Punish the Sinners

by John Saul

In the front row, Judy Nelson’s hand slowly rose.

  “Judy?” Balsam said, then, as she started to stand up, he waved her down. “Not in this class,” he said, smiling. “Let’s save the calisthenics far Latin, shall we?”

  Judy’s eyes widened in surprise; this had certainly never happened at St. Francis Xavier’s before. Not only she, but the entire class seemed to relax. She sank back into her seat.

  “Well?” Balsam prompted her.

  Judy started to speak, then giggled self-consciously, “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just not easy to answer questions sitting down. None of us has ever done it before.”

  Again the class laughed, and Balsam was pleased. So far, everything was going exactly as he planned it.

  “That’s all right,” he said easily. “You’ll get used to it Now, if you haven’t forgotten completely, what did you see in the picture?”

  “Well,” Judy said slowly. “I think it was a skull. At least that’s what it looked like to me.”

  Balsam nodded. “Anybody else see a skull? Raise your hands,” All the hands in the room went up, except one. Marilyn Crane sat, her hands folded on the desk in front of her, her face betraying the shame of having missed out on something.

  “We seem to have a dissenter,” Balsam said, trying to let Marilyn know with a smile that it was all right with him if she hadn’t seen a skull. “What did you see, Marilyn?”

  The girl looked as if she was about to ay. She didn’t want to be the only person who hadn’t seen what everyone else had seen. But she’d seen something different, and she wasn’t going to pretend she hadn’t.

  “I—I suppose it sounds silly, but all I could see was a woman looking at herself in a mirror.”

  Another ripple of laughter passed over the class, but it was derisive, not happy. Before it had died away, Balsam had reached behind him and let the map roll upward into its case, exposing the picture. And then, as they studied it, the class stopped laughing, for Marilyn had been right A second look revealed that the picture was, indeed, a highly detailed drawing of a woman peering into a mirror. It was captioned “Vanity.” Balsam let them absorb the lesson in silence for a moment

  “You see?” he said at last “Nobody was wrong, and nobody was right” The class looked at him, baffled, and Balsam realized he had presented something totally new to them—a situation in which there was no wrong and no right

  “What you’ve just seen,” he told them, “is what we call an experiment in stimulus response. As you may have noted, not everyone reacts to a given stimulus with the same response. How one responds to a given stimulus depends on one’s psychological make-up.” And then, realizing that only Marilyn Crane had responded differently from the rest, he decided to add something for her benefit. “The fact that only Marilyn didn’t see the skull is interesting, isn’t it? You must be an awfully morbid group.” He winked at them, so they would know he was only kidding. But he’d made his point; no one turned to stare at Marilyn. Instead, they stared at each other.

  Balsam glanced at the clock; there were still five minutes left

  “You know,” he said, directing his attention to the class once again, “you all surprise me. For fifty minutes now, I’ve had something carefully concealed on the desk. And not one of you has asked me what it is.” The students looked at each other uncomfortably. “I hope that will change by the end of the term,” Balsam continued dryly. “A little curiosity may have killed the cat, but it never hurt a student. So gather round.”

  He pulled a cloth away, and the students clustered around his desk to see what it was that they should have asked about. It was a wooden box, with a glass top, known as a Skinner box. Under the glass was a white rat. As the students looked on, Peter Balsam flipped a switch on the side of the box, and the rat began pounding at a small lever inside the box. Bach time it hit the lever, a small pellet of food fell into the box. The rat promptly gobbled it up.

  “Conditioned response,” Balsam told them. “The rat has learned that the food will only come out when the light is on and he presses the lever. So every time the light goes on, he presses the lever.” He switched the light off; the rat sat still.

  Around him, the students were talking among themselves, and speculating on the possibilities of the experiment. In the middle of their discussion, the bell rang. Immediately, the discussion ended, and the students began moving back to their seats to gather up their books and notebooks.

  “And that,” Balsam said loudly enough to attract their attention, “is another example of conditioned response. See you tomorrow.”

