Wonderland (19 page)

That voice.

It was with him everywhere.

At the edge of sleep, fearful of surrendering himself to its emptiness, he heard Dr. Pedersen’s voice pronouncing his name.
Jesse. Jesse
. The voice seemed to call him back from a deep, dangerous emptiness where anything might be dreamed, anything might be remembered. It was loving, stern, watchful. Walking to school, pausing at the edge of a curb, he seemed to hear the voice, pronouncing his name clearly, cautioning him as if the curb were the edge of a cliff and he was in danger of falling to his death. Sometimes when he studied in the evening upstairs in his room, he heard the words of his books pronounced in his head in Dr. Pedersen’s voice, so that he would not forget anything he read. It became permanent once it was heard in Dr. Pedersen’s voice. It became sacred.

He had never really heard his name pronounced until Dr. Pedersen pronounced it.

He had begun school and discovered that it was not difficult for him. He was anxious to do well, he studied all the time, he was always far ahead of his assignments. In a way, he felt that he had never attended school before; he had never taken it seriously before. Why that was he did not know. But now he took it seriously, he took everything seriously.… He felt himself an adult among large, chattering children in the school. He had nothing to say to them. They had nothing to say to him. The high school building—with its
VNION SCHOOL
sign above its front door, the “U” shaped quaintly, like a “V”—was antiquated and ugly, dating from the late eighteen-eighties, and it smelled sharply of disinfectant and polished wood and chalk dust, and the perfume and hairdressing of girls, so many chattering girls. Their voices were hectic and insubstantial and wordless, sounds rather than words, like music too trivial for Jesse to bother with. He moved among them shyly, detached from their perpetual excitement. If they brushed close to him, he felt a sensation like small sparks jumping through his body, sparks of panic. He did not allow himself to stare at them. He did not want to see them, did not want to remember them … there was something about the chunky, hotblooded fleshiness of girls that he did not want to remember.… Their skirts were long, well beneath the calves of their energetic legs, but their sweaters were tight across their breasts and shoulders; their hair, worn long, fell in bangs onto their foreheads or in languid strands into their eyes, to be brushed back impatiently, perpetually. The boys seemed much younger than the girls. They milled around together as if for strength, laughing harshly in the lavatories and on the stairs, smoking, calling out to one another in a language that seemed to Jesse partly code, made up of words he did not really understand. They were children, tall, scrawny children, and he was an adult. Something in him yearned for their childishness … but then he remembered who he was, who he must become, and he looked upon them as if from a height, Jesse already grown into the man he must become, grown safely free of their spurts of friendship and their spiteful little feuds.

They are not very real, Jesse thought. He was echoing Dr. Pedersen’s remarks about the war in Europe:
This war is not very real to us yet
.

No, other people were not very real; there was not time to think of them, to invest them with reality. Dr. Pedersen’s voice was real. It was close, intimate, like the murmuring of his own blood. It was somehow contained inside his skull. Other adult voices were important to Jesse—Mrs. Pedersen’s voice, the voices of his high school teachers—but only Dr. Pedersen’s followed him everywhere. It prodded him on, it gave him courage, it chided him when he was lazy. It was always quizzing him, bringing him up short by saying,
What have you just read?
Jesse read his textbooks and other books on chemistry, biology, physics, and mathematics; at the back of his mind he could hear Dr. Pedersen saying,
Yes, good, but why are you so slow? You have so much more
work to do!
Hesitant, as if listening for a distant summons, Jesse would pause on the narrow school stairs. His classmates surged impatiently around him, noisy and shrill and prematurely knowledgeable, their legs straining as if ready to leap into a dance where he could not follow them, their voices hard and musical and hectic, yearning for the future. At the end of the school day they burst out of the old building and gathered together on the sidewalk in front of the Palace Theater or in front of the YMCA building, or they went to join friends who had quit school at Harrison’s Radiator Company, a factory right behind the high school. Or they dawdled on the bridges of Lockport, staring down at the tugboats and the dirty barges, pushing pebbles absentmindedly down into the water with the edge of their feet. Restless. Aimless. They strolled up and down Main Street, eager to be transformed into adults so that they could escape forever the small, maddening confinement of their childhoods. The boys wanted cars, dreamed of cars or of joining the Navy, echoed their parents’ excited fears about the future: What was going to happen in Europe? What was Germany going to do next? The girls chattered about friends who were getting married, or about older sisters who were already married, having babies, always having babies. If Jesse happened to overhear them he felt at times that he had blundered into a crowd, an entire little nation, of strangers.

