The Child Buyer (30 page)

Senator MANSFIELD. Could it be that you fear that unless he

leaves you he'll be spoiled by you—not in the sense of being pampered, madam, but as a bad potato ruins a good one if they're left side by side in the barrel?

Mrs. RUDD. Honestly, sir, you're talking riddles. The one thing I fear for Barry if we let him go is that he'll miss the softening influences of a cultured home. Especially as things will be now.

Senator MANSFIELD. What do you mean by that?

Mrs. RUDD. Thanks to Mr. Jones, we'll be surrounded by the best works of man. I mean, he's going to give us the Five-Foot-Three-Inch Classics Shelf, in de-luxe imitation-leather bindings, and a subscription to the Upstream Book Society, where every month you can practically read right over the shoulders of Aubrey Winston, Pierre Berlioz, and Willing Lion, the judges, I mean as if you were in their own living room with those distinguished litterateurs' truly truly favorite books, and they send you an engraved invitation every month just to read in company with them, and the Sky-Hi-Fi Symphony Series, complete in sixty albums, and a composite stereophonic record player, and the Print of the Month, matted and framed, from the Moden-heim Museum, and the Drawn and Quartered Quarterly, the digest of all the biggest Little Magazines, where you get hopelessness so condensed it's kind of thrilling, and you have to read it or you don't know what you're talking about, and a new television set—I'm not ashamed of this, it's part of our American culture—so we can view The Endless Mind, and Shortcuts to Longhair Music, and The United States Motor Company Shakespeare Half Hour. And a cleaning woman once a week. All the cultural opportunities I've always dreamed of!

Senator MANSFIELD. In other words, Mr. Jones switched his gift list on you. When did this happen?

Mrs. RUDD. He first proposed this new list yesterday afternoon, while Barry was testifying about that naughty Renzulli girl who got him in trouble.

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Senator MANSFIELD. And what does Mr. Rudd think of this new list?

Mrs. RUDD. We've decided—I mean the child buyer and me— we've decided to let him still have that sports car. He loves to tinker. And those fancy brushes with the mechanical razor and music box, if he wants it, though of course he hates music.

Senator MANSFIELD. And you are actively trying to persuade Barry to give in?

Mrs. RUDD. One of the wise things my mother taught me was: When your children reach the age of discretion, don't interfere in their lives. Trust their judgment. And don't try to tie them to the newel post; there comes a time when you just have to let them free. . . . Anyway, Dr. Gozar's working on him.

Senator MANSFIELD. So we've heard. Any other questions, gentlemen?

Senator VOYOLKO. That TV set—that a eighteen-inch screen or a twenty-one-incher?

Mrs. RUDD. Twenty-one.

Senator VOYOLKO. I thought so. That fellow, the one buys the kids, he's not no cheap skate. Like the pro football games, on a twenty-one-incher you can see the plays develop, the belly series, the ride series, where your guard takes and mousetraps your defensive end, all like that. I'm real glad it's a twenty-one-incher, ma'am. I wouldn't advise you to barge ahead and sell the boy if it wasn't only a eighteen-inch screen. O.K., Mr. Chairman, that's all.

Senator MANSFIELD. Thank you, Mrs. Rudd, you're excused. Now, Mr. Broadbent.

Mr. BROADBENT. Dr. Frederika Gozar next, please.

Senator MANSFIELD. Yes, that's it, Dr. Gozar. Be seated.

TESTIMONY OF DR. FREDERIKA GOZAR, PRINCIPAL, LINCOLN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, PEQUOT

Mr. BROADBENT. Witnesses here have informed us, Doctor, 246

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that you now favor the sale of Barry Rudd, favor his going to United Lymphomilloid. Is this correct?

Dr. GOZAR. It is.

Mr. BROADBENT. We are most anxious to know the reason for your change of heart.

Dr. GOZAR. Of mind, not heart.

Mr. BROADBENT. You mean your feelings about the boy Barry Rudd haven't changed?

Dr. GOZAR. They never will. He's the finest of all my children, the thousands of children I've had in my thirty-eight years at Lincoln School. I love him very much. I'll be crushed when he's gone—though of course he'd be gone sooner or later anyway, by graduation; it's in the nature of things, we gain and we lose.

Mr. BROADBENT. Then why—? What did the child buyer give you, or promise you?

Dr. GOZAR. An honorary Ph.D. at Hack Sawyer University.

