When the curtain fled back he did not look up.
When hands dragged him violently out of his vomit he did not resist.
He hung from the hands, limp, looking with slackjawed and glassy idiocy into a face no longer smooth pink-and-white, surrounded now by wild and dishevelled hair whose smooth bands once made him think of candy.
“You little rat!” the thin, furious voice hissed; “you little rat!
Spying on me!
You little nigger bastard!”
The dietitian was twenty-seven—old enough to have to take a few amorous risks but still young enough to attach a great deal of importance not so much to love, but to being caught at it.
She was also stupid enough to believe that a child of five not only could deduce the truth from what he had heard, but that he would want to tell it as an adult would.
So when during the following two days she could seem to look nowhere and be nowhere without finding the child watching her with the profound and intent interrogation of an animal, she foisted upon him more of the attributes of an adult: she believed that he not only intended to tell, but that he deferred doing it deliberately in order to make her suffer more.
It never occurred to her that he believed that he was the one who had been taken in sin and was being tortured with punishment deferred and that he was putting himself in her way in order to get it over with, get his whipping and strike the balance and write it off.
By the second day she was well nigh desperate.
She did not sleep at night.
She lay most of the night now tense, teeth and hands clenched, panting with fury and terror and worst of all, regret: that blind fury to turn back time just for an hour, a second.
This was to the exclusion of even love during the time.
The young doctor was now even less than the child, merely an instrument of her disaster and not even that of her salvation.
She could not have said which she hated most.
She could not even say when she was asleep and when she was awake.
Because always against her eyelids or upon her retinae was that still, grave, inescapable, parchmentcolored face watching her.
On the third day she came out of the coma state, the waking sleep through which during the hours of light and faces she carried her own face like an aching mask in a fixed grimace of dissimulation that dared not flag.
On the third day she acted.
She had no trouble finding him.
It was in the corridor, the empty corridor during the quiet hour after dinner.
He was there, doing nothing at all.
Perhaps he had followed her.
No one else could have said if he were waiting there or not.
But she found him without surprise and he heard and turned and saw her without surprise: the two faces, the one no longer smooth pink-and-white, the other grave, sobereyed, perfectly empty of everything except waiting.
‘Now I’ll get it over with,’ he thought.
“Listen,” she said.
Then she stopped, looking at him.
It was as though she could not think what to say next.
The child waited, still, motionless.
Slowly and gradually the muscles of his backside were becoming flat and rigid and tense as boards.
“Are you going to tell?” she said.
He didn’t answer. He believed that anyone should have known that the last thing in the world he would do would be to tell about the toothpaste, the vomit.
He was not looking at her face.
He was watching her hands, waiting.
One of them was clenched inside her skirt pocket.
Through, the cloth he could see that it was clenched hard.
He had never been struck with a fist.
Yet neither had he ever waited three days to be punished.
When he saw the hand emerge from the pocket he believed that she was about to strike him.
But she did not; the hand just opened beneath his eyes.
Upon it lay a silver dollar.
Her voice was thin, urgent, whispering, though the corridor was empty about them.
“You can buy a lot with this.
A whole dollar.”
He had never seen a dollar before, though he knew what it was.
He looked at it.
He wanted it as he would have wanted the bright cap from a beer bottle.
But he did not believe that she would give it to him, because he would not give it to her if it were his.