J. Lennon - Castle

“Do you believe that it means sexual intercourse, or not, Eric?”

“It does mean sexual intercourse, sir.”

“Do you know what sexual intercourse is?”

I knew that I had to be decisive. “Yes, sir.”

“Eric, tell me what sexual intercourse is.”

“It’s a man and a woman,” I said. “And they… they have no clothes on, and are together in bed. And it makes her pregnant. Sir.”

I felt certain now that he would slap me, but instead, a small smile appeared to play at his lips. He let out a long breath that I had not noticed him drawing, and continued his story as though he had never paused.

“It is an unfortunate fact, Eric,” he said, “that people’s desires are irrational. My daughter wanted a castle, and my wife wanted me to please my daughter. But neither considered the incidental costs of the fulfillment of such a desire, and it was this cost — my absence from their lives — that they had failed to imagine. This did not prevent them from complaining about it, however.

“My wife and I never resolved our differences over this issue, Eric, but Rachel and I did. When she was in her sickbed, she used to gaze out the window at the rock under which her castle was being constructed. She kept her drawing of the castle taped to the wall beside the window, and she imagined what it would look like when it was finished. Unfortunately, she was never to see the completed structure. She died of her illness while I was at work upon it.”

Doctor Stiles gazed at me hungrily. I remained perfectly still.

“Eric, though my family is gone, my castle is finished. Its purpose, until now, was uncertain. But you have given me the inspiration to put it to use. I want to tell you that you have shown tremendous potential in these sessions, and I would like to continue them with you, at my castle. The tests of personal control and endurance you have been given here, you have passed with flying colors. You could become a young man of tremendous strength and loyalty, and a great leader. I would like you, Eric, to spend the summer in my castle.”

Though I did not, of course, reply, I felt an upwelling of pride and personal satisfaction at the Doctor’s words, even as I felt a deep anxiety about what he was asking me to do, whatever it might be.

“Is there anything you would like to say, Eric?”

This was not a question he had ever asked me before. I cleared my throat.

“You may speak,” he said.

I hesitated before replying, “Thank you, sir. No, sir, I have nothing to say.”

He nodded once. “Good. I will speak with your father, then.”

There was a fight. It seemed to me at the time that it was my mother who was being unreasonable, and who threw the first punch. Or perhaps it was a slap. In my mind’s eye, I can see her strike my father, open-handed, on the face, and my father recoil in shock and surprise. In fact, I remember him stumbling backward across the living room, tripping over the ottoman, and banging his head, hard, against the mantel. I also remember seeing him with bandages around his head, and a limp.

However, I also remember coming home from school to find my mother missing and my father waiting in her place, and hearing from him that Mother wasn’t feeling well, and they had had an argument while I was at school, and she had forbidden me to spend the summer at Doctor Stiles’s. My father, however, had extracted a promise from her that I would be permitted to attend sessions with the Professor twice weekly for the entire summer, beginning the week school let out.

In my memory, my father was unharmed during this conversation, and I recall not being allowed to see my mother for several days due to her illness. And that, when I did see her at last, it was she who had a limp, and her face was purple and swollen, and she didn’t speak for quite some time.

It is difficult to reconcile these memories, I’m afraid. Perhaps I am recalling a different injury of my father’s, one he sustained at work. I vaguely remember something about a fall from a ladder. And, rationally speaking, it seems unlikely that I would have been present for this fight. Yet I am struck by the vividness of this memory — the balletic grace in my mother’s slap, the studied athleticism. I see the slap being delivered with the same strength and precision I imagine her golf swing to have possessed, back before she married my father.

In any event, a fight did occur, the result of which was that I would be given over to Doctor Stiles’s care twice weekly, from sunrise to sunset. Though I expressed disappointment that I wouldn’t be there for the entire summer, I was privately relieved, as I had been looking forward to spending time alone as I usually did, wandering through the neighborhood and exploring the swamp and woods. I felt mildly guilty, harboring this desire, and chastised myself for my weakness.

In the final week of June, on a Friday morning, my father woke me before dawn and told me to get dressed. When I came down into the kitchen, he was waiting there with a cup of coffee. “It’s time you tried it,” he said.

I took the hot mug into my hands and blew on the oily black surface. I had sipped my mother’s coffee once, and found it peculiar but nonetheless appealing. That coffee, however, had had cream and sugar added. I looked at my father.

As if reading my mind, he said, “No sugar and milk. That’s for women.”

I nodded, and sipped. The coffee scalded my mouth. I surprised myself by suppressing my cry of pain, and realized that it was because of Doctor Stiles’s training that I was able to do so. The thought made me proud. I was a person who could endure pain. I wondered, idly, if any of my acquaintances at school could say the same, and I surmised that none could. There was no time to drink it all, though — my father soon led me out to the car, and we took to the road in the pink light of sunrise.

My father, true to form, did not speak as we drove. It occurs to me now to wonder what it must have felt like to him, to be so uncomfortable in the presence of his own son. Most likely his own feelings of low self-worth — his fear that he was, or was perceived as, stupid — came into play here. I know that he considered me to be intelligent, because he once wondered aloud how it was possible I was so smart, as I didn’t get it from him, and I sure didn’t get it from my mother, and my sister sure as hell didn’t have it, either. Of course he underestimated my mother as well as himself, and perhaps even my sister, too. At any rate, I was now under the tutelage of a “famous professor,” as I had heard him tell the man at the hardware store, and this fact must have both intimidated him and filled him with pride, two emotions that tended to have the effect of silencing him entirely.

Over the next twenty minutes, we wended our way out of town and out into what appeared to me at the time to be untrammeled wilderness. My family was not “outdoorsy” and rarely left the house except to run errands in town, so this trip had the flavor of the exotic and new. I gazed into the dark woods, imagining what might be in them. Soon we had crested a hill and there, in an intersection, stood a white house.

The house was two stories, clapboarded, and surrounded by what must once have been a lovely flower garden and arboretum, with curved paths running through it, and trellises and gates, and low stone walls. It was obvious to me, even at the age of ten, that the garden had not been tended to for some time; the plants were shaggy, crowding one another, and wild grapevine had begun to overwhelm the whole.

We parked on a gravel drive and were met at the door by Doctor Stiles. Here, at his home, he looked very different. He wore torn and discolored khaki pants and a khaki shirt with four pockets, two on each breast. His boots were heavy and worn, and his eyeglasses were absent. I had dressed much as I had for the office visits, in dress shoes and pants, and a plaid short-sleeved Oxford shirt, and I suffered a moment of embarrassment as he glanced pityingly at me.