The Three Roads

by Ross Macdonald

  A few months before, he had been willing enough to forget, but now he was fiercely impatient with his lagging mind. His memory was perfectly good for the unimportant things. He knew the names of Napoleon’s marshals, the call signs of the ships they had operated with off Leyte, his telephone number in Arlington, his street address in Los Angeles. No, not Los Angeles. He had never lived in Los Angeles. That was a queer sort of slip to make, and he was always making them. Parapraxis, the doctors called it, and said it was perfectly normal, but he was not consoled. It was terrifying not to be able to trust your memory.

  Still, he was getting better. Nine months ago he had been utterly lost in time and space. Now he knew who he was, where he was, why he was here. He repeated the facts like a consoling liturgy. Bret Taylor, Lieutenant, USNR, Naval Hospital, Eleventh Naval District, San Diego. Forgetfulness. The day was Saturday. Sunday, rather, since it was past midnight. Sunday, February 24, 1946. Not 1945, but 1946, and the war was over. It had taken him a long time to catch on to that, but once he got hold of a thing he never let go of it. The problem was to get hold of those lost days in Frisco. All he had was the whisky taste, the buzzing emptiness, and the sense of disaster. Something disastrous had happened, but he did not know what it was. Paula might have told him, but he had been ashamed to ask her.

  Whatever had happened, she had stuck by him. A year and a half later she was still coming to see him every week. She wasn’t married to him as he had imagined, but she was standing by. The thought of her was an island of security among the uncertainties of his mind. He went to sleep with the thought of her standing by his bed. But it was not Paula he dreamed of.

  chapter 6

  He awoke at his usual time, with the taste of the dream in his mouth and a name on his lips waiting to be spoken. The dream faded quickly when he opened his eyes, but he remembered a multitude of bars telescoping into a dreary penny arcade flavored with whisky. In one of the games of chance he had won a kewpie doll with bright blue eyes. It sat on his shoulders like an old man of the sea. He didn’t want the doll on his shoulders, but he had won her in the arcade and she was his responsibility. A policeman with a face like Matthew Arnold proclaimed the fateful words: “Be ye married to disaster until death do us part.” The Matthew Arnold face withered away to a skull, and the kewpie doll danced on his grave in Alsace-Lorraine.

  “Lorraine,” his dry lips repeated. He was married to a girl named Lorraine. But only yesterday Paula had told him that he had no wife.

  He put on his bathrobe and slippers, and ran down the hall to Wright’s sleeping quarters. There was no answer to his knock. He tried the door and found that it was locked. He knocked again.

  A hospital corpsman came round the corner from the duty desk. “The commander isn’t here, Mr. Taylor. Is there something you want?”

  “Where is he?”

  “He went up to L.A. last night. Lieutenant Weising’s on duty.”

  Weising wouldn’t do. He was too young, and he couldn’t talk freely to Weising. “I want to talk to Commander Wright.”

  “He said he’d be back sometime this morning. Can it wait?”

  “I suppose it’ll have to.”

  But his mind wouldn’t wait. After a breakfast that he was unable to eat, he went back to his room to continue his reconstruction of the past. The dream of the kewpie doll, and the single name it had deposited in his mind, filled him with acute anxiety. But it was the clue he needed, the Ariadne thread in the San Francisco labyrinth.

  It took him to a room he remembered very clearly: every detail of the peeling walls, the cracked blind, the clouded mirror hanging precariously over the bureau. He had found this room in a cheap hotel after he left Paula, and had spent a bad night on the thin edge of sleep. He managed to sleep for a couple of hours in the morning, but that was all. Some time before noon he went out and bought a bottle of whisky. He drank a few shots by himself in his room, but the alcohol only depressed him, and he was gripped by loneliness. Company was what he needed, any sort of company. He hid the bottle on the top shelf of the closet and went out to look for a bar.

