Was

by Geoff Ryman

  He tried to take her in his arms and she screamed. It was a horrible sound, a sound like a spaniel caught in a bear trap, a horrible wrenching yelp that turned into a thin, piercing seagull wail, and she pushed the Substitute away.

  “And every day Uncle Henry does it to me, he pushed me up against a wall or down into the dirt, and takes up my dress and he does it to me, with his thing, he does it to me!”

  The other children heard. The Substitute gathered her up and tried to bundle her out of the room, but she fought. She pummeled him about the face. His glasses broke. “You stupid, stupid squirrel. Why did you have to come here? You stupid, stupid man!”

  And then the great galumphing gal curled up onto the floor and wept like a baby.

  She tried to dig a hole in the floor. Her hands were gouging at the varnished wood. She curled up smaller and tighter and tried to dig, her eyes closed, her mouth closed, like a mole, and when he tried to stop her, when he grabbed her wrist she fought and was as strong as he was. Finally he let go, and she went still. She went still, making a small, squeezed, wheedling little sound.

  “If she gets up, keep her here!” he told the class. He turned and ran. He heard his flat feet clatter in the corridor, and he felt his bad heart beat. At first the Principal didn’t believe him.

  “Collapse? Dorothy Gael? That girl has the constitution of an ox.”

  “Even an ox can die of heartbreak,” said the Substitute. “There’s been something terrible going on. She shouted it out, and all the children heard.”

  “Did they indeed? What’s she been doing, stealing peaches? All right, Mr. Baum, I’ll come and see.”

  She was still there on the floor, no longer wailing, but shivering, and she had stuck her thumb in her mouth. Professor Lantz walked in and one of the children giggled. They were all biting their nails.

  “DeEtta,” the Principal said to his assistant, “take the children out into the yard, please.”

  “Come on, children, there’s nothing more to see here,” said Mrs. Warren as the children gaped in wonder.

  “What she said!” breathed out one of the girls.

  The Principal looked up and waited until the children had left. He was taking Dorothy’s pulse rate. It was a scientific thing to do.

  “All right, Mr. Baum. What did she say?”

  The Substitute found he couldn’t say it. He had had a delicate upbringing. The Substitute could feel his cheeks roasting with embarrassment. He sighed and hissed with the difficulty of even finding words for it.

  “Out with it, Mr. Baum, there are only us men here.”

  “She says that her Uncle has relations with her.”

  For just a flicker, as if time had blinked, Professor Lantz went still.

  “I mean, what she actually said was that he pushed his thing up her.” Frank Baum felt his voice suddenly shudder and go weak. He was nearly in tears.

  “Buck up, man,” said Professor Lantz. “It doesn’t surprise me. Dorothy Gael is quite capable of imagining anything. She said this in front of the other children?”

  “Yes,” said the Substitute, overwhelmed by the horror of it.

  “Dorothy Gael,” said the Principal, as if the child were not curled up under his hands, “is a very wicked creature. At times she almost convinces me of the truth of demonic possession. She has said before, herself, that she lies about everything. She is capable of uttering any untruth and, I’m afraid to say, of thinking up all manner of foulness by herself. You do not know the girl, Mr. Baum.” The Principal was fat and had to grunt as he stood up. Without realizing it, he made a gesture of wiping his hands.

  “We’ll get your relative, Dr. Lyman, in to have a look at her. And then we will bundle her up and send her home and ask her never to come back to this school.”

  The Substitute followed him out of the room glancing back and forth between him and the girl. “Are you sure? Are you sure you should send her home?”

  “Where else does she belong, Mr. Baum?”

  “Whatever else may be true, she is desperately unhappy there, Professor Lantz. Please! Look at her! What would make a child try to dig her way into the floor?”

  “I don’t know,” said Professor Lantz, looking back with a half smile. “Perhaps a handsome young actor from New York.”

  The Substitute found that dismay was turning to anger. You are going to blame me for that in there? “What,” the Substitute asked, drawing himself up, “what if what she said is the truth?”

  Professor Lantz stopped smiling and his gaze when steely.

