The Child Buyer (31 page)

Tuesday, October 29

truth at the library, with Miss Cloud's help, I was bitter: that the spherical form of the earth was asserted by Pythagoras in the sixth century B.C., and that in 250 B.C., seventeen centuries before Columbus was born, Eratosthenes of Alexandria, knowing that it was a sphere, calculated its diameter to within fifty miles of the correct figure. Do you know the way he did it? It was ingenious—and childishly simple, as all great leaps of the mind seem to be. At a place called Syene the sun at midday was in zenith, straight overhead: he could see its reflection at the bottom of a deep, deep well. At Alexandria, four hundred miles north, an obelisk cast a shadow, which he measured at its longest point. By simple geometry, using the angle of the shadow and the four hundred miles as his clues, he found his answer.

Senator MANSFIELD. Has this anything to do with your decision?

BARRY RUDD. Maybe. I was thinking about it this morning. About my bitterness.

Mr. BROADBENT. Is it because your mother changed her mind?

BARRY RUDD. Mother's wanting me to go is the one thing that makes me want to stay.

Mr. BROADBENT. What arguments did your mother use with you?

BARRY RUDD. Momma's become genteel again since last Tuesday night—more than ever. After Father fixed the windows she cleaned the whole house, threw out stacks of her cheap magazines, made Father buy some deal bookshelves over at Hansen's, in Treehampstead, and she's taken my books out of the cartons they were in, under the beds and in the corners, and she's put them all out on the shelves. Her arguments with me? She hasn't really urged me very much, but she did say this would be a great opportunity for me to become, as she puts it, 'truly cultured/ Momma didn't read the account of the United Lymphomilloid experiment in this morning's paper as carefully as she might

THE CHILD BUYER

have. She thinks Hack Sawyer University offers some kind of liberal-arts curriculum. Momma wants me to have the best opportunities. . . . I'll be homesick for Momma. I'll miss her. I love her more than I can say.

Mr. BROADBENT. You mention Tuesday night. Are you afraid? Did those hoodlums frighten you?

BARRY RUDD. Did you ever come across a poem called The Brontosaurus—A Sad Case'? It pictures the Brontosaur as a magnificent creature seventy feet long and four tons in weight, but

'As it was lacking in much brainium, It had a pitifully small cranium/ and, the poem concludes,

'He was the giant of his day,

But now his bones are on display/

Mr. BROADBENT. I take it you're not afraid. Could you tell us—

BARRY RUDD. I'm not afraid, but I must confess that ever since a week ago last Thursday, when I took that walk in the woods down to Chestnut Burr Creek, from the moment I put my book down on that log, from the time when my brown friend Mantis religiosa turned his head as if on a swivel to look at me and then took off with a whir, like a helicopter, I've had a feeling that something—everything—was slipping through my fingers. I feel as if I've lost everything. Out there in that room this morning Charley Perkonian gave me the strangest looks. We were a thousand miles apart. I can't explain it.

Mr. BROADBENT. Is this why you want to go?

BARRY RUDD. Maybe, but I doubt it. Maybe it reduces the need to stay, but I can't see how it gives me any good reason to go.

Mr. BROADBENT. Are you going simply because you have no desire to stay?

BARRY RUDD. Maybe. Last night Momma was all steamed up—

finding fault with the schools. And I had the creepiest feeling— of being critical of her. I've never felt that way before; I think something must have happened to me that night when the hoods attacked the house.

Mr. BROADBENT. In what way did you feel critical?

BARRY RUDD. I felt the school people may have been put off by Momma's queer way of being half pushy, half timid. I'll give you an example. When I became five—we still lived in Tree-hampstead then—Momma took me to enter me in kindergarten at a school called Cotton Mather Elementary, and we were received by the school clerk. Momma's always been very much in awe of authority, and she thought this clerk was the principal, and Momma said, 'I think I have a son who is advanced for his age.' The clerk gave Momma an oh-my-God look, and Momma said, 'I suppose you have lots of mothers who think that.' Tou'd be amazed,' the clerk said. But the woman did go and get a primer, and she put it in front of me to read. I'd been plowing through news magazines and technical journals at that time, and I just laughed out loud at the silly book and wouldn't deign to read it. The clerk was polite and said, Til certainly keep an eye on this one.' And Momma was satisfied with that—anyone could see, anyone but Momma, that the clerk was being sarcastic. That year all Momma got was a series of disquieting reports about my refusals to participate in Reading Readiness classwork and about my inferior hopping and skipping on the playground.

Mr. BROADBENT. But surely the teachers discovered you could read?

BARRY RUDD. They found out, after a fashion, but Momma feels that they were much more interested in the fact that I was maladjusted—as I guess I was, having 'I-see-Susan-run-Susan-run-run-Susan' rammed down my throat for six months.

Senator MANSFIELD. Don't you think the school people might be excused for thinking that you had been a bit in the wrong?

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THE CHILD BUYER

BARRY RUDD. I don't see that. What do you mean?

Senator MANSFIELD. I mean your laughing at the primer. After all, you had a chance to show that you could read and you didn't.

