Hiding Places

by Shannon Heuston

  The front door opened. Maggie had her own key. I stood up, letting the throw fall to the floor. I could hear Maggie stamping her feet on the welcome mat, knocking the snow off her shoes.

  I padded out to the foyer in my stocking feet. “You look frozen,” I commented, peering at her ruddy cheeks. “I’m sorry. I should have gone to pick you up.”

  Maggie shook her head, unwinding a long scarf from around her neck. “It’s a good thing you didn’t. Dr. Loren was there, picking up her daughter. The daughter sat with me on the bus and talked nonstop for six hours. She was coming back from visiting her father in Clifton Park.”

  Dr. Loren was one of the younger professors, a perky blonde in her mid-thirties. She taught Women’s Studies. She was a friendly, talkative young woman, popular amongst both students and staff. I avoided her.

  “She didn’t offer you a ride? I’m surprised,” I commented.

  It felt good projecting my own guilt into outrage at someone else.

  “I told her I was staying with a friend in the Main Street Apartments,” Maggie said, referring to second and third floor walk-ups over the bars and pizza joints that made up Baylor’s meager downtown. The Bus Depot was down a side street off Main Street. “She took off before I made it out to the street, or she’d have known I was lying.” She smiled with pride at her subterfuge.

  The surge of relief that washed over me felt wrong, but I couldn’t help it. I was glad Dr. Loren hadn’t driven Maggie to my house. Dr. Loren, champion of women’s rights, was unlikely to out us to the community, but I didn’t want to put that to the test.

  “Papa tried to stay up, but he’s been battling a cold for a few days,” I explained. “He fell asleep right after dinner.”

  “That’s okay, it’s nice to have a few minutes to ourselves,” Maggie said, following me into the kitchen.

  I smiled nervously. Maggie always did this to me, reduced me to a nervous wreck. To think I once believed myself above such things, but now I was knocking over pots and pans, all thumbs.

  “Let me,” Maggie said, taking the kettle from me and filling it with water.

  “I was going to make you hot chocolate. I picked up some Swiss Miss at the supermarket,” I whispered, wringing my hands.

  Maggie grinned. “Thanks.”

  I sat down, watching as the girl poured boiling water into two mugs. “You got the kind I like, the one with the little marshmallows,” she said shyly. “When I was little, I thought the cocoa with the marshmallows was something special.”

  She handed me a mug and bumped it clumsily against her own. “Cheers!”

  We sat side by side in the kitchen, silently sipping, the awkward silence stretching between us.

  I cleared my throat. “How is your family?”

  I sounded like an old lady exchanging pleasantries over tea.

  Maggie rolled her eyes. “Jana demanded a new television set, so I got her one. She told me that I didn’t have to get her another gift for Christmas. She said the television was enough.” She paused to swallow. “One of these days, I’m gonna learn. Apparently, I was not supposed to take her at her word and should have bought her another gift. She threw a screaming fit about it on Christmas Day. Fortunately, my aunt gave me a fifty-dollar gift card. She calmed down after I let her have it.”

  The guilt was back with a vengeance. Compared to the cozy little Christmas I just shared with Papa, Maggie’s holiday sounded like hell. And it was my fault. She wanted to stay here. No wonder. I grew up with parents who were quiet. I could not imagine what it must be like to deal with a parent who threw tantrums like a spoiled child.

  “I’m sorry. I should have let you stay,” I said. I was getting sick of apologizing. Maybe I should stop inventing reasons to be a bitch.

  Maggie shrugged. “It would have caused too many questions. It was better for me to go home to my family. I get to missing them when I’m gone for a long time. I start forgetting what they’re like. I need to go home to appreciate being away from them.”

  “I cannot fathom how anyone could be mean to you. Especially your mother. I would be so proud to have someone like you as a daughter.”

  Maggie blushed. “So, what have you been doing?” she asked.

  I yawned and checked the time. It was just after eight. There is something about these cold frigid nights that make you want to go to bed early and hibernate under layers of blankets. Tonight, I’d have the girl’s warm body snuggled next to mine. The thought made me want to go to bed immediately.

  “I’ve been researching Stanley Milgraum’s experiments,” I finally answered.

  Maggie wrinkled her nose. “Who?”

  “We studied him the last couple of days of class,” I chided, ever the instructor. “He’s the Yale professor who conducted the experiments on obedience, to see how far someone would go to obey authority.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention in class, I was too busy checking out the hot professor,” Maggie teased, with a toss of her curls. “I think I need some one-to-one instruction.”

  I didn’t take the bait. “He began his experiments following the Nuremberg trials, when a lot of the Nazi defendants claimed they were merely following orders when they committed atrocities,” I said, curling my fingers around the handle of my mug to feel its warmth. “He devised an experiment to see how far the average American would go to obey authority. To see if an ordinary American was capable of the same acts under orders.”

  Maggie looked troubled. “I remember now.”

  “Participants were told they were partaking in an experiment on memory and how punishment affects learning,” I continued, as if the girl hadn’t spoken. This was my pet topic. I could talk about it all day. “A learner would be given a group of word pairs to memorize. The teacher would then read the first word and the learner was given a list of possible answers. Each time he got an answer wrong, he would receive an electric shock. The strength of the shocks would increase with every wrong answer.”