  “There must be a reason for it!” exclaimed the Substitute.

  “The only reason,” said the Principal, “is fantasy. Fantasy is pretty unhealthy as a general rule. I will remind you, Sir, that you are an itinerant actor invited here to teach a class for a few days at the suggestion of Dr. Lyman. You do not know Dorothy Gael, nor her guardians, the Gulches. You could not hope to meet more God-fearing or civic-minded people. Her uncle takes her to and from Manhattan every day, the distance of four miles each way, simply to bring her here since her last school failed to effect any improvement. She gets the best care her people can afford. Particularly since she must be a very great trial to them. And I am afraid, Sir, that we will not be requiring your services tomorrow. After creating that incident in there I think you can see why. Cigar smoke and all.”

  The Professor waved his hand in the air as if to wipe away the stench of smoke, of actor, of fantasy.

  Dr. Lyman arrived, with a weary glace at his worthless young cousin. “Sexual hysteria,” he pronounced, having heard the story from Professor Lantz. “There’s not much I can do for her, except take her home. Which under the circumstances I will do gratis. Not my normal policy.” He glanced up again at the actor. “Frank, perhaps you would care to assist.”

  “I will ride back with her,” said the Substitute.

  “No,” said the Doctor. “You will not.”

  They got the great lump of a girl to stand. She really was huge, the size of a grown woman and stronger than most boys her age. The Substitute took her hand, and she grasped his firmly, but he had the feeling she did not know who he was. The flesh on her face hung dead and limp and yellow. She was quite tame. She stepped up onto the Doctor’s coach as if somnambulating. The effect was curiously ladylike. She sat tall and straight. The face had a faraway expression, almost refined, and the Substitute had time to see that the face was beautiful. With the anger and the pain fallen from her, Dorothy Gael would have been a beautiful woman.

  And then the child murmured, “Frank. Frank.”

  And the Substitute thought: Oh no. They were right.

  “Frank,” she said again, in a faraway, failing voice, and it was the voice of a little, little girl, calling for a story.

  Dr. Lyman, his fearsome host, glared at the Substitute and raised an eyebrow and clucked with his tongue and shook the reins, and the coach swept around in a gracious circle. With the wheels spinning faster, making patterns across each other’s faces, the coach sped away down Poyntz.

  The Substitute turned and walked back toward the classroom. It was nearly dark now.

  Was it his fault? It must have been his fault. He thought of his cigar and his stories and leaning on the desk, and he felt like a fool, a fool of a show-off actor. Damn, he murmured. Damn. And he needed the money, too.

  He walked back into the classroom. It was silent and smelled of children and warm, dead wood. He gathered up his hat and his umbrella and sighed and opened the door to go. He looked back to check if he had left anything behind. On the desk there was a piece of paper.

  He picked it up and read it again, and he was sure, he knew that he had been right, that the child had told the truth. He read it and felt the pit open up under his feet.

  “Oh, mercy,” he said aloud.

  A place where no one ever laughed except to frighten or to crow victory, a place without love, a child who had no love, except when she dreamed that she still had a dog.

  “
How could they?” he said aloud, looking about him in anger. She was telling the truth and they were all determined not to believe her. The horror of it rose up and choked his gentle soul. “I wish I could do something, Dorothy,” he whispered. “I wish there was something I could do.”

  He stared at the piece of paper and nearly let it drop. Then he folded it up and put it in his pocket with its names—Dorothy, Em, Henry, Toto. He picked up the red book of Osmanli, the language of Oz. Then he moved on. The door closed behind him and his footsteps echoed down the Kansas corridor.

