CHILD SPECIALIST
I thought Wilmer had bad luck. Bad luck with women. Bad luck with families. Bad luck with his career. That’s what I thought after I had been acquainted with him for a few years.
It added up for me because I’ve won no trophies when it comes to family life. I’ve been married twice, and both wives said pretty much the same thing when they left with our children. “All you care about is numbers. You should marry a computer.”
It’s true that I spend most of my time running equations through a computer. I think of myself as a visionary. I’m trying to discover formulae that relate mathematics to biology – in particular, genetics. I’ve published two papers on the topic and have presented my ideas at many seminars and conventions; my most famous paper backed up a worldwide study indicating that regardless of culture, language or ethnicity, approximately five percent of any given population will be homosexual. Those publications led to my getting my position at the Academy. It’s a perfect job for me. I teach three classes a term and have plenty of time to work on my formulae. People call me “a genius,” and sometimes I feel as if I’m treated as a pet of the administration.
Wilmer was both my neighbor and my colleague.
The first time I saw Dr. Wilmer Otts, I thought he looked like a leprechaun. I’m a tall, lanky fellow – my best friend calls me “Ichabod” or “Daddy Longlegs” or “Father Abraham” depending on his bruin moods – and have to splay my legs to sit in a normal chair, so when I wandered out of the computer lab for some coffee, I practically ran over him, stumbled into him, propped my left hand against the wall to keep from toppling over onto him.
Whatever had impeded my path scuttled out from my fold of legs and arms. Presented to me was a slight, short, balding, white-haired man in gold-rimmed spectacles. He said, “Whoa, big fellah. You’ve got to watch where you’re going.”
“Sorry. My mind was elsewhere.”
“Professor?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’re colleagues.” He held out his tiny hand. “Wilmer Otts, psychology.”
My hand engulfed his. “Teddy Wyandotte . . . er . . . sciences.”
“My first day on campus since I was hired. My office is just down the hall.”
“Join me for some coffee?”
“Sure.”
We wound up having lunch in the cafeteria at one of its square tables with plastic chairs. I eat there only because the cafeteria is near the science building and the labs. I don’t get into grand meals with palate-pleasing courses. I just want something that will quiet my belly and keep my mind going.
I asked between bites of a chicken salad sandwich, “What’s your specialty?”
“Developmental psychology.”
“So, you’re replacing Dr. Hymsdale?”
“I suppose.”
“Did you know her?”
“Only professionally.”
“What brought you to this rather hidden venue?”
“I was driven – you might say – to move to warmer climes. Was weary of the cold North.”
“Unusual for someone your age.”
“So others have said. Let’s just say I’m different.”
“Married?”
“Was.”
“Me, too. Children?”
“Just stepchildren.” He smiled an indulgent smile as if I were about to recount how wonderful my children were.
Instead, I just gave him the numbers. “I have five. Three with my first wife. Two with my second. My paycheck goes mostly to pay child support. Dr. Breznau calls me ‘Father Abraham,’ says I am starting a new tribe in the Middle-Eastern tradition. Fortunately, I own my house, bicycle to work, and don’t have expensive habits.”
“I’m looking for a place.”
“Hymsdale’s former place is for sale, but it’s small, like a cottage.”
“Really?”
“Nice garden, too. She was quite the gardener.”
“What’s the address?”
“2301 Piper Lane. I live down the street opposite.”
“I’ll have to check it out.”
Dr. Otts did buy the Hymsdale place and moved in that very week. He had the cottage stone walls repainted vanilla white with cherry red trim on the window and door frames. The original plain front door was replaced with a cherry-wood door lacquered and polished and with a small roseate stained-glass window.
After the house was remade, I thought
How inviting! The cottage peeked out from down a river-stone path between the poplars and maples and oaks, like a cherry-vanilla ice cream sundae inside a forest green dish. I went over to welcome Otts to the neighborhood. The doorbell chimed softly and sweetly like an Alpine music box. Otts peaked out of his door as if he were a frizzy gnome or a forest troll. Smiling up at me, he said, “I’m sorry, Teddy, but the place is a mess. Still moving in. Still waiting for my furniture to arrive.”
Through the slit in the door, I could see over his head that he had few furnishings. “That’s all right, Doctor. I understand. Just wanted to say ‘welcome.’”
“Thanks. Well, I have to get back to work. A lot to do. See you soon.”
Before the beginning of the fall term at the annual convocation for faculty, he was formally introduced to the rest of us, along with two other new faculty members. Dean Hollander proclaimed, “Dr. Otts has published much in his area of specialty, and we welcome him to our faculty.” Otts stood, but his snowy-rimmed balding head hardly rose perceptibly higher than when he had been seated. I applauded along with the rest. I thought, Welcome to our obscure little town and our out-of-the-way university where eccentrics are pampered and considered geniuses.
