Let the Fire Fall

Chapter Six

IT was raining in New York state, had been raining for three days now, and the wind was cold, the world dark and mist-shadowed. There were no edges on buildings, trees, rocks, anything. Rounded by fog and mist, the estate looked unreal, a double exposure used to illustrate a fantasy tale. Winifred turned from her window and paced her room some more. Turnover time again, she thought bitterly. Of all the initial team that had taken over the care of the Star Child, she was the only one remaining, and now they were being shuffled again. She kicked a hassock furiously. Her clock chimed four and she jerked the door open and marched down the heavily carpeted hallway to the conference room, where she expected to have her dismissal notice handed to her.

Colonel Wakeman was in charge now. A psychologist of the Watson school, he had no use for Winifred. He was a pansy, she thought with disgust. Just what Johnny needed. Wakeman was forty-two, athletic, sunburned, virile-looking, and a pansy, who knew that she knew and hated her for knowing.

At Wakeman’s side was Dr. Felix Duprey, the new pediatrician assigned to Johnny. He had the thick folder of medical records tucked under his arm. A brush moustache, sideburns, pot belly over long thin legs. She looked at the next of the new men. Leonard Mallard, who smiled and smiled, was in charge of security of the estate. Lenny had been there for almost a year before anyone had been let in on the secret that he was in charge. He had filled a vacancy in the lower echelons, ostensibly gathering information about the place and how it was run, and only in the past week had stepped up to his rightful position. And people had vanished overnight.

There were others that she had met briefly: the Russian teacher, a French physical activities coach, consultants in all fields from other nations. She nodded and walked around the conference table to her seat. They were still waiting for Rose Laskey, the art instructor, a tall girl, twenty-seven, with long fluttery hands that could work magic with paper, clay, paints, all the accoutrements of her profession. Winifred suspected that Rose was C.I.A. She wondered again, as she often did, if she was the only one present who wasn’t holding down two positions.

She wondered even more why no one had ever approached her about taking on the second, even more important job. Probably thought she was undependable.

There were ten professionals on the estate, drawing salaries of fifty thousand to one hundred thousand dollars annually, plus whatever they drew that never was recorded for public disclosure. There were fifteen sub-professionals, the second-class professional; the assistants to the first-class professionals, etc., and they made an average of sixteen thousand dollars per year. There were twelve sub-sub-professionals, clerks, cooks, and menials of various sorts, low in rank on the estate, probably very high in offices whose doors came wrapped in plain brown paper. They made from six thousand to nine thousand dollars a year. Openly. Then there was the cost of the upkeep of this minor army. All told the bill came to over two million dollars every year. Quite a budget designated to the care and feeding of one skinny little boy.

Wakeman cleared his throat and the meeting was under way. It was like most of the consultation meetings where various members gave verbose reports about the boy’s progress. Rose would produce art work; the doctors would read from their records and offer a prognosis for the coming months—always the same, colds, hay fever, asthma, prognosis favorable. Winifred’s report consisted of his psychic development. A mother’s baby book, one dollar over a ten-cent-store counter, conscientiously filled in, would have done the same job. Sometimes there was news of an impending Visit by a dignitary, the president of the United States, or the premier of Russia, or a representative of this or that church, but nothing of that sort came up this time. After the meeting Wakeman turned to Winifred and asked if she could stay for a private talk.

She nodded. No one ever ordered anyone to do anything here, much too civilized for that. But she had been ordered, and she suspected, now it would come. Her pink slip. Did anyone ever actually get a pink slip? She never had seen one. Her mind followed the line of thought, pink slip, lingerie, Freudian slip…

“Dr. Harvey, as you know your own work here has been indispensable to those who have studied the Star Child throughout the years. When the clearance has been lifted and you can publish your studies, your name will be placed among the other giants in the field.”

“My reward in heaven,” Winifred murmured. Wakeman looked confused for a second, then cleared his throat and continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

“After many long hours of consultation, however, the decision has been reached that the transference that has been effected by your devoted care of the child is not to his best interests. We believe his growing dependence on you has added to the immaturity that is detrimental to his progress.”

Winifred smiled and drummed her fingers on the polished surface of the table. Again Wakeman was discomfited for a second. Winifred turned to take in Lenny with her gaze. He was seated slightly to the rear and side of her so that she couldn’t see both men at the same time. She addressed herself to Lenny.

“Have you read my latest report? The summary of three months ago?” Lenny nodded, smiling. “Okay, then tell him to knock off this pep talk and get down to basics. I say the kid is, to put it as bluntly as I know how, going crazy in this environment. He has shown signs of autistic behavior from infancy, and they are growing more pronounced. He is developing into a paranoid schizophrenic, and if you remove the one stable element in his environment, this development will hasten.”

“Dr. Harvey, your report was given all consideration,” Wakeman said frostily. “We feel that you have exaggerated the situation.”

Winifred stood up, gathering her notebook and purse, keeping her gaze on Lenny. “Balls,” she said. She started to leave the room, but Lenny’s voice stopped her.

Very quietly he said, “Winifred, there is an alternative.”

She swung around to stare at him.

“You are to be relieved of all official duties in regard to the boy. That’s irrevocable. But you can stay and continue as his confidant.”

She stiffened. Now they were making the offer. She waited ..

“He needs someone he can talk to, and you are that someone. We all know that. You would work directly under my orders, however, not under the medical board’s auspices.” He held up his hand before she could speak. “Not now. Think about it. I’ll talk to you again.”

Winifred walked back down the hall slowly. Wakeman and Lenny. Her side. The U.S.A. side. They didn’t want her reports to go to the international board any longer. They wanted the inside information for themselves. Everyone believed something would come out eventually that would give one side or the other an edge. She entered her room still deep in thought, and jumped when Johnny said, “Are you leaving too?”