He thought of himself as large and vulnerable among them, a tall boy, too serious, soft in the body, with a countrified apologetic look that drew out their puzzled scorn—but they respected him, too; they did not quite know what to make of him, because he was the new adopted son of Dr. Pedersen, Dr. Karl Pedersen, whom everyone in Lockport knew. He seemed to take on for them the gravity of his father’s importance. Glancing at him, they saw Dr. Pedersen instead. He was so serious, with his books and his quiet, stern frown, his manner of walking slowly as if figuring something out in his head, always a problem in his head, always something. He passed among them in silence, grateful for their lack of interest in him. Except for a few remarks he overheard—made up of jargon he did not quite understand, except to know that it marked him as strange—they ignored him, forgot him almost as soon as they discovered him. He was grateful. He wanted only to be left alone by these noisy children, especially by the girls. But one day on the street a group of boys parted and one of them called after him in a voice that sounded familiar, “Jesse! Hey,
Jesse!” He pretended at first not to hear, this alarmed him so. Why should anyone be calling after him? When he finally turned he saw his cousin Fritz running to catch up with him.

“Hey, I thought that was you! What the hell!” Fritz said.

He was wearing a Navy uniform.

“Hey, Jesse, look at me—you didn’t know I was going in so soon, did you? I’ve just finished basic. How do you like that?”

Jesse was very agitated, seeing Fritz like this. For a moment he could not speak. His mind had gone blank. Then he said, stammering, “How do your—your mother and father feel about it? Is it all right with them?”

“Oh, hell, you know my mother—hell—It’s okay with them, I guess. They worry a lot. They think we’re going to get in the war and everything and I’ll be on some boat that will sink, Jesus, you know how they are, Ma especially—she’s been bawling a lot since I signed up—Bob Door and Walter Cleary and I all signed up together. The base I’ll be stationed at is in Florida, how do you like that? Nice summer weather, it’s supposed to be! The hell with how cold it gets up here!… Well, I thought that was you there. You’re looking good, Jesse, Jesus, you’re a lot bigger than you were—Is everything okay?”

Fritz shaded his eyes and grinned at Jesse. When Jesse nodded he went on, his shoulders moving restlessly beneath the dark material of his uniform, “We heard you got placed with a family in Lockport. Heard all about it. Is it okay there? Is everything okay?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, I felt bad about what they did. Pa felt bad too. But—”

“It’s all right,” Jesse said.

“Well, no, Jesus.… How come you don’t come back to visit sometimes? Is that against the rules or something? You like living in town, huh?”

“Yes, I like it a lot.”

“Well, you seem sort of different. Bigger.”

“I feel better than I did before.…”

Fritz smiled in embarrassment. His hair had been trimmed very close to his skull. He looked as thin as Jesse had been, his shoulder bones restless and awkward. Jesse could see a blotch of red moving up his neck.

“Well, that’s good. Well.…”

“How is everything at home?”

“Real good. It’s the same. You know how it is.… You know, it was hard for them to do what they did. Turn you over to the Home and all that. I don’t know. It was strange … it was hard for them … I heard them talking about it a lot and Ma would cry.… You sure it’s okay where you are? What are they like, the family you’re with?”

“They’re very nice people,” Jesse said.

“And you live with them full-time? I mean—just like a regular family? Are you adopted or what?”

“Yes, adopted.”

“Is your name different?”

“It’s Jesse Pedersen now.”

Fritz stared at him. “No kidding? Hell. That’s something to think about.… What is it?”

“Pedersen.”

“Pedersen.…”

Fritz nodded and could not think of anything else to say. They were separated by a yard or so of sidewalk. Fritz was still shading his eyes from the sun and his grin had become strained.

After a few minutes they parted. Jesse felt confused with an emotion he could not understand—shame, fear? His heart pounded hotly and he seemed to hear Dr. Pedersen’s voice in his head.
Let him go, abandon your cousin, don’t allow him to recognize you on the street after this. If he dies in the Navy … If he dies in the Navy …

But Jesse could not hear the rest of this.

“If he dies in the Navy there will be one less person to know me the way I used to be,” Jesse thought.

Each day he was away from home, consciously “away” from his home, and yearning to return. He felt himself gravitating toward that house, drawn to it as if by an actual, tangible force. As he climbed the hill, he experienced a slight confusion of times, as if he were the old, skinny Jesse coming up here to stare at the Pedersen house, and to watch in silence as Hilda Pedersen passed by him, not recognizing him. Then he remembered that he lived there, that he was “Jesse Pedersen” and would take his place at the dinner table, recognized by everyone.… He prepared himself all day long, reading and memorizing pages in his schoolbooks, his mind working, analyzing, discarding, retrieving, getting ready for that moment in the evening sometime
during dinner, when Dr. Pedersen would ask him what he had learned that day.

