The Inverted Forest

by John Dalton

  “What else?” Schuller wanted to know.

  “Something between a friendship and a romance, but whatever it was, it was unofficial.”

  “You mean secret. A secret affair. No need to make it sound better than it really is.”

  This secret affair went on for three months. Sometimes this local man would accompany Linda back to camp after the saloon closed and stick around long enough to help her feed the horses in the morning.

  “Oh, Lord,” Schuller groaned. How it aggravated him to hear this.

  According to Linda, this local man was a decent enough fellow—hardworking, trustworthy. He knew how to talk and how to listen. He was handsome. Or at least she’d held these high opinions of him until last night, Friday night. She’d planned an elaborate dinner for the two of them. In her mind it marked the three-month anniversary of the start of their relationship. She sent an invitation to the lumberyard where he worked. She went shopping for clothes and a bit of makeup. She bought food and wine, and tidied up the mess hall. But, of course, when Friday night rolled around, he didn’t show. So she waited a few hours and then she went to the saloon to see if there had been a mix-up. No mix-up. He wasn’t there, either. She came back to camp, waited some more, called his house several times, and hung up when a woman answered. By then she was on the verge of throwing dinner in the trash. Instead she climbed in the camp van and drove to his trailer park, circling round and round until she spotted his car. All the while she was feeling wilder, more frantic. She stormed up to his trailer door and banged away. No one answered, though there were lights on. So she pulled the van right up across their tiny yard to the front steps, turned on the high beams, and began laying on the horn, over and over . . . until the police arrived.

  “What in the Lord’s name?” Schuller said. “What was she hoping to accomplish?”

  Sandie didn’t know. He said she probably hadn’t been thinking rationally. And now she felt miserable about it all; mostly because when the police were hauling her away, the woman and her little girl came out of the trailer and Linda could see that she’d terrified them.

  “Of course she did,” Schuller said.

  There was more still. As it happened, the local man wasn’t even home. The police told Linda he’d gone to Springfield with friends to see a motorcycle rally. Linda said she kept going over it all in her head. He knew about the special dinner. She was certain of it. He’d just chosen to do something else that night. What galled her most was that he hadn’t called or sent back the invitation to let her know he wouldn’t be coming. He wasn’t honest enough to tell her no.

  She’d made this confession to Sandie while standing on the porch of her cottage, smoking a cigarette with an unsteady hand. She said that after a night in jail she’d come to the conclusion that while she may have been a worthy enough friend to drink and talk intimately with each Friday night—and to sleep with, too—she wasn’t the kind of woman he wanted to think of as a girlfriend or a lover. No romance. No tenderness. Or, at least, none that could be acknowledged. In part it was her fault, she said, because she’d fooled herself into thinking it might be otherwise. But not anymore. She knew what she was. She knew how men thought of her, how little of themselves they were willing to give. She’d go back to knowing herself the way she did before this relationship. She promised she would.

  For all Schuller knew, every word of Linda Rucker’s confession—as told to him by Sandie—had been utterly sincere, utterly true. Were he a more cynical man, he might have suspected that her story had been softened by Sandie so that Linda Rucker could retain her position as program director. Because it had certainly turned out that way. She’d made all the proper amends, paid back the bond money, written what must have been a convincing letter of apology to the woman she’d terrorized. By summertime the charges of harassment and trespassing had been dropped.

  Schuller decided to hold his staff meeting in the camp office, in the hour after lunch, known at Kindermann Forest as the siesta hour. Outside the afternoon had turned humid and hot, and much of this balminess had found its way inside the office. But the counselors and wrangler and lifeguards seemed not to notice. They’d arrived in a cheerful mood and had lined up against the walls or had sprawled languorously across the office furniture, stretching their suntanned limbs, smoothing the ragged hems of their cutoff shorts. Wherever Schuller turned his gaze, he saw the fussy and preening gestures of the self-absorbed.

