Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
“Yes. Jesse Harte is our subject,” Dr. Pedersen said, as if he were addressing Mrs. Pedersen. But he seemed unaware of her existence; he was staring only at Jesse. “It is a matter of fate that we are together, in this room this evening. It was ordained to take place. We are going to establish precisely the nature of our several relationships, we are going to attempt to organize the future so far as it is possible. We imagine that we exercise freedom of will, but beneath all gestures, beneath all desperate assertions of the self, there is the stratum of fate, hard as the hardest rock.… Well, Jesse, what is your opinion?”
Jesse stared.
“I—”
Dr. Pedersen waited politely. But when Jesse did not go on, he said in his prim, courtly way, “Is the world a mystery to you, Jesse?”
“I … I think so.…”
“Yet you were brought up in a conventionally religious household?”
“Yes, I think so.…”
“You attend church now, with the other boys?”
“Yes.”
“Do you pray very often?”
“I don’t know … maybe.… Maybe I do.…”
“What do you pray about?”
Jesse could not answer. Dr. Pedersen watched him. He breathed slowly, deliberately.
“Do you give thanks to God that you are alive, a living thing? That you still possess your God-given soul, your unique spirit?”
“Yes.…”
“Ah, good. And you believe then in the Incarnation and the Redemption of sinners,” Dr. Pedersen said flatly, “and you believe in the prophecy set down in the Apocalypse, that the cities of the earth will be leveled and the sinful destroyed?”
“Yes.”
“But it is all a mystery. And how do you propose to confront that mystery?”
Jesse did not understand.
“How do you, Jesse Harte, intend to confront the riddle of existence? How do you intend to organize your own life?”
Jesse’s brain raced. “By … by going as far as I can go, as far as … my abilities will take me.…”
“Ah, good. An extraordinary answer. Yes. Good,” Dr. Pedersen said, a little surprised. He smiled and a half-dozen dimples suddenly blossomed around his mouth. “Fourteen years old, Mary,” he said, though not turning to Mrs. Pedersen, “and he gives an answer like that.… It is fate, obviously.”
Mrs. Pedersen nodded.
“Now, Mary, if you will please leave us, I must talk more frankly with this young man,” Dr. Pedersen said. He got to his feet, and, with a grave formality, opened the door for his wife. She paused at the door and smiled again toward Jesse, though without really looking at him; she seemed girlish. Dr. Pedersen returned and sat down, his arms folded. He rested. His breathing was contemplative, slow, regular. Jesse found himself keeping pace with it. He was sitting very straight, his eyes burning in their sockets, staring at Dr. Pedersen and waiting for something to be said. It seemed that he had been sitting there, in that position, for most of his life.
After a wait of a minute or two, Dr. Pedersen took two things out of his inside coat pocket—a leather case with a pair of glasses inside, and a piece of paper. He put on the glasses and his eyes became womanish and even more kindly. “Jesse,” he said, “I have not told you very much about myself or about my interest in you. Perhaps you are curious. I will not trouble you with details that concern the past. I am a scientist, and I believe in the present and in the future. I am first of all a scientist, and then a physician, and then a father, and then a member of the American community. I owe no allegiance to any foreign power nor am I interested in politics of any kind. The delusions of Europe do not concern me at all. I do not think of them. I am a citizen of the world and of the twentieth century. Mr. Foley has perhaps told you that I am considered a dependable physician. Patients are sent to me from all over the country, but my interest is not in establishing a reputation, or in making money, but simply in doing my work. I am a diagnostician by instinct. I cannot explain my talent except in terms of its being a unique gift that has never failed me. Never. My talent is God-given and I do not explain it or exploit it. I am a humble man. I want only to help mankind. I believe that God has given me a gift and that I am responsible for it, and He has given my daughter and my son gifts also, gifts peculiar to them, and I am responsible for them also, for guarding them. I have a daughter who is thirteen years old and a son who is seventeen. No other children. I am responsible for them and I believe that I am responsible for you … I believe that there is something in you, a certain destiny, a certain fate.…”
He brought one hand to his face, shading his eyes as if Jesse were too brilliant to look at, and once again he was silent. His pale, protruding forehead seemed to brood over the mystery of the boy before him.
