For Love of Audrey Rose

by Frank De Felitta

  He nodded sympathetically. “I am not offended. But I was told that now it is your husband who has become interested.”

  She grew silent. Bill’s obsession seemed to have an unhealthy quality, nothing like the Master’s calm recitation of doctrine.

  “It’s been very sudden,” she confessed.

  “Very well. We are pleased to help in any way.”

  “Thank you. You’ve been most kind.”

  The Master wished to chat on about the garden for a few moments. He seemed to find a delight and a tranquility in observing the small changes, day by day, as the garden prepared for the hard, cruel winter.

  “One does not fear death,” he observed, “if one knows that life returns.”

  Janice smiled and let him accompany her to the door.

  “Do I—that is, can I make a contribution?” she asked awkwardly.

  “Not necessary,” he said, his eyes twinkling ironically. “Good-bye, Mrs. Templeton. Come whenever you like.”

  She left, buoyed up by the Master’s gentle but irresistible optimism. She did not even mind the slips on her desk, saying that Bill had called twice. She did not even mind his displeasure at the Master’s vague answer to the question of time.

  But gradually, as the climate turned colder, and the leaves clustered at the base of the buildings, and the rain began to break with fury over the cold stone, Bill’s attitude began to weigh down on her. He called five times, six times a day. He called at home. He needed magazines; some had to be ordered from London or Delhi, and he needed them now. And she had to disguise them as Newsweeks and Times to keep Dr. Geddes in the dark.

  Janice went to the Temple five more times, until she felt she was studying for some cosmic final examination. Like a robot, she wandered for the thousandth time into the religion sector of the public library, looking into obscure journals with unreadable print. She felt like a marionette, with Bill jerking the strings with unforgiving violence, impatient and angry.

  And yet the search, at some subliminal level, was having its effect on her. She knew too much. She refused to believe, and yet she was no longer simply a go-between. The concepts traveled around with her, a perpetual resonance from another world.

  She slept alone at Des Artistes, the nights a heavy weight to endure. She neither feared the night nor yet looked forward to the dawn. Sleepless, driven by Bill, she went to work only half conscious of the exhaustion that was sapping her will to resist.

  Bill called, excited. He was making discoveries, he claimed. Now he needed to know the specifics of signs.

  “Signs?” Janice asked.

  “Yes, the signs of reincarnation!”

  “Bill, I’m exhausted. I can’t do this much longer.”

  “Just a few more questions, honey. A few more answers. Then we’ll be all set.”

  “Set for what, Bill?”

  “Never you mind. Just get to the old geezer and pop him these questions.”

  Janice wearily watched her hand write down more questions on the note pad. She avoided Elaine as she sneaked out for what seemed like the hundredth time at 3:30, and headed down to the Temple.

  “So, Bill sends you back again,” the Master said.

  “Yes, it’s—it’s the signs he wants to know about,” Janice said, entering onto the slanted wooden floor. “It seemed very urgent to him.”

  The master closed the door behind them.

  “Signs?” he asked, his eyes twinkling as they always did; but somehow they never denoted humor, only a steady, ice-cool concentration that was almost lyrical in its purity.

  He turned, ushered her into his cold office. He lit a small stove with newspapers, shoved in sticks—the table legs of cast-off furniture—and rubbed his hands, blowing on them. Setting a battered tin pot on the stove, he went to a small basin, turned the tap for water, and made preparations for tea.

  “The signs of reincarnation,” Janice said fearfully.

  The Master nodded slowly, as though he had heard the question, urgently demanded, a hundred, a thousand times before, but did not answer at once.

  Janice thought he was merely waiting for the tea water to boil. It was his custom to begin indirectly, to make oblique references to the matter at hand to induce serenity. That was why words made perfect sense here, and didn’t quite when she relayed them to Bill.

  “Things have changed so much,” he said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I came here, there were a thousand young people clamoring at our door. And such enthusiasm. Reading and chatting and real, sincere worship. And now we are down to five students.”

  Janice nodded awkwardly, surprised at the realistic attitude the Master displayed.

  “Fashions change,” she said softly.

  “Yes. Fashions. But when I came from India ten years ago, it was no fashion. At least, it seemed to be real. But now we are no longer respected.”

  Unaccustomed to his downcast mood, Janice said nothing. She watched him walk to the stove where he fed more paper and sticks into the stove. He stood over the water, pushing back the long, orange sleeves of his robe. Now, in the soft, Vermeer light of the shabby office, he looked indeed no older than fifty, handsome in a masculine, Western way, the white hair a subtle shock over the brown skin.

  “This may be the last time the Temple will be open to you,” he said.

  “What? Why? Have I done something wrong?”

