Into That Fire

by M. J. Cates

  * * *

  —

  Working at Willard’s Sixty-Third Street Pharmacy four days a week proved to be demanding enough that Imogen could not think about her father, or her mother, or Quentin. It was hard on the back and the ankles to be standing behind a counter all day, but she needed the money, since her father was never going to support her psychiatric ambitions. When she had applied for the job, old Mr. Willard—a Victorian relic in apron and sleeve garters—asked her many questions about her scientific and medical education, so many she thought she might soon be compounding medicines at his side, a not unwelcome extension of her education.

  But it was not to be. Willard’s was a thriving enterprise, and its proprietor needed her help behind the counter, serving customers. At least he didn’t expect her to man the soda fountain. That job belonged to a boy named Zach, who was probably the skinniest, and certainly the cheeriest, specimen of male adolescence Imogen had ever seen.

  She sold two Owl Eye glass eyes one week, and a surprising number of Gold Pheasant condoms, not one of them to a man. She’d already had to put them on Mr. Willard’s reorder list twice.

  “Hah. Apparently we serve a troop of secret minxes,” he said. “The good ladies are relieved to be buying their husbands’ sheaths from a woman. Although at these numbers I sense a triumph of optimism over reality.”

  Physician or no, Imogen was not comfortable discussing condoms with her employer, and steered his attention to a recent run on Hoofland’s German Tonic. “I don’t understand it,” she said. “It can’t possibly do the things it claims.”

  “That’s why they call it a tonic. General pick-me-up.”

  “I mean, at least the toothache drops work.”

  Mr. Willard regarded her, his face a collage of eyebrows and spectacles. “The field of medicine, my dear, is not a paradise of pure reason.”

  The shop’s customers were mostly women, and they all expected a personal consultation with Mr. Willard, who had been prescribing for their colds, rashes, moods, and digestive issues for decades. He took great pride in having an MD on staff, and made sure all his customers knew it. When they began asking Imogen for advice, she was diffident about giving it and referred them to Mr. Willard. “No, no,” he insisted, “by all means consult with Dr. Lang. She has my every confidence.”

  His view darkened, however, as the weeks went by and his customers began to tell him they would come back when the doctor was in. The only ladies who remained loyal to him were so aged that they found the idea of a female physician preposterous. He began to be grumpy with Imogen, even rude.

  Some of the customers also began to chat with her on a personal level, encouraging her to forgo further education and remain in the pharmacy right there on Sixty-Third Street. She soon learned not to mention her plan to study psychiatry. Many did not know the term, and when she explained, they reacted with muted horror. Alienists, after all, worked in the state hospitals—asylums housing two or three thousand lost souls, most of them incurable.

  One of her regulars was more sophisticated. “You should try for superintendent,” Mrs. Ludlow told her. “They make the money, I’m telling you. Look at all the jobs they get to hand out. Plus you’d get a big fancy house for nothing. I don’t believe there’s ever been a woman in charge of a state hospital.”

  “No,” Imogen said. “I’m sure not.”

  “The assistant psychiatrists have a bum time of it. I have a nephew who’s an assistant at Worcester. Lives on the hospital grounds, never gets enough time off to go anywhere, and the pay is terrible.”

  “Well, their housing is paid for too.”

  “But it’s a pokey little place. And it’s not as if he ever cures anybody, is it? Teddy tells me the only people who get better are the maniacs.”

  “Manic-depressives, you mean.”

  “That’s them. And they only get better because that’s the nature of it. The spells come and go. Got nothing to do with the doctors. When it goes, they let ’em out.”

  “Well, I’m hoping to secure a position in a clinic. Some place much smaller than an asylum.”

  “You’re not a follower of Herr Freud are you? Teddy told me about that man’s theories. Disgusting.”

  “Yes, well, I don’t imagine I’ll be psychoanalyzing anyone anytime soon.”

  Detecting a certain cooling in Mrs. Ludlow’s regard, Imogen placed her items—five-grain aspirin, Kelsey’s Hair Restorer, and a bottle of Lloyd’s Cocaine Drops for Toothache—in a paper sack and counted out her change.

  * * *

  —

  Even though she had told Quentin she would no longer reply, his letters kept coming, sometimes consisting of no more than a single sentence, and not always a coherent one. If only you were here, he might write, but you’re not. Another, more alarming, purported to be his own sardonic death notice; it was hard to tell from his tone how worried she should be. But when she received yet another letter that implied in various ways that his life was no longer worth living, Imogen felt she should notify someone.

  She sat down one rainy afternoon on her day off to use the typewriter in her father’s study.

  Dear Dr. Goodchild,

  In the course of my studies at Rush Medical College I had the good fortune to enjoy the friendship of your son, Quentin. Although our relationship was friendly, even affectionate, it was never romantic and I tried always to make clear the limits of my feelings. However, Quentin has been sending me letters this summer which would seem to indicate he has not accepted this, and that he wants a romantic involvement, which never existed, to extend into a limitless future.

