Embracing Darkness (66 page)

“Oh, I thought I’d give her a little bit of a break and let her sleep.”

“It’s way past lunchtime, but dinner’s still a ways off,” Phineas said.

“Yes, well, you know your mommy. She loves that sofa! Come on, son. Let’s go for a walk, just us men.”

They passed by Dodson’s General Store where Phineas saw that annoying advertisement, “GRUBER’S TOILET SOAP! THE SOAP OF CHOICE FOR HOUSEWIVES ALL ACROSS NEW ENGLAND! AVAILABLE NOW AT YOUR LOCAL GENERAL STORE!” The words “AT YOUR LOCAL GENERAL STORE” had been crossed out and replaced with the word “HERE.”

“Hey Phin!” Robert said in an elated tone. “You wanna go down to Wallis Sands State Park and fly a kite? They got ’em in Dodson’s. One of them is real nice, bright green with a yellow ribbon. Would you like me to buy it for you? Then we can go fly it. It’s a great day for kiting! What do you say, champ? I’ll flag down a carriage, and we’ll go.”

Phineas just shrugged. “I suppose,” he replied.

The truth of the matter was that Phineas didn’t wish to be around his father at all. Instead, he just wanted to go home and be with his mother, someone who’d always looked out for him and had never made him feel the way his father had these last two months.

“Come on, boy! It’s almost May! And you know how fun things get when the warm weather arrives.”

Dr. Poole ran into Dodson’s like a child running into a candy store. Within moments he emerged with a huge blue kite with a ridiculous-looking pink tail. “They sold the green one yesterday,” Robert said mournfully, ignoring Phineas’s indifferent expression.

As promised, Robert flagged down a carriage. Within seconds the taxi, powered by a single white horse, transported them to Wallis Sands State Park. While alone in the carriage, away from the ears of others, Robert posed his long-delayed question.

“What especially bothered you about what you saw in the shed, Phin?”

Phineas felt as though he’d just been punched in the belly. “Would you ever do that to me?” the boy asked in a trembling voice.

“Oh Phinny,” Robert said, putting his arm around the boy. “I would
never
in a million years hurt you. You
have
to believe that. And I wasn’t
hurting
that girl. I was
helping
her.”

Now Phineas felt as confused as ever. “But you
were
hurting her,” he replied, alarm now in his voice. “She was crying, and she was bleeding all over.”

Robert sighed and brought his face down to his son’s. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. “No, son. I wasn’t hurting her. I told you. I was
helping
her.”

When they arrived at the park a few minutes later, Phineas jumped out of the carriage while Robert collected the kite and Phineas’s books. He paid the driver and tipped him twenty-five cents. The driver thanked him warmly, but Robert saw it as a good omen. If he showed kindness, appreciation, and generosity toward others, then perhaps, if there were a God, He would grant the same to Robert. He might grant the greatest gift he could ask for—namely, that Phineas would understand his father’s actions and forgive him. For an atheist far removed from organized religion or belief, this was a leap of faith.

As they flew the blue kite with pink tail, Robert and Phineas remained quiet as strangers. Robert wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. He thought he would again repeat that he had been helping the young girl, no matter what Phineas had seen. Just as Robert was about to speak, his son beat him to it.

“How can hurting someone be the same as helping them? When I got a spanking last summer for jumping in the water with my shoes on after you told me not to, was that helping me? When I hurt so bad that I cried, was that helping me?”

“Actually it is,” answered Robert, “but that’s a different kind of helping and a subject for another time.” Robert turned to face Phineas, who in turn focused more intently on the kite. “I was helping her in another way, Phin. She was in trouble.”

“But you made her bleed. Couldn’t you have been nicer?”

“You don’t understand, Phineas. You’re too young to understand complicated issues right now.”

“What’s an issue?”

“Issues are things that are hard for a boy your age to understand. I don’t think I can explain what I was doing, Phin, because if I told you it would make you see the world differently. I don’t want to spoil your delusions about life. Everything would change. It would make you grow up too fast. You’ll find out the truth about the real world in due time.”

