Unknown - The Genius

Green Gardens was over the Hudson, off Route 151. We drove through low neighborhoods still festooned with tinsel; we came to a highway junction where, in a wet asphalt lot adjacent to a gas station, two men stood watching a third as he walked backward atop a truck tire. Before letting Samantha get behind the wheel, I’d made her promise she was calm enough, and by now she had returned to her dry, rational self, spending the bulk of the drive flatly relaying holiday horror stories.

“My mom called Jerry my dad’s name.”

“You’re joking.”

“Wish I was.”

“Was she drunk?”

“No. But he was. That’s why she did it, I think. I think she was having one of those flashbacks to when she used to yell at my dad. Jerry was being an ass about something she cooked and she goes, ‘Goddammit Lee!’ Right away she put her hands over her mouth, like in a cartoon.”

“Did he notice?”

“Yup.”

“Oh boy.”

“Yup.”

“That’s appalling.”

“It is what it is.” She looked at me. “Did you call your father?”

I hesitated. “No.”

She nodded, said nothing.

Feeling defensive, I said, “I was going to. I actually did pick up the phone.”

“But?”

“I had no idea what to say.”

“You could have asked why he wanted to buy your drawings.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s up to you.” She signaled left. “We’re here.”

The stone columns flanking the entrance to Green Gardens had once supported a gate; similar columns ran all along the frontage, stained with rust runoff near the empty bracket holes in their tops and sides. Thickets of pine and alder blocked the view from the road; as we cleared them, I felt a rising sense of anticipation. A towering white house came into view, gabled and turreted and encircled by a porch. We parked and mounted the steps and were greeted by a man with a little red goatee.

“Dennis Driscoll,” he said.

“Ethan Muller. This is ADA Samantha McGrath.”

“Howdy.” One corner of his mouth turned up. “We don’t get a lot of visitors.”

The interior of the house was creaky and musty and berugged, its original Victorian trimmings intact: god-awful wallpaper, push-button light-switches, an off-kilter chandelier. Steam pipes hissed. In the foyer hung a severe oil portrait of a jowly, baldpated man: THOMAS WESTFIELD WORTHE, according to the nameplate.

“He was in charge until the mid-sixties,” Driscoll said. “In its time, it was considered a fairly progressive place.” He led us upstairs, pausing on the landing to point out the window. Across a wide, snowy meadow stood a second building, this one squarely modern. “That’s where the dormitory used to be. They knocked it down in the 70s to make room for the main rehab facility. The house is from 1897.” He started up toward the third floor. “I was surprised to hear from you so soon. Frankly, I don’t think Dr. Ulrich expected you to show up, which is probably why she agreed.”

“Here we are.”

“Yessirree.” We walked along a cramped, dark hallway, went up another flight of stairs. “This part of the house isn’t used very much, because the heat doesn’t work that well. And in the summer it’s like a kiln. Mostly we use these rooms for storage. Long-term patients can leave their bags. We get a lot of out-of-staters, a few Canadians tired of being on a waiting list. In theory family members could sleep here, but I always recommend they use the Days Inn. Voila.” We turned the corner.

He said, “You can see why I didn’t want to go through them all myself.”

All along the hallway hung hundreds of photographs, their frames cracking from decades of seasonal fluctuation in humidity. Virtually every inch of wallpaper was covered, evoking one of those claustrophobic seventeenth-century “paintings of paintings,” some Flemish archduke’s personal gallery smothered floor to ceiling in art. A few of the photos were of individuals, but most were as Driscoll had described, in the style of a class portrait, the subjects arranged in rows, tallest in the back, shortest sitting cross-legged, all of them dead-eyed, their hair slicked down and their collars buttoned up; all of them rigid and sullen, as befits the subjects of an old photo. But I detected, too, an extra dose of insolence; sneers lingering and chins jutting out farther than strictly necessary. Was I overreading? I did know, after all, that they’d been sent here for bad behavior. Either way, I felt a profound sympathy for them, these castoffs. Had I been born in a less indulgent era, to a less indulgent family, I might have ended up among them.

Knowing that somewhere in this array of faces we might find Victor Cracke gave rise to the temptation to rush, but we proceeded methodically, squinting to read the legends. Some were unlabeled. I lifted one frame off the wall and found nothing on the reverse but June 2, 1954. All these faces and names; all these forgotten souls. Where were their families? What kinds of lives did they lead before coming here? Did they ever leave? Ghosts tugged at my sleeves: spirits looking for a living body to carry them away.

I think I expected fireworks when we found him. All that happened, though, was Samantha saying,

“Ethan.”

Seven men in a single row. She put her finger near the bottom of the frame.

STANLEY YOUNG FREDERICK GUDRAIS VICTOR CRACKE MELVIN LATHAM

Shorter than the men to either side of him by at least four inches, wearing an uneven moustache, his eyes wide and terrified as he waits for the flash. A high forehead and a rounded chin give his face the shape of an inverted tombstone, its width out of proportion with his torso, which is sunken and slight. He might be hunchbacked. Based on the other men in the photo, seemingly from the same cohort, I put him at about twenty-five, although he looked prematurely wizened.

Driscoll said, “I’ll be darned.”

My hands shook as I took the picture from Samantha. I felt a lot of things—sadness, relief, excitement—but most of all I felt betrayed. Once, he had not existed. Once, I had been the one to create him; I had been the prime mover. Then, as we hunted him down, I had been forced to forfeit those beliefs, piecemeal and painfully. I talked to people who knew him. I ate his apples. I walked in his footsteps. He became realer and realer, and afraid of losing him entirely, I had grabbed at him. Instead of minimizing him, I inflated him. I had expected that when I finally did lay eyes on him, he would be more: more than a typed name; more than a bunch of muddled grays and chalky whites, a piece of institutional arcana; more than a sad-looking golemlike little man. I wanted someone monumental; I wanted a totem, a superman; I wanted a sign that he was of the Elect; I wanted a halo hovering above him, or devil’s horns sprouting from his forehead, or anything, anything at all to justify the sweeping changes he had wrought in my life. He was my god, and his plainness shamed me.

Interlude: ó/44.

In the little house he has everything he needs. Mrs. Greene cooks for him and does his laundry. She teaches him how to read and how to do simple math. She teaches him the names of birds and animals, she gives him a big book, she puts him on her lap and reads to him from the Bible. The story he likes best is Moses in the bulrushes. He imagines the basket on the Nile, surrounded by crocodiles and storks. Mrs. Greene uses her hands to make their snapping jaws, scaring him with loud claps. Chomp! But Victor knows that the story has a happy ending. Moses’s sister watches from the banks. She will not let anything happen to him.

Most of all he likes to draw, and when Mrs. Greene goes to town she brings back boxes of colored pencils and paper so thin he has to be careful not to tear through. She does not go often enough to satisfy his hunger for blank space and so he draws on the walls. When she sees she is angry. You must not do that, Victor. There is never enough room to draw, so he learns to hoard paper of all kinds: envelopes he fishes out of the trash, the insides of books Mrs. Greene reads and puts away on the shelf. One time she pulls down a book and sees what he has done and then she is angry again. He doesn’t understand. She has already read them, what does it matter? But she says You must never and then she beats him.