Castle: A Novel

by J. Robert Lennon

  “Did I tell you to eat the cake” he hissed, his face up close to mine, his dank breath in my nose.

  “No!” I blubbered.

  “Did I not tell you to do nothing that you are not told to do”

  “N—Yes!”

  He raised his hand again. I cowered. The hard wooden seat was hurting my behind, and my jaw throbbed. “Did I tell you, Eric,” the Professor growled, “to cry?”

  “N-no, sir.”

  “Did I tell you to cringe”

  “No, sir.” I began to straighten, then abruptly stopped. The Professor smirked.

  “Very good,” he said. “You may sit up straight.”

  I obeyed, moving slowly, willing my body to stop shaking. My mind raced—just how precisely, I wondered, must this rule be observed? Would I be punished for sneezing, for twitching? For drawing breath? Would I be slapped if my eyes strayed too far to one side? If I crossed my legs, licked my lips? My face must have been a mask of terror and calculation, and the Professor studied it carefully, eventually drawing back, settling into his chair, and nodding with evident satisfaction.

  “Very good,” he said again. “You’re attempting to determine the parameters of the rule, aren’t you? You may answer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Be assured, Eric, that you may continue to breathe. Should you feel ill, or need to use the toilet, you are permitted to raise your hand and inform me. You are never to speak without being asked a question. You are never to answer a question with more information than was requested. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” I opened my mouth to add, “I think,” but restrained myself. For having done so I was able to feel a very small amount of pride.

  For some time I would despise Doctor Stiles. In fact, I took the risky step of telling my mother this, though I didn’t dare tell her what had gone on at that first meeting. I realized my mistake almost immediately, as my mother leaned close—we sat at the dining room table, me doing my mathematics homework, she her mending—and whispered, with desperate intensity, “What happened, Eric?”

  In retrospect, I think it is possible that she had already begun to develop the loathing for me that she would eventually come to embrace fully, and for which I have always been more than willing to forgive her. If I might venture an armchair psychologist’s opinion, I believe that, for her, assigning me the role of my father’s confederate, and making me complicit in his shortcomings, was less painful for her than the alternative, which was to understand that she ought to have protected me from what was to come, but was powerless to do so. Thus, even at this early date, an edge of resentment and doubt could be heard in her voice, even if I was too young and inexperienced to identify it. I knew only that the question made me uncomfortable.

  “N-nothing,” I replied.

  “Something must have,” she demanded.

  “We talked.”

  “About what?”

  “Just… we talked.”

  My mother’s eyes were pink and wandering, taking in my face as if the truth could be found somewhere on it. When my father’s footsteps sounded on the stairs, she pulled back and resumed her work, and I resumed mine.

  My sister, however, seemed to know precisely what had transpired at my meeting, or at least understood that I had been severely disciplined. She came into my room that night after I had turned out the light, and knelt by my bedside to interrogate me. The smell of her cigarettes was heavy on her, and I found her presence somehow comforting. She said, “What’d he do to you?”

  “Nothing,” I answered, for the second time that day.

  She shifted her body, making herself more comfortable. I could make her out, just barely, her arms wrapped around her ankles, her chin resting on her knees. “My friend Amy used to know the girl that died. His daughter. She said her mom looked like a concentration camp victim or something.” She inclined her head closer to mine and lowered her voice, as though our sleeping parents might hear. “They told her she could kill the cancer by thinking about it. And she had to wear old-fashioned dresses and stand with a book on her head.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “That’s why I split that time he was here,” Jill went on. “I figured it was all going to be about making me behave.”

  Another moment of silence passed. Somewhere outside my cracked-open window, a dog was barking.

  “Eric, did Dad hit her or something?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Mom,” she said, sounding somewhat exasperated. “She looked nuts the next day. Like… just really loony.”

  I pulled the covers up to my chin. “I should go to sleep now,” I told her.

