“You’re afraid his imagination may overcome him?” I asked needlessly. When she nodded, swallowing, I leaned forward, patted her hand, and told her:
“Ellie, imagination is the most precious thing childhood has got. The ability to imagine in detail, like those Indians, is beyond valuation. Your boy is more than sane; he may be a genius. Whatever you do, never try to kill that in him.”
I still believe I was right-totally mistaken, but right.
On this warm day, I chuckled and finished, “As for his, uh, jet airplane, I’ll bet you a dozen doughnut holes Pete Dunbar has a few Buck Rogers Big Little Books.”
All small boys were required to loathe school, and John went through the motions. No doubt much of it did bore him, as must be true of any kid who can think and is forced into lockstep. However, his grades were excellent, and he was genuinely gripped by what science and history were offered. (“A star passed near our sun and pulled out a ribbon of flaming gas that became the planets. . . . The periods of world civilization are Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and modern time, which began in 1492.”)
His circle of friends, if not intimates, widened. Both sets of parents regretted that my Billy was four years older, Jimmy two and Stuart three years younger, than Johnny. At their stage of life, those gaps dwarfed the Grand Canyon. John shunned organized games, and by and large existed on the fringes of the tribe. For instance, Eleanor had to do the entire organizing of his birthday parties. Nevertheless, between his gentle manner and his remarkable fund of conversation--when someone else took the initiative and stimulated him--he was fairly well liked.
In his eighth year he caused a new sensation. A couple of older boys from the tough side of the tracks decided it would be fun to lie in wait for individuals on their way back from school and pummel them. Buses only carried farm children, and Senlac wasn’t yet built solid; most walking routes had lonely spots. Naturally, the victims could never bring themselves to complain.
The sportsmen did, after they jumped John Havig. They blubbered that he’d called an army to his aid. And beyond doubt, they had taken a systematic drubbing.
The tale earned them an extra punishment. “Bullies are always cowards,” said fathers to their sons. “Look what happened when that nice Havig boy stood up and fought.” For a while he was regarded with awe, though he blushed and stammered and refused to give details; and thereafter we called him Jack.
Otherwise the incident soon dropped into obscurity. That was the year when France fell.
“Any news of the phantom uncle?” I asked Eleanor. Some families had gotten together for a party, but I wanted a respite from political talk.
“What?” She blinked, there where we stood on the Stocktons’ screened porch. Lighted windows and buzzing conversation at our backs didn’t blot out a full moon above the chapel of Holberg College, or the sound of crickets through a warm and green-odorous dark. “Oh.” She dimpled. “You mean my son’s. No, not for quite a while. You were right, that was only a phase.”
“Or else he’s learned discretion.” I wouldn’t have uttered my thought aloud if I’d been thinking.
Stricken, she said, “You mean he may have clammed up completely? He is reserved, he does tell us nothing important, or anybody else as far as I can learn--”
“I.E.,” I said in haste, “he takes after his dad. Well, Ellie, you got yourself a good man, and your daughter-in-law will too. Come on, let’s go in and refresh our drinks.”
My records tell me the exact day when, for a while, Jack Havig’s control broke apart.
Tuesday, April 14, 1942. The day before, Tom had made the proud announcement to his son. He had not mentioned his hope earlier, save to his wife, because he wasn’t sure what would happen. But now he had the notice. The school had accepted his resignation, and the Army his enlistment, as of term’s end.
Doubtless he could have gotten a deferment. He was over thirty, and a teacher, of science at that. In truth, he would have served his country better by staying. But the crusade had been preached, the wild geese were flying, the widowmaker whistled beyond the safe dull thresholds of Senlac. I also, middle-aged, looked into the possibility of uniform, but they talked me out of trying.
Eleanor’s call drew me from bed before sunrise. “Bob, you’ve got to come, right away, please, please. Johnny. He’s hysterical. Worse than hysterical. I’m afraid . . . brain fever or-Bob, come!”
