T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

It was in February, the sky stretched low and gray over the city, dinner stewing in a thousand pots, the eternal thumping and slamming and bellowing of the other students quietened both by the weather and the usual pre-prandial lull. Itard was seated in the kitchen of the Guérins’ apartment as Madame Guérin prepared the meal, quietly smoking and observing the boy, who was always at his most alert when food was the focus. It happened that while the boy was at the stove, overseeing the boiling of his potatoes, the Guérins, husband and wife, began an animated discussion of the recent death of one of their acquaintances in an accident involving a carriage.

Madame Guérin claimed it was the fault of the coachman — that he was negligent, perhaps even drunk — while her husband defended him. Each time she made a claim, he said, “Oh, but that’s different,”

and put in a counterclaim. It was that simple exclamation, that vowel sound, that “o” that caused the boy to turn his head, as if he could distinguish it from the rest. Later, when he was preparing for bed (and, incidentally, showing a marked preference for freshly laundered sheets and a featherbed to the nest of sticks and refuse and the cold planks he’d formerly insisted upon), Itard came to him to say goodnight and drill him on his vowels, thinking that the agency of sleep might somehow help impress the sounds on the empty tablet of the boy’s mind.

“Oh,” Itard said, pointing to the window. “Oh,” he said, pointing to the bed, to his own throat, to the round and supple sound hanging in the air.

To his amazement, from deep in the boy’s throat, the same sound came back at him. The boy was in his nightgown, tugging at the blankets. There was no show of ablutions or pretense of prayers to a non-conceptualized God; when the child felt sleepy, he retired to his room and plunged into the bed. But now, as he lay there, he repeated the sound, as if struck by the novelty of it, and Itard, excited, bent over him, repeating “oh, oh, oh,” until the child feel asleep.

It only seemed natural then, that in the morning, when the boy came to him, Itard called him by his new name, the one he’d suggested for himself, an august and venerable name borne proudly by any number of Frenchmen before and since, a name in which the accent fell heavily on the open second syllable: Victor. His name was Victor, and though he couldn’t pronounce the first part of it and perhaps didn’t even hear it and never would, he learned to respond to the second. He was Victor. Victor. After thirteen years on this earth, he was finally somebody.

It was around the time of his naming that Victor — or rather, Itard, on Victor’s behalf — received an invitation to attend the salon of Madame Récamier. This was a great opportunity, not only for Victor, whose cause could be promoted amongst the most powerful and influential people in France, but for Itard too, who, despite himself, had unrealistic social expectations, and like any other man, yearned for recognition. Madame Récamier was then twenty-four years old, a celebrated beauty and wit, wife of a wealthy banker three times her age and doyenne of a chateau in Clichy-la-Garenne, just outside the city; anyone who was anyone came there to pay her homage and to be seen. Accordingly, Itard bought himself a new jacket and had Madame Guérin make Victor a suit of clothes replete with a high-collared shirt, waistcoat and cravat, so that he looked like a gentleman in miniature. For a full week before the date of the salon, Itard devised various games and stratagems to teach Victor how to bow in the presence of a lady, with mixed results.

On the evening of the party they hired a carriage, Victor by now having lost his fear of horses to the extent that he stuck his head out the window and shrieked with glee the whole way, startling pedestrians, gendarmes and dogs alike, and proceeded through a cold rain to Clichy-la-Garenne. At first things seemed to go well, the bon ton of Paris making way for the doctor and his charge, the former savage who was now dressed and comporting himself like any other boy of thirteen, though Victor failed to bow to anyone, let alone his hostess, and persisted in trotting from one corner of the grand hall to the other, smearing his face with whatever foods he was able to find to his liking, the beaded eggs of fish presented on wafers of bread, fungus that had been stuffed, breaded and fried in hot oil, the remains of songbirds skewered nose-to-anus.

Madame Récamier gave him the seat of honor beside herself and even fussed over Itard a bit, trying to draw him out for the benefit of her guests, hoping he might, like a circus trainer, persuade Victor to show off some trick or another. But Victor didn’t show off any tricks.

Victor didn’t know any tricks. Victor was mute, unable — or unwilling — even to pronounce his own name, and he wasn’t in the least susceptible to Madame Récamier’s legendary beauty and celebrated eyes. After a while she turned to the guest seated on her other side and began to regale the table at large with an involved story concerning the painter who had recently done her portrait in oils, how he’d made her sit frozen in a single position and wouldn’t even allow one of the servants to read aloud to her for fear of breaking her concentration. The tedium she’d endured. The suffering. What a beast this painter was. And at a gesture from her everyone looked up and there it was, like a miracle, the very portrait of the inestimable Madame Récamier — couchant, her feet tantalizingly bare and her face wearing a dignified yet seductive look — displayed on the wall behind them. Itard was transported.

And he was about to say something, searching for the right words, something charming and memorable that would rise above the self-satisfied gabble of his fellow diners, when a crash, as of priceless statuary upended, silenced the table.

The sound had come from the garden, and it was followed, sharply, by a second crash. Itard looked to Madame Récamier, who looked to the vacant seat beside her even as one of the notables at the far end of the table cried out, “Look, the Savage — he’s escaping!”

In the next moment, the whole party was thrown into turmoil, the men springing up to burst through the doors in pursuit, the ladies gathering at the windows and fanning themselves vigorously to keep from fainting with the excitement of it all, the servants fluttering helplessly round the vacated places at the table and the hostess herself trying to look as if this were all part of the evening’s entertainment. Itard, mortified, threw back his chair in confusion, the napkin clutched like a lifeline in his right hand. He was immobi-lized. He didn’t know what to do.

By the time Itard came to his senses, Victor was zigzagging back and forth across the lawn, pursued by a dozen men in wigs, frilled shirtfronts and buckled pumps. Worse, the boy was divesting himself of his garments, flinging the jacket from his shoulders, tearing the shirt down the middle, running right out of his shoes and stockings. A moment later, despite the hot baths, the massages and the training of his senses, he was as naked to the elements as he’d been on the day he stepped out of the woods and into the life of the world — naked, and scrambling up the trunk of one of Madame Recamier’s plane trees like an arboreal ape. Itard moved through the doors as if in a trance, the shouts of prominent citizens — including the august General Jean Moreau, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, future king of Sweden and Norway, and old Monsieur Récamier himself — ringing in his ears. With the whole party looking on, he stood at the base of the tree, pleading with Victor to come down, until finally he had to remove his own jacket and begin climbing.