Separate from the World (17 page)

The professor paid for the oatmeal. As Hannah made change, Caroline moved over to the counter behind her husband, and the professor said, “Hannah, this is my wife Caroline.”

Hannah nodded bashfully and said, “Pleased to meet you.” She did not smile.

Caroline said, “I hope your Albert is going to be fine, Mrs. Erb.”

Hannah wrung her hands in her apron without replying. Her eyes would not meet Caroline’s.

Gently, Caroline said, “We have no children.”

Hannah looked up puzzled. Childless couples were rare in her world. She appeared to be wondering if it were possible—a childless couple.

Caroline saw her considering this possibility and explained, “I had miscarriages, Mrs. Erb. The children died.”

Branden watched his wife’s face for the signs of sorrow and regret he usually saw when she spoke of children. He saw none of that now; she had set her own sorrows aside. Caroline was reaching out to the other woman for a common bond.

Hannah Erb said, “I am sorry to hear that, Mrs. Branden.” Her tone was sincere. It was conciliatory. The professor took his package of oatmeal and eased through the door, leaving Hannah and Caroline alone in the store. Then he sat behind the steering wheel of the Miata and waited.

 

 

It was forty-five minutes before Caroline came out with Hannah. The two were talking about Albert, and as they passed the Miata in the parking lot, Caroline gave her husband a little “stay put” wave.

The women crossed the drive and took the sidewalk back beside the big house, going up the steps of the back porch and into the mudroom. The professor decided to stretch his legs.

 

 

Daniel Erb had been watching from the corner of the big house since the Brandens’ Miata had driven up and parked in front of the family’s store. He had seen the two Englishers go in and had taken the opportunity to move to the back corner of the store, where he could see the sports car better. And as the Brandens talked with
die Memme
inside the store, he studied the beautiful machine from his close perspective, his imagination roaming to the curvy, hilly stretches of blacktop, where he’d let that machine have all the speed it could handle. Where he’d go a hundred miles an hour and catch a glimpse of the world in a flash-by blur, taking corners like a wild man, daring fate on the crest of every hill.

That was his dream—to master the English gadgets one at a time. To take hold of the ultimate gadget, and make it roar. To tame a fine sports car and make it do his bidding.

The other gadgets were trifles by comparison, he thought. The library had computers, but he’d tired of those eventually. Cell phones had been fun, but only for a spell. Movies were just entertainment, no more exciting than the fantasies of his own mind. But the sports car! That was the ultimate challenge!

When Daniel saw the professor walk toward the barns at the back of the property, he slipped around the corner of the store, crept up to the blue machine, opened the driver’s door, and sat behind the wheel.

He dare not let his feet touch the pedals. The knobs, dials, and panels were unfamiliar to him. But he understood the gear shifter and the steering wheel, and he caressed the wheel with his left hand and took hold of the shifter with his right. Then, making his best engine “grrr-ing” sound, he turned the wheel back and forth on the curves in his mind, and shifted so expertly that the roadster never lost speed.

 

 

When Caroline came out the front door, the professor was seated on a porch swing. Behind Caroline came Hannah, carrying Albert. Where his shaved scalp had been white before, Albert now had a faint gray stubble, his black hair already starting to grow back. Hannah set Albert down on his feet. The four-year-old stepped around to stand behind her legs and clung to her long skirt.

Without allowing him to say a word, Caroline pulled Branden off the swing and down the porch steps.

“He hasn’t spoken,” Caroline said, “and he closes his eyes when men are around.” They were in the Miata, top down, heading home on Route 241 to Millersburg.

“But he opens his eyes to Hannah,” she said. “He responds to her, Michael. I think he laughed inside, when she made a face for him. I could see that in his eyes. But his face shows no other emotions. His face is as blank as a wall. I don’t think he’ll ever be a little boy again.”

Turning the corner at Mt. Hope, Branden pulled into the lot at Mrs. Yoder’s Kitchen and parked near the door. The engine of a tour bus was growling down by the fence. Inside the restaurant, a crowd of tourists in the front hallway waited for tables. Branden caught the eye of the cashier, and she showed them to a small table in the corner nearest the kitchen. Coffee was delivered automatically.

“I’m not all that hungry,” the professor said to the waitress. “Just the salad bar.”

Caroline said, “Salad bar, too, please,” and the little Amish waitress wrote out a slip and went to get water glasses.

As they ate, Caroline described what had happened inside the Erb house.

“First of all,” she said, “all the men are gone. The whole district is over at Bishop Miller’s house on Harrison Road.”

Branden said, “I’d like to see that—there’ll be twenty-five buggies parked on his front lawn.”

“Albert was seated by himself at the big kitchen table. The other kids all had their chores, and they all stayed busy. Hannah sat me next to Albert, and he watched me like I was Russian—a Martian —somebody exotic. You’d have thought he had never seen an English woman. But I saw a little curiosity in his eyes. I saw him wondering about me.”

“He didn’t talk?” the professor asked.

“No, Michael. He uses his eyes. He let me see his eyes. Through his eyes, he let me see something that wasn’t dead inside.”

THE HEADLIGHTS of the Miata brushed across the front of the Brandens’ house and caught movement on the porch. The garage door was on its way up, but the professor canceled the remote and sent it back down. He immediately backed out into the cul-de-sac and trained the headlights on the front door.

Laura Pope, the college’s chief registrar, turned from the doorbell and shielded her eyes from the headlights with a volume bound in this year’s senior thesis colors—brick red and gray. She waved her free hand and called out, “Mike, I need to see you.”

Caroline got out, and the professor pulled the Miata into the garage. Entering the house through the laundry room, he heard Pope saying to Caroline, “No, I can’t stay.”