  Corndale, Ontario,

  Canada

  November 1956—Spring 1957

  The picture also opened well in the thirty-two key cities surveyed by Variety, bringing in more money in the first week than such recently successful MGM films as Goodbye Mr. Chips and Idiot’s Delight. But the picture didn’t have enough legs to justify its cost…The Wizard of Oz cost $2,777,000 and grossed $3,017,000 for the studio. When the cost of distribution, prints and advertising were added to the cost of making The Wizard of Oz, it meant a loss to the studio of nearly a million dollars. The movie edged into the black during its first re-release in 1948–49, when it brought in another $1,500,000; but it did not really make money until it was leased to television…

  The film was shown for the first time on 3 November 1956 from 9 to 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. With a 33.9 rating and a 52.7 per cent share of the audience, The Wizard of Oz did extremely well—but not as well as it did 1959, 1964, and 1965. As of July 1975, The Wizard of Oz was in 11th place on the list of the highest-rated movies ever shown on network television. (It was also in 12th place, 14th place, 16th place, 21st place, 23rd place and 25th place.)

  — ALJEAN HARMETZ,

  The Making of the Wizard of Oz

  In his later years, Jonathan would look at old photographs of the house in Corndale. There would be a kind of electric jolt from the photographs, a cattle-prodding of memory. The photographs were surprisingly small, cracked, rather greasy-looking, with crinkle-cut edges like tiny pies.

  In the photographs Jonathan would see his father’s old drinking mug and Jonathan would remember its rich brown color and the black etchings of highwaymen printed onto its surface. It was silver around the rim and made everything taste slightly of beer. He would see the wicker basket in which logs were kept next to the fireplace. He would suddenly be able to feel in his fingertips the smoothness of the wickerwork, with its suddenly harsh edges. He would remember how dismayed he was as a child when the basket was displaced from its corner by a new desk.

  He would see a brass elephant bell, and he would remember its sound and he would remember the shelving it had been kept on. It stood in a glass display case built into the wall next to the front door. The case went through the wall; its outside was frosted glass. Standing on the front steps, you could see all the treasures kept inside it: a brass ice bucket; a porcelain squirrel that was a souvenir of Algonquin Park. They would be seen as if through a mist.

  In the photographs Jonathan would see his parents when they were young. He would see his mother, standing on a pile of dirt in high-heel shoes in the early 1950s. His mother was the picture of Canadian elegance, her yearning for style and urbanity revealed in immaculate hair and dress and the angle at which her cigarette was held. His father was standing beside her, with his shock of Einstein hair. He was young and slim and bare chested. A baby hung suspended from his arms. This was the ground-breaking for the new house in Corndale. Beside them, in swim trunks, with a shovel, there was a rather handsome Scottish-looking man whom Jonathan did not know. Neither, now, did his parents.

  His first world. Through all the later changes in his life, Jonathan would remember his childhood as happening in that house. They had moved away from it when he was nine years old, but the interior of the Corndale house was the continent of his infancy.

  The photographs would bring it back. He would remember the uncomfortable texture of the gray sofa. It had raised, rough, surfaces in the shapes of flowers and vines. They made his skin itch.

  He preferred instead to lie on the floor under the ultramodern chairs. He would trace with his finger the snakelike wiggle of the metal strands that supported the cushions. He liked the feeling of being enclosed, hidden, safe.

  One of the ultramodern chairs was crimson, the other was bright green, and they stood by a lime-green throw rug that slipped underfoot on the polished pinewood floors which always smelled of wax. There were bookcases made of boards sandwiched between bricks, and on them stood small Indian vases, with bright blue and yellow flowers embedded in the red ceramic.

  Jonathan could remember the colors, even though the photographs were black-and-white. This was very strange. Jonathan was colorblind. Except in the strongest light, green and red looked the same to him. Blue and purple were indistinguishable.

  So how had the infant been able to see them? Jonathan could remember loving red, a color he could not now perceive.

  Love is almost too feeble a word for the rich passion that red had inspired. Red moved the infant Jonathan like music. In his coloring books, everything was red. He wanted the whole world to be red. He tried to make it red.

  He would steal his mother’s ruby lipsticks and, to her misery, scrawl all over the walls, over the pale pinewood of his bookcase, over the prints of Canadian forest scenes. He alarmed her by painting his fingernails red with her polish. He would rub lipstick all over his face, surprising visitors.