Of course, my mind was occupied with my mathematical-biological theories, and I spent most of my time in the labs, running formulaic sequences through the computer, trying to link genetic dispensation with algebraic equations. Consequently, I didn’t see much of anyone except the students to whom I taught microbiology. More than any others, I interacted with my two reliably efficient lab assistants: Maria Cristal Benares and Thomas O’Leary (both married with families). I also used interns in the lab, but they changed from term to term or year to year, so I hardly remembered their names unless they were outstanding assets.
Sometime during the first year of Dr. Otts’ residency, I wandered down the hall until I found myself at his office. His door was decorated with bright many-hued, cut-out flowers and balloons. I knocked, compelled by curiosity.
“Come in,” said a congenial voice.
Dr. Otts leaned back, like an elf in a palm frond, in his desk chair. He smiled and said, “Dr. Wyandotte, good to see you. What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. I just saw your office and thought I’d look in and see how you were getting along.”
“Everything’s going well. Have a seat. How are your children?”
I sprawled into the one chair that seemed built for adults. “Your chairs are rather small . . . and colorful.”
“For the children. I asked how yours were.”
“They’re fine, but I hardly see them.”
“That’s a shame.”
I looked around the office. His shelves were filled with books. Behind him were psychology tomes from Rousseau through Freud and Piaget and Skinner and Chomsky and Maslow to Kohlberg – especially all things concerning human growth and development – but to his left and in front of him were a myriad of brightly colored children’s books of all kinds: pop-up books, nursery rhymes, fairy tales – books of all kinds for all children all the way from pre-readers to adolescents, ending with the Harry Potter books. Centered before him was a massive video screen and beside it was a library of VCR tapes and DVDs, holding seemingly every film or show ever made for children. On shelves next to the door were a variety of children’s games, board and electronic.
“Quite a library here, Sir.”
“I try to keep up, not only with psychiatry and psychology, but also with children’s interests. How are your formulas coming?”
“Making progress. I have done some statistical analysis of microbe development that fits nicely into a distribution equation. However, the more complex the organism, the less predictability – which is another formula. But for simple life-forms, frequency of deviation is becoming more and more predictable.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
I noticed framed pictures of children on the shelf behind him and on his desk. “Are these your stepchildren?”
“Yes.”
“None with your ex-wife in them.”
“No, she cut me out of their lives, so I cut her out of the pictures.”
I laughed. “Tit for tat.”
“Sort of.”
“Well, I was out to get some coffee. Then back to the lab. Care for a cup?”
“No, I want to finish some reading.”
That, as it turned out, was pretty much how our relationship went. I’d see him in the halls or at meetings. We’d chat a bit. Sometimes as I pedaled by his candied cottage, I would notice him directing a landscaping crew around his yard. Although he kept Hymsdale’s orange, mango and papaya trees, he had replaced her vegetable and herb gardens with bright flowers: vivid yellow jonquils, waxy orange and red tulips, white lilies, towering blue hollyhocks, purple snapdragons, velvety pansies, and beaming golden sunflowers. I would wave and keep pedaling.
My best friend at the Academy and a colleague in biology, Simon Breznau, visited my house about once a week. His specialty was ecological systems and their effect on organisms, and despite what he knew about organisms and their reactions to systems, he was a smoker, a drinker and an overeater. And – according to him – a passionate lover.
Simon usually wore loose-fitting shirts and loose-fitting pants around his ursine body and sandals over his hirsute, paw-like feet. Sometimes he would come over to my house and we would sit on the porch, drinking tea, eating whatever he had brought with him (he didn’t trust me to have anything tasty and nutritional on hand) and discussing systems and formulae. He’d also puff on a pipe, so the blue smoke curled around his thick prickly brown beard and hair. He used the pipe as a pointer. When he wanted to emphasize a point, he’d grab the bowl and turn the stem to the listener.
That’s what he did one evening as we sat noshing spare ribs and nacho chips, a much heavier meal than I usually had. He blew a blue smoke ring and pointed his pipe stem at me and said, “’Daddy Longlegs,’ there’s something distasteful about Professor Otts.”
“You mean, ‘Smokey,’ that he’s as eccentric as the rest of us?”
“Remember, I’m an expert in systems.”
“I do remember that, despite your fouling of your own system.”
He laughed at my puny attempt to pick on him (because I cared about him and wanted him to stop abusing his body) and flashed his brown eyes. The pipe stem came closer. “A man has to live, Teddy. Not everyone can envelop himself in his thoughts to the exclusion of all natural urges – like you do.”
“I have urges.”
“Not urgent urges.”
“I urgently want to know how DNA propagates.”
“That’s a quest that you’re wrapped up in. It’s not an instinct or an urge. Not a pleasure outside your self.”
“I’m a simple person.”
“Simple my ass.” He stuck the pipe into his maw and puffed.
We gazed down the street at Ott’s home and garden, which even in the dim twilight seemed to glow with a radiant light.