  There was a bar where the singing waiters wore handlebar mustaches and served beer in foaming mugs. There was a bar whose walls and ceiling were mirrors reflecting a sickly fluorescent light and women’s waiting faces. There was a bar with naked pink ladies painted on the walls, their nipples as large and red as maraschino cherries. There was a bar with a roughly finished interior like a log cabin, and a basement where submarine men could play at being under water. He felt out of things there and went to other bars. There was the place in Chinatown where a girl in a kimono served him fried prawns and he was sick in his booth. He had never before drunk past the first onset of drowsiness and sickness, but that day he did. There was a long series of bars, indistinguishable from each other, with a jukebox at one end and a pinball machine at the other. In each of them a white-jacketed bartender with a bored and knowing face served drinks in a semidarkness to shadowy couples and single men and women hunched on leather stools. In one of these, behind the smoke screen of noise that the jukebox laid, the nightmare of Lorraine had begun.

  The scene he remembered had the earmarks of a dream. There were a number of people in the long room, but none of them made a sound. His own voice, competing effortlessly with the brawling of the jukebox, issued from his throat without moving his lips. His legs and feet, the hand with which he paid for their drinks and raised his glass to his mouth, seemed as remote as Pacific islands. But he felt carefree and powerful, borne up and thrust forward like a plane by the buzzing in his head.

  Of course it hadn’t been a dream. Lorraine had been a real girl sitting not in some cavern of the unconscious, but in an actual bar drinking genuine whisky. For a girl of her age she seemed to have a remarkable capacity. If the truth were known she probably had no right to be drinking in a bar at all. They were strict with minors in California, and she didn’t look twenty-one. Her face was extraordinarily innocent, he thought, and extraordinarily sweet. The whiteness of her low, broad forehead was marbled with delicate blue veins and framed in black hair. Her long brows, which had not been plucked artificially thin like Paula’s, gave her blue eyes a pure and steadfast look. Yet there was nothing heavy about her face. Her short upper lip, repeating the upward tilt of her nose, gave it an impish gaiety accentuated by her full, impulsive mouth. She looked like an innocent kid from out of town who had blundered into a dive by mistake and was quite untouched by her surroundings.

  He felt a certain responsibility for her, as he felt responsible for all weak or innocent or helpless people. It was only natural that he offered to buy her a drink.

  “I don’t mind if I do,” she said. “Two stripes mean a full lieutenant, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I like your face. You have a lovely, pure face.”

  She wriggled and giggled. “You Navy boys are fast workers. Been out a long time?”

  “Nearly a year this last time.” He leaned toward the fragrance of her hair, which was sleek and heavy on her shoulders. When he inclined his head, his mind descended in a dizzy spiral round and round her body like a wreath. He said in a choked whisper: “I like the way your hair smells.”

  She laughed with pleasure and turned her head quickly back and forth so that her hair flew out against his face. “You ought to. That’s expensive scent. What’s your name, sailor?”

  “Bret.”

  “That’s a nice name, so unusual. Mine’s Lorraine.”

  “I think Lorraine is a beautiful name,” he said.

  “You flatter me.”

  He seized her hand and kissed its moist palm. The bartender gave him a brief, cynical glance.

  “Be careful, Bret. You’ll spill our drinks.”

  “To hell with them! I’ve got a quart of Harwood’s in my room. This stuff makes my throat dry anyway.”

  “I like Harwood’s,” she said with girlish candor.

  “Let’s go then.”

  “If you wan
t to, Bret dear.”

  She slid off the stool and buttoned her coat. She was surprisingly small, but her figure had the dignity of perfection. As she moved ahead of him to the door he saw how the hips under the tight coat bloomed out from the narrow waist, swaying with every tap of her quick heels. His mind swayed with her body, and his eyes undressed her.

  Twenty minutes later he undressed her with his hands. The taxi ride to his hotel had been a continuous kiss, and he was breathless and dizzy. She let out her breath to help him with a last difficult hook and eye and lay back smiling. He was amazed by her body’s economy and richness. Beneath the luxury of her breasts he could feel the fragile ribs. He could span her waist with his hands. But the sweep of her hips was terrifying, and the blandness of her belly and thighs, and the panther blackness of her hair.