  She waited. I heard her tongue move across her lips. “Just watch out for that guy, Eric,” she said. “Seriously. You don’t have to do what Dad says. You don’t have to listen to anybody.”

  Jill stood up and, seemingly as an afterthought, patted my curled-up form through the blankets. A momentary impulse almost made me ask her to stay, but I kept my mouth shut. Seconds later, she was gone.

  The second of my weekly meetings with Doctor Stiles proceeded in much the same way as the first, with the Doctor testing my adherence to his code of conduct, and punishing me with sudden vehemence when I strayed from it. The third week, he slapped me only once, and that merely when the chair beneath me creaked—a circumstance arguably beyond my control. By the fourth week, it was nearly summer, and Doctor Stiles had the windows of his office open, and a spring in his step. I sat, as he had commanded me, in the straight-backed wooden chair, and I had begun to experience what would eventually, in later years, come to be a familiar sense of anxious well-being. I was comfortably suspended in a web of interlocking strands of obligation, strength, and bureaucratic mastery. I was tense, alert, and on the verge of contentment. Doctor Stiles waited long minutes before he spoke, during which I stared straight ahead, at the curled yellow warrior poster on the back of the door. That poster—which I would later learn depicted Achilles’ defeat of Hector at the siege of Troy—had become the linchpin of my inner calm, the mast that I had learned to lash myself to when the ship of my tutelage encountered stormy seas.

  It was around this time, I believe, that I began to feel different from the people around me. I had never been close to any of my classmates at school, but after a few weeks in Doctor Stiles’s presence, I began to take notice of their apparent lack of self-control, their irrational responses to simple problems, their disrespect for their teachers. But my feelings were more complicated than that: the teachers themselves came under my scrutiny as well, and I could not help but notice the inexpertise with which they wielded their authority. By comparison, Doctor Stiles was a master of consistency and restraint. Though I appreciated my teachers’ praise of my newly adopted poise, obedience, and serenity, I had begun to realize that they were weak leaders, easily swayed by their emotions, easily manipulated by their charges. At times, when the only response they could muster to a rowdy classroom was a deep, tired sigh, I pitied them.

  Now Doctor Stiles broke the silence of his office. “Eric, I have something I wish to tell you today.”

  I remained still, concentrating on the crumpled form of Hector at Achilles’ feet.

  The Professor crossed the room and stood before me. “Please stand up,” he said, “and sit in the leather chair.”

  I did as I was told, without registering the surprise I felt. The Doctor took my place in the wooden chair, leaning back without fear of the chair’s collapse, despite its unnerving creak. He threw one long leg over the other in a fluid, almost feminine motion, and one might have thought, to look at him, that he was more at ease there than in the soft and sturdy chair I now occupied. I gazed at him in silent anticipation.

  “Perhaps you know that I am without wife or child,” the Doctor began. “My daughter died of an illness some years ago, and my wife, by a cruel coincidence, also died soon after.

  “My daughter was named Rachel,” he went on, “and she was preoccupied with the
notion of living in a castle. I suppose this is the case with many girls, but in Rachel’s case, the desire was very intense, and I felt duty-bound, as her father, to provide her with the same. In addition to my salary here at the college, I am fortunate to possess considerable family wealth, and I set out to create a home for my family that would fulfill my daughter’s wishes. Based on a drawing she made of the castle she envisioned, I designed a dwelling, a small castle, and hired contractors and builders to help me make it a reality. I chose a secluded, wooded area on our property, a clearing at the base of a large rock outcropping, and began construction. That was seven years ago.

  “This might be difficult for you to understand, Eric, but my wife—and yes, even my daughter—did not appreciate my plans. At first they did, of course—there is a romantic charm to the idea of building a castle, in this day and age. But the project soon came to obsess me, and I lost sight of the very people whose lives I hoped to enhance with it. I spent most of my time at the building site, particularly in the summer, when the weather was fine and the college was not in session. My daughter cried herself to sleep some nights, and my wife eventually ceased conjugal relations with me.”

