The Child Buyer (23 page)

Senator SKYPACK. I call this attitude shocking. Shocking.

Dr. GOZAR, Senator, your shock threshold is low down—like some other things about you. And while I'm at it, I think I'll give you another shock, sir, and I hope a taste of liberal education at the same time. Are you braced, Senator Skypack?

Senator SKYPACK. What now?

Dr. GOZAR. That stink bomb I've been reading about in the papers.

Senator SKYPACK. What about it?

Dr. GOZAR. I made it. And I threw it.

Senator SKYPACK. My God! And she calls herself an educator!

Dr. GOZAR. At least, I arranged to have it propelled.

Senator SYKPACK. If I was the town of Pequot, I'd fire you so fast.

Dr. GOZAR. Bzzt!

Senator SKYPACK. What was that? Why are you pointing at me? What did that sound mean?

Dr. GOZAR. That was a death ray going off the end of my

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index finger in your direction, Senator. Bzzt! Bzzt!

Senator SKYPACK. I swan! I never seen a woman like this onef

Dr. GOZAR. Then why don't you subside and let a person talk? You interrupt too much. And too foolishly.

Senator MANSFIELD. I must say, Doctor, I share my colleague's astonishment. Why would a school principal do a thing like that?

Dr. GOZAR. Do you really want to know why I did it?

Senator MANSFIELD. I certainly do.

Senator SYKPACK. I sure do.

Senator VOYOLKO. What she do? What the lady do?

Dr. GOZAR. If you'll be patient I'll tell you exactly what I did and why. In full. Do you want to hear it?

Mr. BROADBENT. Yes, indeed. Proceed.

Dr. GOZAR. Then don't interrupt, please. Senator Skypack, you see this lethal index finger? . . . Very well. ... On Mr. Cleary's solicitation I showed up at the lecture by the State Supervisor for Exceptional Children. I knew Miss Henley's line of blabber inside out, because I'd been listening to it for years without thinking that it really affected me or the children in my school. But this time I suddenly realized that all her gobblede-gook had a direct connection with my Barry, and it began to agitate me; I began to cross and uncross my legs and to fidget in my seat. Her words acted on me as prickly heat or griping bowels might. I was near the back of the auditorium and on the side aisle—I always like to sit on the aisle in case I have to go turn up the thermostats or call the riot squad or whatever—and I noticed that one of the large windows along the west wall, just to the audience's side of the stage, was open, because that day, last Tuesday, was Indian-summery, warm, hazy, and muggy, and with all those ardent humid teachers in there, it was close—so, as I say, that window was wide open. And Miss Henley's effluvia were suddenly too much for me, with a result that I had an idea

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associated with that open window. And I got up and left.

Mr. BROADBENT. What time was this, please?

Dr. GOZAR. Miss Henley had been talking only about five minutes, because I know I worked up my charge awfully fast; I suppose it was four fifteen.

Mr. BROADBENT. Our investigator has established that the stink bomb was exploded at four thirty-eight. So what did you do in those twenty-three minutes?

Dr. GOZAR. Hold on awhile. You asked my motive. Before I tell you exactly what I did I want to tell you why I did it. Maybe even you will understand, Senator Skypack. ... It had begun with a choking sensation, a feeling that I was being asphyxiated by Henley's outpourings, which were based on the notion that education is a science, that the process of learning is like a process of catalysis or combustion or absorption—observable, definable, measurable, manipulable; and that Barry— volatile, mysterious, smoldering Barry—is inert experimental material. But the idea of education as a science appalls me, really actively sickens me. There are some aspects of human social organization that simply cannot be defined and analyzed yet with the kind of precision that is the sine qua non of science. So I reacted to Henley with violent sensations. I felt as if I were drowning. And as if drowning I saw pass before my eyes certain images of my experience, which battered at my mind's vision seemingly to prove to me that education is non-science. Will you be patient and hear me out? Because I think this will help to explain my stink bomb, and lots more besides, lots about Barry's predicament, perhaps.

Mr. BROADBENT. Go ahead.