  He smiled sadly. “Of course not. But the rent here, Mrs. Templeton. Do you have any idea what it costs to be in Greenwich Village? And now, with almost nobody left, our revenues…”

  “I’m sorry, Sri Parutha. I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

  The water boiled. Using an aged towel, the Master cautiously lifted the pot and with deft, long-practiced motions, filled two delicate ceramic cups.

  “We will be talking about it this afternoon,” he said. “I think we shall disband the Temple.”

  “I don’t know how to express my sympathy,” Janice said. “I feel very bad for you.”

  The Master smiled again, an enigmatic expression in his eyes. He handed Janice a cup of tea. The aroma twirled upward with the steam; a jasmine scent that, like the gentle light coming in from the frosted windows, obscured all terror, soothed all doubt, and brought a subtle tranquility down to the marrow of the bones.

  “There is a phrase by one of the English poets,” the Master said. “The ‘inconstant lover.’ Let us just say that the Americans are inconstant lovers.”

  Janice drank slowly, waiting for the brew to cool. She knew the Master had not forgotten why she had come, but she also knew that the realities of what he called the external world had inexplicably intruded and even destroyed his beloved sanctuary.

  “Well, then, your husband needs to know the signs of reincarnation?”

  The Master removed several books, fat with bookmarkers in them, and several broken brass candleholders. They sat down.

  “Basically, the signs can be categorized according to the physical, the psychological, or the religious. Physical signs include birthmarks, wounds—which can reappear in modified forms—or certain congenital abnormalities. A clubfoot, for example, is repeated. Or a claw hand comes back as unexplained scars on a healthy hand. These are really so common that nobody in India would be particularly astonished if you showed up with, let us say, a dead uncle’s deformity of toes, or his laughter, or his manner of expression. Is all this clear, Mrs. Templeton?”

  “Perfectly,” she answered, writing quickly onto a spiral-bound notebook.

  “Psychologically, if a child has peculiar memories of a place, of people, of events that he or she has never seen. If suddenly, his mood and behavior change, with no warning but in a consistent manner. Like your own daughter, Mrs. Templeton.”

  “Yes.”

  “Quite often a person feels a sudden desire to travel to a part of the world he has never been to before. And when he goes, he finds that he knows how to get around, he never gets lost, and he k
nows the names of people he meets. Quite often there is an aspect of violence involved.”

  “Violence?”

  “Yes. For example, a man is compelled to travel into Madras, and there, not knowing why, he is compelled to wield an axe and he murders a distantly related uncle. It is because, several generations before, he was robbed of his inheritance by the previous incarnation of that uncle. In fact, I know of several cases in which the accused were exonerated on just such grounds.”

  Janice nodded quickly, trying to cram her handwriting into the narrow-ruled pages.

  “I see. And is it the same in Tibet?”

  The Master paused, suddenly uncomfortable. He temporized by pouring fresh hot water into their cups.

  “Tibet,” he said softly, “is a very old form of Buddhism. They do things very differently in the mountains. I realize that your husband is particularly interested in these forms of religion?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it is much more elaborate. The Dalai Lama, for example, the highest of the priests, is the latest in a long line of reincarnated men, and often it takes many months of searching the caves and farms to find the infant with the proper markings. I find, quite frankly, that there is something too intense about this form. The divinations, for example, take weeks in the bitter cold, and the mandalas are extremely sexual and violent.”

  “Are they really?” Janice asked, perturbed.

  The Master waved a vague hand, as though to dismiss them, evil thoughts, back into the cold air.

  “Copulating skeletons. Drifting among death. Fire that eats out the body and films the eyelids. You see, it goes back to a very, very ancient time. Long before the Indo-Europeans came down to the plains of India.”

  Janice finished with her notes, and the Master sighed, rubbed his eyes, and shivered.

  “Before I go,” Janice said gently, “I must ask you one more thing.”

  “I will answer it if I can.”

  “If there is a reincarnation—I mean, when there is a reincarnation—is it possible to know where the soul will return?”

  The Master smiled gently. “The physical location?”

  Janice nodded.

  “The soul seeks the locus of its growth and its greatest happiness. That normally means very close to where it left the previous body.”

  “So if a person died in New York City—”

  “One must assume that it will reappear in the area. You see, it is like a gravitational field. The soul drifts and, faster and faster, as it approaches life again, it falls toward its previous origin.”

  Janice paled, but said nothing. For a while, she thought of not writing down that answer. Then she put her pencil to paper. Then, confused, she put the pencil and paper away, discouraged.

  “Perhaps I should go now,” she said.

  “As you wish.”

  The Master, in the Western manner, rose from his orange crate and escorted her to the door. Feeling lonely, or disturbed about something, he accompanied her down the dark stairwell, into the white garden. The snow was falling, smaller, colder, a bitter screen of textured dots over the fat stone walls where old basins of stained wood had been brought from temples in India.