  They stared at him for a moment, then burst into spontaneous laughter. As Balsam watched them drift out of the room, he decided it was going to work. The psychology class was a success.

  He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk, and took out the brown bag that contained his lunch. Then, as he began slowly munching on a sandwich, a vague discomfort came over him. At first he couldn’t pinpoint the cause of his anxiety, but as he continued eating his lunch it all came clear to him.

  It was the picture, and the way the class had reacted to it. Why, out of thirty students, had all but one of them seen the image of death? Why had only Marilyn Crane, of all the students, seen a woman and a mirror? The ratio was wrong—the class should have been fairly evenly split in their initial perception of the picture.

  But they weren’t.

  5

  Inez Nelson heard the telephone ring, and glanced toward her husband. His eyes remained fixed on the TV. It rang again, and Inez glanced at the ceiling, as if expecting to be able to see Judy running toward the upstairs extension. When it rang for the third time, Inez sighed, got up from her chair, and walked into the kitchen, half-expecting it to stop ringing before she could pick it up. It didn’t

  “Mrs. Nelson?” Inez immediately recognized the voice as Karen Morton’s. “Is Judy there?”

  “Just a minute,” Inez said. She laid the receiver on the kitchen counter and went to the foot of the stairs.

  “Judy!” she called. “For you! Karen Morton!”

  “In a minute,” Judy’s muffled voice called back. Inez walked slowly back to the kitchen and picked up the receiver. “Shell be here in a minute,” she said. She stood by the phone, idly waiting to hear her daughter’s voice before she hung up.

  “Karen?” Judy’s voice came on the line. “I was just going to call you.” Her voice dropped slightly, and her tone became confidential, “I saw him today. I mean he spoke to me.”

  “Who?” Karen asked without much interest

  “Lyle,” Judy said, as if Karen should have known. “Lyle Crandall. Isn’t he gorgeous?”

  “If you like that type,” Karen said. She was not about to admit that she agreed that Lyle Crandall was, indeed, gorgeous.

  “I think he’s neat,” Judy went on. “He looks just like Nick Nolte, only better. Is he coming to your party?”

  “I suppose so,” Karen said, sounding bored. “I mean, I guess he’ll show up with Jim Mulvey, and you better believe Jim’s coming.”

  “But he’s not coming with any of the girls?” Judy asked.

  “It’s not going to be that kind of party,” Karen said. Then, after a slight pause, she added, “At least not at first. But you never know what might happen, do you?”

  Judy felt a wave of anticipation run over her, and wondered if the party was really going to turn out the way Karen had implied. “What about your mother?” she said. “Isn’t she going to be there?”

  A slight snicker came over the wire. “She has to work Saturday night,” Karen replied. “At first she told me I couldn’t have a party if she couldn’t be here, so I told her I was only going to have some girls in. She thinks we’re going to make fudge or something.”

  “What if she finds out boys are going to be there?” Judy wanted to know.

  “She doesn’t get off till midnight” Karen said confidently. “By then we’ll have gotten everybody out of the house.” Then, in a near whisper: �
�Did you tell your mother you were coming over early?”

  “Of course,” Judy said. “You don’t think I’m going to wait till everyone’s there and then change my dress, do you?”

  Karen giggled. “That might be interesting,” she said.

  “Maybe for you,” Judy said archly. “I’m a little more modest.”

  “In that dress?” Karen said. “I didn’t think you bought it because you thought it was modest. I thought you bought it because you thought it was sexy.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Judy breathed. “Do you think Lyle will notice?”

  “How can he miss?” Karen said sarcastically. “With that neckline, and the way it fits, everyone will notice you.” Then she paused a moment. “What if your mother finds out which dress you bought?”

  “She won’t,” Judy said confidently. “Besides, even if she does, I can talk her into letting me keep it” Then, remembering that her mother sometimes stood at the foot of the stairs listening to her when she was on the phone, Judy glanced down the stairwell. No one was there, but she decided enough had been said about the new dress.