Branden joined them in the vestibule. “What have you got there, Laura?”

She held out the thesis, saying, “This one needs a second look, Mike. I don’t think it’s worthy of a Millersburg College degree.”

She handed the brick red volume to him, and he read the front cover. It was the thesis of Edwin Hunt-Myers III.

Branden again felt that weird, nervous compression in his spine. “What do you think is wrong with it?” he asked.

“I don’t want to say,” Pope answered, reaching back for the doorknob. “But would you read it, Mike? Give me your opinion?”

“Sure, but . . .”

Pope interrupted as she pulled the door open, “Please. Just read it. I trust you, Mike. If you say it’s legitimate, I’ll forget all about it. Frankly, I could stand to let it go. Then I might get some sleep.”

 

 

“I’ve never seen Laura so rattled,” the professor said to Caroline. They were in bed with the house locked up tight, security alarms activated. The house was peaceful, a haven from threat or danger. Eddie’s thesis rested on the nightstand.

“Are you going to read it?” Caroline asked.

“She wants me to,” Branden said.

“Why would she ask you to read a psych thesis?”

“I have no idea. Aidan Newhouse is Eddie’s adviser, and Nina Lobrelli was the second reader. She thought Eddie’s thesis was so good she nominated it for an award.”

“What’s Laura think you’ll find?” Caroline asked.

“I don’t know,” the professor said, “but Laura Pope wouldn’t come out to the house at this hour of the night unless she thought there was a real problem.”

EDDIE’S THESIS broke into the professor’s dreams at four o’clock the next morning. Still in his pajamas, he punched in numbers on the wall panel to turn off motion detectors on the first floor and took the thesis down to the kitchen to make coffee. While it brewed, he read the title:

At the kitchen table, the professor read Eddie’s introduction, a review critical of authority abuse and cult submission inside the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, the Jim Jones People’s Temple cult in Guyana, and The Family of Charles Manson. Eddie next presented the traits of classic personality and behavior disorders and moved straight from there to an assertion that the Amish constituted a Christian cult in Holmes County. He noted especially the singular authority of Amish bishops and the “blind, childlike submission of the congregants.” He wrote about conformity among the Amish to arbitrary rules about dress, about the illogical spurning of modern devices, and about the backward and tragic reliance on folk medicine for diseases that were treatable with modern medicines. Eddie especially emphasized the “cruel practice of shunning” and commented that it seemed to him to be the least Christian of all their practices, though in a
caveat
he wrote that he neither knew nor practiced Christianity himself. Finally, he argued that the Amish were a cult suitable for study and that his research would be designed to help a “modern and sophisticated public understand the nearly irresistible impulses at work among the subservient personalities in a patriarchal society.”

Caroline called from the top of the steps. “Michael, what are you doing?”

He closed the thesis and went to the bottom of the steps. “I’m reading.”

“Eddie’s thesis?”

A sleepy nod.

“Come back to bed.”

“In a minute.”

 

 

At 6:45 A.M., Caroline came down to the kitchen and found her husband at the kitchen table, reading the last pages of Eddie’s thesis. She checked the coffee and found it burned and stale, so she dumped it out and put up another pot. Then she sat across from her husband and waited.

When Branden had finished the thesis, she got up, poured two cups, and joined the professor, who had wandered out onto the back porch. He was slumped into a wicker chair, legs out straight and crossed at the ankles, and he had his arms folded over his chest. His eyes were closed in thought. When she placed a cup on the glass table next to his elbow, he mumbled, “I know why he did it,” and went upstairs to get dressed.

 

 

“You know better, Aidan,” Branden said. “You’re not teaching them proper research methods. You taint their research with your own prejudices. It’s not objective research.”

“That’s not fair, Mike!”

“You send them out after Koresh and Jim Jones, and then you aim them at the Amish. It casts bias into their work. Really Aidan, it’s unprofessional.”

“Look, Mike, I just ask them to think about the Amish from a new perspective. We’re groundbreakers, Mike. It’s new work. Original. Of course the Amish are a religious cult—they intermarry!”

“Cut the crap, Aidan. I’ve read the introduction of every senior thesis your students have written in the last ten years.”

In fact, the professor had done just that. After a quick shower and breakfast, Branden had called the registrar and asked her to have Newhouse’s students’ thesis introductions and titles copied to a zip file and e-mailed to him at home. When he had the files, he extracted the documents and quickly scanned the titles. Then he read the introduction to each thesis. When he was sure of what he was seeing, he walked to campus and climbed to the second floor of the science building. There, he found Newhouse in his office and confronted him.

Newhouse argued, “Amish are a cult, Mike. Everybody gives them a pass because they’re ‘Christian.’ Well, they’re not
Christians.
Not proper ones, anyway. They’re judgmental. They’re homophobes and sexists. My God, the plight of the women alone ought to be enough to convince anyone.”

“You’re wrong, Aidan. And you’re slipping. What’s going on?”

Newhouse flushed crimson. He stared at Branden over his desk. His mind raced as he tried to gauge the level of his exposure. Of course one never read the entire thesis of every student. Not the better ones, anyway. It just took too much time. A thesis like Eddie Hunt-Myers’s was a gift on a silver platter. He’d been one of the best. Sound research, well documented. Good writing, unusually expressive. Thorough treatment, referenced throughout. It had been nominated for the Walton Prize. Wait, stop, he thought. Perhaps that was a bit more exposure than was convenient. Thinking of other seniors who’d gotten an easy pass from him, Newhouse said, “Mike, you can’t throw a flag on a thesis like Eddie’s. Of course I’ve read it. It’s been nominated for the Walton.”