The Child Buyer (15 page)

Mr. BROADBENT. Now would you tell us, sir, about your visit to the Rudd home?

Mr. JONES. I should say, first, that most of the homes I've visited making purchases of specimens for United Lymphomilloid have been in suburban areas and have been 'nice' houses—natu-

THE CHILD BUYER

ral habitat of the handsome I.Q. High incidence of baby-grand pianos. Hi-fi. Books. Standard-package cultural values. Many foreign cars. Ambitious mothers and ulcerated fathers. But listen: let me tell you about the Rudds' heap. It's down at the tail end of River Street in Pequot, the end that looks like a crushed cigarette butt. The house is one of a series of tenement blocks—frame buildings, tinder boxes. The Slatkowski block, where the Rudds have two ground-floor rooms, is a rickety four-story pile on the end of a row of check-by-jowl buildings, separated on the other side from a dingy grocery store by a narrow dirt-paved alleyway. The house is covered with tar paper that has bricks printed on it. There's no entrance to the apartment, if you can call it that, from the front hallway with its creaking stairway leading to the other flats upstairs. There's a heavy door from the Rudds' kitchen, right out to the street, but this is apparently swollen and warped out of all use, and you have to enter by going through the alleyway to the back, where a yard about twenty feet deep separates the house from the retaining wall of the Pohadnock River. There's a sagging lean-to porch roof against the house back there, but no porch; on the bare earth under the roof is a mare's nest of rubbish—I noticed broken dishes, a rusted toaster, old milk cartons, a disemboweled alarm clock with a bell on top like a bicycle bell, a burst bag of hickory nuts. This open-pit garbage mine is only a hint of the slovenliness inside.

Mr. BROADBENT. Mrs. Rudd told us she wasn't too strong on housework.

Mr. JONES. She certainly isn't. That's an understatement. There are just the two rooms, a living room and a kitchen, both of which double as bedrooms. There's a dirty, broken-down couch in the living room that's simply smothered with clothes that need mending, limp magazines, the kids' wet-weather togs, every which thing. There's a don't-care atmosphere. The lino-

Monday, October 28

leum on the floor is worn through to the fabric and even to the underlying wood in places, and the plaster on the walls is cracked and falling, so the place looks like Liberty Hall for mice. No pictures, limp gray muslin curtains. The kids' rollaway bed in the kitchen doesn't get rolled away—doesn't even get made. The whole flat is warmed by a cheap kitchen stove on which was balanced, the afternoon I called, a spoked laundry rack draped with mildewy bras and other unspeakables. The tin chimney of the stove goes out the side wall over the alley walkway. Bundles of lint stir in the drafts like the tumbleweed on the desert down in our part of the world. But if you look closely, you see the surprise of this filthy nest.

Mr. BROADBENT. Which is?

Mr. JONES. Here and there, tucked under beds and seats, in corners, wedged under the sink, wherever they can be scuffed away from the pattern of traffic of the four Rudds, are cardboard cartons, containing treasures that belong to the boy.

Mr. BROADBENT. Treasures?

Mr. JONES. Books. Scores on scores of books. God knows how he's scrounged and scraped to get them.

Mr. BROADBENT. So. When you called, who was home?

Mr. JONES. At first the mother and father but neither child.

Mr. BROADBENT. What transpired?

Mr. JONES. The first thing I discovered, of course, was that Cleary had beat me to it. He had the mother so nervous she could scarcely waggle her tongue.

Mr. BROADBENT. You outlined your proposition?

Mr. JONES. You have to slide sideways into my sort of proposition. I got Mrs. Rudd loosened up about the boy. Among other things, she recalled a newspaper article that labeled Barry, when he was nine, a genius. She got it out and made me read it. It was pretty bad—written by an untalented reporter in unconsciously mocking tones. She spoke of her son's careful and pain-

THE CHILD BUYER

ful reactions to that publicity—his trying to find out what genius is. Mrs. Rudd showed me some typewritten notices tacked to the wall above the boy's work table in the living room. William James to the effect that genius is the faculty of perceiving in a new way, or 'unhabitual way/ I think it was. Things like that.

Senator SKYPACK. He was spouting that genius stuff to us, like his personal preserve.

Mr. JONES. I think you get him wrong, Senator. I don't believe he's conceited. He has an almost frightening humility. Dr. Go-zar fed him most of that material. Mrs. Rudd told me that after the third-grade year Dr. Gozar was wonderful to the boy; the lab work began when he was in fourth.