  When he turned out the light the whole night became panther-black and terrifying and sweet. Her kisses were the fulfillment of a promise too sweet to be believed, like a springtime in midwinter. Somewhere inside him the ice went out with a rush. The black night flowed like a river toward the delectable mountains, through a narrow, desperate gorge, into a warm valley where eventually he went to sleep.

  This time Commander Wright was in his office and called to him through the open door to come in.

  “Do you mind waiting a minute, Taylor? I should have got this stuff out yesterday.” He was working at his desk on a typewritten report, emending it with a red pencil that threatened to snap under the pressure of his thick fingers.

  Bret sat down in a hard chair to wait. His body was tense with anxiety. Unless he was having delusions again he had done the one thing that fouled up his life completely. He remembered waking up in the morning with the girl in bed beside him. His head rang like a cracked bell, but a drink from the dwindling bottle of Harwood’s softened its tone. He went back to the sleeping girl and was fascinated again by her half-covered body shining in the dingy room. He had wakened her with his hands, and she turned toward him as soft and sensuous as a kitten. All this had been bad enough for a man of his moral pretensions (and the day after Paula had flown five hundred miles to be with him), but it wasn’t the chief thing that was worrying him now. He seemed to recall that when they ran out of whisky and went out to buy more, he also bought a marriage license.

  “Bloody Navy red-tape,” Wright grumbled. He looked up from his papers and retrieved his dead pipe from the ashtray. “I suppose you came to get the word on Dr. Klifter? Well, he’s here. He drove down with me this morning.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “Didn’t Miss West tell you he was coming?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He’s a friend of hers, a well-known psychoanalyst. He was one of the original members of the Viennese Society until he broke with Freud. Then he ran his own clinic in Prague before the war. He’s been practicing in L.A. the last few years.”

  “Very interesting,” Bret said. “But how do I come into all this?”

  “He came here to interview you, I thought you knew. He’s going over the files with Weising now. If he thinks your case is susceptible to psychoanalytic treatment, we’ll arrange for it—”

  “Who’s going to pay for it? I can’t afford the luxury of a psychoanalyst from Middle Europe.”

  “Miss West is handling that.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t seem very pleased. If he takes the case you’ll get a leave out of it. Don’t count on it, but that’s what’s in the book.”

  “I’ve given up counting on anything.” Under different circumstances the prospect of a leave would have delighted him. But all he could think of right now was the stranger he had slept with, or married. If he had married her it meant the end of the one thing he cared about. When Paula found out, if she didn’t already know.… But she must know. Why hadn’t she told him?

  Wright gave him a narrow look. “Is there something bothering you, Taylor?”

  “Yes. Am I married? I know how irresponsible that sounds.”

  Wright’s nostrils emitted twin streams of smoke like a benevolent dragon’s. “Close the door, will you? Thanks. Now sit down.”

  “Do you have a record of a girl called Lorraine? It’s important to me to know—”

  “Yes. You plan to marry Miss West, don’t you?”

  “Answer my question,” Bret said sharply. “I don’t see any reason for making a mystery of it.”

  “I’m not making a mystery out of it, Taylor. Your own mind did that.”

  “All right, all right. Am I married?”

  Wright knocked out his pipe as if extinguishing an impulse to ease his patient’s tension. “You can’t go on using my memory indefinitely. You’re getting to be quite a big boy now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bret said in flat hostility.

  “Let’s see, you met this Lorraine Berker in San Francisco in the fall of ’44. Can you tell me about her? What she looked like?”

  “She was a blue-eyed brunette, a very pretty girl.” He adopted the doctor’s past tense with a half-unconscious recognition of its aptness. “She had a remarkably white skin for a brunette.”

  “Is that the way she looked the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to think.” He caught a glimpse of Lorraine’s face stained with sleep and tears as it had been the morning he left her. The ship was due to weigh anchor at eight, and he had to leave the hotel at five to allow time for the long ride to Alameda. He had kissed her for the last time, on mouth and eyes and breast, and left her in what must have been their marriage bed. “I married her, didn’t I? Before I sailed? Is it in the record?”

