Six Graves to Munich - Mario Cleri [5]
“All right,” Michael said. “I’ll play.”
That day was a glorious day for him. He found out that he had good physical coordination and that he could hold his own playing football or fighting with other boys. He came home for supper with his expensive leather briefcase smeared with mud. He also had a black eye and puffy, bloody lips. But he was so proud and so happy that he ran to his mother shouting, “I’m going to be on the football team! They picked me to be on the football team!”
Alice Rogan took one look at his battered face and burst into tears.
She tried to be reasonable. She explained to her young son that his brain was valuable, that he should never expose it to any danger. “You have an extraordinary mind, Michael,” she said. “Your mind may someday help humanity. You can’t be like other boys. What if you should hurt your head playing football? Or fighting with another boy?”
Michael listened and understood. When his father came home that evening he said almost the same thing. So Michael gave up all thoughts of being like ordinary boys. He had a precious treasure to guard for humanity. Had he been older he would have realized that his parents were being pompous and a bit ridiculous about this treasure, but he had not yet acquired that kind of adult judgment.
When he was thirteen the other boys started to humiliate him, taunt him, knock his briefcase from his hands. Michael Rogan, obeying his parents, refused to fight and suffered humiliation. It was his father who began to have doubts about how his son was being brought up.
One day Joseph Rogan brought home huge, puffy boxing gloves and taught his son the art of self-defense. Joseph told him to stick up for himself, to fight if necessary. “It’s more important that you grow up to be a man,” he said, “than to be a genius.”
It was during his thirteenth year that Michael Rogan discovered he was different from ordinary boys in another way. His parents had always taught him to dress neatly and in an adult fashion, because he spent so much of his time studying with adults. One day a group of boys surrounded Rogan and told him they were going to take off his pants and hang them from a lamppost, a routine humiliation most of the boys had undergone.
Rogan went berserk when they put their hands on him. He sank his teeth into one boy’s ear and ripped it partly from the boy’s head. He got his hand around the ringleader ’s throat and throttled him, despite other boys kicking and punching him to make him let go. When some grown-ups finally broke up the fight, three of the group and Rogan had to be hospitalized.
But nobody ever bothered him again. He was shunned not only as a freak but as a violent freak.
Michael Rogan was intelligent enough to know that his rage was not natural, that it sprang from some deeper source. And he came to understand what it was. He was enjoying the fruits of his extraordinary memory, his intellectual powers, without having done anything to deserve them, and he felt guilty about it. He talked of his feelings with his father, who understood and started to make plans for Michael to lead a more normal life. Unhappily, Joseph Rogan died of a heart attack before he could help his son.
Michael Rogan, going on fifteen, was tall, strong, and well coordinated. He was absorbing knowledge on the advanced levels now; and under the complete dominance of his mother, he really believed that his mind was a sacred trust to be guarded for its future use to humanity. By this time he had his MA and was studying for his MS. His mother treated him like a reigning king. That year Michael Rogan discovered girls.
In this he was perfectly normal. But he discovered to his chagrin that girls were afraid of him and treated him with giggling teenage cruelty. He was so intellectually mature that once again he was regarded as a freak by those his age. This drove him back to his studies with renewed fury.
At eighteen he found himself accepted as an equal by the seniors and graduate students at the Ivy League school where he was completing