Mr. BROADBENT. Did you finally put your proposition to the parents?

Mr. JONES. I did. I explained the entire business to them.

Mr. BROADBENT. Including the facts you gave us off the record on Friday?

Mr. JONES. Everything.

Mr. BROADBENT. Weren't you afraid of leakage?

Mr. JONES. Not at all. Parents of this kind of child have learned, the hard way, to play their cards close to the chest.

Mr. BROADBENT. Even a man like Mr. Rudd, who wanted to sell?

Mr. JONES. Especially a man like him. The very fact that his son seems alien to him makes him excruciatingly sensitive to slurs and innuendoes about the boy from other people like himself.

Senator SKYPACK. You say you told them everything.

Mr. JONES. Every last word.

Senator SKYPACK. Sir, I want to ask you to release for the record the material, the remarkable pioneering your company's doing, that you entrusted to us, off the record, on Friday. I want you to let us put that on the record.

Monday, October 28

Mr. JONES. Out of the question, Senator—

Senator SKYPACK. When the public sees the patriotic . . . That precocious little J.D. wouldn't have a prayer. . . .

Mr. JONES. You have to realize, Senator, we're living in a free-enterprise system. If other companies, with which we at United Lymphomilloid have to compete—

Senator SKYPACK. All the same, mister, if the public could just know how one little self-appointed genius is trying to sabotage this country's—

Mr. JONES. I don't feel free at this time. You'll just have to accept that.

Mr. BROADBENT. What was the price tag, sir? What did you offer the parents?

Mr. JONES. First of all, cash. My starting offer was twelve thousand five hundred ninety-three dollars.

Senator MANSFIELD. For a human life?

Mr. JONES. I was careful to say that was my starting offer. Besides, the cash was only part of it. You see, people in this country are so adjusted to the TV quiz and give-away mechanism, as well as to the whole tax-dodge-payola-material-gift-bonus ritual, that money has become, not entirely meaningless, not by a good bit meaningless, don't misunderstand me—but the image of reward, you see, has a much more complex texture.

Mr. BROADBENT. So what did you offer?

Mr. JONES. You must remember this was my starting position. A matched set of Brigham metal-linen flax-weight troposphere-blue airplane luggage—

Senator MANSFIELD. For the Rudds?

Mr. JONES. It's basic, Senator: the more inappropriate the 'gift* or 'prize/ the more comfortable the image seems to the receiver. I mean, you could see that what was called for in that home was some new furniture, a vacuum cleaner, a rag mop. But those wouldn't tempt. Repulsively necessary. I offered a Bonson-Telldorf nates-length gossamer-coal-fiber-lined mink-

THE CHILD BUYER

dyed natural stone-marten bed jacket. A Potenga-Borg two-hundred-liter after-drive piston-silver-colored sports-racer convertible. For Mr. Rudd a pair of matched monogrammed ivory-backed military hairbrushes with built-in Swiss ninetcen-jewel gravity-wind clockwork razor and music box. These, plus perhaps one or two other small items, to make the list sound a little longer, constituted my starting offer.

Senator VOYOLKO. Nice stuff.

Mr. BROADBENT. Did the Rudds bargain?

Mr. JONES. When they learned that it would be necessary for them to sign away all rights to the specimen, including the right of visitation, and to sign an authorization for experimentation, up to and including major surgery, you could sense a stiffening.

Mr. BROADBENT. So you went up?

Mr. JONES. I first increased the cash offer. To sixteen thousand seven hundred thirty-four dollars.

Senator MANSFIELD. Why these odd numbers?

Mr. JONES. The 'bargain myth/ We've had it thoroughly researched, sir. The buying public is so conditioned to getting a bargain at ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents that our research people tell us these same people don't think they get a good value when they sell something if the figure's round. The prices I mentioned have more 'specie-weight' to them, in the bargain-myth terminology, than a much higher round number, say twenty thousand dollars.

Senator MANSFIELD. Still seems low. For a human being.

Mr. JONES. Value in commerce, sir, is an illusion. What matters is that the price seems right to the purchaser, or seller, not to an outsider, who may be a Polynesian barterer or an Eastern European communist or—I have you in mind, Senator—a clear-minded realist who sees interlocking relationships of values not apparent to the partners in the transaction. In any case, our

Monday, October 28

negotiations were cut off because the boy came in.