I hurried to hold the thin body in my arms, try to make sense of his ravings, eventually give him an injection. Before then Jack had shrieked, vomited, clung to his father like a second skin, clawed himself till blood ran and beaten his head against the wall. “Daddy, Daddy, don’t go, they’ll kill you, I know, I know, I saw, I was there an’ I saw, I looked in that window right there an’ Mother was crying, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”
I kept him under graduated sedation for the better part of a week. That long was needed to quiet him down. He was a listless invalid until well into May.
This was absolutely no normal reaction. Other boys whose fathers were off to war gloried, or claimed they did. Well, I thought, Jack wasn’t any of them.
He recovered and buckled down to his schoolwork. He was in Tom’s company at every imaginable opportunity, and some that nobody would have imagined beforehand. This included furloughs, spent at home. Between times, he wrote almost daily letters to his father—
--who was killed in Italy, August 6, 1943.
2
A DOCTOR cannot endure having made his inevitable grisly blunders unless he recalls enough rescues to offset them. I count Jack Havig among those who redeemed me. Yet I helped less as a physician than as a man.
My special knowledge did let me see that, beneath a tight-held face, the boy was seriously disturbed. Outside the eastern states, gasoline was not rationed in 1942. I arranged for a colleague to take over my practice, and when school closed, Bill and I went on a trip. . . and we took Jack along.
In Minnesota’s Arrowhead we rented a canoe and entered that wilderness of lakes, bogs, and splendid timber which reaches on into Canada. For an entire month we were myself, my thirteen-year-old son, and my all but adopted son whom I believed to be nine years of age.
It’s rain and mosquito country; paddling against a headwind is stiff work; so is portaging; to make camp required more effort than if we’d had today’s ingenious gear and freeze-dried rations. Jack needed those obstacles, that nightly exhaustion. After fewer days than might have been awaited, the land could begin to heal him.
Hushed sunrises, light gold in the uppermost leaves and ashiver across broad waters; birdsong, rustle of wind, scent of evergreen; a squirrel coaxed to take food from a hand; the soaring departure of deer; blueberries in a bright warm opening of forest, till a bear arrived and we most respectfully turned the place over to him; moose, gigantic and unafraid, watching us glide by; sunsets which shone through the translucent wings of bats; dusk, fire and stories and Bill’s young wonderings about things, which showed Jack better than I could have told him how big a world lies beyond our sorrows; a sleeping bag, and stars uncountable.
It was the foundation of a cure.
Back home again, I made a mistake. “I hope you’re over this notion about your father, Jack. There’s no such thing as foreknowing the future.” He whitened, whirled, and ran from me. I needed weeks to regain his confidence.
His trust, at any rate. He confided nothing to me except the thoughts, hopes, problems of an ordinary boy. I spoke no further of his obsession, nor did he. But as much as time and circumstance allowed, I tried to be a little of what he so desperately lacked, his father.
We could take no more long excursions while the war lasted. However, we had country roads to tramp, Morgan Woods to roam and picnic in, the river for fishing and swimming, Lake Winnego and my small sailboat not far off. He could come around to my garage workshop and make a bird feeder for himself or a broom rack for his mother. We could talk.
I do believe h
e won to a measure of calm about Tom’s death by the time it happened. Everybody assumed his premonition was coincidental.
Eleanor had already taken a job in the library, plus giving quite a few hours per week to the hospital. Widowhood struck her hard. She rallied gamely, but for a long while was subdued and unsocial. Kate and I tried to get her out, but she declined invitations more often than not.
When at last she began to leave her shell, it was mostly in the company of others than her old circle. I couldn’t keep from remarking: “You know, Ellie, I’m damn glad to see you back in circulation. Still--forgive me--your new friends are kind of a surprise.”
She reddened and looked away. “True,” she said low.
“Perfectly good people, of course. But, uh, not what you’d call intellectual types, are they?”