  “What do you think of Mr. Balsam?” she asked, changing the subject

  “I guess he’s okay,” Karen replied, not wanting to commit herself to an opinion until she found out how her friends felt about the new teacher. “At least he’s different from the Sisters. But hell probably change. In a week his class won’t be any different from the others.”

  “I don’t know,” Judy said, suddenly thoughtful. “Janet says he’s completely different in Latin than he is in psychology. She says it’s like having two different teachers.”

  “Really?” Karen was suddenly curious. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” Judy said. “I guess he teaches Latin the same way the nuns do, making you stand up to recite, and all that Janet says she thinks it’s because he doesn’t really know Latin very well, and he’s trying to cover up.”

  Karen giggled. “Maybe he’s just crazy, and he’s trying to cover that up by teaching psychology. You know what they say about psychologists—most of them need one.”

  Now both girls laughed, but in the middle of the laughter Judy thought she heard a click, as if someone had picked up the other phone in the kitchen,

  “Well, I have to go now,” she said, cutting into the laughter. She hoped Karen would pick up her signal. “So I’ll come over an hour earlier on Saturday, and help you get ready, all right?”

  There was a short silence while Karen tried to fathom why Judy was breaking off their conversation so suddenly. And then, with the antennae that teen-agers share, she knew what was happening. “That’ll be great,” she said. “If I can get Penny and Janet to come early too, it’ll almost be like having two parties. See you tomorrow.” She hung up the phone, congratulating herself on how quickly she had caught on and helped Judy fool whoever was eavesdropping on them.

  Judy Nelson replaced the phone on its cradle, then stuck her tongue out at the instrument, as if it had been responsible for her mother’s violation of what Judy regarded as a personal and confidential conversation.

  But the click she had heard had not been her mother picking up the downstairs phone; rather, it had been Inez finally replacing the receiver. Now she was back in the living room, and she was fuming. She glanced at her husband, and saw that he was still intent on the baseball game. Well, there wasn’t any use in trying to talk to him anyway. He would simply rebuke her for listening in on something that was none of her business, then tell her that, since tapping telephones is illegal, she couldn’t use anything she had heard against Judy. That, she thought, is what I get for marrying a lawyer. Purposefully, Inez moved to the stairway. George Nelson glanced up.

  “Going upstairs?” he said.

  “I have to talk to Judy,” Inez said, certain that if she told her husband what she was going to talk about, he would stop her. “It won’t take a minute.”

  “Tell her if she wants, I’ll beat her at backgammon in about a half hour,” George said. Then his eyes locked once more on the TV screen. Inez stared at him for a moment, then shook her head grimly. There would be no cozy games between father and daughter this evening, not if she had anything to do with it. She marched up the stairs, entered Judy’s room without knocking, and closed the door behind her.

  From the bed, Judy looked at her mother, and was about to complain about her having come in without knocking, when she realized something was wrong. Her mother was angry. And then she knew. The phone. The click hadn’t been her mother picking up the phone. It had been her mother hanging up. She had heard the wrong part of the conversation.

  “I see you know why I’m here,” Inez began. Judy weighed the chances of bluffing it out. Just how much had she said about the dress? She tried desperately to remember. Too much.

  “Do I?” Judy countered.

  “I think you do,” Inez could feel her temper rising. “I heard you talking to Karen just now.”

  Judy stared defiantly at her mother.

  “You bought that dress, didn’t you?” Inez demanded, her voice accusing.

  “Which one?” Judy stalled.

  “Don’t talk to me that way, young lady,” Inez snapped. “You know very well which one. The one I distinctly told you you couldn’t have. You bought it, and stashed it away at Karen Morton’s, didn’t you?”

  “Well, what if I did?” Judy blurted out “That dress you wanted me to buy made me look twelve years old. And the other one looked nice.”

  “Nice enough to help you get into trouble with Lyle Crandall? Well, it isn’t going to work. Tomorrow afternoon you’re going to get that dress and return it to the store.”