  Jonathan loved Indians. They were called Red Men. He had an Indian blanket that was red and a pink piggy bank that looked like Pow Wow the Indian boy. He loved his picture books that were full of pictures of Indians, hunting buffalo in the grass or dancing. He would coat them with layers of red—lipstick, jam and Crayola crayon.

  It was difficult for Jonathan to imagine now, but he had been a very bad little boy. He was still surprised to hear his aged mother refer to him as a problem child. The person Jonathan remembered being was a horribly polite, cringingly well-behaved child who loved his parents and thought of them as his best friends.

  But the photographs showed a burly, tough-looking boy. The Corndale house was growing around him in stages. He would stand chuckling amid its wooden skeleton holding a hammer, a wild destructive light in his eyes. He was a hefty little brute who looked as if he would grow up round and small and hearty. Jonathan had grown up to be tall and thin, distant and mild.

  The little thug looked wonderfully happy. Jonathan the adult was tempted to say insanely happy. The eyes sometimes seemed to be stricken with a faraway vision, fogged with wonder. The smile sometimes blazed beyond delight. Something broken would be clutched in his stained and brutish, pudgy fist. The smiles of his parents would be sideways and nervous.

  Jonathan needed reminding that Dr. Montemuro in Streetsville had diagnosed him as being autistic.

  Jonathan had smiled and Jonathan had rocked. He would sit on the floor cross-legged and rock back and forth for hours. Jonathan the adult could not sit cross-legged at all.

  The bad little boy had rocked himself to sleep each night. He threw himself back and forth, until the cot swayed dangerously, wood creaking. His parents said they had built the extension to give themselves a separate room in which to sleep. The rocking was very noisy, particularly as the little boy hummed and keened to himself. The songs would be wild, tuneless, like the crying of a bird, his mother said. He shook his head from side to side as if denying the world. He would fall asleep from sheer exhaustion.

  He ripped his sheets. He tore holes in them big enough to crawl through. His mother thought it was his constant nightly exertions. In fact, he tore them quite deliberately with a guilty, almost sexual delight. He would work a small tear in the center and gradually prize it open.

  He was trying to make a hole big enough to climb through. It was as though the sheet were a screen that separated him from somewhere else. When the hole was large enough, he would climb through it, hoping to emerge somewhere wonderful. It was a dis
appointment to him, to find himself still alone in his room. He kept on tearing sheets.

  He was subject to fits of blinding rage.

  He broke his Indian bow and arrow quite coldly out of hatred for something he did not understand. It was terrible because he had truly loved his Indian bow and arrow. He was stricken with remorse.

  “Is that your bow? Your new bow?” his mother demanded, invisible from within the house. He wept as he held it up, like a broken bird.

  “Well, this time your father is not going to fix it for you.”

  He hid under his Indian blanket in the driveway. He knew his father would coast into the driveway, up and over it, over him.

  “You stupid child! Don’t you ever do that again!” his mother said in alarm, shaking him, her eyes wide and fearful. Jonathan’s face was covered in the red crushed juice of berries, as if he were bleeding.

  What kind of kid was that? Jonathan asked himself, remembering. And why did he look so happy?

  His earliest memory was of being small enough to be bathed in the bathroom sink. He kept striking the warm water, to make it splash over him. “Oooh, lovely warm water,” his mother cooed. He understood her. He said something in reply, in the language of childhood, a series of sounds. His mother didn’t understand him. Why not?

  Jonathan could remember the moment of dismay when the infant realized that he would have to use the same word each time for the same thing. He could remember the horror: he realized the size of the task ahead of him. He became enraged with disappointment. The world should work so that everyone understood out of love, as he did.

  Jonathan did not begin to speak until he was three years old. He was angry. He rejected the world out of rage.

  The scrawls he made on the walls were writing without words, messages in Crayola and lipstick. “Walt Disney owns Cinderella and Mickey Mouse and Disneyland too,” the scrawls would say in the swirling shapes of cyclones.

  When Jonathan finally decided to speak, it was in a complete sentence. He had been able to speak all along. Every family has its legends, and this was one his mother was pleased to relate, entertaining visitors.