“N-no. . . . All right.” She straightened in her chair. “Bob, let’s be frank. I don’t want to leave here, if only because of what you are to Jack. Nor do I want to be buried alive, the way I was that first couple of years. Tom influenced me; I don’t really have an academic turn of mind like his. And . . . you who we went with. . . you’re all married.”
I abandoned as useless my intention in raising the matter--to tell her how alien her son was to those practical-minded, loud-laughing men who squired her around, how deeply he was coming to detest them.
He was twelve when the nuclear thunderbolts slew two cities and man’s last innocence. Though the astonishing growth rate I had noted in him earlier had slowed down to average since 1942, its effects remained to make him precocious. That reinforced the extreme solitariness which had set in. No longer was Pete Dunbar, or any schoolmate, more than a casual associate. Politely but unshakably, Jack refused everything extracurricular. He did his lessons, and did them well, but his free time was his and nobody else’s: his to read enormously, with emphasis on history books; to take miles-long hikes by himself; to draw pictures or to shape things with the tools I’d helped him collect.
I don’t mean he was morbid. Lonely boys are not uncommon, and generally become reasonably sociable adults. Jack was fond of the Amos ‘n’ Andy program, for instance, though he preferred Fred Allen; and he had a dry wit of his own. I remember various of his cartoons he showed me, one in particular suggested by a copy of The Outsider and Others which I lent him. In a dark, dank forest were two human figures. The first, cowering and pointing, was unmistakably H. P. Lovecraft. His companion was a tweedy woman who snapped: “Of course they’re pallid and mushroomlike, Howard. They are mushrooms.”
While he no longer depended on me, we saw a good bit of each other; and the age difference between him and Bill was less important now, so that they two sometimes went together for a walk or a swim or a boat ride-even, in 1948, a return to northern Minnesota with Jim and Stuart.
Soon after he came back from this, my second son asked me: “Dad, what’s a good book on, uh, philosophy?”
“Eh?” I laid down my newspaper. “Philosophy, at thirteen?”
“Why not?” Kate said across her embroidery. “In Athens he’d have started younger.”
“Well, m-m, philosophy’s a mighty wide field, Jim,” I stalled. “What’s your immediate question?”
“Oh,” he mumbled, “free will and time and all that jazz. Jack Havig and Bill talked a lot about it on our trip.”
I learned that Bill, being in college, had begun by posing as an authority, but soon found himself entangled in problems--was the history of the universe written before its beginning? if so, why do we know we make free choices? if not, how can we affect the course of the future . . . or the past?--which it didn’t seem a high school kid could have pondered as thoroughly as Jack had done.
When I asked my protégé what he wanted for Christmas, he answered: “Something I can understand that explains relativity.”
In 1949, Eleanor remarried. Her choice was catastrophic.
Sven Birkelund meant well. His parents had brought him from Norway when he was three; he was now forty, a successful farmer in possession of a large estate and fine house ten miles outside town, a combat veteran, and a recent widower who had two boys to raise: Sven, Jr., sixteen, and Harold, nine. Huge, red-haired, gusty, he blazed forth maleness--admitted Kate to me, though she couldn’t stand him--and he was not unlettered either; he subscribed to magazines (Reader’s Digest, National Geographic, Country Gentleman), read an occasional book, like travel, and was a shrewd businessman.
And . . . Eleanor, always full of life, had been celibate for six years.
You can’t warn someone who’s tumbled into love. Neither Kate nor I tried. We attended the wedding and reception and offered our best wishes. Mostly I was conscious of Jack. The boy had grown haggard; he moved and talked like a robot.