“What’s a delusion?” asked Phineas. While he waited for his father to reply, Robert knew that his son had listened to nothing he had said after the word “delusion.” Amid the ensuing silence Phineas withdrew back to his kite.

Robert inhaled deeply, trying to reorganize his thoughts. He then knelt down and touched Phineas’s chin. “Son, she was already hurt. She came to me for help because someone had hurt her. If I didn’t help her, she’d be in a lot more pain later on. So you see, Phin, I had to hurt her a little more in order to make it all better.”

Phineas’s attention was restored. His eyes met his father’s, and at that moment he dropped the string, immediately causing the kite to crash into the ground.

Robert ran his fingers through his hair and was close to giving up. He knew that he wouldn’t get anywhere by speaking like a doctor to a seven-year-old, but it was hard for him to bring a topic of this nature down to a level that Phineas could understand. He then came up with an analogy.

“Phin,” said his father. “Do you remember when you fell on the concrete while we were downtown last August? Do you remember how you skinned your knee?”

“Yes,” replied Phineas.

“Well, do you remember what I had to do to make it better?”

“You put something on it.”

Robert smiled again, knowing he was going to get his point across. “That’s right. And that made you cry, remember? You cried when I put the iodine on your knee. It stung, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, a lot.”

“But it took out the bad germs that were inside, and your knee was all better in a day. Well, it’s the same thing, the same principle. I had to hurt you a little more so that you would hurt less. That’s what happens sometimes.”

“So you helped her?”

“Yes, Phin.”

“But how did she get hurt?”

“I can’t tell you that at your age now.”

Phineas didn’t pursue the matter. He was feeling better simply by knowing that his father had explained why he had done what he’d done. The boy needed time to digest this new lesson in helping people:
Sometimes
you
have
to
help
people
who
are
hurt
by
hurting
them
a
little
more
so
they
can
feel
better
. Unfortunately, Phineas later would confuse this lesson with another precept:
Sometimes
you
have
to
help
people
so
they
can
feel
better,
even
if
it
means
hurting
others
.

Robert, meanwhile, was still worried that Phineas would some day tell his mother what he’d seen his father doing in the shed.

“Daddy?” said Phineas.

“Yes?”

“What’s ‘principle’?”

“A principle is something in which you believe.”

“What do
I
believe in?”

“You believe that it’s right to help people who are in trouble.”

“Then I want to help people too.”

Robert patted his son on the head. “I’m sure you do, Phin, and you will. You have your whole life to help people.”

Father and son left the kite where it had fallen and made their way out of the park toward town.

“Let’s go for ice cream, daddy,” said Phineas, sounding like his old self again.

“Sounds good!” replied Robert, happy that things were seemingly back to normal, at least for now.

As the two left Blendinger’s Malt Shop, Robert had a nagging feeling that he had something to worry about. All of a sudden, as an automobile passed by on the street, Phineas exclaimed, “Look! Look at that!” For a moment Robert’s heart sank as he imagined his son, holding Mary Margaret’s hand, running into the shed and screaming, “LOOK! LOOK AT THAT!”

When Robert’s paranoia subsided, he realized what had excited his son. The sight of an automobile was rare, and, although Phineas had seen one before, it was still a novelty.

Dr. Poole then concluded that there was no way he could live in peace as long as he feared that Phineas might one day tell Mary Margaret or anyone else for that matter. He knew that he needed to make Phineas feel a part of what was going on, so that the boy would take ownership of the secret and have enough of a stake in it not to tell Mary Margaret.

“Phin,” Robert said while they were en route back home. “About the girl. I told you she was in trouble, but I never told you what the trouble was.”

Phineas just licked his fingers that were sticky from his dripping ice-cream cone.

Robert continued, “You need to first know where babies come from.”

“Babies?” said Phineas. “I already know.”

“You do?” Robert replied, puzzled. He assumed that Mary Margaret had taken leave of whatever senses she had left and told her seven-year-old about sexual intercourse.

