Something Happened

we had thought of asking them.

They stayed late, and ate and drank more than we would have supposed. (I still wonder with some perplexity about the small amounts of food they prepare when they entertain. I guess they must be hungry too by the time we reach home.) I mixed tangy martinis that everyone drank, and the mood was lightened from the start. I thought of myself as courtly as I stirred and poured. I caught glimpses of myself in the mirror: I was utterly courtly. I wore a courtly smile. (I am vain as a peacock.) I had no one there from the company. I had a copyright lawyer, a television writer, an associate professor of marketing, a computer expert, the owner of a small public relations firm, and an engaging specialist in arbitrage with a leading brokerage, about whose work none of us knew much and all of us were curious (for a while). The wives were all pretty and vivacious. The conversation was lively. There was boisterous laughter. My wife gave recipe tips when asked. The Barons were nearly the last to leave.

'Thanks, Bob. We really enjoyed it.'

'Thanks, Art, I'm glad you could come.'

My wife and I were aglow and enchanted with our success and made love. The evening went marvelously indeed, but it was written in the atmosphere — and my wily sixth-sense tells me it is still there — that we were not to invite him again for a long time, although it was much more than just okay to have done so then. My wife, a churchgoing Congregationalist, doesn't understand; she is instructed by a minister of God in matters of duty and hospitality. As a registered Republican, though, I know more about protocol.

'Why not?' she wants to know, and there is a tinge of eagerness in her perseverance. 'Aren't you getting along with him?'

'We're getting along fine.'

'Don't you think they'll want to come?'

'It isn't time.'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'It's written in the atmosphere. Give a dinner party without them if you want to give one.'

My wife falters. Derek's a heavy presence in the home now and changes things. (Enthusiasm dwindles rapidly into lassitude and stillborn wishes. Long-range plans for joy turn dreary in contemplation of their fulfillment. Then she has nothing to do.) Then we have my daughter to cope with as well if she doesn't have a date of her own for that evening and decides to stay home to watch. Either she mingles with our guests more intimately than we want her to or passes through in silence with a countenance of rude displeasure that everyone can see, responding with the barest cold nod to the salutations of anyone there who knows her (and passes through again like that an hour later, every hour on the hour, until my wife mutters, 'I'll kill her if she does that again' and goes to tell her off). The time may soon come when I'll have to order her acidly to keep out of sight completely whenever we have company, like Derek. (I don't like children hanging around when I visit other people, either.) Derek creates disturbing problems also in our relationship with our other children because of the attention we have had to concentrate on him and the large amount of money he costs. (Soon, I will have to start putting money aside for his future.)

'How are the kids?' people feel obliged to inquire whenever they come to our house, or we go to theirs.

It's a question I've learned to fear.

'Fine, all fine,' I feel obliged to reply with too much alacrity (in order to get off that subject as speedily as possible). 'And yours?'

Derek is a heavy presence outside the home as well, for my wife and I still nurture that special terror of walking into a frolicsome party at somebody else's house one evening and meeting socially one of the score of doctors and psychologists we've gone to in the past who know all about him, and all about us. It hasn't happened yet. We prefer large, noisy gatherings, at which public conversation is impossible; we are on guard at smaller, formal groups in which the discussion at any time might take an unpredictable turn to zero in on us. Then we must react hastily to divert it or sacrifice ourselves for a minute or so to talk evasively about something we don't want to talk about at all. (We have to admit it quickly. Admitting it may be good for other families. It isn't good for us. Everybody in the room turns uncomfortable suddenly.) Even at large parties, I have been taken aside often by someone who feels closer to me than I do to him and asked confidentially in a hawking undertone:

'That youngest boy of yours. How is he?'

'Fine, fine,' I respond. 'Much better than we would have hoped.'

By now, my wife and I have had our fill — are sick and glutted to the teeth — of psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, neurosurgeons, speech therapists, psychiatric social workers, and any of all the others we've been to that I may have left out, with their inability to help and their lofty, patronizing platitudes that we are not to blame, ought not to let ourselves feel guilty, and have nothing to be ashamed of. All young doctors, I'm convinced, strive to be beetle-browed, and all older ones have succeeded.

'Prick!' I have wanted to scream at them like an animal. 'Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick! Prick!' I have wanted to shriek at all of them like a screech owl (whatever that is, including the two I went to see briefly in secret about myself). Why can't the simpleminded fools understand that we want to feel guilty, must feel guilty if we're to do the things we have to?

Unperturbed, they would answer equably that my screaming at them was a way of trying to relieve myself of blame and call the repetition perseveration.

And they would be right. And they would be wrong.

I could tell stories. An outsider wouldn't believe the number of conflicting opinions the different doctors gave us and the backbiting judgments they made of each other, but we did. We believed them all, the good and the bad. And disbelieved as well (we had no choice) and had no choice but to search for others, like wandering supplicants.

'It's organic.'

'It's functional.'

'It's largely organic with functional complications now.'

'He isn't deaf but may not be able to hear.'

'At least he's alive.'

'The prognosis is good.'

'For what?'

'The prognosis is bad.'

'It would not be possible to offer a prognosis at this time.'

Not one of them ever had the candor, the courage, the common sense, the character to say:

'Jesus — I really don't know.'

It began with:

'You're making too much of it.'

And moved to:

'He will never speak.'

'He probably will not surpass a mental age of five, if he attains that. His coordination and muscular control will never be good. It will require tremendous patience.'

We hate them all, the ones who were wrong and the ones who were right. After awhile, that made no difference. The cause didn't matter. The prognosis was absolute. The cause did matter. It was organic (ceramic. The transistors are there). It just doesn't work the way others do. (A radio will not work like a television set.) There was no malfunction. It worked the way it was built to (worked perfectly, if looked at their way). The architecture's finished. The circuits can't be changed. Nothing is broken; there's nothing they can find to be fixed.

'Why can't they do it with surgery?' my wife's asked me.

'They wouldn't know where to cut and stitch.'

He's a simulacrum.

'If only we hadn't had him,' my wife used to lament. 'He'd be so much better off if he'd never been born.'

'Let's kill the kid,' I used to joke jauntily when I thought he was just innately fractious (I used to carry color snapshots of all three of my children in my wallet. Now I carry none), before I began to guess there might be