In his new home, he rarely got a chance to see us. Afterward he would not go into detail about the months which followed. Nor shall I. But consider: Where Eleanor was a dropout from the Episcopal Church, and Jack a born agnostic, Birkelund was a Bible-believing Lutheran. Where Eleanor enjoyed gourmet cooking and Jack the eating, Birkelund and his sons wanted meat and potatoes. Tom spent his typical evening first with a book, later talking with her. If Birkelund wasn’t doing the accounts, he was glued to the radio or, presently, the television screen. Tom had made a political liberal of her. Birkelund was an ardent and active American Legionnaire--he never missed a convention, and if you draw the obvious inference, you’re right--who became an outspoken supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
And on and on. I don’t mean that she was disillusioned overnight. I’m sure Birkelund tried to please her, and gradually dropped the effort only because it was failing. The fact that she was soon pregnant must have forged a bond between them which lasted a while. (She told me, however, I being the family doctor, that in the later stages his nightly attentions became distasteful but he wouldn’t stop. I called him in for a Dutch uncle lecture and he made a sulky compromise.)
For Jack the situation was hell from the word go. His step-brothers, duplicates of their father, resented his invasion. Junior, whose current interests were hunting and girls, called him a sissy because he didn’t like to kill and a queer because he never dated. Harold found the numberless ways to torment him which a small boy can use on a bigger one whose fists may not defend.
More withdrawn than ever, he endured. I wondered how.
In the fall of 1950, Ingeborg was born. Birkelund named her after an aunt because his mother happened to be called Olga. He expressed disappointment that she was a girl, but threw a large and drunken party anyway, at which he repeatedly declared, amidst general laughter, his intention of trying for a son the minute the doctor allowed.
The doctor and his wife had been invited, but discovered a prior commitment. Thus I didn’t see, I heard how Jack walked out on the celebration and how indignant Birkelund was. Long afterward, Jack told: “He cornered me in the barn when the last guest had left who wasn’t asleep on the floor, and said he was going to beat the shit out of me. I told him if he tried, I’d kill him. I meant that. He saw it, and went off growling. From then on, we spoke no more than we couldn’t avoid. I did my chores, my share of work come harvest or whatever, and when I’d eaten dinner I went to my room.”
And elsewhere.
The balance held till early December. What tipped it doesn’t matter-something was bound to-but was, in fact, Eleanor’s asking Jack if he’d given thought to the college he would like to attend, and Birkelund shouting, “He can damn well get the lead out and go serve his country like I did and take his GI if they haven’t cashiered him,” and a quarrel which sent her upstairs fleeing and in tears.
Next day Jack was not there.
He returned at the end of January, would say no word about where he had been or what he had done, and stated that he would leave for good if his stepfather took the affair to the juvenile authorities as threatened. I’m certain he dominated that scene, and won himself the right to be left in peace. Both hi
s appearance and his demeanor were shockingly changed.
Again the household knew a shaky equilibrium. But six weeks later, upon a Sunday when Jack had gone for his usual long walk after returning from church, he forgot to lock the door to his room. Little Harold noticed, entered, and rummaged through the desk. His find, which he promptly brought to his father, blew apart the whole miserable works.
Snow fell, a slow thick whiteness filling the windows. What daylight seeped through was silver-gray. Outdoors the air felt almost warm-and how utterly silent.
Eleanor sat on our living-room couch and wept. “Bob, you’ve got to talk to him, you, you, you’ve got to help him . . . again.
What happened when he ran away? What did he do?”
Kate laid arms around her and drew the weary head down to her own shoulder. “Nothing wrong, my dear,” she murmured. “Oh, be very sure. Always remember, Jack is Tom’s son.”
I paced the rug, in the dull twilight against which we had turned on no lights. “Let’s spell out the facts,” I said, speaking bolder than I felt. “Jack had this mimeographed pamphlet that Sven describes as Communist propaganda. Sven wants to call the sheriff, the district attorney, anybody who can force Jack to tell who he fell in with while he was gone. You slipped out to the shed, drove off in the pickup, met the boy on the road, and brought him here.”
“Y-y-yes. Bob, I can’t stay. Ingeborg’s at home. . . . Sven will call me an, an unnatural mother--”
There Will Be Time Page 2