  “I’m afraid we have a problem,” he began and then told them straightaway. “The male campers of Cabin Two have been congregating in the back of the sleeping barracks at night and having sex with one another.”

  Did they appear startled? Yes. Startled to have him say such a thing aloud, yet they seemed to be on familiar terms with the news itself.

  “Here’s what Linda Rucker and I want you to know,” he said. “This absolutely will not continue. We are making plans to separate the male campers of Cabin Two, and if anything remotely like this is happening in your cabin, it’s essential that you tell us at once. We are deeply concerned. Do not doubt for a moment that we’re in charge and ready to take action.”

  He seemed now to have everyone’s attention, the young women with their carefully brushed ponytails and jaunty postures, the young men, who, under the weight of the matter being discussed, had decided to fold their arms and stand up squarely.

  “We began the State Hospital Session in such a rush,” Schuller said. “I would have liked to talk with you right at the start. But I haven’t had the chance, until now, to share a few thoughts with you. Thoughts on the state hospital campers. And so I’ll begin by asking a very simple question. Who are the retarded?”

  As he might have expected, the counselors were made bashful by such a question. They pulled at the seams of their clothing. They lowered their heads, frowned in concentration.

  “I don’t mean to put you on the spot,” he said. “You can answer however you like. Who are the retarded? Please tell me.”

  Together they endured a lengthy silence. Schuller, who’d chosen to stand sentrylike before the director’s desk, was happy to wait them out.

  A young woman raised her hand. “Someone with a mental condition,” she said. “A mental condition that causes a low IQ.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s a good start, I suppose.”

  “A very low IQ,” someone said. “Lower than a hundred.”

  “And behavior problems, too,” a young man offered.

  Apparently they’d gotten over their bashfulness, were willing now to offer opinions like so many dull coins pitched into a fountain.

  “No, no. Not lower than a hundred. Lower than seventy.”

  “Seventy or a hundred. Does it really matter?”

  “It does if you have an IQ of ninety-nine.”

  “Well let’s just say it’s a hundred then.”

  “But it’s not. It’s seventy!”

  “Oh, shut up, Wayne, you stinking puddle of—”

  An explosion of laughter. They pitched forward in their seats and howled. Whatever this joke might mean, the counselors appeared to love it.

  Eventually the room ebbed a few degrees quieter. “Let me answer the question a different way,” Schuller said. “Let me answer by telling you who the retarded are not. They are not children, not exactly. And not helpless, either. There are many things they can and will do on their own, provided they know what’s expected of them. And provided someone in authority is standing nearby ready to urge them in the right direction.

  “But they’re definitely not adults. I’ll say it again. Not adults. Even though some supposed experts have complained that you insult the retarded if you don’t pretend they are all independent adults.” He surveyed his audience to see if anyone thought this an idea worth defending. No one did. “Imagine the questions these experts think we should be asking. For example, do the retarded want to vote and marry and have children? Do they want to sleep with one another? Some would say that they do want these things.
Why? Because it is what we are supposed to want. We are all human, you and I and the retarded. Therefore we must all want the same things.

  “But if you can find a retarded person who hasn’t been influenced by these expectations, they will always be ambivalent about such matters. They don’t care either way. They don’t particularly share our wishes and desires. Our appetites. And yet, like children, they are very good at imitating the things we do. Think of how it is that so many of the campers smoke cigarettes. Where do you suppose they learned this? From their caretakers, of course. And if you look close at the way they smoke cigarettes—that frantic huffing and puffing—then you’ll see they’re acting out a habit they don’t even understand.”

  Schuller could see Linda Rucker sunk deep into a padded chair at the back of the office. He could read her half-squinting gaze well enough: she thought he was taking too much obvious pleasure in his speechmaking. Perhaps he was. But should it be done any other way? Was he supposed to convince his audience by being stodgy and dull and fumbling with his words?

