier’s. She continued barking for a little after Mr. Paley had turned his back on her and hastened from the room, at which point it finally struck her what she had been doing. She had been barking at the principal. He must have thought she’d lost her mind!

  But she knew that was not the case. Her mind was as lucid as ever. She had had a nervous breakdown, four years ago, but that had been nothing but a case of frayed nerves, and after a few weeks in less stressful circumstances, she’d been fine. This was not the same thing.

  She had always had an extraordinary memory for any phone number she’d called more than a few times, and she was able to dial the number of her old psychotherapist without having to consult the address book in her purse.

  After three rings a receptionist answered and said, “Dr. Helbron’s office. Can I help you?”

  Miss Gerhart took a deep breath and said, “This is Miss Motherfucker Piss Cunt. I seem to be having some kind of… speech problem. And I’d like to—”

  But the receptionist, who had never before had to deal with a patient suffering from Tourette syndrome, had already hung up in indignation.

  47

  When school began again, the Wednesday after Labor Day, Miss Gerhart was no longer on the teaching staff. Her last action as a faculty member had been to revise the memorandum she’d written for William’s file, urging much more earnestly that he not be allowed into the Early Admissions Program. The language of the memo was so intemperate that the remaining two members of the Early Admissions Program Committee had to wonder if it were not a further symptom of her disorder. One of the members, Mr. Thorsen, who had tutored William in math and seen him accomplish four years’ work in one without any apparent strain, was so incensed by the tone of Miss Gerhart’s memo that he became William’s champion. He obtained a fresh printout of the term paper (the original with Miss Gerhart’s comments on it had been used as kindling, William confessed, to start a fire in the backyard barbecue) and insisted that Mr. Paley read it.

  Mr. Paley was cautious in such matters, slow to move, and being moved, not likely to move far. He had a strong conviction that a principal should never override a teacher’s decision, especially in regard to grades. Inevitably, some teachers would abuse their power, but so long as their actions did not inspire insurrection, it was better not to challenge them. The alternative, in his view, was anarchy and a return to the sixties. However, there were reasons why this case could be considered an exception. Miss Gerhart no longer taught at St. Tom’s and so would not feel the slight to her authority, while Mr. Thorsen’s advocacy ought to be accommodated before it got any fiercer. He’d known other men of Thorsen’s apparently mild disposition to get some such bee in their bonnets and become perfect fanatics. The boy was obviously bright enough, and while the loss of even a single student’s tuition was not to be regarded lightly (St. Tom’s had a very tight budget), there was the possibility for some discreet publicity that would suggest St. Tom’s was a breeding ground for young overachievers. Mr. Paley allowed himself to be persuaded: the disputed Civics grade was quietly emended to a B, and William was allowed to enter the Early Admissions Program.

  William could not have been happier, not on a regular day-to-day basis. His classes were much more interesting as a senior than when he was a freshman. He wasn’t in over his head, but it wasn’t so much like wading at the kiddie end of the pool. American History, with Miss Gerhart’s old crony Mr. Raab, was the only class he felt any real aversion for, and even that wasn’t as bad as Civics had been, since he was able to keep a low profile and not become one of Raab’s preferred sparring partners and the butt of his sarcasms against “Mondale Me-Too liberals.” That had become Judith’s destiny, but she actually seemed to enjoy the little “Socratic” dialogues that Raab engineered, and to do Raab credit, her grades didn’t suffer for her services as a straw man and scapegoat. At the end of the first six weeks she had an A, while William’s careful neutrality got him only a B.

  At home everything seemed as bright and cheery as if they all were auditioning to appear as the average happy family of four featured in an ad for absolutely anything. Sondra had spent a small fortune on maternity clothes and glided around the house looking like a medieval fashion show, while Judith had filled out with the same almost-overnight blossoms-on-the-bough suddenness to become a hypothetical candidate for St. Tom’s Homecoming Queen, hypothetical because St. Tom’s didn’t have a football team whose coming home could be celebrated with a dance. She looked terrific, but beyond looking terrific she radiated good feelings, high spirits, and (in her own account of it) joie de vivre. “I feel just like Cinderella,” she confided to William one night after a game of fast but noncompetitive Ping-Pong. “The only difference is the clock never strikes twelve.”

