The Three Roads

by Ross Macdonald

  Dr. Klifter laid down the clipping and drew a long breath. “It is rather hideous, is it not?”

  “That’s one of the things that reconciles me to Bret’s loss of memory. He doesn’t have to remember these things. He doesn’t even know that his name was in the headlines.”

  “You’ve told him nothing?”

  “Not I. And fortunately Commander Wright agrees with me. I couldn’t bring myself to show him these.” She made a gesture of repugnance toward the clippings on the table. “You keep them if you wish. I don’t know why I’ve held on to them so long.”

  “Thank you. I may have a use for them.”

  “What use?”

  He answered her indirectly: “I’m not sure that the Commander is right—”

  “In keeping back these facts? I realize Bret will have to know eventually. But not now. His hold on reality is still so precarious. I don’t know what the shock would do to him.”

  “Nor do I. I hope to understand him better when I have talked to him tomorrow. It may be that the truth of these things, the ugly and naked truth, is exactly what his mind requires. You see, the fact that he is innocent of his wife’s death does not exclude the possibility of subjective guilt. It merely removes the most obvious objective reason for his guilt.”

  “You’ll have to take it slower. My brain isn’t functioning tonight.”

  “I shall illustrate my meaning. Suppose that he desired his wife’s death. Though he was innocent in all but wish, her death, satisfying as it did his unconscious or partially unconscious desires, might very well leave him with an overpowering sense of guilt. Do you understand me now?”

  “Yes,” she said in a low voice. “I felt guilty of her death, for that reason.”

  Her eyes, black with fear, were fixedly watching the dark window again.

  Part II

  SUNDAY

  chapter 5

  He did his best thinking in the night watches, when darkness and silence swathed his room. Long after midnight he lay awake charging the wilderness of memory that stretched backward from the advancing edge of the present. The motives that explained his life were as difficult to trace as a river that ran underground for more than half its length. But night after night he renewed his groping search. In this dim subterranean place, the hidden life of violence and hatred, tenderness and desire, he might find the self that he had lost, and the key to the door of the room where he lay.

  The landmarks of his external life—his boxing championship in college, his graduation summa cum laude, his Washington appointment, the publication of his book on the Age of Reason—these things lost all their significance when he looked at them from below, from the vantage point of darkness. The bald ceremony at which he was sworn in as an officer in the Naval Reserve had moved him deeply at the time, but now it was meaningless except as one remote link in the chain of events that had brought him to this hospital bed. His mental crisis, like a crisis in the economy of a nation, had changed the value of his currency.

  But there were scenes in his hidden life that seemed to be lit by a pulsating lightning, a throbbing anguish as secret and intimate as his blood. On his tenth birthday he shot a sparrow with the new air rifle that was his father’s birthday present to him. The sparrow flopped crazily around the garden for a long time and refused to die. He had not been able to shoot it again or to touch it with his hands. He stood paralyzed by guilt and repulsion and pity, and watched it beat away its life among the flowers.

  Standing by his father’s coffin ten years later, he had not been able to grieve. The flower-choked funeral parlor in the little Indiana town bored and irritated him. He was anxious to get back to Chicago and his work. And in the heavy atmosphere of the cut roses and carnations he remembered his tenth birthday. His father had found him with the dying sparrow, and they saw it die together, change in a spasm from a frantic bird to a handful of dusty feathers. They had buried the dead sparrow beside the rosebush, and his father had taken away his air rifle, and he had never seen it again.

  He looked down into the rouged and sunken face of Professor Emeritus George Taylor who had sired and fed him, taken away his air rifle, and died unloved in his sleep in his sixty-sixth year. But two days after the funeral he awoke in his Pullman berth on his way back to Chicago and wept for the poor old man and the dead bird. Another ten years had passed since then, but he could still remember the fading eyes of the sparrow as its life went out, and the terrible loneliness of the body in the coffin.

  A loneliness as deathly as the dead man’s had enclosed him for most of those ten years. He had never been able to take love or give it until he met Paula in La Jolla and she decided to stay with him. Even the day he told her he loved her had been flawed by an impulse of rejection. Though nothing had actually happened and the evil impulse had been rejected in turn, the remembered scene, the moving sky and the gray sea, the dark, sharp cormorants skimming low over the water, were lit by the guilty lightning in his mind.

  It was the first cloudy day in their week together, too cold and dark for sun-bathing or swimming in the cove. A rough wind from offshore reinforced the tide, and the waves rolled in like hills of glass that shattered on the deserted beaches. The wind brought color into her cheeks and made her eyes shine. With a brightly figured scarf over her hair she was young, absurd, and lovely, laughing at the white explosions of the waves bursting on the rocks. They linked hands and climbed the sea wall as they had on the first night. Threading their way among the pools and fissures of the water meadows, they scrambled up on a high rock and stood there out of reach of the surf.