  He waved off her unspoken criticism with a slow shake of the head and said to the assembled counselors, “I honestly cannot imagine what these experts in charge of the state hospital are thinking. To allow the retarded to imitate our worst habits. And then, when they are sick from smoking or hysterical from all the sex and violence they see on the television, then, these experts say to themselves, ‘Oh my, it’s time to cure our retarded patients with therapy or protect them with medication.’ What nonsense. Wouldn’t it be better to create for the retarded an environment in which these influences don’t exist at all?”

  A long moment passed before his audience understood he had ended his address. They stared at him, perplexed. He smiled back.

  “Are you saying,” a young woman asked, “that we should take away their cigarettes? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He told her no, he was not. “I’m talking about an idea,” he said. “An idea of Kindermann Forest Summer Camp as a refuge.”

  She gave him a respectful yet dubious nod, an expression of reluctance he saw mirrored on nearly every other face in the room. With one exception: Christopher Waterhouse. He was still thinking through Schuller’s message, still straddling his foldout chair and tipping his forehead up and down, concentrating, and then, as Schuller watched, arriving at a judgment of what he’d just heard—a judgment in favor of Schuller’s message. Clearly this was the case because he rose from his seat with a look of half-grinning approval and turned to the wrangler, Stephen Walburn, one of the more dour skeptics, and pretended to exchange a series of slow-motion punches. (They were fond of acting out elaborate, balletlike slaps and punches, this group.)

  “It’s an idea,” Christopher Waterhouse said. “If you could roll back the clock and raise them from infants without influences, they’d be totally different people.”

  Stephen Walburn shrugged thoughtfully. Nearby other counselors listened in. It was a measure of Christopher Waterhouse’s standing with the group that those who a moment earlier had been ready to argue or ridicule were now willing to stop and reconsider.

  For that Schuller was grateful.

  He had the rest of the day to do with as he pleased. Hours and hours indisputably his own. In his cottage he stretched out on his bed and read from a book on the castles of Ireland and Scotland. He dozed off, woke, read a few more pages, dozed again. For dinner Maureen Boyd and her kitchen girls put on one of their better meals: oven fried chicken, mashed potatoes with country gravy, fresh green beans. By early evening he was back in his cottage at his drafting table. No way to explain to others the pleasure he took—a pleasure as expansive and deep-to-the-bone as any—in the coziness and privacy of his cottage, feeling the crisp separation of good paper between the sharp blades of his scissors. His window fan thrummed softly. Through it he could hear the din of the evening activity, a scavenger hunt, coming to him from a pleasing distance.

  The good meal. The finely grained texture of the paper. The airy voices.

  One small matter detracted from these satisfactions: the memory of what it had been like that afternoon to finish his address and hear the dull silence and then take stock of his uncertain audience.

  He was not a fool. Of course, you couldn’t make a public declaration to that effect. Nor could you explain to an audience the private rationales that lay behind your strongest beliefs. But for now it was worth insisting, if only to himself, that he wasn’t a fool. He didn’t lack self-knowledge. Since boyhood he’d been willing to look inward and weigh carefully his private inclinations. Long ago he’d understood something singular and important: whatever it was that made people miserable or frantic or deliriously happy with longing, whatever strong compulsion made them lie down with strangers or writhe alone in their beds, whatever this was, it was not present in himself.

  To be clear: not a void, not a hollowness, but a benign absence.

  It wasn’t a trait he’d inherited from either of his parents. His father, Theodore Kindermann, owner of a sometimes prosperous St. Louis flooring store, adored his mother. Often he lingered at the breakfast table when he should have left for work or, at his worst, followed her from room to room. Schuller’s mother, Marta Kindermann, was far more fickle in her return affections. Neighbors thought them an odd pair. Handsome, endlessly patient Theodore and matronly, plain, easily distracted Marta. She suffered through fifty-five years of his affection. Yet she wasn’t without tender feelings or sharp desires; they were just aimed at impossible and unacted-upon targets outside her marriage. At her most distressed, she’d plead for breathing space. She wondered, tearfully and aloud, why she couldn’t be allowed to step away from this endless partnership, if just for a week or two, and have an honest-to-God, actual experience in the world. What she wanted, of course, was the experience of loving other men.