  Wright permitted himself to say yes.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Remember for yourself, man.”

  Another face in another bed (the old spool bed his father had bought in Boston?) came over the horizon of his conscious mind and into memory’s middle distance. It wasn’t Lorraine. Yet he couldn’t be sure. Death did strange things to people’s faces.

  “Is she dead?” he whispered.

  “You tell me.” Wright’s predatory eyes were stalking him from the underbrush of his eyebrows.

  “I remember a dead woman. She had on a black silk dress.”

  “Your mother,” Wright said irritably. “That all came out in narcosynthesis, remember? She died when you were very young.”

  “My sense of chronology seems to be a little scrambled.” And this fat-faced doctor, arrogant and smug like every man with too much gold braid on his sleeve, wasn’t giving him any help. He sat behind his desk as bland as a Buddha, with all the important secrets locked in his thick skull.

  Instead of the truth he had asked for, Wright was making him listen to a talk on elementary metapsychology: “Time is a relative concept,” he was saying. “The mind is like a clock with several faces, each keeping its own time. One for the minutes and hours, one for the seasons and the years, one for the individual biological development, one for the mental life, and so on. On the level of motivation and emotional reaction the mind is practically timeless. Freudians like Klifter say that the clock is set once in early childhood and never changes unless you go back and give the hands a push. I think that’s an oversimplification, but there’s a good deal of truth in it. Klifter said on the way down that you’re probably identifying your wife and your mother, though they died over twenty years apart.”

  “Then Lorraine is dead?”

  “You know she is, don’t you?”

  “How did she die?”

  “You’ve got to remember for yourself. Klifter may have different ideas, but so long as I’m handling the case it’s going to be that way. It’s our only guarantee against a relapse. I could tell your conscious mind, but it wasn’t your conscious mind that wiped out the memory. The unconscious levels have to accept the fact. The only way you can demonstrate that they have is by recovering the memory yourself.”

  “I can’t see any purpose in this mystification.”


  Wright shrugged heavily, like a man shifting a weight on his shoulders. “It would be nice and easy to overhelp you, but I’m not going to do it. You’re going to stand on your own feet, understand?” He got to his feet as if to emphasize the metaphor.

  Bret rose at the same time, but Wright waved him back into his chair. The gesture, in combination with his dark blue uniform, accentuated his resemblance to a burly policeman. “You might as well wait here. I’ll go and see if Klifter’s ready for you.”

  Bret sat down to wait again. His resentment died down suddenly as soon as Wright had closed the door behind him, and depression took its place. In the space of a few hours he had been married to an unknown girl and widowed in an unknown way. It seemed to him that time was the meaning of his life, and he had lost it. His future was still in the inescapable past, and he was caught in a closed circle as meaningless as the treadmill in a rat cage and as timeless as hell.

  chapter 7

  Externally Bret seemed to be a typical young American, big, smooth-faced, and brown, with a strongly constructed nose and chin, and candid blue eyes. The only sign of inner disturbance that Klifter noticed in the first few minutes came when the young man’s eyes roved to the window. Then the heavy muscles of his shoulders bunched and strained under his gray fatigue uniform, as if the narrow office hemmed him in and he was held in his low steel chair by an invisible belt. When he withdrew his eyes from the green vista of the hospital grounds, his face had taken on a complexity that had not been apparent at first.

  The eyes were not blue after all, but blue flecked with gray. The combination of color gave them depth and modified their transparency. They seemed to contain more than one surface, like a series of lenses that filtered and selected their perceptions before they reached the brain. The mouth was equally complex, the generous softness of its natural molding held in a firm line by an aggressive will. The conflicts in the young man’s nature, of which he seemed intelligently aware, gave him a kind of tense, self-conscious beauty. But Klifter was disturbed by the ironic bitterness that when he smiled cast a shadow in his eyes and deformed his mouth.