independent of the childish body in which it was housed; when he talked, I ceased to be aware of his age.
His questions came at me, as rapid and stinging as hailstones. He seemed to have barely assimilated one answer before a dozen new lines of inquiry had been formed. After a while I started to feel like a Sunday batter facing a pitching machine gone berserk. He fired away for a few minutes more, then, just as abruptly as he'd begun, ended the conversation.
'Good.' He smiled with satisfaction. 'I understand now.'
'Great,' I said, and exhaled wearily.
He filled half his plate with ketchup and dragged a bunch of soggy french fries through the scarlet swamp. Stuffing them in his mouth, he said:
'You're fairly intelligent, Dr. Delaware.'
'Thank you, Jamey.'
'When you were a kid, were you bored in school?'
'For the most part. I had a couple of teachers who were inspiring. The rest were pretty forgettable.'
'Most people are. I've never really attended school. Not that uncle Dwight didn't try. When I was five, he sent me to the snobbiest private kindergarten in Hancock Park.' He grinned. 'Three days into the semester it became clear that
my presence was' - he mimicked a histrionic schoolmarm -' upsetting to the other children.'
'I can imagine.'
'They were doing reading readiness exercises - colour matching, learning the alphabet, stuff like that. I thought it was mind-numbing and refused to cooperate. As punishment, they put me in the corner by myself, which was no punishment at all because my fantasies were terrific entertainment. Meanwhile, I'd got hold of an old paperback copy of The Grapes of Wrath that someone had left lying around at home. The cover was really interesting, so I picked it up and started to read it. Most of it was pretty accessible, so I really got into it, reading in bed at night with a flashlight, stashing it in my lunch box and taking it to school. I'd sneak in a few pages during snack time and when they stuck me in the corner. After a month or so, when I was halfway through the book, that bitch of a teacher found it. She freaked out, snatched it out of my hands, so I attacked her - punching, biting, a real fight. They called Uncle Dwight down, and the teacher told him I was hyperactive and a discipline problem and needed professional help. I jumped up, accused her of being a thief, and said she was oppressing me the same way the farm workers had been oppressed. I still remember how their jaws dropped -like robots that had become unhinged. She shoved the book in front of me and said, 'Read!' - just like a Nazi storm trooper ordering a prisoner to march. I buzzed through a couple of sentences, and she told me to stop. That was it -no more kindergarten for Master Cadmus.'
He stuck out his tongue and licked ketchup from his lower lip. 'Anyway, so much for school days.' He looked at his watch. 'Oops. Gotta call my ride.' And with that, he was off.
The Friday afternoon visits became regular after that, a floating crap game with ideas as the dice. We talked in the office, in the graduate reading room, over junk food in the Coop, and while strolling the shaded walkways that webbed the campus. He was fatherless and, despite the guardianship of an uncle, seemed to have little awareness of what it
meant to be male. As I fielded countless questions about myself, all framed in the hungrily naive manner of an immigrant seeking morsels of information about a new homeland, I knew I was becoming his role model. But the questioning was one way; when I attempted to probe into his personal life, he changed the subject or emitted a blitzkrieg of irrelevant abstractions.
It was an ill-defined relationship, neither friendship nor therapy, for the latter implies a contract to help, and he had yet to confess the existence of a problem. True, he was intellectually alienated, but so were most of the kids on the project; alienation was assumed to be a common trait of those in the cosmic range of intelligence. He sought no help, wanted only to talk. And talk. About psychology, philosophy, politics, literature.
Nevertheless, I never relinquished the suspicion that he'd shown up that first Friday to unburden himself of something that bothered him deeply. I'd observed his moodiness and periodic anxiety, bouts of withdrawal and depression that lasted for days, had noticed the sudden dark look or wet eye in the midst of a seemingly neutral conversation, the acute constriction of the throat and involuntary tremble of hand.
He was a troubled boy, plagued, I was sure, by significant conflict. No doubt it was buried deep, wrapped, like a mummy, in a gauzy cocoon of defences, and getting to the core would be no mean task. I decided to bide my time: The science of psychotherapy is knowing what to say, the art is knowing when to say it. A premature move, and all would be lost.
On the sixteenth Friday he arrived carrying a load of sociology books and started to talk about his family, spurred on, supposedly, by a volume on family structure. As if lecturing from that text, he ejected the facts, helter- skelter in a voice devoid of emotion: The Cadmuses were 'rolling in money'; his paternal grandfather had built an empire in construction and California real estate. The old man was long gone, but people spoke of him as if he were some kind of god. His other grandparents were dead, too.
As were both his parents. ('Almost like a hex, huh? Sure you wanna stick around with me?')
His mother had died in childbirth; he'd seen pictures but knew little about her. Three years later his father had committed suicide by hanging himself. The responsibility of raising an orphaned toddler had fallen to his father's younger brother, Dwight. This had translated to the hiring of a succession of nannies, none of whom had stuck around long enough to mean anything to Jamey. A few years later Dwight had married and fathered two daughters, and now all of them were one happy family - this last comment pronounced with bitterness and a look that warned against further questions.
His father's suicide was one subject I was determined to broach eventually. He'd indicated no self-destructive thoughts or impulses, but I considered him at elevated suicidal risk; the moodiness concerned me, as did his extreme perfectionism, sometimes unrealistic expectations, and fluctuating self-esteem. When you added a history of parental suicide, the odds tipped further upward; the possibility that he'd choose, one bleak day, to imitate the father he'd never known couldn't be ignored.
It came to a head midway through our twentieth session.
He liked to quote poetry - Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth -and was particularly enamoured of a poet named Thomas Chatterton, of whom I'd never heard. My questions about the man were evaded with contentions that a poet's work spoke for itself. So I did a little library research of my own.
An afternoon spent slogging through dusty volumes of literary criticism produced some interesting facts: The experts considered Chatterton a genius, the chief poet of England's eighteenth-century Gothic revival and the major precursor to the Romantic movement, but in his day he'd been alternately ignored or vilified.
A tormented, tragic figure, Chatterton lusted for fortune and fame and was denied both. Frustrated at the lack of appreciation for his own works, he perpetrated a major literary fraud in 1768, producing a group of poems supposedly written by a fifteenth-century monk named
Thomas Rowley. But Rowley never existed; he was a figment of Chatterton's imagination, his name cribbed from a tombstone at St. John's Church in Bristol. Ironically, the Rowley poems were well received by the literati, and Chatterton enjoyed a brief, vicarious adulation - until the hoax came to light and its victims exacted their revenge.
Excommunicated from the literary scene, the poet was reduced to pamphleteering and menial jobs and, eventually, to begging for scraps of food. There was a final, morbid twist: Though penniless and denied bread on credit by local merchants, the starving Chatterton complained to a benevolent apothecary of rat infestation in his garret and was dispensed arsenic.
On August 24, 1770, Thomas Chatterton swallowed poison, a suicide at the age of seventeen.
The next time Jamey quoted from him I reported what I'd learned. We were sitting on the rim of the inverted fountain that fronted the psych building. It was a clear, warm day, and he'd taken off his shoes and socks to let the water trickle over bony white feet.
'Uh-huh,' he said glumly. 'So what?'
'Nothing. You got me curious, so I looked him up. He was an interesting fellow.'
He moved several feet away and stared into the fountain, kicking one heel against the concrete with enough force to redden the skin.
'Something the matter, Jamey?'
'Nothing.'