  “The participants drew scraps of paper to determine who would be the learner and the teacher. Once the experiment began, and the learner missed a question, the teacher was ordered to shock him. In each case, the learner would complain that the shocks were painful, and claim to suffer from a heart condition. The instructor administering the experiment would tell the teacher to ignore the learner’s discomfort and continue shocking him. In a large percentage of cases, the teacher continued shocking the learner on command, even after they passed out and ceased responding.”

  Maggie stated, “There were no electric shocks. The learner was just an actor. The real subject of the experiment was the teacher, to see if he’d hurt someone under orders. I remember.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Turns out, most of our fellow Americans would hurt someone if ordered to by someone in authority. The teachers who refused to continue when the learner cried out in pain were in the minority.”

  “But that experiment was a long time ago. The early 1960’s, correct? Things are different now. “

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “That’s why I would like to do a similar experiment.”

  “Baylor wouldn’t go for that,” Maggie scoffed, “and you wouldn’t get accurate results anyway. Like you said, it’s still 1955 here.”

  “This is true,” I admitted. I put down my empty mug. “Enough of this. Let’s go to bed. I missed you.”

  After making love, we lay awake, listening to the grandfather clock tolling in the hall.

  “I hate that clock,” I stated, staring up at the ceiling. “It was here when we moved in.”

  “Really?” Maggie said. “Maybe it was here all the way back when this place was a station on the underground railroad.”

  “It’s not that old,” I scoffed, “it’s battery operated. Not much of that going on in the nineteenth century.”

  “Why don’t you just get rid of it, then?”

  “Too much trouble,” I admitted, nudging the girl. “Did you tell anyone about us? A friend? Your cousin?”


  Maggie bristled. “Of course not. You told me to keep it a secret. I wouldn’t tell anyone in my family anyway. I don’t even want to imagine the hateful things they’d say.”

  “I told Papa,” I confessed.

  Maggie rose up on one elbow. “My God,” she said. “How did he take it?”

  “He said he already knew,” I said. “I’m not sure he understands. Like, what it is we do together. But at least he’s accepted it.”

  “I was more worried about his reaction than anyone else’s,” Maggie said. “I don’t care what they think. But your father thinks I’m an angel. I thought he’d be disgusted to find out I was sleeping with his daughter.”

  “The older generation can be a lot more accepting than one would expect,” I explained. “Having lived so long and experienced so much, they’ve learned what is important. Love is important.”

  “I love you, Ursula,” Maggie replied.

  I stayed silent for a long time. I could hear the girl breathing short, panicked breaths, and knew she was in agony. Finally, I put her out of her misery. “I’m not going to lie. I love you too,” I said, “enough that I worry. I’m too old for you. You still have so much to experience of life. I don’t want to mold you, usurp your identity, and influence your path. That’s something you need to do yourself.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Maggie argued. “You can teach me so much.”

  “You might feel differently in ten years,” I reminded her. “Or twenty. I’ll be retiring, and you’ll still be relatively young.”

  “I won’t ever change my mind about you,” Maggie insisted, ending all discussion on the topic.

  I turned onto my side, away from her. It was not for the girl I feared, but for myself, a nameless terror I couldn’t articulate. What if the girl became my sun, the axis around which my life revolved, only to leave? What if she took off in twenty-five years, when she was still young enough to start over, leaving me to face my waning years alone? I would rather always be alone, then become dependent on someone else.

  It would be better if Maggie left now, while there was time for both of us to start over.

  Life offers no guarantees, I reminded myself, recalling the former colleague who married a much older woman, only to drop dead of an aneurysm three months later. Twenty years later, the woman was still alive. No one could ever have predicted it.

  Was it better to live a loveless life, with nothing to lose, or open yourself up to love and risk losing everything?

  Maggie’s breathing evened out. She was sleeping on her side, her arm curled over her head. She used to sleep on her arm. I had broken her of that habit. “You’ll end up with compressed nerves and all kinds of problems, if you keep that up,” I said. “You probably think I’m being a pain in the ass, but ten years from now, when you need to have an operation to free a pinched nerve, you won’t be happy.”

  The girl was ethereally beautiful in the moonlight falling through the lace curtains framing the floor to ceiling windows. I didn’t have shades on the windows up here. It was too high for anyone on the ground to see in, and the suffocating gloom of the lower floor infected me with a desire for sunshine and moonlight.

  Maggie was a fairy creature come to life, a nymph sleeping nude in my big old fashioned four posted bed. An errant curl had fallen across her cheek, and I brushed it away, leaning over to trace her porcelain skin with my lips, inhaling. She smelled like wind and baby powder and something citrusy.

  I probably smelled like mold.

  I collapsed against the pillows, unable to sleep.

  I carefully slid out from beneath the comforter, taking care not to shake the mattress and disturb the sleeping princess. I wrapped myself in a plaid bathrobe. I looked in on Papa on my way down to my office. He was sound asleep with his head thrown back, making a faint whistling noise as air passed in and out of his congested nostrils.