  While they watched the terrific horseplay of the sea, the seals came in. Usually they stayed a mile or so out, their raised snouts tiny disappearing cones of darkness against the shifting colors of the ocean. But sometimes when their mood was right and the waves were high, they caught them and rode them in to shore. They could swim up and out of the crest of a wave, leap clear, turn in the air, and slide back into their element. Back and forth they swam inside the breaking rollers, the continuous grace of their movements as clear to the watchers as if they were swimming under glass. Just before the waves swept them to destruction on the rocks, they ducked and released themselves, swam out and rode in again. The sleek bodies gliding and twisting in the glass walls were like the bodies of women. He felt exultant, with an undercurrent of fear and shame. He had never possessed the body of a woman.

  “How I’d love to be a dancer!” Paula said. “To say things directly with my body, instead of through a typewriter and actors’ faces and camera angles. It must be the most satisfying art there is.”

  He didn’t answer until the seals had tired, or thought of another game, and went away. When he turned to her a tender warmth was trembling through him.

  She faced him gladly, with soft and shining eyes. Her glowing body was hidden like a beast in ambush under her fur coat. He was painfully aware of the warmth of her hand, the whiteness of her chin and throat, the redness of the mouth that was raised to him. His heartbeat was quickened, and his knees loosened by desire. She opened her coat to let him in, and they embraced on the rock above the sea, in full view of two hotels.

  It was then that he told her he loved her. But in the dizzy instant of passion the revulsion had taken hold of him. He moved to free himself, but she misinterpreted his movement and held him closer. He felt trapped. She was a divorcée, her kisses were hot and syrupy, her body was cheaply had. She was a woman like the rest. There was no virtue in any of them, as his father had warned him long ago.

  He had mastered the impulse, of course, but it had almost overpowered him for a moment: to fling her backward into the boiling surf, let her appetent body be purified and broken. He might so easily have killed her, with a single violent motion have rejected love and lost her forever. Actually he had done nothing to hurt even her feelings. His love for her had drained back into him by way of his head, and he had kept his secret.

  It occurred to him now for the first time that per
haps she had not been wholly unaware. They were together for nearly two weeks after that, but they had not become lovers. He had blamed his inexperience and desperate shyness, but it may have been Paula after all who had subtly withdrawn herself. When he asked her to marry him she had preferred to wait. She had seen too many hasty wartime marriages, she said. Of course she wanted to be his wife, but it was better to wait and be sure. When his ship got its sailing orders and headed west again, they weren’t even formally engaged.

  Still she had been as faithful as a wife, though for nearly a year the only bond between them was the tenuous paper chain of letters. She had written him every day, turning her mind inside out on the pages to show that there was no part of her that didn’t love him. His interior life had fed on her letters like an unborn child drawing nourishment through its cords. A letter a day, thirty letters a month. Sometimes when they were on the high seas for weeks at a time, he would hear nothing for a month and reap a harvest of thirty letters at once. The serial number of her letters had mounted to over three hundred when his ship was ordered back to the West Coast to pick up a load of planes.

  Security regulations forbade him to tell her in advance, and he had too strict a sense of duty to try to get around them, so that she didn’t guess he was coming until he phoned her studio from Alameda. She greeted his voice with incredulous laughter, as if it were a miracle that they should be together on the same continent again. He called her shortly before noon. She caught a plane from Burbank at two o’clock, and a little after four he met her at the San Francisco Airport.

  When he saw her tall figure descending the ramp and crossing the apron toward him, he felt a glow of possessive pride that was quickly snuffed out by the fear that he couldn’t claim her. From her narrow feet to the tilted hat upon her shining hair she was poised and elegant, moving mysteriously and surely in a female land-world that glittered forever beyond his reach. He saw her through a glaze of time, locked away from him as if in amber.

  Then she came through the gate in a little rush, a halting run. Distance and time were annihilated between their bodies. He forgot his doubts and fears, everything but the knowledge of his five senses that he was with her. “It’s good to be home,” was all he could think of to say against her cheek, and all she could answer was “Yes.”

  They started out to celebrate in the usual way, drinking at the Top of the Mark, dining at Omar Khayyam’s. They talked about the life of ships, which was strange to her, the life of the studios, which was equally strange to him, the life of separated lovers, which they both knew well. But he gradually lost his ability to respond to her intimacy. He was acutely embarrassed by her obvious pride in the double lieutenant’s braid that he wore now.

  As the hours went by, the hours that he had counted over one by one while he lay sleepless on the last five nights from Pearl, his inner tension increased and became unbearable. Paula sensed his trouble and tried hard to play it down. But after they quarreled at supper her good spirits seemed almost defiant in the face of something that was too much for her but that she’d fight to the last ditch. They both drank heavily, and the midnight taxi-ride to Oakland, which she suggested because she had never crossed the bridge, was a drunken flight from an inescapable reality. Before twelve of them had passed, they knew that their golden hours were being lost.