“The stork. Everyone knows that.”

Robert rolled his eyes in relief. “Yes, that’s what your mother told you. A girl needs a boy to make a baby. They make it by, well, by making love.”

“How do you make it?”

“Make what?” Robert asked, perplexed.

“Love. How do you do it?”

“What I mean is that they create a child through love for one another. They make something out of love, or at least most of the time it’s out of love. Do you get what I’m saying here, Phin?”

Phineas shrugged. Despite the cool breeze blowing, Robert was beginning to perspire. He wondered whether he had added to the problem of keeping Phineas quiet. If he told his son too much about the miracle of conception, his son might want to tell Mary Margaret about what he had learned.

“Sometimes,” continued Robert, “people who don’t love each other make a baby. As I just said, most of the time love can create a child, but sometimes it’s different.”

“You mean they make love without loving?” asked Phineas.

Robert was pleased to see how his son was able to simplify what he’d said, and he wished he could do it himself.

“Yes, Phin, that’s correct. And sometimes the man, the father of the child, forces a woman to make the child. Often the mother and father are not married and sometimes don’t even know each other. And as you know, the mother has to carry the baby.”

“So when does the stork come? After love?”

“There is no stork, Phin. The baby grows in the mother’s belly, but it’s not
really
a baby until the woman’s belly is big. Until her stomach is swollen, it’s something that doesn’t resemble—sorry, look like—a baby. So it isn’t, is it?”

“What does it look like?”

“It doesn’t look like a baby.”

“How are the boy and girl a father and mother if they’re not married?”

“As long as a baby is made, they are the mother and father of
that
baby. A mother carries and gives birth to the baby. It comes out of the girl when it’s time. The father is someone who puts what will one day become the baby inside her.”

“What?”

“You’re too young for that just now.”

Phineas found it riveting that he, along with every other human being in history, had come from two other people instead of a stork. To a child who’d always thought otherwise, this fact was like the discovery of the ages.

“But they don’t need to know each other,” Robert continued. “And sometimes it’s done in a brutal and terrible way, with the man hurting the woman so that she doesn’t even want to have the baby.”

“Why wouldn’t she want it?”

Robert knew he had to be delicate in his answer. He had salvaged Phineas’s trust in him and didn’t want to lose it again. “She just doesn’t,” he replied. “As you get older, you’ll understand why. But such a girl is in trouble because she needs to get what will be a baby out of her before it becomes a baby. Therefore she needs to come to someone like me, a doctor, who can take care of it for her.”

“So you take the baby that’s not a baby yet out of the girl?”

“Yes, Phinny.”

“But what happens to the baby after you take him out?”

“Remember, Phin, it’s
not
a baby yet.”

“So what is it?”

“It’s called a fetus.”

Robert wanted Phineas to distinguish between a baby and a fetus, because, if he were going to include his son in helping with the procedures, he wanted the boy to understand that they were preventing an unwanted pregnancy instead of killing a baby. It was Robert’s ultimate hope that Phineas wouldn’t read too much into what they were doing and one day come to the conclusion that they were in fact preventing a baby from living.

“That’s sad, daddy, the poor baby who’s not a baby yet,” said Phineas mournfully, sinking his head low.

“I know, but understand this, Phinny. If I didn’t help these girls in trouble, there would be two unhappy people, the mother and the baby. This way the baby will never become neglected, unwanted, or unloved, and the mother will be happy again. It’s far better than a baby who’s born to a mother who doesn’t love it.”

To Robert’s surprise his son produced a half smile. The explanation helped Phineas see the point, but Robert was still worried about his wife’s finding out that he was performing illegal abortions in his backyard shed, a place in which he’d promised to do only two things—smoke his cigarettes and do household repairs.

Mary Margaret was a strict Catholic and had been raising Phineas the same way. If she ever found out what her husband was up to, she’d divorce him in an instant, take him for everything he had, be sure he was sent to prison, and never let him see their son again. The couple hardly spoke anymore, so this would be the final nail in the coffin that was their unhappy marriage.