  That some woman will one day be made happy in marriage with your son, I have no doubt. Unfortunately, I am not she—not through any defect of Quentin’s but owing to my own limitations and ambitions. One of Quentin’s greatest qualities is his sensitivity, and please believe me that I grieve to be the one inflicting pain on him. He would be mortified and perhaps outraged to learn I have said even this much to you, but I feel I must because his letters have taken a darker turn and I fear he may harm himself in some way.

  If you can somehow help him through this painful time without mentioning that I have written to you, that might be for the best. With every wish that we could have met under happier circumstances, I am,

  Yours truly,

  Imogen Lang

  She pulled the sheet from the typewriter, signed it, and folded it in three. She typed the address on a plain envelope, put the letter inside, and sealed it. No return address. That would look peculiar—it might even alert Quentin—but using her own address was out of the question, and using a false one struck her as both dishonest and liable to backfire in some unforeseen manner.

  She put a stamp on the envelope and left her father’s study. The house was mostly quiet; her younger sisters were downtown, no doubt torturing the sales staff at Neiman Marcus and Marshall Field’s. She could hear Mrs. Bidwell banging about the kitchen, preparing dinner. Rose was upstairs in her bedroom, paralytic with migraine, she said. Her father and Alice would not be home for hours.

  She collected the post and sorted through the bills and letters. Nothing for her father; most of his correspondence went to the office. Various letters in girlish handwriting for her sisters. Some official-looking envelopes from charitable foundations for her mother. Nothing, thankfully, from Quentin.

  Imogen took her raincoat from the vestibule and put it on. She slipped the letter into her bag, selected a pearl-handled umbrella from the hall stand, and went out. If she hurried, she could make the three-fifteen post.

  * * *

  —

  On a weekday afternoon toward the middle of August, Quentin himself turned up. Somehow he had discovered where she was employed, and figured out which streetcar she would have to take to get home. He was waiting at her stop like a figure in a dream. It must have taken him days, and more than one train, to travel from Lake Placid to this corner of Chicago.

  “You’re wrong, you know.” Th
at was the first thing he said to her.

  Imogen did not know how to reply. The evening was cloudy, the light a smudged, dirty grey. People pushed by her as she stood there.

  “You’re wrong,” he said again. Strain showed in the lines around his eyes, the tightness of his mouth.

  “Quentin, you shouldn’t have come.”

  “We’re more than friends, Imogen. We always were, right from the start. We just didn’t know what to call it. I didn’t. I do now.”

  “Quentin, please.”

  She stepped into the lee of a newsstand to get out of the way of people heading home.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not here to make any more pleas. You needn’t write to my father again.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “He didn’t come to the summer house this year. He’s staying with friends in Canada.”

  “You open his mail?”

  “You can hardly claim the moral high ground, contacting him behind my back.”

  “I was worried about you. You seemed so despairing. Your letter—”

  “I know. I know. I don’t want you to feel bad about me. But I just hate the idea of life without you.”

  “But you can’t expect any one person to—”

  “I know that—it’s exactly what I told Jack, who told me not to come here, by the way. Doesn’t matter. One thing I learned this summer, other than the fact that I can write even when I’m feeling desperate, is that I haven’t the courage to kill myself. It would be easy enough—Lake Placid’s full of shotguns, and there’s no shortage of places to drown or cliffs to leap from, but I can’t do it. So I’m going to let the Germans do it.”

  “The Germans! We’re not even at war!”

  “The U.S. isn’t. But I’ve signed up with the Canadian Expeditionary Force—97th Battalion. They’re calling us the American Legion. We ship out in a couple of weeks.”

  “Quentin, you’ll get yourself killed.”

  “That’s the idea. Some lucky Hun does me the favour, and I’m out of your way—and mine—forever.”

  “Quentin—please!” She clutched his arm but he pulled away. “I don’t want you to die—I want you to live a long and happy life.”

  “Without you, that’s not possible. You’ll never know how much I, how much I—well, it doesn’t matter now.”

  He turned and hurried away from her through the smoke and tumult of a Chicago evening. Imogen called his name until she could no longer see him, and then broke down in tears.

  That night she couldn’t stop thinking of one of Quentin’s poems, a ballad of many stanzas, each one ending with the phrase “into that fever, into that fire.” Sometimes he seemed to be talking about love, sometimes about an inner struggle—the meaning changed with each repetition—but now there seemed no doubt at all about what he meant. She sought solace from her mother, something she had not done for several years. The two of them sat in the front parlour after dinner, on the blue velvet sofa that faced a mantelpiece covered with family photographs.

  Imogen gave a condensed version of the situation. A friend, someone she’d known since her first year at Rush, was passionately in love with her but she was not in love with him. And now he had joined a foreign army in hopes of being killed.

  “He sounds a very unstable fellow,” her mother said.

  “But he isn’t. Not usually. I can’t imagine anyone more honest, loyal, dependable.”

  “In that case, why don’t you marry him—assuming he has an income.”

  “He’s also eccentric and excitable.”

  “Obviously—if he’s running off to join the Foreign Legion.”

  “The American Legion—it’s part of a Canadian battalion. The Canadians are at war, Mother.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it—warn the border authorities? Broker a peace treaty?”

  “No, I just—”

  “Just what, dear? Surely you’ve noticed by now that men were put on this earth for the sole purpose of making life difficult.”