“You must be saved. You must be fed, clothed, sheltered, guarded. Loved. You must be loved. Your destiny is … it is almost clear to me … almost visible to me.… It is in you, in the structure of your bones, and it must be cultivated or it will die with you. Do not be alarmed, but I see this in you: that you will die shortly, in a year or two, unless you are loved.”
Jesse tried to smile.
But Dr. Pedersen did not seem to notice. He passed his hand over his forehead again, then over his head. His hair was thin and gray.
“I am a scientist, yes, but I rely upon intuition. I was born with a gift
of prophecy, whatever you like to call it. Men have tried to analyze me, assess me, but they have come away puzzled. I am a puzzle to myself.… To speak quite frankly, Jesse, my private life is incomplete. My family is incomplete. My daughter, Hilda, is a remarkable child but, so far as I can foresee, an incomplete child who will grow into an incomplete woman. My son, Frederich, is also something of a disappointment to me. My wife, Mary, is a most generous woman, religious and good, an excellent wife and mother, though rather spoiled by her father … but she has failed to give me the child I had foreseen for myself, it has not worked out quite the way I imagined it would twenty years ago.… Not that my marriage is an unhappy one,” Dr. Pedersen said slowly, “but that it is somehow incomplete. I want more. I need more to nourish me. I need another son. Jesse, I will show you something.”
Jesse waited, staring.
“I will show you a certain clipping from a certain newspaper. It is the basis of my interest in you. It dates back several months. I will not go into the sequence of ideas that this clipping began in me, in my imagination, I will only show you the clipping. And then, when you have read it, you will tell me your feelings quite honestly and frankly.”
“Yes …?”
“You are prepared?”
Jesse nodded. The roof of his mouth tasted of panic—dark, dank, acrid.
Dr. Pedersen smoothed out the clipping and Jesse read:
BOY ELUDES GUN-TOTING FATHER
Yewville, New York (UPI)
—Fourteen-year-old Jesse Harte, who ran from home when his father opened fire on him with a 12-gauge shotgun, was the only survivor Friday from his family of six.
His parents, two sisters and brother were dead in what police have called a quadruple murder-suicide. State Police said that Willard Harte, 35, shot his wife, Nancy, 31, and three children, Jean, 16, Shirley, 11, and Robert, 5, then turned the shotgun on himself in their home outside Yewville. Harte died in the hospital.
The murders were apparently committed in the morning or the early afternoon, because Harte was seen in Yewville with his son, Jesse, late Wednesday afternoon. He picked his son up at a store where he
worked after school. Jesse ran from the house after his father brought him home. He fled to a neighboring farm, wounded, and was driven to the Yewville Memorial Hospital, where he is in critical condition.
The mother and children were found dead in the living room of the small house, which is adjacent to a service station run by Harte.
Harte was found in critical condition just outside the house, the gun beside him.
Niagara County Prosecuting Attorney Virgil Block ordered an inquest as police completed their investigation.
Jesse read the article through once. Then again. He felt his spirit skimming back across the miles of road to that house, that intersection of roads, that clump of trees, that junkyard … and at the same time he felt how solidly he sat where he was, how awakened he was now, how real, how vivid to the man who sat watching him through those round, gleaming glasses. How real this moment was!
It was the only fact.
Jesse handed the clipping back to Dr. Pedersen. He said nothing.
“Ah, yes. My boy. Yes,” Dr. Pedersen said, nodding. His head bobbed with sympathy. He took off his glasses and, like a girl, began to weep. Jesse looked up at him fearfully, himself girlish and suspended and astonished. Dr. Pedersen took Jesse’s hand in his and shook it. “Yes, you have said nothing. You simply hand it back to me. Yes. You have dignity. You will grow beyond that, that terror. Already you are pushing into the person you will be, the future that belongs to both of us. Yes, already, already the future has begun.”
His tears fell onto Jesse’s hand.
In this way he became Jesse Pedersen, the third child, the second son, of Karl and Mary Pedersen of Lockport, New York.