  “Oh, all right,” Judy said, giving in on the theory that simply returning the dress was a comparatively mild punishment.

  “And you can forget about going to that party,” Inez added.

  “Mother—” Judy began, but Inez cut her off.

  “Don’t!” she said, holding up her hand. “If I were you, I’d think more about my sins than how I could get around my mother!”

  Judy stared at her in bafflement. “Sins?” she said blankly. “What are you talking about?”

  Inez’s eyes narrowed. “Do you want me to count them out for you? You can start with the lie. You lied about the dress.”

  “I didn’t,” Judy said defensively. “You never asked me which one I’d bought” It was a technicality, she knew, but she hoped it would work. It didn’t.

  “You would have lied about it, if I had asked you,” Inez snapped. “There’s a commandment about honoring your father and your mother, you know.”

  Suddenly it was too much for Judy. She leaped up from the bed, and stood staring at her mother. And then she burst into tears.

  “Don’t say that,” she screamed. “Wanting to grow up doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s something I want to do for me, not to spite you! Can’t you understand that?” Then, as she saw that her words had had no effect on her mother, Judy fled to the bathroom and locked herself in. She felt the anger well in her, and wished it would resolve itself into more tears. But, instead, it turned into more anger, and she suddenly felt trapped. Trapped like that rat in Mr. Balsam’s box. Well, she’d show her mother. She’d find a way to get even, and her mother would be sorry.

  Outside the bathroom, Inez Nelson stared at the closed door. She listened for a moment, hoping to hear a sound that would tell her what was happening inside. But there was no sound, and she knew that Judy was sulking again, something that seemed to be happening more and more lately. Well, this time she wouldn’t give in, and she would see to it that Judy didn’t find a way to get her father on her side. But she hadn’t reckoned with her daughter’s determination.

  The thought had crossed Peter Balsam’s mind that it might not be a bad idea to give Margo Henderson a call, and invite her Out for a drink. Then the call had come from the rectory, and he had found his plans for the evening abruptly changed.

  Monsign
or Vernon—he was still having trouble with that; he had almost called the priest “Pete”—had asked him to come up to the rectory for a “chat.” Something in his voice told Peter it was a summons, not an invitation; it was a command. So he had trudged up the hill and arrived at the rectory at precisely nine o’clock. Monsignor Vernon had met him in the foyer, as before, and led him down the hall to what apparently was his private den; at least, if others used it, Peter Balsam hadn’t seen them yet. The Monsignor had closed the door behind them, and offered Balsam a glass of sherry. This, Balsam realized, was a ritual, and he wondered if he was expected to decline the offer. Well, if he was, it was too bad. The least the priest could do if he was going to ruin Balsam’s evening was give him a drink. Peter accepted the sherry and took one of the comfortable chairs by the fireplace without waiting for an invitation.

  “Well,” Monsignor Vernon said amiably, sinking into the other chair and holding his glass up to the light “This is nice.” Balsam was unsure if he was referring to the sherry, or things in general. He grunted noncommittally.

  “How did it go?” tìie Monsignor asked him suddenly. “The first day of school, I mean?”

  Balsam shrugged. “As well as can be expected, I suppose.” Then he grinned. “I mean, I’m still alive, and nobody even shot a spitball at me.”

  Monsignor Vernon smiled icily. “They wouldn’t,” he said shortly. “We leave that sort of thing to the public schools.”

  Balsam nodded somberly, a sudden image of Sister Elizabeth flashing into his mind. With her around, he imagined, discipline problems were kept to a minimum at St Francis Xavier’s.

  “I suppose I should get to the point,” the priest said, shifting in his chair. So I was right, Balsam thought This was a command performance. He waited quietly for the Monsignor to begin,

  “I had a chat with Sister Elizabeth this afternoon,” the priest began. “She seemed a little upset about you. She thinks you have what she called a ‘cavalier attitude.’ “

  Balsam smiled at the term, but when he saw that the priest was not smiling, his expression quickly sobered.