Mr. BROADBENT. What happened then?

Mr. JONES. The parents and I—together with the girl, who arrived home shortly thereafter—moved into the kitchen so the boy could work at the small table in the living room that has been set aside for him. After a few minutes I asked if I could talk alone with him. The father—and by then it was clear that he was itching to make a move—said he'd like to tackle the boy first. I was afraid of his approach, but he was, after all, the father, and he was insistent. He went in. From my seat in the kitchen, when Mrs. Rudd swung the door between the rooms open a few minutes later on some bogus errand she invented to settle her curiosity, I caught a glimpse of the two of them: the porcine limited man standing under the edge of a cone of light, the boy sitting with his elbows on his precious papers looking up into his father's eyes. The two faces were almost opposites— the father's face, though chubby, was mobile and expressive, every passing thought and feeling reflected in a pull and ripple of flesh around the organs of sense, so that an intelligent person like the boy could almost have added a silent sum in the man's mind just by watching the legible face, or, in this case, have read the unspoken underlying thought, 'I want to sell you, son'; while the boy's face, to the contrary, was a soft, round, flaccid, un-moving mystery, only the vivid eyes leaping ahead of the father's words from problem to answer to implication.

Mr. BROADBENT. Did Mr. Rudd have any success with the boy?

Mr. JONES. He returned to the kitchen after a few minutes and shrugged heavily, as if to say, 'I've never understood that boy/ So then I had my shot at him.

Mr. BROADBENT. How did you go about it?

Mr. JONES. Realizing that the father—and Cleary before him —might already have soured the boy, I had to adopt a gingerly

THE CHILD BUYER

approach. I started by asking him what had happened to the wet book Dr. Gozar had brought in, and he told me the story. Then I congratulated him on the research report I'd heard him give that morning, and he said, Tm going to give a report on superstition next time. It sure is lucky for the kids that I've decided that/ I asked him why lucky. 'I don't mean because it's going to be so good/ he said. 'What I mean is, most of my reports arc so dull. "The Linnacan System of Binomial Nomenclature!" On superstition I'll give them some fun. Why thir-teen's unlucky. Do you know why thirteen's unlucky?' I said I didn't. 'Probably because primitive man, in his cave-dwelling stage, learned to count by using his ten fingers and two feet. Anything beyond twelve was mysterious, fearful, unlucky. Later man found that twelve was divisible by two, three, four, and six, while thirteen was indivisible, like a big ugly boulder. You know, the duodecimal system makes better sense in a lot of ways than the decimal system, for instance as a basis for money. . . . There were thirteen at the Last Supper. In Scandinavian mythology there were twelve demigods, until Loki, the evil one, came along to make the thirteenth. But, speaking of money, do you know something? I've seen a man turn down a two-dollar bill because it was unlucky, but never a one-dollar bill, yet the one has thirteen letters on it in E Pluribus Unum, thirteen letters in Annuit Coeptis, thirteen stripes in the shield, thirteen leaves, thirteen berries, thirteen stars, thirteen arrows. Enough bad luck to queer any deal that was based on the buck/ I didn't know whether he was slyly alluding to my deal—you know, subtly putting the whammy on me. Anyway, he went on, 'I sure am sorry for the class for time after next. I'm afraid I have an irresistible impulse to report to them on the saurians and sphene-dons—the lizards and tuataras/ He sighed. 'I guess I just have a soft spot in my thalamus for those creatures/ 'In your what? 9 I said. 'It's inaccurate/ he said, 'to speak of having a soft spot in

Monday, October 28

your heart for something, because the thalamus, in the between-brain, is more properly the seat of the emotions/

Senator SKYPACK. Ye gods and little fishes! How much of this—?

Mr. JONES. I asked him what he wanted to be. A taxonomist, he said.

Senator SKYPACK. And what the hell might that be?

Mr. JONES. A biologist who classifies animals and plants according to their natural kinships. For some time he's been working up a complete classification of the animal kingdom, according to phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, species, and subspecies. It's all written on a scroll of shelf paper fourteen feet long. He remembers every item on the scroll. He said to me as he was showing it to me, 'I wish I could track down the orders of the Holothurioidea, the sea cucumbers, for sure. I know three orders, but I don't know if they have any more.'