He would recite what he had learned. In his quick, respectful voice, making no mistakes, he would recite as much of it as Dr. Pedersen required. Now both Frederich and Hilda listened to him as well, though Frederich would not look at him. Hilda ran her finger round and round the edge of her messy plate. Dr. Pedersen nodded his head sharply as if checking Jesse’s words against his own memory. Once he interrupted Jesse to ask, “Explain the term
homeostasis
, don’t define it. Explain it to us, please.” And Jesse said, “Hippocrates believed that disease could be cured by natural powers within the living organism. He believed that there is an active opposition to abnormality as soon as the condition begins. In 1877, the German physiologist, Pfluger, said that the cause of every need of a living being is also the cause of the satisfaction of the need. The Belgian physiologist, Fredericq, said in 1885 that the living being is an agency of such sort that each disturbing influence induces by itself the calling forth of compensatory activity to neutralize or repair the disturbance. The higher in the scale of living beings, the more perfect and the more complicated the regulatory agencies become. They tend to free the organism completely from the unfavorable influences and changes occurring in the environment. In
The Wisdom of the Body
, the American physiologist Walter Cannon quotes the French physiologist Charles Richet:
The living being is stable. It must be so in order not to be destroyed, dissolved, or disintegrated by the colossal forces, often adverse, which surround it. By an apparent contradiction it maintains its stability only if it is excitable and capable of modifying itself according to external stimuli and adjusting its response to the stimulation. It is stable because it is modifiable—the slight instability is the necessary condition for the true stability of the organism
.”

Silence.

Jesse had a dizzying vision of Dr. Pedersen’s stern face. He waited. At the other end of the table Mrs. Pedersen made a sudden gesture, as if straightening her plate, adjusting her plate on the tablecloth.

“Yes, fine,” Dr. Pedersen said slowly. “Fine. But you must read Claude Bernard. He has the idea of ‘homeostasis’ even if he doesn’t use the term itself.… You must read the
Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
, it’s a marvelous, exhilarating, inspiring work.… Bernard is one of the giants of medicine, working at a time when science
was young, fresh, mysterious, open, anything was possible then … anything.…” He broke off, staring at Jesse. His face brightened slowly. “Well, Jesse,” he said, “it seems you are becoming yourself.”

And Jesse understood then that he had done well.

He began taking Jesse to the Clinic on Sunday afternoons. They drove out in Dr. Pedersen’s black Rolls-Royce, a stately, archaic vehicle that caught the eyes of other motorists. Jesse felt as if he were in an unearthly vessel with Dr. Pedersen, propelled silently and rather swiftly along the ordinary Lockport streets, while Dr. Pedersen talked energetically to him about his patients and his inventions and his plans for the future. The Pedersen Clinic was not very large, but it was a handsome, modern building just on the outskirts of the city. “For a while Hilda would come out with me on these special little visits to my Clinic, but then she lost interest,” Dr. Pedersen said. He and Jesse would be the only ones in the building and his voice would echo importantly. “Frederich, of course, does not like to leave the house. His asthma bothers him, he has shortness of breath … and of course he is totally devoted to his music.… But here, Jesse, look here,” he would say, pulling out a giant blueprint, “here are plans for my addition; you can see the operating theaters here, these large areas, and along this side private rooms for special patients.… It is a marvelous adventure, the future. You and I believe in it, don’t we?” He put on his glasses to peer down at the intricate blueprint, as if looking directly into the future and finding it good. “Jesse, there will be people in your life who claim that the future of the world is bleak. Listen to these people, be respectful to them, but never believe them. They are already dead. It is death speaking in those words. At this moment Europe is at war, it is even claimed to be a threat to us—but don’t take it too seriously. A very wise man said that war is not adventure; it is a substitute for adventure. And that is very true, because adventure is here, here,” he said, tapping the unwieldy, smudged blueprint, “it is what we create, not what we are thrust into. You and I are not at war. We are not being shot at. Our world is thriving, Jesse. It is expanding every day, every minute. I own a great deal and it is expanding minute by minute, and because you are my son you share in it too, this extraordinary growth.… You must understand, Jesse. All life is a movement into the infinite … or it is a shrinking back. Make up your mind. They come to take their turns, step by step, the people of the earth—well, make up
your mind, I say to them!—will you thrust yourself into the infinite, or will you shrink back? If you shrink back I have no time for you. If you make claims about history and death and sickness and chaos I have no time for you. What can history tell us? It is all a joke! Manure! We are not to be dragged down by the stupidities of the past. Hegel says, quite correctly: ‘People and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.’ And so, what have we left …? We have the health of the living organism, the living body, which maps itself outward and defines limitations for itself, for
itself
—it does not allow others to do this for it! Never! It is the living organism that strives to become God. I am striving, straining—” And here he would press both hands against his chest, as if he had to keep back the straining of his big heart. “I am straining to be God, to move into that place which is God’s place, to take from Him all that He will allow me to take. I am a perfect protoplasm. That is because every cell in me is growing, straining outward into infinity, and because I am able to make a map of the life that will be mine, while other people bump into one another in stupid crowds and herds, like animals. When this war is over, Jesse, there will be a marvelous growth. Everything will grow, expand, come alive again. And after that there will be another war, because the economy demands it; there will always be a war, and we will watch it from these shores, and some of us will direct it, because it is a fact of life that certain people must direct wars and other people must die in them. It is Fate. Do you understand? What is war, Jesse? What is war? Is it death? Never! It is the very heartbeat of life—the last resources of life’s energies! Do you understand?”