Tunes for Bears to Dance To

These chapters continue to explore The Inadequacy of Language to express emotion. Henry and Doris speak in whispers, silences, and shrugs. Henry doesn’t have the words to express his opinion of her father or how beautiful he finds the sketch that Mr. Hairston shows him. Once again, Henry decides not to confide in his mother. Whether a subject is terrible or joyful, words fail the characters. Conversely, Doris’s explanation of her father’s verbal abuse of her mother testifies to language’s power—but power to do harm rather than to heal or to bring people together.

A particularly marked lack of communication surrounds the therapy that Henry’s father is going to the hospital to receive. It is more than likely electroconvulsive therapy, or so-called “shock therapy,” a psychiatric procedure in which electric currents are passed through the patient’s brain to cause changes in the brain’s chemistry. These changes can alleviate some mental health conditions, including depression. In the 1960s, however, ECT was often administered without anesthesia or muscle-relaxing agents, and the procedure and its side effects carried a negative stigma. The silence surrounding Henry’s father’s hospitalization also dovetails with the family’s avoidance of the past; as a result of Eddie’s death, Henry’s father’s depression is also off limits.

The thematic exploration of The Everyday Nature of Evil develops in these chapters as Mr. Hairston begins grooming Henry to make him complicit in his own loss of innocence. He has already targeted a vulnerable, sensitive boy. He now gains Henry’s trust by showing interest in Mr. Levine’s toy village, and he offers to try to fill a need in Henry’s life by obtaining the headstone for Eddie’s grave. Cormier foreshadows the end result of this grooming process with Henry’s feeling of having betrayed Mr. Levine. Notably, it is also on this day that Henry connects Doris’s bruises and pain to her father’s abuse, revealing another facet of the evil Mr. Hairston embodies and underscoring the danger Henry is in. Doris cautions him that her father has many ways to hurt people, not just physically—another instance of foreshadowing.

Cormier continues to use simile and metaphor to create sensory impressions in these chapters, especially as Henry talks to Doris in Chapter 10 about her injuries at the hands of her father. She walks “as if her bones would come apart” (48). When she climbs the stairs at the end of Chapter 10, they creak under her feet “like the sound of her wounded bones” (50). The repetition of “bones” evokes George’s description of Mr. Levine as being “only skin and bones” after the war ended (38), raising the question of whether Doris will survive her own encounter with evil. It also reinforces the association between Mr. Hairston and the Nazis, which not only foreshadows Mr. Hairston’s actions toward Mr. Levine but also suggests that evil always functions in more or less the same way, even as its scale differs.