  He paused, and frowned at me. “Do you know what that means, Eric?”

  I did not speak.

  “You may speak.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me what it means.”

  “It means sexual intercourse?”

  Doctor Stiles scowled at my interrogative tone. I knew that I was on thin ice, and might soon be struck. I knew very little about sex, my mother having sketchily explained it to me after I inadvertently caught a glimpse of her in bed with my father.

  “Do you believe that it means sexual intercourse, or not, Eric?”

  “It does mean sexual intercourse, sir.”

  “Do you know what sexual intercourse is?”

  I knew that I had to be decisive. “Yes, sir.”

  “Eric, tell me what sexual intercourse is.”

  “It’s a man and a woman,” I said. “And they… they have no clothes on, and are together in bed. And it makes her pregnant. Sir.”

  I felt certain now that he would slap me, but instead, a small smile appeared to play at his lips. He let out a long breath that I had not noticed him drawing, and continued his story as though he had never paused.

  “It is an unfortunate fact, Eric,” he said, “that people’s desires are irrational. My daughter wanted a castle, and my wife wanted me to please my daughter. But neither considered the incidental costs of the fulfillment of such a desire, and it was this cost—my absence from their lives—that they had failed to imagine. This did not prevent them from complaining about it, however.

  “My wife and I never resolved our differences over this issue, Eric, but Rachel and I did. When she was in her sickbed, she used to gaze out the window at the rock under which her castle was being constructed. She kept her drawing of the castle taped to the wall beside the window, and she imagined what it would look like when it was finished. Unfortunately, she was never to see the completed structure. She died of her illness while I was at work upon it.”

  Doctor Stiles gazed at me hungrily. I remained perfectly still.

  “Eric, though my family is gone, my castle is finished. Its purpose, until now, was uncertain. But you have given me the inspiration to put it to use. I want to tell you that you have shown tremendous potential in these sessions, and I would like to continue them with you, at my castle. The tests of personal control and endurance you have been given here, you have passed with flying colors. You could become a young man of tremendous strength and loyalty, and a great leader. I would like you, Eric, to spend the summer in my castle.”

  Though I did not, of course, reply, I felt an upwelling of pride and personal satisfaction at the Doctor’s words, even as I felt a deep anxiety about what he was asking me to do, whatever it might be.

  “Is there anything you would like to say, Eric?”

  This was not a question he had ever asked me before. I cleared my throat.

  “You may speak,” he said.

  I hesitated before replying, “Thank you, sir. No, sir, I have nothing to say.”

  He nodded once. “Good. I will speak with your father, then.”

  SIXTEEN

  There was a fight. It seemed to me at the time that it was my mother who was being unreasonable, and who threw the first punch. Or perhaps it was a slap. In my mind’s eye, I can see her strike my father, open-handed, on the face, and my father recoil in shock and surprise. In fact, I remember him stumbling backward across the living room, tripping over the ottoman, and banging his head, hard, against the mantel. I also remember seeing him with bandages around his head, and a limp.

  However, I also remember coming home from school to find my mother missing and my father waiting in her place, and hearing from him that Mother wasn’t feeling well, and they had had an argument while I was at school, and she had forbidden me to spend the summer at Doctor Stiles’s. My father, however, had extracted a promise from her that I would be permitted to attend sessions with the Professor twice weekly for the entire summer, beginning the week school let out.

  In my memory, my father was unharmed during this conversation, and I recall not being allowed to see my mother for several days due to her illness. And that, when I did see her at last, it was she who had a limp, and her face was purple and swollen, and she didn’t speak for quite some time.

  It is difficult to reconcile these memories, I’m afraid. Perhaps I am recalling a different injury of my father’s, one he sustained at work. I vaguely remember something about a fall from a ladder. And, rationally speaking, it seems unlikely that I would have been present for this fight. Yet I am struck by the vividness of this memory—the balletic grace in my mother’s slap, the studied athleticism. I see the slap being delivered with the same strength and precision I imagine her golf swing to have possessed, back before she married my father.