Simon said, “Is Otts an apiarist?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“His place is perfect for attracting honey bees.”
“Or hummingbirds, robins and wrens.”
“Or green parrots or any creatures attracted by ultraviolet luminescence.”
During Otts’ third year on campus, he acquired a grant to study preschoolers, which allowed him to use a classroom in the science building as a daycare center. The center was free to qualified parents. Otts used interns as staff. The purpose of the study was to test various learning theories. After two years, he published a monogram on the results and presented his findings at a conference and his academic star rose.
After that success, he began a kind of private practice, seeing children in his office or at his home. He specialized in curing childhood neuroses and behavior problems. Many wealthy and powerful people in the community sent their children to him; after all and unfortunately, to gain wealth and power, one often neglects the children, who will subsequently need some kind of intervention and therapy.
My own children were out of his reach, but I didn’t know if they had special problems or not, even though he invariably inquired about them whenever I encountered him. They were out of my touch or influence and had stepfathers of their own.
One Friday night Simon told me (over a bucket of barbequed chicken and a platter of corn on the cob) that Otts had a living room like a playpen. “So I’ve been told. Never been in his place.” He wiped his fingers on a napkin and lit his pipe.
“Yes, Maria Benares, my assistant, says he helped her with her toddler, who was having problems with the potty.”
“Yah, Maria and Tom. You got lucky with those two.”
“They’re very reliable and usually very agreeable, but they got into an argument this week.”
“Over what?”
“Otts.”
“Isn’t Tom from the Caribbean somewhere? Trinidad?”
“Jamaica.”
“Ah, voodoo and reggae and pigeon peas and jerk chicken. Next week I’ll bring pigeon peas and jerk chicken. So what was the argument?”
“Tom – like you – thinks there’s something phony about Otts. He doesn’t trust him.”
“A man of good instincts.”
“Maria thinks Otts is wonderful and performed a miracle with her daughter.”
The pipe stem came at me. “Parlor tricks, ‘Ichabod,’ – that’s what psychology is. Half of all psychiatrists go into the business to exorcise their own demons. They’ve taken the place of priests and sorcerers.”
“And not all systemic biologists are as cynical as they seem, ‘Big Ben.’”
The pipe went back between his purple lips. “Humph,” he puffed.
The old bear had me thinking, so in the lab the next day, I asked Tom during a lull in our classifying of the simple lives of our research, “Mr. O’Leary, I overheard the argument that you had with Ms. Benares. What is it about Dr. Otts that you dislike?”
Tom seemed taken aback because we rarely chit-chatted. He was accustomed to my single-minded focus on the work at hand, so he stood there regarding me silently for a moment and then asked, “Why? Have you heard something?”
“No, I heard only the argument, but you seemed so put off that I’d like to know why . . . I respect your opinion.”
“He gives me the creeps. I’ve seem him around children, and there’s something more than just professional interest in the way he addresses them. Almost like they are little adults.”
“Maria thinks he cares deeply about children.”
“Maybe so. Maybe too much. On the Island, a person like him would be watched very carefully.”
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you.”
“What is it President Reagan was famous for saying: ‘Trust, but verify’?”
A few weeks later, Otts resigned his position, abandoned the cottage on Piper Lane and fled the community. His leaving was so abrupt and unexpected that I was perplexed. My two assistants had reactions opposite each other. Maria cried as if she had lost a savior. Tom clapped with relief . . . and a hint of self-satisfaction.
Simon brought some grilled salmon and scalloped potatoes to my place and said, “You’ve heard the news, haven’t you, ‘Father Abraham’?”
“That Dr. Otts is gone?”
“No, why he left.”
“Why?”
“He was about to be charged with child molestation.”
“How do you know that?”
“Dr. Hollander told me.”
“Why?”
“She appreciates me.” He pulled out his pipe, and I, absentmindedly, struck a match and lit the bowl for him, saying, “Here, ‘King Arthur.’” I hadn’t calculated the probabilities, so I had a new regard for the bearish analyzer of systems.
END
"Child Specialist" was first published in
A Collection of Nickel-Plated Angels, 2007.
When this story first came to mind, I subconsciously created the ambience of "Hansel and Gretel." In my imagination the two professor friends seemed to be an obsessive crane (who eats like a bird) and a sensual bear (who devours his food as if for upcoming hibernation), while the seemingly inoffensive pedophile took on the persona of a gnome (the tiny, odd Dr. Otts)--fairytale creatures all--for a stealthy, dark story that few "normal" people can fathom. This inordinate interest in children is why all child-care workers must have background checks, although pedophiles comprehend that no normal person understands their compulsion and is repulsed by it. They know they have to be sneaky. Sometimes to discover a perverse personality, instinct is needed to override logic, which are also personified by professors Breznau and Wyandotte respectively.
It is a sinister story with a deceptive facade--a gingerbread house hiding wickedness.
.
;