  As teenagers Schuller and Sandie were aggrieved to understand this. But they had their own fraught dealings with the opposite sex to contend with. Or at least Sandie did. Like his father, he was easily stricken. A girl in the school choir they attended could undo poor Sandie by encouraging his attention as she tied her hair in a long red ribbon. Schuller wasn’t so easily undone. He’d rather the girl left her affectations and hair ribbons at home. And he’d have liked her better if she arrived at rehearsals on time. Which was not to say that he didn’t notice she was pretty. Prettiness was far better than homeliness, certainly, but he didn’t have the desire, as other boys of his age, to unwrap this prettiness and press his fingers and tongue and the most private parts of himself against it.

  An odd dilemma: in many ways they were the same, he and Sandie, but in this respect they were different. And they knew it, each of them, without ever discussing the matter openly. Sandie pined for the company of girls. He composed letters—even songs—that hours later caused him to cringe in shame. He looked at photographs. He kept a hand towel wedged between his mattresses. Schuller did none of these things. When he was twenty, his parents sent him to lunch with an elderly physician uncle who asked a series of prying questions. Was he too shy to speak to girls? Was he afraid of them? Did he think it disgusting to kiss a girl? Did he prefer the company of boys? Did he dream of boys?

  He was startled, of course, to have the conversation take such a private turn. No, he said. No, not afraid. Not disgusted. He didn’t really keep company with anyone besides Sandie, but if he did, he’d probably choose boys since they were smarter and more capable. As for dreams, romantic or otherwise, the answer was definitely no. Not ever. (Until this chat it hadn’t occurred to him that boys could lust after boys.) His uncle gave a tenuous nod of acceptance. It was unclear what he reported back to the family at large.

  Undaunted, Schuller went forward with his life and career: a college degree in business, a carpet cleaning service that he expanded into a successful venture, then sold. In 1956 he acquired a summer camp. All the while his parents and extended family thought up safe euphemisms for Schuller’s situation: he was a late bloom
er in his teens, an all-consumed entrepreneur in his twenties, a confirmed bachelor in his thirties. They went to their graves wondering.

  He’d have liked to have spared his family this disappointment. Yet it couldn’t be helped. It couldn’t have been otherwise. In his later years he’d come to understand a peculiar irony at work in the world: what you lack will always be magnified by the people and events that constitute your life. A boy with no appreciation for food will be born into a family of cooks and live above a bakery. A woman who feels no kindness for her children will see, everywhere she goes, mothers and fathers fawning over their babies. So it was with him. He’d gravitated to a career as a summer camp director. All his life he’d been exasperated by other people’s unwise longings.

  The next morning he chose a different route for his walk: a straight trek across the meadow and onto the gravel pathway that slipped under the roof of the forest and led to Cabins One through Four. He had thought, mistakenly, that he would be a lone figure at 6:45 A.M. strolling past barracks of sleeping men and women. Not so. Already there were faces pressed against the porch screens—peculiar faces in that they were intensely homely or intensely comic or intensely naked in their expressions. Outside Cabin Two, a group of retarded men were squeezed onto the concrete landing as if it were a tiny stone island in the middle of a boiling sea. No one dared step off the edge. They were all in their pajamas and had unlit cigarettes squeezed into their mouths. When they saw Schuller, they let out a great clamor of grunts and jeers, none of it intelligible, and yet it was so cheerful and clearly aimed at Schuller that he felt obliged to answer back.

  “Yes,” he said. “Good morning, friends.”

  They crooned back at once. “Harruuuuuuummme! Arrryuhhh!”

  “Yes, yes. Let’s keep it down. We have people still sleeping.”

  The cabin door opened and one of the counselors stepped out, the big one with the disfigured face and the somewhat lumbering manner. He was in the process of setting fire to the men’s cigarettes when he spotted Schuller.