  In any event, a fight did occur, the result of which was that I would be given over to Doctor Stiles’s care twice weekly, from sunrise to sunset. Though I expressed disappointment that I wouldn’t be there for the entire summer, I was privately relieved, as I had been looking forward to spending time alone as I usually did, wandering through the neighborhood and exploring the swamp and woods. I felt mildly guilty, harboring this desire, and chastised myself for my weakness.

  In the final week of June, on a Friday morning, my father woke me before dawn and told me to get dressed. When I came down into the kitchen, he was waiting there with a cup of coffee. “It’s time you tried it,” he said.

  I took the hot mug into my hands and blew on the oily black surface. I had sipped my mother’s coffee once, and found it peculiar but nonetheless appealing. That coffee, however, had had cream and sugar added. I looked at my father.

  As if reading my mind, he said, “No sugar and milk. That’s for women.”

  I nodded, and sipped. The coffee scalded my mouth. I surprised myself by suppressing my cry of pain, and realized that it was because of Doctor Stiles’s training that I was able to do so. The thought made me proud. I was a person who could endure pain. I wondered, idly, if any of my acquaintances at school could say the same, and I surmised that none could. There was no time to drink it all, though—my father soon led me out to the car, and we took to the road in the pink light of sunrise.

  My father, true to form, did not speak as we drove. It occurs to me now to wonder what it must have felt like to him, to be so uncomfortable in the presence of his own son. Most likely his own feelings of low self-worth—his fear that he was, or was perceived as, stupid—came into play here. I know that he considered me to be intelligent, because he once wondered aloud how it was possible I was so smart, as I didn’t get it from him, and I sure didn’t get it from my mother, and my sister sure as hell didn’t have it, either. Of course he underestimated my mother as well as himself, and perhaps even my sister, too. At any rate, I was now under the
tutelage of a “famous professor,” as I had heard him tell the man at the hardware store, and this fact must have both intimidated him and filled him with pride, two emotions that tended to have the effect of silencing him entirely.

  Over the next twenty minutes, we wended our way out of town and out into what appeared to me at the time to be untrammeled wilderness. My family was not “outdoorsy” and rarely left the house except to run errands in town, so this trip had the flavor of the exotic and new. I gazed into the dark woods, imagining what might be in them. Soon we had crested a hill and there, in an intersection, stood a white house.

  The house was two stories, clapboarded, and surrounded by what must once have been a lovely flower garden and arboretum, with curved paths running through it, and trellises and gates, and low stone walls. It was obvious to me, even at the age of ten, that the garden had not been tended to for some time; the plants were shaggy, crowding one another, and wild grapevine had begun to overwhelm the whole.

  We parked on a gravel drive and were met at the door by Doctor Stiles. Here, at his home, he looked very different. He wore torn and discolored khaki pants and a khaki shirt with four pockets, two on each breast. His boots were heavy and worn, and his eyeglasses were absent. I had dressed much as I had for the office visits, in dress shoes and pants, and a plaid short-sleeved Oxford shirt, and I suffered a moment of embarrassment as he glanced pityingly at me.

  “Good morning, Eric.”

  “Good morning, sir.”

  He turned to my father. “That will be all, Brian,” he said.

  My father’s hand had been resting on my shoulder. Now it tightened, as though nervously, and slipped away.

  “All right then!” my father said, drawing a deep breath. “So I should see you here at…?”

  “Sundown.”

  “Eric,” my father said, “I’ll see you later.”

  I stood very still, and did not speak.

  “Son, I’m heading out.”

  Doctor Stiles faced me, his brow creased, his hard eyes boring into mine. I blinked and tried to look past him, at the house. I hoped my father would understand that I was not able to speak. But he persisted.