“This writing he does,” I began, groping.
He shied away. “We used to send him to school, or have tutors in. He’s extremely bright. You might not think it, to look at him. Most people, one glance … Freddy’s problem, when it’s endocrinological, goes along with slow-wittedness. You see a boy like Freddy, you naturally assume … But in Freddy’s case it’s genetic. He’s smart as a whip and painfully sensitive. That’s why we keep him home.” He shook his head crossly, and his voice, when he spoke, was close to breaking. “You’ve no idea what it’s like out there, for a boy like mine — the nastiness, the torment not to mention the danger. Not that it’s so wonderful here, you understand.” He shot me a look. “I don’t fool myself. I was fifty when he was born. His mother was younger, of course. She was killed when he was nine — a highway accident.” He raised his hand abruptly, as if saluting the Führer. What the gesture meant I have no idea.
When he drew back his hand I leaned forward slightly, forehead lowered. “I don’t think you mentioned what’s wrong with him,” I said.
“No.” His pale lips jerked back. “No, not yet. I’m sure you’re curious!” He pressed his hands to his knees and leaned forward, about to stand up.
I looked down, puzzled at his suddenly turning on me again. “Remember, I came because you asked me, Professor.” Now both of us were rising — stiffly, formally.
“Yes, I know. Also for other reasons.”
I kept silent a moment. “The world’s not perfect,” I said at last.
“Yes. Not perfect,” he said. He pushed up his glasses and touched his eyelids with the index finger and thumb of one hand. He whispered something, wincing, arguing with his demons, then moved ahead of me, turning back to see that I followed, toward the door he’d gone through for the tea and then later the wine. It did lead, as I’d supposed, to the kitchen, a large, gray-walled room like the kitchen in a home for the aged or some hospital in the slums. The appliances — refrigerator, stove, washer-dryer — were thirty years old if a day. The pots on the stove were large, the kind used by restaurants.
He took me through another door that led to a pantry, scented with rat-poison and general decay, white discoloration like lichen on the walls, then down a high, narrow hallway leading to what had once been, apparently, the servants’ quarters, a section of small rooms that he now kept locked off — a nightlatch on the door, which he opened with a key from his small, cluttered ring. The ceilings were lower here, the rooms sparsely furnished, the wallpaper less gloomy — cheap and plain — a sitting room, bedrooms, a bathroom, a doorway that led, as I was soon to learn, to the narrow back stairs. At the first of the servants’ rooms I stopped in my tracks. Pieces of wallpaper hung down like stalactites, the windows were partly boarded up with plywood, and in the walls there were holes, as if someone had stood in the center of the room firing cannonballs. Bits of lath showed like dry, broken ribs; in one place even the flooring had been broken. I went to the window — a few of the windowpanes were intact, barred but not boarded — and I stood for a moment fingering my cooling pipe and looking out. Snow and desolation, dark trees, then nothing, a shifting wall of gray.
Professor Agaard stood with his head thrown forward, lips clamped together, his small hands clasped behind him. “Freddy was ten,” he said. “He’d been naughty, and to punish him we locked him in his room.” He gestured. “This room. He has another room now, upstairs. They’d told us at school he had terrible tantrums, but of course we had no idea; this was the first we ever saw of it. Not that we hadn’t seen signs, of course. … It was a hard time for him. Needless to say, they tried to force me to institutionalize him. He was at that time still a child. Not a ‘small child’—baa. But the teachers he’d have had there, and the creatures he’d have been locked up with, day after day! Idiots, crazy people …” He closed his eyes. “But the teachers above all. Those fools you talked with at the party last night, they’re risen saints by comparison!”
“Surely you’re just a little hard on them,” I said. I reached out, without thinking, and touched his arm. He stiffened as if in fear of me. “You should try to get to know them,” I said, drawing my hand back, “talk with them a little.”
“Talk with them!” he exploded. “Look there, Mr. Winesap!” He pointed to the window where I’d just stood looking out, and after a moment I realized that he meant me to notice the bars. I suppose, having noticed them earlier, I was not as impressed as he’d hoped I’d be. He turned toward the door to the back stairs and pointed. “And look there!” On the door there were three heavy locks. I remembered the big iron locks I’d seen on the front door and nodded, suspending judgment. “Talk with them, you say?” he yelped. “Shall I leave that poor odd child in the care of the cleaning girl — supposing I could get a cleaning girl? Is that what you suggest? You look at me harshly!” His scornful smile twitched briefly, then failed, sagged toward panic. “You’ve misunderstood. It was Freddy who put those bars on the windows and locks on the doors, not I!” He jerked his head back and woefully laughed.
I squinted, fingering my pipe, trying to understand. “Are they frequent, these tantrums?”
He looked puzzled, then annoyed, as he would at a dull, persistent student. “He hasn’t had a tantrum in years.” He peered into my face as if wondering at the depth of my stupidity. “Come,” he said at last, “come up and meet him.”
To my surprise, the latches on the door to the stairway were not locked. As Agaard started up the steep narrow steps ahead of me, I asked, “Are you saying he locks people out, that is, locks himself in?”
“That’s what he does all right!”
I hesitated, feeling duped, trifled with. But I said, still moving cautiously, “I can see that would be worrisome. Do you know what sets him off?”
He glanced back guiltily. “Anything! Everything! A knock at the door, a truck in the driveway — my telling him to turn off his light—”
“You mean if no one bothers him—”
“Exactly!” he exclaimed. He’d reached the top of the stairs now. He stood catching his breath, his fist clenching the railing. “Leave him to his miserable little paradise of books, his cave of old maps and print”—he gestured with his left hand, strangely childlike, exactly as if the spirit of a child had taken possession of him—“leave him alone and he’s happy as a clam! But rouse him out of it — even let him imagine you’re about to rouse him out of it — he begins to lock things. Seals himself off. Not in bad humor! All very quiet and methodical. And he’ll open them again if you insist — though Lord knows he doesn’t like it! You’ll say I’ve spoiled him, but believe me, it’s more complex than that. I don’t mean I’m not to blame — how could any child grow up normal, living with an odd duck like me? In any case—” He put his hand on the top of his head, apparently hunting for the thread he’d lost. He said, “You see, Professor Winesap, he’s made a world for himself — and why not? The outside world frightens him — not that he shows it much: simply gets his locks out, maybe prays a little, or buries himself in his books.”