One morning in August, 1940, Jesse was standing at the railing of the largest bridge in Lockport, high above the Erie Canal. He was gazing down at the locks. He held a library book tightly, as if fearful it might somehow fall; he was fascinated by the depth of the bridge, the steep damp sides of the canal, the different levels of water. So he was here at last, standing here alone.… Everything in sight was illuminated with a hazy, pearl-like glow because of the humidity and the brilliant, glazed sunlight, and Jesse saw how his arms glistened with minute particles of dampness, the pores of his skin like tiny eyes, the red-blond hairs rising delicate and yet powerful from his flesh.
He had survived. He was here
. His hands were no longer so bony; his knuckles were not so prominent.
Beneath him, a long dizzying drop to a pit of water that was dark and fairly still. In front of him the other locks, the other levels of water, vibrated with energy—the noise of water splashing angrily from one level to the next. A continual racket. Jesse felt how the brain might grow dizzy exposed to such frenzy, the spectacle of water churning and splashing and passing away, endlessly, within the human contrivance of falls and locks.… A few other people, men of a certain aimless, apologetic age, stood on the bridge, leaning on the railing as he did, staring down. Nothing else to do. They were men who for some reason were alone, and Jesse glanced away from them, as if in shame, in fear of their loneliness. He thought of his Grandfather Vogel. He erased the thought. Behind him traffic moved as usual, not very much of it on a weekday morning in Lockport. Women strolled downtown to shop, in no hurry. In the distance there was a church steeple, hazy in the sunlight. What was so fascinating about this, Jesse thought, was its ordinary nature—the canal, the locks, the noisy water; the town itself ordinary and quiet, as if it had existed for centuries, with a profound certainty of its right to exist, no awareness of the fact that it had no reason for existing, no guarantee of its right to exist. It was here; it moved in a slow, timed orbit. Already he could define himself against it:
Jesse Pedersen on the big bridge, waiting for a barge to come through the locks
. But he saw none in sight. He would not be able to wait for hours, like
the solitary men who hung around the locks having nothing else to do. He had to be home by noon.
… That terrible rush of water out of a pipe, a large rusty pipe … the explosive fall of water from one level to the next, down a series of small cliffs of water, the water boiling and frenzied and yet, in places, oddly tranquil, as if its surface were somehow firm, hard enough to walk on.… He stared, fascinated. Hypnotized. A dank, fetid odor rose from the deepest pit of water, directly below him. Jesse leaned over the railing. It was important for him to see everything, as much as he could see. Along the canal’s banks buildings had been built, decades ago, that seemed to descend into the foundation of gray, dreamlike rock itself, their peaks and arches and chimneys rising to the sky, their lower parts descending into the smudged, rain-washed gray rock, as if going back to a time when there was no distinction between human life and the life of rocks. Had they slept for thousands of years before being wrenched out of the earth, dug up to make way for the canal …? Jesse frowned and thought of the calm, wide, muddy canal that existed away from the sequence of locks, winding into the distance. No one would suspect, approaching the locks, that the water could turn so violent and dangerous.… Below, workmen were talking about something. Maybe arguing. An official with a white shirt and tie approached them. Jesse would have liked to hear their conversation, for they seemed to him privileged, walking so casually in an area forbidden to everyone else, blocked off by high fences and “No Trespassing” signs. They moved their arms, gesturing, but Jesse could not hear anything they said. He could not even make out the expressions on their faces.
He looked away from them, disturbed by their remoteness and by the fact of their activity, their work, their arguing. He was reminded of the Pedersens. Very soon now, at luncheon, he would be quizzed about how he spent the morning. In the evening, at dinner, he would be quizzed about how he spent the afternoon. Dr. Pedersen asked each of the children in turn what he had done, what “progress” he had made … what “observations” he had made.… At first Jesse had been allowed to sit in silence, amazed at the things Hilda and Frederich reported, too amazed to realize that he would have to take part in this himself. But his newness wore off after the first week. Dr. Pedersen had
turned to him and asked, in his grave, kindly, rather maidenish voice, “And what use did you make of today, Jesse? Please tell us.”
He had stammered something. His voice had faltered, faded. Hilda and Frederich had stared down at their plates, as if in sympathy for him, and Mrs. Pedersen smiled nervously at him, encouraging him, not quick enough to realize that he was hopeless. Dr. Pedersen had kept after him, though. Several minutes of questions, questioning. He was very patient. He said nothing that was critical to Jesse, but Jesse understood that he had failed.…