“How did you get in here? What are you doing out of your section?”

“Did you get fired? Are you going away too? If you do I’ll kill myself!”

Looking at the frail boy who had learned to sneak from his room almost as soon as he had learned to walk, who had learned to lie with the facility of a veteran diplomat, who had learned to trust no one at all, probably including her, who had learned, God only knew how, that he was the world’s most lavishly housed and protected-guarded prisoner, and had yet to learn why, she knew that she couldn’t leave him. She told him so. She asked him how he had managed to get to the upper floor without being stopped, and he, wiser than she, put a finger to his lips and smiled.

“Johnny, I do want to talk to you sometime soon. Not now, not here. Outside, under the tree where we saw the squirrel fight. Remember?” He nodded and she added, “The first sunny day.”

When they had their talk Winifred told the boy that she had been fired as his doctor, but that she would remain so that he would have a friend there, someone he could talk to when he wanted to talk. And she told him, after taking a deep breath and hoping the trees weren’t bugged, that she wouldn’t tell anyone what he had to say to her, if he didn’t want her to. She told him that no one else was likely to keep his secrets, and he nodded in agreement. Winifred stood up then to return to the house. Johnny stopped her.

“They don’t like me, do they? They don’t like you either. Everyone’s afraid all the time. They wish I’d get sick and die. But I won’t. And when I know they’re afraid, when they see me looking at them, I make them more afraid. I’m a mirror. Nobody can see me, they just see themselves when they look.”

Winifred sat down again and pulled him down at her side. “What do you mean? Why do you say they’re afraid?”

“Look at them. Always sneaking around listening to me, watching what I do, even when I go to the bathroom. And when I eat. And when I had a cold last month I heard Dr. Clephorn say maybe this time. And I knew what he meant. They could all go away and do something else…. They don’t like it here. It’s too quiet and dull.”

Oh, Lordy, Winifred thought, Lordy, Lordy.

Johnny jumped up. “He’s coming,” he said. He stared at Winifred hard. “Some day will you tell me who I am and why I have to stay here?”

Wakeman came into sight around the trees and Winifred also stood, up, brushing her skirt, waving to him. “Yes,” she said under her breath to Johnny, who wasn’t even looking at her now, but was throwing stones at birds in a meadow off to their left. “I’ll tell you everything,” she said, promising, knowing her promise to be reckless, but knowing that he needed it.

She was told later that day not to take the boy away from the house to talk to him, and she realized what Johnny seemed already to know: the entire house was bugged. Meekly she agreed, and reported what conversation had taken place between them out in the open. It was a truncated report of their talk.

During the summer when she had her three weeks’ vacation she told most of it to Matt, who did record it. Matt and Lisa were the only two people she felt at all certain about any more, just as she was the only person Johnny felt certain about. And Matt and Lisa had each other. So it worked out.

Matt and Lisa had a shadow over them now, where there had been none. They seldom mentioned Blake, and, his dog had vanished so there wasn’t even that reminder. They had moved again, this time to a subdivision that had escaped urban renewal by incorporating itself into a village and passing a law against the renewal act. They had a large, slightly dilapidated frame house with a big yard that was fragrant with lilacs and peonies.

Winifred spent a week with them and they talked openly, the only place where she permitted herself this luxury.

Obie had clamped down on Blake’s public appearances, she learned. The boy had not been exploited for the past six weeks or longer. Maybe Obie had him in a school somewhere; no one knew, and Obie turned away all questions, saying only that Blake would return to take his proper place among men.

Matt exclaimed over the Star Child’s precocious grasp of the conditions at the estate, and Winifred shrugged it away. “He was bound to realize what was going on sooner or later. He’s not stupid, and he has something that isn’t bound by intelligence. He can sense much more than he can logically understand. And he trusts his intuition more than his logic. Most of the time he’s right, incidentally. He has no reason to trust or believe anyone around him. When I called him paranoid, it was a description of fact, but if the paranoiac is being watched and hounded, isn’t his paranoia reasonable?”

“But why?” Lisa asked. “Why can’t they simply let him grow up like other children? Why are they so afraid of him?”

“Are you kidding?” Winifred said. “So the aliens return and find that their kid has been allowed to run the streets and get himself hit by a truck and has had his neck broken? They turn on the big guns and that’s it. Or what if he is taken by the Chinese. They’re still screaming over him from time to time, you know. What if he is indoctrinated in some kookie philosophy that the aliens detest? What if he learns that the little bit of paradise he has come to expect doesn’t represent the rest of the world and reports slum conditions, poverty, pandemic malnutrition on three-fourths of Earth, wars in Africa, and Asia, and South America, near slave conditions that exist in most areas of the world so that the U.N. space programs can proceed in all due haste? You see? If and when they come back, they will see that we treat him like a prince.”

Matt was watching her closely and Winifred stopped.

“You think they’ll ease you out anyway?” Matt asked a bit later.

“Sure. They’ll find that they aren’t getting enough from me to pay for my keep. And the kid will be growing up, you know. A young teenager soon, he’ll turn from a woman confidant, and they’ll supply an understanding male who will worm his way into the kid’s life. They’ve been trying, just haven’t found the right one, but in time they will. And then I’ll go.”

Winifred couldn’t sleep that night, but sat on the Daniel’s porch and listened to the crickets and the night birds, and when Matt joined her and offered a drink, she accepted it with a sigh. “I have to tell him, Matt. When they give me my papers, there won’t be any good-byes. That isn’t how they operate, and God only knows when that time will come. I’ll have to pick my own time and tell him everything.”

Matt nodded, a blurry white shadow that moved slightly on the darkened porch.

Winifred continued, as if to herself, “He has to have an identity he can hang onto. He’s got nothing.