  Even Ben was swept away by these spring tides, to the degree at least that he, too, stopped smoking. Lacking Sondra’s powers of self-command and her sense of decorum, Ben’s battle against the weed was conducted at center stage of the family theater, with much moaning and groaning, and momentous falls from grace when a late night brandy would tip the scales of willpower and send him out of the house in a panic to find a cigarette vending machine, forays from which he would return repentant and crestfallen. Gradually, however, the crises became rarer, and the lamentations diminished to ordinary kvetching and self-deprecation. Ben even began to use the exercise bicycle in Sondra’s bedroom and to partner her in the exercises recommended in the book on natural childbirth. However, Judith proved to be a better partner, as Ben had no knack for relaxing.

  Through it all William experienced the delight, all the keener for having to be kept secret, of knowing himself to be their benefactor. When he saw his mother sitting cross-legged on the living room’s white carpet rocking back and forth in time to “Puff the Magic Dragon,” it was as though he were singing the tune that had enchanted her. And when he came upon Judith whirling about the house in a black leotard augmented with a red tablecloth while The Rite of Spring blared at top volume from all three sets of downstairs speakers, it was as though he’d been conducting the music and summoning with flicks and jabs of his baton all her contortions and dashings about.

  When Judith saw William in the doorway, she didn’t interrupt her gyrations (the music had come to the “Evocation of the Ancestors” and had momentarily calmed down) but gestured for him to join her on the floor where she was spinning around alternately on her knees and on her behind. He declined, on the grounds that he had homework to do but really because he would have been embarrassed to make such a fool of himself, even though it did look like fun. He’d never been able to cut loose that way, even with rock music. “I’m too inhibited!” he shouted out over the music, and Judith just nodded and paid him no more attention, flicking her sweat-drenched hair about like the mane of a horse, then bending backwards slowly and flailing her arms convulsively when there was a bleat of brasses or a cymbal crash. William himself could never predict just when these explosions would come, but Judith connected with almost every one and seldom got faked out. William was impressed, since even though The Rite of Spring was one of his favorite pieces of music, he was always going blip when Stravinsky was going blat! and vice versa. This was all the more remarkable since Judith had never been known to dance so much as a two-step until this fall, when she’d started taking a course in Interpretive Movement in order to meet St. Tom’s Phys Ed requirement.

  The overall change in Judith since she’d returned from Florida was almost spooky. She seemed another person. It wasn’t just that her face and figure had filled out, but the animating spirit within this new and ampler flesh had changed, too. She moved differently. There was still something abrupt and birdlike about her,
but the bird you might be put in mind of was more likely now to be a swan than a stork. She had started wearing makeup and doing inventive things with her hair. Gone were the Peter Pan blouses, the droopy pastel cardigans, the pleated tartan skirts. In their place was an array of clothing that seemed to present a different hypothesis of the essential Judith Winckelmeyer every day. Sondra’s drawers and closets were filled with years of impulse buying, clothes that had been worn once or twice (or never at all) and then retired to mothball status: shirts and sweaters in all the colors fashion had ever thought to decree; pounds of bracelets, bangles, pins, and beads; the jeans of all major designers; miniskirts and maxiskirts and skirts that formed spiraling, caressing draperies as you walked. Sondra tended to buy off the rack, and many of these old purchases, when they were exhumed from their mothballs, proved to fit the new Judith better than they’d ever fit the old Sondra. Without having to spend a cent of her father’s money, Judith had a wardrobe to rival any at St. Tom’s, and she’d taken to it like a duck (or a swan) to water.

  Meanwhile, since some time in mid-September, the caduceus had begun to regain its former power. Each time William took it from its hiding place in a box of Saran-Wrapped comic books, the tingle he felt on touching it seemed perceptibly greater. Though he could not measure this increase, he knew that the power involved was more than the power of suggestion and that somewhere out beyond William’s ken the caduceus was doing its work. Turnage, with each flick of his 24k Cartier lighter, had been planting seeds of carcinoma in some smoker’s lungs, and those seeds were growing. The effect of this impending harvest on the caduceus had not become apparent until (as Mercury had explained) the outstanding debt for Turnage’s and William’s family’s “health insurance” had been paid in full. Now at last the shifting balance of plus and minus had been restored and soon, as further seedlings ripened to mature cancers, it would be possible to bring William’s unborn sibling within the charmed circle inscribed by the caduceus about the Winckelmeyer household.