Something Happened

"He will never speak." That bastard.

All my life, it seems, I've been sandwiched between people who will not speak. My mother couldn't speak at the end. My youngest child Derek couldn't speak from the begi

Derek is pleasant enough most of the time (for a kid that ca

"Shhhh," we whisper.)

"Will he ever speak?" my boy asks.

"No."

"Will you send him away?"

"We'll do what's best."

"Would you send me away if I couldn't speak?"

"You can speak."

"If I couldn't?"

"You can."

"But if I couldn't. If something happened to me."

"We would do what was best."

"For who?" sneers my daughter.

"For all of us. We aren't sending him away just because he can't speak."

"Please don't give him away," begs my boy, who is unable even to look at him without drawing back.

"Then why don't you help us with him?" I demand. "You never want to play with him. Neither of you."

"Neither do you," sneers my daughter.

I do not reply.

My boy is silent.

In the family in which I live there are four people of whom I am afraid. Three of these four people are afraid of me, and each of these three is also afraid of the other two. Only one member of the family is not afraid of any of the others, and that one is an idiot.

It is not true

It is not true that retarded (brain-damaged, idiot, feeble-minded, emotionally disturbed, autistic) children are the necessary favorites of their parents or that they are always uncommonly beautiful and lovable, for Derek, our youngest child, is not especially good-looking, and we do not love him at all. (We would prefer not to think about him. We don't want to talk about him.)

All of us live now — we are very well off — in luxury with him and his nurse in a gorgeous two-story wood colonial house with white shutters on a choice country acre in Co

And I have plenty more I could let myself hate (if I were the type to complain and run off at the mouth, ha, ha, or yield contemptibly to impulses of self-pity, ha, ha, ha). I can even hate myself — me — generous, tolerant, lovable old Bob Slocum (in a kindly and indulgent way, of course) — for staying married to the same wife so long when I've had such doubts that I wanted to, molesting my little girl cousin once in the summertime when no mothers were looking and feeling depraved and disgusted with myself immediately and forever afterward (as I knew, before I did, I would — I didn't enjoy it. I can still recall her vacant, oblivious little girl's stare. I didn't hurt her or frighten her. I only touched her underpants a moment between the legs, and then I touched her there again. I gave her a dime and was sorry afterward when I realized she might mention that. Nobody said anything. I still keep thinking they will. I didn't get my dime's worth. She was a dull, plain child. I wonder what became of her. Nothing. She is still a dull, plain child in my archives. That's the way she stops. The branches of my family have grown apart — I can kick myself for fumbling all those priceless chances I had with Virginia at the office for more than half a year, and with a couple of Girl Scout sisters I knew from high school earlier. I thought they were only kidding in their giggling insinuations. And they were having genuine sex parties with older boys from tougher neighborhoods who would crash parties in our neighborhood they had not been invited to and break them up. It was rumored they raped girls), seeing my big brother with his fly open on the floor of that shadowy coal shed beside our brick apartment house with a kid named Billy Foster's ski

What a dope I was.

"Do you remember Mrs. Yerger?"

There will be no one I know in this whole world who will have an inkling of what I am talking about. Virginia might understand, but Virginia will not be in earshot when I lose control of my reason in senility or delirium and begin pressing upon strangers such puzzles of ancient, germinal importance to me as: