Ruffly Speaking

must feel, more or less.”
    “But does Ivan know?” Rita asked.
    “How could he not?” Leah said.
    “What I’m asking,” said Rita, sounding like her old self, “is whether this little boy had any help in dealing with this profound loss. Did anyone help him to articulate his feelings? Was anyone there for him? Is anyone?”
    “His mother spends time with him, if that’s what you mean.” Leah helped herself to more ice cream and generously added another scoop to Matthew’s bowl. “She gets books for him, and they read together all the time. Ivan reads... Well, he probably reads as well as I do, but they read aloud together. Plays and things.”
    “That’s, uh, a mixed blessing,” Matthew commented.
    “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” said Leah, smiling.
    “How is that—?” I started to ask.
    “Ivan identifies with Puck,” Leah told me.
    Matthew elaborated. “In the Avon Hill play, it’s... It’s their own play. They write it, they produce it, they do everything, and the idea is that they write their own parts, and we’re there strictly as advisors, backup—”
    “ ‘Not censors,’ ” Leah said censoriously. She was obviously quoting someone.
    “So Ivan is creating some kind of dilemma?” I asked.
    “The feeling is,” Leah said, “that he ought to be encouraged to be more creative, because what he’s doing now is basically just copying Shakespeare.”
    “Robin Badfellow,” Matthew added.
    “He must say it a hundred times a day,” Leah said. “What he says is, ‘Robin B-a-d Badfellow is my name.’ And the director—the director of AHSP, not the director of the play—-she’s a kid—anyway, the director tried to have this sort of tactful talk with Ivan, because he’s also borrowed a lot of the dialogue and stuff, but she didn’t get anywhere.”
    “Because,” Matthew explained, “Ivan told her that if it was all right for Shakespeare to borrow plots from other people, then it was all right for him to borrow from Shakespeare.”
    “That’s hard to argue with,” I said.
    “Ivan is always hard to argue with,” said Leah, “which is one reason this leave-him-free-to-express-him-self method—”
    “That’s not—” Matthew began.
    “Oh, yes, it is,” Leah said. “And what’s wrong with it is, you give Ivan a choice, and he’ll always screw things up, and then what are you supposed to tell him? ‘Great job, Ivan!’ How could you? I keep telling you, what we need to do is to set him up so he has no choice. Like with that woman next door to you, Matthew.”
    “Alice Savery?” I asked.
    Leah ignored me. She went on lecturing Matthew. “You know what’s going to happen? In fact, it’s happening now. First of all, someone ought to drive Ivan home from the program or walk him home or whatever, because, now, he’s like a dog running loose; he’s just invited to get into trouble. And then when she shows up at the program and tells us we have to tell Ivan to quit sneaking into her carriage house, all that’s really happening is that we’re not just giving him a choice, but we’re showing him what the wrong choice is. And, you know, Matthew, it’s really dangerous, because—”
    “The carriage house is a firetrap,” Matthew agreed, “and he does go in there. I saw him there the other day. But that story about the kids sneaking in there to smoke, that’s... if they did it, they would’ve burned it down by now, and—”
    “Why doesn’t she just have it tom down?” Leah demanded.
    “Leah,” Matthew said firmly, “the point is that you can’t safety-proof the whole world.”
    “You don’t have to,” Leah said, “because not all of it’s relevant.”
    “Leah, you’re not being rational. Here’s... Take my mother, for instance.” Matthew spoke with unusual animation. “In theory, one could redesign the environment so that deaf people receive the sensory input they need exclusively through visual channels—no more telephones, just TTYs; every film has subtitles; and so forth and so on—but in practice—”
    “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” Leah said.
    “It’s cost-ineffective,” Matthew told her sourly. “And no one could reasonably suggest depriving most people of telephones because—”
    “But everyone could have a TTY,” said Leah. Turning to Rita and me, she added, “You type instead of talking, and instead of hearing, you—”
    “We know,” I said.
    “Stephanie has one,” Leah said. “And, Matthew, you know