  The final wastage, the jackpot of nothingness, came at the bitter end of the evening. She had managed to sublet a suite in one of the apartment hotels on Nob Hill for the three days they would be together, and she invited him up there for a final drink. From the window of her living-room he could look out over the lighted city like an airman, down the slanted neon streets to the dark harbor, where the ferries and water taxis crossed and recrossed, and the bold arch of the bridge slung across it like a chain of light. His vision was slightly blurred by alcohol, and the whole city stirred like a brilliant armada in a light breeze. A fleet laid out like that would be nice to bomb, he thought. Or a city. A little bombing in the right places would do Frisco a lot of good. Jesus, his head felt rotten! Liquor made him melancholy four times out of five, and the fifth time it made him wild. It seemed to affect Paula hardly at all except to heighten her reactions, and that was all she understood about it.

  She came up quietly behind him and closed her arms around his waist. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “Greater than Troy or Carthage. There are three cities in this country that give me the feeling of greatness, the feeling I had when I went to London and Paris. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. That sounds like the name of a railway, doesn’t it? A super-railway with no changeover at Chicago.”

  “There’s nothing left of Troy,” he answered somberly, “and they sowed salt on the ruins of Carthage.”

  She laughed softly in his ear. “You and your tragic sense of history! I wasn’t thinking of anything like that. They have a romantic sound to me, is all. And they were big navy towns in their day.”

  He resented her laughter, her easy rejection of his mood. To his whisky-sickened nostrils the perfume in her hair was overpoweringly sweet. He resented her material perfection, the long polished nails of the hands that held him, the fine clothes he could not have bought for her, the lofty rooms he could not have rented. They had quarreled at supper when she had tried to pick up the check. Though she had seen her error and given in immediately, his humiliation still rankled.

  “You’re a very independent woman, aren’t you?” he said.

  She was silent for a moment, then answered matter-of-factly: “I suppose I am. I’ve been on my own for a good many years.” But her embrace slackened, and she drew back from him a little as if in self-defense. “You wouldn’t want me to be a clinging vine, would you?”

  He laughed harshly. “There’s not much danger of that.” He was still facing the window. The lights of the city outside were bright and heartless, like cruel eyes. San Francisco, the city he had dreamed of for a year, meant no more to him now than the empty camouflage cities built to mislead enemy bombers.

  “I thought you liked me as I was, Bret. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing at supper. I’ve simply gotten into the habit of paying my way. It’s a measure of self-protection in Hollywood.”

  He stirred angrily, and her hands fell away from him entirely as he turned to face her. “I don’t know much about your Hollywood crowd, but that seems like a funny attitude to take to me. I thought we were going to be married—”

  “We are.”

  “What sort of place will I have in your life if I’m your husband?”

  “What are you trying to do? You’re making a difficulty where none exists.”

  “On the contrary. The difficulty may be insuperable.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “I don’t even know what we’re quarreling about. Those weeks in La Jolla I thought I learned to understand you. Whether I did or not, you took reality with you when you went away. All the time you were out my life here seemed unreal. Before I met you it was the war that was unreal, but since then it’s all I’ve cared about.”

  He had hurt her once, and the resulting pain made him strike out blindly again. “No doubt I’ve given you some very authentic touches for your next war picture.”

  She threw away her vanity and took hold of his unbending body. “Don’t be a bastard, darling. You can’t be jealous of my work.”

  “That’s a laughable thought.”

  “Then what’s the matter? I was crazy with happiness when you phoned this morning. I thought everything would be wonderful, and it hasn’t been. Don’t you love me?”

  He answered with an effort: “I don’t know.”

  “All your letters said you loved me. Have I done something to spoil it? Turn around and face me.”

  He turned in the circle of her arms and looked down into her face. There was a spillage of tears from the corners of her eyes, which she tried to blink away. She closed her eyes and leaned toward him.

  “I know you love me,” said her red and swollen mouth. �
��Forget whatever it is, Bret. Just love me.”

  He lacked the power to accept her love. His mind went whimpering backward down the past to stand transfixed by a dead face on a pillow. He was as cold as the face of his dead mother; his heart perished in her mortmain grip. He took Paula by the shoulders and pushed her away from him.

  Her face was torn by grief and anger, but she kept her voice steady. “I don’t know what the matter is, Bret, but you’d better go now.”

  “I suppose I’d better.”

  “You’ll call me tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know. Good night. I’m sorry.”

  He heard her crying softly while he waited in the funereal hallway for the elevator. The dead hand of the past held him by the arm, and the image of the dead woman descended with him in the automatic elevator and followed him out into the slanting street.

  Lying in his hospital bed a year and a half later, he could see his mother’s face as clearly as he had then: the marble face of the long dead, closed to the sight, unresponsive to the touch, with hair like wings of darkness folded on the brow. She had died when he was four, more than twenty-five years ago, but the image of her face hung on the wall of every room he entered, and the cold memory of her death still chilled him to the bone. Yet so far as he could remember, she had died naturally in bed. The trouble was that he didn’t remember very well. His brain was a whispering gallery thronged with uncertain images.

  His memory of what he had done after he left Paula was doubly confused because he had gone on drinking the next day. He knew nothing else about it, but he could taste the whisky in the passages between his nose and throat and recall the buzzing alcoholic emptiness of his head. He had gone down in the automatic elevator, crossed the steep street to a taxi stand, and disappeared from his own consciousness.