John Gardner - Freddy's Book

He nodded, apparently deciding against pointing out that he had not, in fact, invited me in.

“Well, so long,” I said. I cocked my head like a bluejay and gave a foolish little wave.

He seemed to study the gesture, then glanced at my face as if to see if I’d intended the wave to be the childish, self-conscious thing it was. When he saw that I hadn’t, he smiled, then tried to hide it, nodding, looking at the paper, then closing the door.

You meddling fool, Winesap! I thought. With a prickling of the scalp I realized that I’d spoken it aloud. Blood stung my cheeks, embarrassment like a child’s. I calmed myself. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.

NEVER MIND,” the professor said testily as we poked at our meal, sitting at the kitchen table. It seemed to please him that I’d failed. He seemed to have shrunk, and grown ten years older, but also he seemed downright delighted with himself, as if he’d discharged some painful responsibility — justified himself and in the same gesture put the guilt on me. We were neither of us ourselves by now, hardly human in fact, prickly and tyrannic as those shadowy powers of the most primitive religions. So much for the noble evolution of the mind!

“That boy needs medical help — immediately,” I said — petulant, vindictive. “At the very least get him a physical checkup. It’s not good, letting him withdraw like that. He’ll get peculiar.”

“Doctors!” Agaard said scornfully, but he was thinking about it. “You’re saying it’s too late — is that it?”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” I said. “It’s true, he doesn’t care to have his privacy invaded. Sooner or later he’s got to get out into the world, you know. You know what Plato says—”

Agaard snorted. “Like his father, you mean. If I don’t act soon, he’ll be as bad as his father.”

I said nothing.

After we’d eaten, he put bread, squash, potatoes, and four large pieces of chicken on an aluminum-foil cooking pan and, holding it in both hands, carried it upstairs. When he came down again, we finished the wine, practically in silence, each of us angry and embarrassed in his own way. He snarled from time to time about this or that, his vituperation striking out in all directions as he tried to make peace by thinking up enemies we both might hate; but it was a paltry effort, the comic bad temper of a Punch and Judy show, and I refused to go along.

At last he took me upstairs, to the front of the house, some distance from where Freddy was, and showed me to my room. The bed had clean sheets and blankets, and someone had dusted, not well. I realized that Agaard had planned from the beginning that I should stay the night. I smiled, rueful, remembering he’d invited me to come around three. The old man had given himself plenty of time to work up his nerve. I had to admire him for the care with which he’d cornered himself — and ultimately saved himself, since now it was all my fault. No question about it, he had an eye for strategy. All those old-fashioned hard-evidence histories of war and intrigue.

Outside the room, wind was howling through the pines.

As he was about to go out the door I said, giving the line one last little tug, “Nobody can live without some kind of contact with the world, Professor.”

He raised one hand, meaning to interrupt, then changed his mind, too weary of me to argue.

I said, “If you keep trying to manage this alone, there’s no telling where it will end. Surely you’ve considered that yourself. Surely it’s the reason you spoke to me last night. You wanted me to come here and judge.” I looked at his forehead, not his eyes, my hands in my pockets.

He stood very still, a bent, black-suited old crow, looking at his claw on the doorknob. At last he said “It’s a wonderful feeling, righteousness. I envy you.”

I stiffened. “That’s hardly fair, I think.”

He thought about it, crunching his dentures. “At any rate, as you’ve said yourself, it was I that lured you here. I get part of the credit.” He turned his torso rolling his magnified eyes in my direction.

“He still needs a doctor,” I said sharply.

“Yes, yes.” He gave an impatient little wave. “You win, Professor agree.”

“It’s surely not a matter—” I began, but he cut me off.

“You’ve persuaded me, Professor!”

We both stood motionless, in stalemate again. He looked down at the hand on the doorknob, staring at it hard. His voice was cool and level: “You say he must be brought out into the world. Let me tell you what that means. When he was a boy of six he was already unusual. Every single day, week in, week out, he’d come home crying. One forgets what merciless creatures people are. Teachers spanked him to prove they weren’t afraid of him. I saw it; they didn’t fool me! And don’t think a child doesn’t notice such things! In the end he hurt someone — not badly, as luck would have it. A terrible little man. A gym instructor.” His tone became ironic. “I suppose that’s when I myself began to be afraid of him.”

I nodded, not certain what was expected. As a kind of stall, I loosened my tie and undid the top button of my shirt. Then I stood once more with my hands in my pockets. I must try not to see it as a fight with Sven Agaard, even if, in a way, it was — historian against historian contending for control of the past. Perhaps I could talk to the boy tomorrow. I should sleep, get it all in perspective, quiet my nerves. I knew how Freddy felt, that absolute safety of books. Living all alone with a man like his father … I said, pretending to soften a little, “It may not be as bad as it seems, Professor. We’re too close to it right now. A good psychiatrist might settle the whole thing in no time. The boy loves books, paper dragons. … All right, why not? He needs to adjust to a few simple chores — proper eating, exercise—,” I held out my hands like a lawyer to a sympathetic jury. My voice, against my wish, became as ironic as Agaard’s. “He can still have ‘the sweet, solitary life’ he’s gotten used to. A good psychiatrist will convince him.”

“Yes, no doubt,” Agaard said.

Perhaps that instant we were closer to agreement than he imagined. I was thinking of the glittering lights and the roar of the party last night, the blazing faces as we talked nonsense about the big-foot, honing definitions like childish medieval philosophers, slapping each other’s shoulders, laughing at jokes only an ape would think, in the privacy of his tree, to be amusing. We were happy as children, nymphs and satyrs of the Golden Age; yet if it was joy — and it was — it was a fraudulent and ultimately brutal joy: witness the hostility of all those free spirits to an authentic though uncivil intellectual like Agaard; witness the pandering and falsehood of the young man who’d driven me home. In the end, who’d trade a golden imaginary world, Freddy’s sad paradise, for such foolishness as that?

For an instant a picture came into my mind. I imagined Freddy Agaard at the same glittering party of university historians — or pseudo-historians — his head brushing sparks off the ceiling, his huge face enraged, his wide hands reaching out to seize people, smash them against walls. I blinked, driving it away. It was vivid, but it was nonsense. I saw Freddy Agaard as I’d seen him an hour ago, flushed and sweating in his walled, locked garden of books, and I winced, shaking my head. No wonder he locked doors. Even if he were strong, he’d be right to hide. Why leave that “green shade,” as the poet calls it, for the common, mindless glare? Again, involuntarily, I winced and shook my head. I was sickened by the injustice of things, the doom snapped on him by no one, for no reason, a pairing of genes carried down from the days when, as we read in the Bible, giants walked the earth. But there was nothing I could do. He had cause enough to dislike us, I was ready to admit; cause enough to shrink from us, shudder with rage at our invasions of his sacred grove or sunless cave.