Dr. GOZAR. A long, long time ago some schoolteachers in the hills up in the northern part of the state held up in front of me that there was something better than sprinkling a stove with perspiration in a mill-town tenement block, that if you worked

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hard you could accomplish. Also they sold me, and my sister, too, on the idea that there is such a thing as vertical social mobility through education, and so my sister and I decided we'd have some of that. My sister's a year and a half older than I am, a full professor of biochemistry at Penniman Institute. She calls herself the uneducated half of the Gozars; she only has four graduate degrees, and I have six. Meg was one of New England's more famous women athletes in the early days, when women athletes were hampered by copious bloomers; nothing was supposed to show but the lowest part of the shinbone, even if you were competing in the hop, skip, and jump. Some people still take me for Meg, and I'm always flattered. Well. My mother was an ignorant immigrant woman who always put it up to her two daughters that if you tried hard enough you could do just about anything. I believed it then, and I still believe in it, and I talk it up energetically eight days a week. My first job was at age six: leading a horse to pull earth up out of a well that was being dug by hand. I had a paper route. I've always been obliged to do some things that are commonly reserved to the male sex. I graduated from eighth grade in a little one-room school in the foothills of the Berkshires. Father was a cow-and-vegetable farmer, a patient man who thought that if he just kept at it long enough, he'd be able to remove every single stone from a New England field; he was from Lithuania, he didn't know the stones were half a mile deep with just a pinch of clayey dirt sprinkled in for good measure. His persistence with his ever-willing team of oxen and his stone boat and his chain—the picture of him comes to my mind whenever I think I'm tired. Well, Father's farm went broke, and we missed a few meals here and there, but I've caught up on those in recent years, as you can see, and my sister Meg is even vaster than I am. Our school only went through eighth grade, and the nearest high school was thirty miles distant, so Meg and I struck a bargain with the teacher to start us off on something

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like a high-school education. She did. She was a fine inspiring lady named Danna French—one woman with eight grades and sixty people in her schoolroom, willing to take aboard two urchins who just wanted more. I've seen so much of that in schools in my time. She gave us a course in algebra and one in history, and in turn we helped her to do some of the cruder teaching. We also did coolie work—cleaned the place; and if you think I have powerful arms, they came originally from chopping firewood at Danna French's school. Meg and I were there that one year, then we made arrangements where we went to Galilee High School, thirty miles from home. We had to pay six dollars a month tuition, because they didn't have a district system to take care of us, and our room cost three dollars a month, and our food ran us six dollars a month. We didn't live too elegant on the tooth, but we weren't awful hungry. We worked various places; I remember I was some kind of sorter in a watch factory, and I assembled the two blades of shears. I must have put three hundred thousand pairs of scissors together with little screws. That was tedious —but when you took fifteen dollars a month out of your pay for fixed charges at one clump, you just had to get married to tedium, you were stuck with it. In the spring I helped with planting, in the fall I helped with the harvest. There was no stigma attached to hard work in those days. Danna French had held up the idea that if there was something better in the world, by gosh, you could go and get it. There were convenient places where my sister and I got work; there was a dairy not far from the school where we washed bottles. We had to start at four in the morning, but we got done before school. Out of twenty units of credit, I got nine A's and eleven B's. My sister reversed that. She was a better student than 1.1 tried to be as good a student as I could, and a good athlete, too. I wanted to look good to Meg. I still do. We had some great teachers who steered us both. Mrs. Ethel Le Grand. G. W. Sudland. Glenn B.

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First. They were always holding up in front of you the possibilities of people to amount to something. When I got to college, at Silverbury, as I think I told you the other day, I decided on biology, and I took the two degrees, and then I settled out to teach, and so did Meg. And besides teaching I took on some of those jobs I was telling you about. One of them was in an iron foundry. It was an open shop, and I mean open—they put you doing whatever you could do, no matter what they were paying you. I was classified as a laborer, but at times I was doing molding, layout work, machine shop. One autumn I worked as an apple picker and saw them feed the people—they were itinerants, winos and bums, goodhearted broken folks—I saw the orchards feed these people on metal plates nailed to the tables, the knives and forks on chains; they washed up with fire hoses. All those years, whatever job I was on, I'd go to school on the side. Or maybe the job was on the side. I worked up an M.A. in biology in 19— at Springfield. Then I got a Ph.D. six years later at Colton College. I told you about all those semesters at Silver-bury. Then after the second war I picked up an M.A. in history at Manchester College. After that I figured I was in the education business and it would be a good gesture to get me an M.A. in elementary education, which I did at Perkins State Teachers. And so it went. I've had two hundred and eighty semester hours since my Ph.D.—seven full years the way the credits usually go. This doesn't affect my salary; don't think that's why I did it. I'm planning now to get a master's in either physics or math so I can keep up with the Space Age, you know? Right now I'm taking a correspondence course in meteorology with Silverbury. In my leisure time I write Westerns for rags like Highwayman and Big West, though I've never been west of Albany; it's all from reading. Course I do it under a pseudonym, I don't want a scandal. Then I'm an amateur photographer. I point and shoot. I'm a very amateur musician, play the clarinet for the Valley Power