Mr. BROADBENT. And for that, for one more sheepskin—

Dr. GOZAR. Wait a minute. This isn't a bribe. He hasn't offered me a Ph.D. He bet me one. On my side of the bet I've put up a new turtle-neck sweater with the varsity letters H.S.U. on it, for him to wear when he rides his motorbike; I've promised to knit the cursed thing myself if I lose, and I loathe knitting-woman's slave labor! And if the child buyer wins, he will have earned his letter, believe me.

Mr. BROADBENT. What's the bet?

Dr. GOZAR. Let me tell you how it came about. I don't know whether you realize it or not, but out there in the anteroom, or outer hall, or whatever you call it, where you herd the witnesses while they're waiting to take the stand, we've been having sessions of our own ever since last Friday, tugging and hauling at each other and at Barry, trying to settle this thing, and I'll wager (I'm in a betting mood, sir) that our battle has been just as

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lively, and just as terrible, as your hearings. You know how there's that small wickerware table near one end of the gloomy room, with all the state pamphlets on it, on how to test well water, and how neighbors should establish common fences, and other such anachronistic pap, and between the table and the wall there's a settee, under the Governor's portrait? That's where Barry has been established the whole time. It has been like a royal levee. The rest of us have formed clumps around the room—three or four in one of the high windows looking out on Prospect Park, where the fat city squirrels play among the gum wrappers and empty cigarette packs glistening in the sun; another group standing under that mad brass chandelier in the middle of the room that looks like a tangle of golden rams' horns with little incandescent onions impaled on their tips. We've been lobbying and intriguing and debating. And Barry has sat there receiving one supplicant after another, with that impassive look on his face, giving no sign, simply listening. There's a kind of desperation in a long, long wait to hear your name called, and all of us were stripped down to our naked personalities. Papa Owing perspired gallons in his determination, if you could call it that, not to take a position. The great forceful Cleary has alternated between nourishing himself on the polish on the child buyer's boots and running the man's nasty little errands of corruption. Charity Perrin nodded and looked frightened but didn't budge an inch till she came back from lunch yesterday with the child buyer, as tiddly as a tufted titmouse; she was down the river; there were dollar bills sticking out of her ears. Anyway, my real crisis began first thing this morning, when I came in there with today's paper, and I'd done my stint in the lab before driving up, so I'd only had time for four cups of coffee, with a result that my blood was creeping like slush in a gutter in March, because this big frame of mine is hard to keep habitable, it really ought to be changed over to central heating. I sat alone

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in a window light and read about this hearing of yours yesterday afternoon, about the off-the-record matter on the United Lym-phomilloid plan, what they do with these brilliant human beings, and then I looked over at Barry on the settee, with his mother patting his hand on one side (her hide's as tough as a turtle's shell, believe me) and the G-Man whispering in his ear on the other. At first, before the full weight of the United Lymphomilloid scheme landed on my shoulders, I sat there wondering whether you people are trying to prove something with these hearings, or whether you're just running down hares and pheasants. So much of government these days seems to be elaborate machinery for the ego-satisfaction, as I think Cleary would call it, of the elected. What do you really want of us the governed? . . . But I didn't last long on that line—because then it hit me. Barry would beat their system. Barry would show them they can't manipulate human minds like that. His steadfastness would break their backs. Oh, don't worry, I know that the roughest lesson about humankind this century has taught us is that mental breakdowns can be systematically produced to satisfy tyrants' whims. But this is the faith I have in Barry: He has the mind, and he has the fiber, to resist, to hold on, to remain himself. Barry's not just a routine cataloguist; he's more than a taxonomist. Don't forget that Aristotle worked on the classification of animals as a youth in Plato's Academy, but he didn't stop there. I have faith in Barry. He's the sort that could do very great things for this mortal world.

Senator SKYPACK. Know what I think? I think he's a silly, conceited boy. Probably going to be a homo. Turns my stomach, what we've heard him say.

Dr. GOZAR. And you, Senator Skypack, are a Philistine. And Mr. Jones is worse: He's a Visigoth. But Barry, my Barry, he's one of those timeless ones, one of those who carry the human spirit-flame in them. My mentioning Aristotle makes me say

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what I've long thought—that Barry has that wonderfully sun-struck optimism, the love of existence, that the Greeks had and that gave meaning to their insatiable curiosity. This is why I think he can bring down the Goddess U. Lympho. Hell sit them out, and they'll find they can't make a calculating machine of him.