BARRY RUDD. I never gave that much thought. The book was so moronic, from my point of view at that time, I mean. . . . So Momma blames the schools, the schools blame me, and I blame Momma. It's a kind of circular motion, isn't it? Maybe some such circular linkage of forces, love and hate, love-blame and hate-blame, philos-aphilos, is what makes the world go round. Brings progress, war, adaptation—

Mr. BROADBENT. What about Dr. Gozar—did she persuade you this morning? Do you plan to hold out at United Lympho-milloid in the way she urged?

BARRY RUDD. Oh, no. Once I go, I'll go the whole way. It would be wonderful, but of course this is impossible—it would be wonderful if I could experience the United Lymphomilloid process twice, once co-operatively, and once fighting it. ... You seem to want to know who persuaded me. . . . Everyone has changed. Why has everyone changed? Mr. Clcary—he used to have such contempt for me; he's been hovering around me like a brood hen, warm and protective. Miss Perrin has gone giddy, she's tried to argue me into leaving and she uses the funniest arguments. Dr. Gozar, my dear, open friend, is suddenly so conspiratorial, whispering with Mr. Jones and then whispering with me—about defying United Lymphomilloid. And Momma. So ladylike. But I can still hear the echo of her shrieks the other night. TH sell him, I'll sell him. 9 ... I can't say I'm going in order to please you, Senator Skypack. ... I guess Mr. Jones is really the one who tipped the scales.

Mr. BROADBENT. How? How did he influence you?

BARRY RUDD. He talked to me a long time this morning. He made me feel sure that a life dedicated to U. Lympho would at

least be interesting. More interesting than anything that can happen to me now in school or at home—now that everyone has changed. Or perhaps it's that they've come out into the open as themselves. . . . Fascinating to be a specimen, truly fascinating. Do you suppose I really can develop an I.Q. of over a thousand?

Senator MANSFIELD. So the child buyer found a way to corrupt you, too, did he?

BARRY RUDD. Corrupt? What do you mean, corrupt? Is it corrupt to want to be interested—to want to use your mind—to want to be alive?

Senator MANSFIELD. I don't suppose a person who has succumbed can be expected to recognize the coin that has bought him. I.Q. points! How absurd! . . . Does it occur to you, sonny, that the child buyer has driven a wedge between you and your mother?

BARRY RUDD. Not at all. I told you I love Momma. The child buyer has been most generous with her.

Senator MANSFIELD. You like him, do you?

BARRY RUDD. Very much. Why shouldn't I? He respects intelligence. He wants intelligence on his side.

Senator MANSFIELD. I wonder what else the child buyer wants. What he wants altogether—for himself, I mean.

BARRY RUDD. I think I know. I can guess. I feel I know him now. I think he wants to be accepted as a specimen. I believe he hopes that his good work as a child buyer will earn him the right. He must know he's old for a specimen, and I can assure you he has no illusions about his brilliance, but his devotion is pure. He believes in U. Lympho. He worships Her already. Do you know what I think he wants most of all?

Senator MANSFIELD. What is that?

BARRY RUDD. I think he wants more than anything to go into the Forgetting Chamber.

THE CHILD BUYER

Senator MANSFIELD. Do you really think you can forget everything there?

BARRY RUDD. I was wondering about that this morning. About forgetting. I've always had an idea that each memory was a kind of picture, an insubstantial picture. I've thought of it as suddenly coming into your mind when you need it, something you've seen, something you've heard, then it may stay awhile, or else it flies out, then maybe it comes back another time. I was wondering about the Forgetting Chamber. If all the pictures went out, if I forgot everything, where would they go? Just out into the air? Into the sky? Back home, around my bed, where my dreams stay?

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOHN HERSEY was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He was graduated from Yale in 1936 and then attended Clare College, Cambridge, for a year; upon his return from England he was private secretary to Sinclair Lewis during a summer. His first novel, A Bell for Adano, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. Since 1947 he has devoted his time to fiction and has written The Wall (1950), The Marmot Drive (1953), A Single Pebble (1956), The War Lover (1959), and The Child Buyer (1960).

Mr. Hersey brought to The Child Buyer more than a decade of interest in American public education. He has been a member of a local school board and of a town school-study committee; chairman of a state committee on the problems of gifted children; member of the National Citizens' Commission on the Public Schools; delegate to the White House Conference on Education; member of the National Citizens 1 Council for Better Schools; and consultant to the Fund for the Advancement of Education.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

THIS BOOK was set on the Linotype in ELECTRA, designed by W. A. Dwiggins. The Electra face is a simple and readable type suitable for printing books by present-day processes. It is not based on any historical model, and hence does not echo any particular time or fashion. It is without eccentricities to catch the eye and interfere with reading—in general, its aim is to perform the function of a good book-printing type: to be read, and not seen.

The book was composed, printed, and bound by KINGSPORT PRESS, INC., Kingsport, Tenn. Paper manufactured by S. D. WARREN Co., Boston. Typography by VINCENT TORRE; binding design by CHARLES E. SKAGGS.