Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

I asked her how old she was and then said she didn’t look twenty. She showed me her driver’s license. Her name was Elizabeth Norris Ames, and she said everybody had always called her Norrie. She was twenty, and on the driver’s license it said she was a student. I asked her why she wasn’t in school, and she said she had had to drop out of Coulter in her senior year because of illness. She said she had her books with her, and she needed a quiet place to study and catch up. She had been out since March. She said that, if she could put in a good month of work, she could go back and they would let her take her final examinations.

I walked back with her and up the hill and down into the valley and unlocked the place for her. She thought it was wonderful, but she was looking at the trees and the creek and the pool, not the cabin. I said that, because it didn’t have conveniences, she could have it for the month of May for forty dollars if she wanted it. She gave me two twenty-dollar bills back at the house when I wrote out her receipt. I told her then that I was renting it to her alone, and it didn’t include visitors. I certainly didn’t want to find a whole crowd of them living in that little cabin, carrying on the way they do these days.

By the time Ralph got home she was all settled in. He didn’t think much of the idea. But I took him back there and introduced her, and when we walked back to the house he said that she seemed like a mannerly little person. Maybe we wouldn’t have any trouble with her, but that, he said, was a case of wait and see.

She was polite, but she wasn’t very friendly. I would wave to her when she would drive out to go to the village and do her shopping, and she would wave back. When I made some brownies I took her some, still hot, and she thanked me nicely, but she gave me the feeling she’d rather I didn’t come calling. She said there wasn’t a thing she needed. I saw that she had her books and notebooks opened up all over the table, and she had some of that music they like these days playing over a little black radio standing on the shelf over the bunk bed, but not loud.

Maybe everything would have been all right if I hadn’t gone down there to the cabin that one Thursday afternoon, the twentieth day of May, as I recall. I was taking a Coleman lantern to loan her. I got a call from the power company that they had to change something or other around and they were going to cut off the power at six o’clock at night and turn it back on at six the next morning. I thought it might be scary for her to be all alone in the dark like that and not knowing what had happened, so it was a Christian favor I thought to do for her.

As I came around the end of the cabin I thought I heard a man laugh, and because I didn’t want to walk in on her if she had company, I stepped up onto a cinder block and looked through the end window. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, I’d say, and there she was, bold as brass, naked as an egg, her and the boy too, making love in a way no decent woman ever would, right on that bunk bed. I could see that he was just a young boy, maybe sixteen years old, stretched out flat on his back, and she was mounted on him, sitting up straight, or squatting, sort of, holding his hands for balance, and churning away with her narrow little hips. The two of them were giggling and chuckling. It was a dirty, shameless performance. That young boy wore his hair as long as a girl.

The boy looked beyond her and noticed me staring in and said something to her and she stopped whatever they call that trick she was doing and snapped her head around. With the two of them staring at me I stepped back off the cinder box and twisted my ankle. Not badly, but enough to give me a twinge.

“What do you want, Mrs. Turner?” she called in one of those social voices like you hear in the movies and on TV. I didn’t answer, and she called out the same question again.

By then I had an answer, and I made her hear me! I said I wanted her out of the cabin and off the property in an hour. I said when she packed and drove out she’d find an envelope in our RFD box with her forty dollars in it.

She called to me again in that same voice. “Thank you, Mrs. Tinner. You’re very kind. Good-bye, Mrs. Turner.”

Then I heard them giggling again in there.

I watched at the window and when she drove out she had the boy in her little red car beside her. She didn’t even glance toward the house. And she didn’t stop at the mailbox. I went and got the money back out and then I went down to the cabin. I have to say, in all fairness, that she left it all spick-and-span, just as nice or nicer than when she moved in.

By the time Ralph came back from the village, I had decided there was no point in going into it. It would only upset him. So I said that the girl got word from home that she had to hurry back, and she’d said to say good-bye to him too. It was easier that way. In spite of all the years we’ve been married, I don’t really see how I could have brought myself to explain to Ralph just what I saw them doing. I don’t like dirty talk.

I never thought I would ever see her again, not in my lifetime. But it just goes to show you that some people are absolutely brazen and shameless. What did she expect me to do when she came back here two years later? Hug her and kiss her? Pin a medal on her? I did what I had to do.

My name is Wyndam Harger. Dr. Wyndam Harger. I receive an annual retainer from Coulter College, the girl’s school where Elizabeth Norris Ames was a third-year student up until early March two years ago. My office is three blocks from the campus.

I was summoned on an emergency basis and arrived at the small infirmary at six o’clock on Monday morning, March third. The Ames girl had been brought in an hour earlier. I was told that one of the girls in the dormitory had been awake and had seen a car stop in front of the dormitory and had seen the Ames girl ejected forcibly from the vehicle. It had then driven off at a high rate of speed. The Ames girl had walked a short distance and had then fallen onto the grass. The girl had awakened her roommate, and the two of them had taken the Ames girl to the infirmary, awakening the trained nurse on duty and reporting to her that the Ames girl had been absent from the campus and from classes for perhaps ten days.

I examined the patient. She was semiconscious and uncommunicative. I could find no specific indications of drug abuse. I could find no indications of sexual assault or serious trauma of any kind. She was emaciated. Her color was bad, and she showed the classic symptoms of malnourishment. There were some contusions on her hips and thighs and breasts, overlapping bruises acquired over a period of time, according to the coloration of the bruises. The pattern and the dispersion of the bruises were such that I found it reasonable to assume they were the result of strenuous copulation with a male either very muscular or of sadistic tendency.

Her body was rather immature for a female of twenty. Pulse and respiration were slow. Blood pressure was down. Reflexes were below norm. There was minor anemia. The white count was within limits. Temperature was slightly subnormal.

To me the most indicative symptom of what was probably wrong with her was her refusal to answer any question, her determination to keep her eyes shut tightly, and her tendency to curl into the foetal position.

I had the choice of recommending treatment there, of asking that they call for psychiatric diagnois, that they take her forty miles into Boston to a hospital, or that they contact her parents in the Philadelphia area to come and take the girl home for all necessary medical attention.

I recommended the final course, as it seemed to me to be in the best interests of the patient. I suspected that it was an emotional disturbance, and probably severe. We have seen a fourfold increase in such disturbances among the young in recent years, and I believe that only a small percentage of that increase is due to experimentation with the mind-distorting drugs. With increasing numbers of us, there seems to be a kind of brutality of indifference, a loss of identifiable goals, a dubiousness about any kind of social or emotional ethic, which creates a climate requiring more survival strength than our more imaginative and sensitive young people possess. The pattern seems to be a sense of isolation and meaninglessness which demands of the young person increasingly bizarre behavior and eccentric social activities. Out of this identity quest comes a kind of wildness which eventually results in some deep and lasting violation of self-image. And then the next step is a fragmentation of personality and a withdrawal from reality.