Senator MANSFIELD. But what about the drug, 'L.T.'? Can he resist that?

Dr. GOZAR. Ah, that's a worry. I've worried about that a great deal this morning while I was sitting with Barry on that creaking piece of furniture trying to give him my point of view. But here's what I think: To produce its effect, 'L.T.' must be essentially hypnotic, and, at least as far as the hypnosis administered by a human hypnotist is concerned, we know it isn't effective so long as the subject refuses to give over his mind. I believe it may be so with the drug. I believe it may. Barry can hold on. He can cling through that ordeal to the minimum notion that he is going to be a classifying biologist, that he's going to persist in this aim and break them, or Her, in the effort to make him exclude everything but Her from his life. He knows the phyla, classes, orders, and on down the line. He'll recite them to himself a hundred times a day. He will not forget. He'll cling to the memory of a weasel gliding along, like the slippery hope in a thief's heart, beside a stone wall near a hen coop; the gaping mouths of baby robins, uptilted triangles, in a nest in dangerous springtime; a soldier termite undermining some man's slipshod carpentry with his sharp clamping jaws. He'll remember. I really believe he will.

Senator MANSFIELD. And if he doesn't?

Dr. GOZAR. If he doesn't, it will be a great loss. But not so great a loss as it might have been, were it not for the fact that Barry has been destroyed for all practical purposes in the last few days anyway. Talent is a hundred times as fragile as crystal from

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Venice. It can't stand up under hammer blows of stupidity— least of all, those of stupid notoriety. Barry's finished as far as the world of Pequot and Treehampstead and what he has called home is concerned. Thanks to you gentlemen. So that the chance of something remarkable being salvaged at United Lym-phomilloid seems to me worth taking. And if he fails, if he docs forget, and if they do turn him into a machine, he'll be the best; he (or it) will have an I.Q. of twelve hundred, fifteen hundred. How the wheels will turn!

Senator MANSFIELD. Dr. Gozar, mightn't this position you've adopted be just what the child buyer wanted? Aren't you serving his ends?

Dr. GOZAR. How do you mean?

Senator MANSFIELD. It doesn't matter to the child buyer whether you urge Barry to go in order to defy or go in order to comply. All he wants is to get him, buy him. Don't you think the child buyer may have—

Dr. GOZAR. The devil! The dirty devil!

Senator MANSFIELD. How did you happen to make your bet with him?

Dr. GOZAR. That's why I call him a devil and a toad! I realize . . . About ten this morning, I'd had my first exciting reaction to the thought that Barry might resist, when Jones approached me—he watches faces closely, he says he studies foreheads, he must have seen the agitation under my skin—and he began talking—

Mr. BROADBENT. Excuse me, Doctor. Mr. Chairman, I've just been handed a note by the usher. It says the boy Barry Rudd wants to be heard.

Senator MANSFIELD. We'd better have him right in. Dr. Gozar, I know you'll forgive us if we excuse you out of hand. We'd better—

Dr. GOZAR. It doesn't matter. It was only about my idiotic

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bet. I'm such a fool—but I still have faith in ... They can't takeaway. . . .

Senator MANSFIELD. Yes, thank you. You may have the boy brought in, Mr. Broadbent.

Mr. BROADBENT. Barry Rudd.

Senator MANSFIELD. Take the chair, sonny.

TESTIMONY OF BARRY RUDD, MINOR, TOWN OF PEQUOT

Senator MANSFIELD. You wanted to tell us something?

BARRY RUDD. I've decided to go.

Senator SKYPACK. About time!

Senator MANSFIELD. Poor child!

Senator VOYOLKO. Go? Go? Where's he gonta go to? We finished with him yet?

Mr. BROADBENT. What decided you, Master Rudd? Why have you decided to be sold?

BARRY RUDD. It's funny, but I don't really know. One of the many things that passed through my mind out in that outer room this morning was a piece of misinformation they taught me in school. It was under Miss Songevinc, in third grade. I remember the page in our social-studies book, and the words. I see the type in my mind now, under a sentimental litho of the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina. 'Until that time, men believed that the earth was a flat disk. If you sailed too far you would fall off the edge into Chaos. But young Christopher Columbus had the idea that the world was round. . . .' I suppose this was a benevolent simplification—nice short sentences with nice short words, and the equally nice notion that Columbus was the first man to think up a spherical earth, so he could discover America where all good school children live. It was too simple, and when, during my fifth-grade year, I learned the