  “Never mind, Mother.”

  “Is that why you asked me in here? To make me feel useless?”

  “Of course not. I just thought, you know, you might have had a similar experience at one time. That you—”

  “That I what? That I had a kind and intelligent man fall in love with me? That I spurned him and lived to tell the tale?”

  “I hoped you might be able to tell me how to deal with this.”

  “Your father was the only man who ever courted me. It never occurred to me to turn my back on him. If you have no wish to marry the man, I don’t see what the loss is.”

  “Mother, he’s my closest friend.”

  “Men and women can never be friends. Really, my dear, it’s hard to see the point of medical school if you haven’t learned that. Anyway, Miriam Landis is your best friend.”

  “I haven’t seen Miriam in years. We have nothing in common anymore.”

  “I thought that’s why you went to medical school—to be uncommon.”

  “To be useful. Not uncommon.”

  “And now you’re going to study psychiatry. Hardly an endeavour designed to attract suitors. Quite the opposite I should say.”

  “Mother, I’m not talking about suitors. I’m talking about a friend.”

  “You didn’t lose a friend. You lost a beau. He was right to declare his feelings—honest, as you say. He no longer chose to be deluded about what was going on—you, it seems, chose otherwise. In any case, the man has now seen the light. He is in love, you are not. Joining the army is quite traditional in such cases.”

  “But I feel so bereft!”

  “You’re not allowed to feel bereft after you send someone packing.”

  “I didn’t send him packing. I just said I didn’t want to marry him. I can’t bear the thought of his being killed over there.”

  “Once he starts shooting at Germans, I don’t see how you can be held responsible for the outcome.” Her mother got up and went to the door, pausing for a moment with her hand on the knob. “I don’t know why you’re so keen on psychiatry, Imogen. You’re an intelligent young woman, but you don’t seem overly insightful.”

  “All the more reason to study it.”

  “A psychiatrist would require a deal of compassion, as well. Evidently not your strong suit.”

  “Thanks a million, Mother. Really. I feel so much better.”

  For the first time, Imogen wondered if her mother had always been like this. Could it be that her father’s betrayal was as much a result of Rose Lang’s blasted heart as a cause? She remembered overhearing the two of them talking once when she was very little, perhaps a year or two after Laura’s death. “Are you resolved never to be happy again?” her father had asked. “Happy?” her mother responded. “No. I shall try to be cheerful at times, but I shall never be happy.”

  * * *

  —

  Now it was the last week of August and Imogen was seated on a bench in the first-class waiting room of Chicago’s Union Station, watching the massive clock tick toward boarding time.

  She had taken the Limited only once before, when she was a girl of six, with Alice and her mother. The younger girls were not yet born. Laura had died the year before, and the household was still enveloped in gloom. Perhaps as a welcome distraction, her father had planned an educational trip to Washington D.C. to show the girls the nation’s centre of government. Her mother, not yet the near invalid she would become, was involved in the City Beautiful movement, and was gratified to learn from her travel brochure that the train tracks had at last been removed from the National Mall.

  “They’re planning to build a stupendous monument to Abraham Lincoln at the far end,” she told the children, “so there will be a pure green vista from the White House to the memorial, whatever shape it may take. Oh, your father would’ve been so excited to see this.”

  “Then why didn’t he come?” fifteen-year-old Alice inquired with a litigious edge.

  “The p
oor man had to change plans at the last minute. You mustn’t be upset, dears. Your father works tirelessly to support all of us. That is how he shows his love, and we must all be grateful for it.”

  Imogen remembered her mother’s silhouette against the rushing green hills, the balled-up handkerchief she used to dab her eyes.

  She had felt like crying too. Even with the excitement of the train trip, it was impossible to forget about Laura. Her own reflection in the window was a perfect, if transparent, reproduction of her dead sister’s face. Despite her own ache for Laura, she tried to cheer her mother up. She didn’t go anywhere without the miniature notepad and pencil that hung from the ribbon around her neck. She took the notepad now and printed one word in neat rounded letters and jabbed her finger against the windowpane, which was surprisingly cold.

  “Don’t, dear,” her mother said, lightly clutching her wrist with two gloved fingers and holding it away. “You’ll leave fingerprints.”

  “Shouldn’t she be wearing gloves?” Alice said without looking up from her Harper’s Bazaar. “Everyone else is.”

  “She’s too young for gloves.”

  Imogen pointed again, without touching the glass.

  “Yes, dear. Cows. Aren’t they lovely.”

  Imogen printed a few more words and showed them to her mother.

  “Happy? I’m not sure they look happy. Contented, perhaps.”

  Alice sat forward and glanced out the window. “They won’t be happy when they find out what they’re in for.”

  “Whatever can you mean, Alice? They’re dairy cows. They’re not going to the slaughterhouse.”

  “Well, not today.”

  Imogen printed slotter and a question mark in her notebook and showed it to her mother. You couldn’t live in Chicago without smelling the slaughterhouses, but somehow her parents had managed to preserve her ignorance concerning the provenance of their Sunday roasts.

  “Never mind, dear.”

  What means slotter house?