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and Light Company Marching Band. I've had four offers to be a permanent college professor—but no. I'm me. In spare times I go to track meets. I've made every state track meet in the last twenty-four years—even helped coaching a bit. It's on account of Meg, that's obvious. I take pictures, about thirty at each meet, of the finishes, on a four-by-five Speed Graphic, then I have the prints made and I send a copy to every athlete who shows, to the winner a copy and the negative—because somebody did that for Meg back in 19—, bloomers and all. It was a man named J. F. Van Palent, a Dutch preacher, with an old Graflex, and he sent Meg a copy of her breaking the tape in the hundred-yard dash. For the past couple of decades I've been sending copies like that—'this is of you and this is on the house.' Sometimes they write, and sometimes they don't. Oh, I could have retired four years ago. I wasn't interested. I can retire at seventy, but I won't unless they give me the heave-ho, because if I keep feeling as good as I do now, I don't think I'll ever want to stop learning and trying to hand on some of it. ... Now do you see, gentlemen, why that stuff of Henley's about need reduction and reinforcement of rewards and restructuring the Gestalt field drove me to action? Do you begin to understand? How about you, Senator Skypack?

Senator SKYPACK. All right. All right.

Dr. GOZAR. All right. So now we get back to what I did in those twenty-three minutes between my leaving the lecture and the bomb going off. I flew like a hummingbird to Wairy High School, about a block and a half away from Lincoln, and I was feeling pretty ferocious; my old ticker was pounding a lot faster than my feet. I said hummingbird, though it's not an image that goes with my physique, to express speed, because I figured Miss Henley would talk about forty minutes, so I'd have to hurry. Speaking of pulse rates, did you know, by the way, that a hummingbird's heart beats six hundred and fifteen times per minute?

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More than ten times a second? Barry found that out and told me it; we've had fascinating talks about the metabolism of birds. Anyway, I thought out my whole plan on the way to Wairy, and I charged up to the lab, and I found Barry and Flattop there— Barry was puttering around on some experiment, as he often does in after-school hours. I went right to work, and I never did anything with such dazzling speed. The two boys wanted to help me in whatever I was doing, but I wouldn't let them, because the law can take rather strict views of complicity, and Barry would just have slowed me down with his deliberate questions, anyway. I mixed ferrous sulphide and hydrochloric acid and a coloring agent in a globular vial in a matter of seconds. Then I took a large snap-type rat trap, and I—

Senator MANSFIELD. Why a rat trap?

Dr. GOZAR. Back during the second war I had to fill in for a couple of months for a sick high-school physics teacher, and I did a lecture on ancient engines of war, such as the testudo, the battering ram, Greek fire, and so on. I developed a slinging mechanism on the snapping arch of a rat trap to show the centrifugal hurling principle of the trebuchct, and the spring action of the ballista and catapult. Furthermore, to exercise the brighter youngsters' math, I conducted a series of experiments to calculate the trajectories of objects of various weights as thrown by my rat-trap engine, and I had used these same globular vials containing varying amounts of water as my projectiles. I was therefore able to weigh my stink-bomb vial and estimate fairly closely how high and how far it would carry. It took me only about half a minute to rig a timing mechanism—a kitchen timer I keep in the lab for experiments, to whose pointer I attached part of a wooden pencil, so I could simply set the timer alongside the trap and in due course the pencil would swing down on the bait-trigger of the trap.