The Child Buyer Read Free Page B

Lincoln Elementary. A woman.
    Mr. BROADBENT. Yes, sir, we have called Dr. Gozar to testify, the Rudd boy being in her school, and I was wondering if, for the committee's benefit, you would give us your assessment of Dr. Gozar. It would be a help.
    Mr. WAIRY. Assessment?
    Mr. BROADBENT. If you would tell us a bit in confidence about the people we're going to have to question on this case.
    Mr. WAIRY. You mean you have the prosecutor's itch, young man, you'd like to know a few weak points you can work on?
    Mr. BROADBENT. Not at all, I—
    Mr. WAIRY. I don't know whether your investigators happened on this fact for my dossier or not, Mr. Counsel, but I once went to law school myself, and we had an expression for
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    THE CHILD BUYER
    the glint I see in your eye—the warmth of your cheeks: 'D.A. fever/ we called it. Right?
    Mr. BROADBENT. I don't know what you mean, sir. You were about to say, on Dr. Gozar.
    Mr. WAIRY. She's a great big man of a woman, and I'd say she's contented with her lot. She gives an impression—she has a constant, barking, bass laugh—that she's mighty glad to be so overwhelmingly a doctor. She's a Ph.D., that's where the 'doctor' comes from, and her doctorate is backed up by half a dozen other post-graduate degrees, because, my heavens, she takes a laborer's job in a factory every summer and goes to summer school to boot. When she talks about social adjustment, you can take one look at her and sec that she doesn't mean the pale, wishy-washy conformism that so often seems to be intended by school psychologists who use that phrase. She's what we call an old-timer; I mean a real New Englander. She's got a traprock forehead and a granite jaw; stone ribs, too—but there's a passionate optimist living behind all that masonry. Let's see, grew up on a farm, a survivor of Elton's Seminary for Women, sixty-seven years old, been principal of Lincoln Elementary for thirty-eight years, and she's grown younger ever since I've known her, which has been most of the time she's had that job. She started out kind of hidebound, but she's wound up wise, freedom-loving, self-reliant, tolerant, and daring. And flexible. For about the last half of her tenure at Lincoln, she's demonstrated that she feels there's not any single mandatory school program for which there could be no substitute. She's a talker: she'll bend your ear! But verbum sap., Mr. Counsel. I would not press her too hard. I wouldn't try to take her skin off, because the first thing you know, young man, she'll have broken your whipper off from your snapper.
    Senator SKYPACK. What about the G-man? What's his name? Where does he fit in? What was that name, Broadbent?
    Friday, October 25
    Mr. BROADBENT. Cleary.
    Mr. WAIRY. Mr. Cleary? He's an ambitious young man. I understand he grew up in Watermont, and that he's descended from an Irish immigrant who came to America in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century and spent the vigorous years of his life laying railroad tracks up the Connecticut Valley and across Massachusetts to Boston; the old boy may well have been in the gang that Thoreau mentions as putting down the roadbed along the far side of Walden Pond from his cabin. In the rare moments when Mr. Cleary alludes to his background, he's inclined to say that he didn't come from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, he came from between them. That picture pleases him, I'd imagine, because it strengthens his idea he's going someplace. The feelings of his immigrant forebears about being Irish in anti-Irish times were evidently handed down to him; I mean he seems to have a firm conviction that the world is hostile. I don't know whether he sets any store by Our Lord, but he surely believes in the Devil, whose big job, Cleary'd say, is to snatch the hindmost. Survival of the fittest, that's him—to be fit and out front is the works with him: 'in shape,' he calls it. Know what he wants? He wants recognition; he thinks mere happiness isn't worth a candle. All this