  I felt like a ghost gliding through the dark halls.

  I shut the blinds in my office, suddenly feeling exposed, like there were eyes watching me from outside. It was eerily quiet, the way it always seemed to be on bitterly cold nights, when no one was outside, not even the neighborhood dogs.

  I switched on my laptop and settled behind my desk, tugging my robe around me.

  I used to think I had seen all the available footage on the Milgraum experiments, but whenever I checked YouTube, something new had been added.

  I bit my lip as I watched the grainy black and white footage of the teacher, swiveling around in his chair to address the instructor when the learner shrieked that his heart was bothering him. There were distressingly few “teachers” who challenged the experiment. Milgraum had concluded that Americans were no more willing to challenge authority than Nazi soldiers.

  Very few participants refused to continue shocking the learner. They all hesitated, but when ordered to go on by the instructor, they obeyed, ignoring the screams and pleas.

  Would Maggie be one of the few who refused?

  I had to know. I needed to know what kind of person Maggie was, deep down inside at her core. Would she defy orders and refuse to hurt someone else, or would she be one of the many who laughed to hide their discomfort, as they went on torturing the shrieking learner?

  My mind turned back to the experimental re-education program the federal government wanted Baylor to host next summer.

  Illegal aliens requiring re-education, immigrants forced to adopt American customs quickly. Real people who bled red. Not actors pretending to be receiving electric shocks. Flesh and blood people who could be hurt.

  One of the flaws in Milgraum’s experiment was the teachers were told the shocks were painful but harmless. They didn’t believe they were hurting anyone. In contrast, the Nazis knew they were hurting people, that their screams were real and their injuries permanent. An important distinction.

  How would the fine students of Baylor University, tasked with re-educating a group of aliens, fare? How far would they go to ensure these illegals learned to be good Americans?

  How far would innocent, wide-eyed Maggie go?

  I needed to find out.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ursula

  “We are pleased you have agreed to head our program, Dr. Reiter,” the government official said.

  I never caught his name. It was just as well. He was just another nameless man visiting the college, men that wore suits and were slightly balding and smiled with too many teeth, interchangeable. Politicians. Always men. Never women.

  “Well, it took some convincing, but we did it!” Dr. Heinrich enthused, as if I’d been difficult.

  I inhaled, counting to ten before giving them both a cold smile. I was a woman in academia. I was used to men taking credit for my ideas and decisions. I’d ignored it for many years. It never really mattered. Yet now I found it insufferable. I was sick of the boy’s club. I wanted better for Maggie.

  When did I start caring?

  The official turned back to me. “I’ve heard wonderful things about you,” he said. “And your background, with all the research you’ve done on the Holocaust, will really benefit this program.”

  How so? Really, what did he mean by that? Did he want me to employ the tactics used by the Nazis? I decided not to ask. I would prefer not to know the answer.

  “Ursula is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor,” Dr. Heinrich informed him.

  Heinrich. That was a German name. I wondered when his family emigrated to the United States. What had they been doing during the Holocaust? Did they have an alibi? I nearly laughed out loud at my own thoughts.

  The official flashed his teeth in a predatory smile. Was that the way Nazi bureaucrats had smiled, ordering the deaths of millions with a signature? “Really? Fascinating. He was in one of the camps, then?” His eyes glittered. Maybe it was just the sunlight reflecting off the snow outside.

  I took a swallow of tea to cover my discomfort, involuntarily making a face. Too hot. I put my mug down hastily. “He was in Auschwitz,�
� I replied. “But he was hidden for most of the war by a Christian family. They were betrayed towards the end by an informant.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That’s very interesting, since our guests were also turned in by informants.”

  I looked past him, out the window to the heavy crust of snow coating the campus. It was mid-March, but winter had yet to loosen its iron grip on the North Country. A lone student scurried down the path between the Student Union and the library, head down against the frigid wind. It seemed unbelievable to be discussing a summer program.

  “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  “Well, we took a poll. Our fellow Americans have some very definite ideas about what sorts of people should be allowed to stay in our country. That they speak English tops the list. Thus, teaching these aliens English is of the utmost importance.”

  “The United States doesn’t have a national language,” I informed him. “There are no laws on the books stating that a person must speak English to live here.”

  He waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t worry overmuch about the details,” he said. “Most Americans believe that if you want to live here, you need to assimilate. That means speaking English.”

  I was ticking through possibilities in my brain. “Would setting up a system of punishment and reward be appropriate?” I queried. “As a psychologist, of course I am very curious to see what kind of impact this would have on the learning process.”

  “Of course,” the officer answered. “We understand that the opportunity to experiment on live subjects is an added incentive to directing the program.”

  I took a deep breath. Did he just give me the freedom to do whatever I wanted to the participants? “What sorts of punishment would be allowed?”

  “Ms. Reiter, ugh, Dr. Reiter,” he corrected himself, “these are throwaways. I know that’s harsh, but the US government is only giving them the opportunity to stay here to satisfy the Liberals. Good Americans don’t want them here. Failing to complete the program means immediate deportation. They need to please you. If they don’t, out they go.”