Perchance. Michael Kurland
colony here on the West Side. Good citizens, if a bit clannish. Came over after the Walloon Uprisings.”
“All the signs are in English in Philadelphia,” Delbit said.
“Of course they are,” Dobbins told him. “Pennsylvania Commonwealth has restricted immigration. New York State has unrestricted European immigration. Not many Chinamen make it here, but a lot of Flems and Fresses and Armenians and Jews and Hellenes. We got a bunch of Swedes after the Danish occupation, but most of them settled in Boston. All good citizens, for the most part. And we’ve got the best restaurants in the Constitutionally Confederated States right here in New York. Those Flems really know what to do with a side of beef.”
Delbit looked at Dobbins with new interest. A servant who knows about such things, a servant who could afford to eat out, was a superior creature indeed, in Delbit’s view. Working for this Dr. Faineworth might prove to be a pleasant and interesting experience. Delbit wondered again what was in store for him. So far in his nineteen years, the only interesting experiences had proved painful.
The Faineworth Clinic was a three-story mostly Georgian building on a couple of acres of land on the east side of Broadway right above 110th Street. It had been added to from time to time, with each of the additions zigzagging off in one direction or another from the main building. Each segment had been treated as a fresh architectural challenge, independent of whatever it abutted. The building appeared to be at war with itself. In the front yard, to the right of the drive, was a large white wooden sign. The emblem on the landau door was duplicated on the sign, with below it the words:
THE FAINEWORTH CLINIC
FOR THE AID AND EXAMINATION
OF THE BEWILDERED
LEARN YE INNER TRUTH & BEE FREE.
The electric pulled around the drive past the front doors and made a sharp right into a narrow brick half-oval tunnel that went through the building. “We enter the back,” Dobbins explained.
“Of course,” Delbit agreed.
Dobbins brought Delbit in through the back door, which entered on the institution’s kitchens, and led him through a series of corridors and passages toward the front. The place was as ornate and eclectic on the inside as the outside. Dark wood paneling gave way to antiseptic painted plaster, which abruptly changed to figured wallpaper. Carpeted hallways intersected tiled lobbies and parquet vestibules. An occasional stripe of colored paint crossed the walls vertically or diagonally for no apparent reason. Delbit examined this passing scene with interest, and concluded that it was designed to create the bewildered people that the clinic then examined.
“Wait here,” Dobbins said, taking Delbit through a light-colored door in the painted plaster section of hallway and into what looked like the anteroom to a doctor’s office.
Delbit sat himself on the red couch which took up the left-hand wall and waited. After about ten minutes the inner door opened and he was called in. As he had suspected, the inner room was a doctor’s office, with a large desk in the middle of the floor, two massive cabinets full of obscure medical instruments looming behind the desk, and a variety of large naturalistic paintings covering the walls. The floor was covered with a dark red carpet which ended precisely a hand’s-breadth away from the wall in all directions, revealing six inches of highly polished wood. The man sitting at the desk, who Delbit assumed must be the doctor, nodded and smiled. He was tall and beanpole-thin, and had a large rounded nose and small pointed ears. His teeth also appeared to be pointed. “So this is Delbit Quint,” he said, leaning back in his massive wooden chair and smiling a broad smile. “A pleasure, it is.”
“Delbit, this is Dr. Faineworth,” Dobbins said, gesturing him forward to the front of the desk.
“A pleasure to see you, lad,” Dr. Faineworth told him, his voice thin and reedy. “You are, so to speak, just what the doctor ordered.” He chuckled. “I suppose you’re wondering just what you’re doing here.”
Delbit allowed himself a slight smile. “I am a bit bewildered, yes, sir.”
“Ah! The lad has a sense of humor. We should have guessed.” The doctor leaned forward. “Sit down, Delbit, lad, and let me explain.”
Dobbins brought over a straightback chair and placed it in front of the desk, and Delbit sat.
Dr. Faineworth pulled a piece of light blue paper from a stack to his right and placed it below his nose. “These are your Articles of Apprenticeship,” he told Delbit, peering down at the paper as though it were a new species of bug. “They give the master the right to sell you, if he so chooses, as you know. Well, I have bought you. You will be delighted to know, I assume, that you are no longer apprenticed to a master shoemaker, but to a medical doctor. I can promise you that you will find it different. More exacting, more demanding, longer hours, but more rewarding, if you do your job well. And more painful, much more painful, if you do not. But, of course, we all assume that you will. Do you understand?”
The doctor paused and stared expectantly at Delbit, waiting for his reaction. Delbit was surprised to discover that he didn’t have one. Two days ago he had been peacefully, if not happily, sweeping the floor of a steam-operated shoe factory in Philadelphia; yesterday Master Branterberger had told him he’d be going to New York City; and now he found out that he’d been sold. He would probably have a reaction soon, but at the moment he merely felt as if someone had kicked him in the gut.
“You have five years and two months left under the articles, is that right?” Dr. Faineworth asked, after waiting a minute for Delbit to speak.
“That is so,” Delbit said.
“Your father sold you into apprenticeship? I assume things weren’t going well with him?”
“My stepfather,” Delbit explained. “I think he was tired of feeding me.”
“Interesting,” Dr. Faineworth said, but he didn’t elaborate. Delbit waited silently. Sooner or later someone would tell him what was going on.
Dr. Faineworth pushed the blue paper aside and pulled over a pink paper to take its place. He examined it for a moment, then stared up at Delbit. “I have your school records here,” he said. “Pennsylvania Commonwealth Free School number 125 thinks highly of you.”
“Yes, sir,” Delbit said.
“It is that record that has occasioned my interest in you,” Dr. Faineworth explained. “It includes your test results from the alpha-battery and the omicron-battery of tests you took in the first and sixth grades. You remember?”
“Yes, sir,” Delbit replied. What on earth did his sixth-grade tests have to do with anything?
“You’re fairly bright, you know that?”
“Yes, sir.” Delbit was actually very bright, a fact which he had learned to conceal, as it had never done him one bit of good. Intelligence was of small comfort while sweeping the factory floor. The master and the other ’prentices tended to resent it when his intelligence showed in any form whatever. “If you were so smart, you wouldn’t be a ’prentice” was one of the milder comments. Which was grossly unfair, as his opinion had never been asked in the matter.
“Well, I can see you’re not modest either. That’s fine, lad. Modesty never won a war.” Dr. Faineworth leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, his black-sleeved elbows sticking out like wings on either side. “Would you like to know what you’re doing here?”
“Yes, sir.” There was no doubt about that.
“You remember a bunch of tests you took on a big machine, where they pasted electrodes all over you?”
“Yes, sir, I remember.” Painful, irritating, boring, and pointless. The Faineworth Apperception Tests, they were. Faineworth—well, how do you like that.
“Well, one of the things that test did was to take what I like to call a mental profile of you. One might say that it showed the way your individual mind does its thinking in different situations,