  “If you could impress upon your husband,” he said delicately, “not to dwell too rashly in these ideas….”

  “Why not? Is it dangerous?”

  “Not dangerous, exactly. But I have seen too many young people who also suffered mentally as does your husband. They seized upon Hinduism and Buddhism, like drowning men clutch at the air. And in the end they misunderstood everything, and were no better off than before.”

  “Yes. I’ll tell him. Perhaps, in time, his enthusiasm will die down.”

  “Clarity of mind,” the Master said, leading her back through the empty Temple, where only one disciple looked up from sorting a few prayer books along the wall, jealous of Janice’s proximity to the Master. “If the mind is unclear… like a distorting pool… the doctrine becomes warped.”

  Janice left the Temple. As usual, the visits to Sri Parutha left her strangely energized, eager to face the rest of the day, yet with a lingering sensation of doubt. And as the day wore on, the doubt always grew stronger. Until, finally, when the tranquility of the old Brahmin had faded sufficiently, a kind of bleak terror invaded her very body, and she took to mixing Scotch with soda as a more durable, if less spiritual, antidote to the conflicts within her.

  Back at Des Artistes, the telephone rang. Janice tried to ignore it, wielding the ink brush as quickly as she could manage. But the ringing never stopped. She conceded, and picked it up.

  “Janice,” Bill exclaimed. “Where the hell were you?”

  “I just came in as the phone was ringing.”

  “Did you see the priest at the Temple?”

  “Yes. We had a very nice talk.”

  “Good. Very good. Listen, I’ve got something I want you to do.”

  “No, Bill.”

  “Janice, you have to go downtown to the—”

  “We agreed this was the last time.”

  “Janice,” he pleaded. “I’m begging you!”

  “No. I’ve got work of my own, Bill. Be reasonable.”

  “But we’re running out of time.”

  “We’ve got plenty of time, darling. Now I have to jot down some ideas Elaine gave me, and—”

  “Then I’ll do it myself.”

  Janice decided Bill was not fooling.

  “I’m telling you, Janice,” he said darkly. “If I have to, I’ll bust out of this place and do it myself.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Bill. It frightens me.”

  “It has to be done and it doesn’t matter who does it.”

  “What, Bill? What has to be done?”

  “Somebody has to go down to the Hall of Records. And see who was born the same minute Ivy died.”

  “Bill, this is all nonsense. Sri Parutha said not to be rash, and here you are—”

  “Screw Sri Parutha. Listen to me, God damn it, Janice! Somebody has to go down and look at those records!”

  “This is crazy! I won’t do it! It’s one thing to bring you books, and—and go visit the Temple, but this is impossible!”

  Bill said nothing for a while, yet she heard him breathing at the other end.

  “All right,” he said angrily. “At least I know where you stand.”

  He hung up. Janice clicked the receiver button again and again, but the line was irretrievably dead. Miserable, she resumed her work at her table, where the designs lay in sketched form under the lamp by the windows. After ten minutes, an uneasy feeling grew to where she could no longer think straight.

  She called the clinic back.

  “Mr. William Templeton, please,” she said.

  After ten minutes, during which Janice was afraid they would not find him, Bill came to the telephone.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “All right. You win. I’ll go. But please, that’s got to be all. You’re chasing crazy will-o’-the-wisps.”

  “Let me be the judge of that. You know what you’re looking for?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell me.”

  “February 3, 1975. 10:53 in the morning.”

  “10:43!” Bill shrieked. “10:43 in the morning—a mistake like that could be fatal!”

  “All right—10:43—I’ll look it up for you.”

  “Okay. And bring me notes on what the priest told you today. Okay? Will you do that?”

  “Bill.”

  “What?”

  “Why New York? Why not Baltimore? Or Chicago? Or even Pittsburgh or Hong Kong? Why would she come back to New York? She could be any place at all!”

  “Because the soul seeks the locus of its greatest happiness. It’s like a gravitational field, Janice. Picture a meteor falling through space. Suddenly it gets caught up in a force field and it starts to accelerate downward. Well, it’s like that. Back to where the soul developed.”

  Janice bit her lip. Bill had a
nswered, almost word for word, as the Master had. Evidently Bill’s expertise was reaching startling proportions. Janice began to be afraid of him in the way that she had once been afraid of Hoover. There was too much knowledge at the other end of the line.

  8

  The Hall of Records stood recessed from the streets, its upper reaches in the slanted sunlight, but off the ledges of the first floor icicles melted slowly in shadow. Long windows, crisscrossed with a protective wire inside, gave off no light. The steps to the main doors were unscraped, covered with sprinkles of salt and brown dirt. Around the building rose higher structures, sleek, expressive of the supernational organization of the twentieth century, while the massive Hall, like a throwback to gray stone and marble, huddled in their shadows, a monument to weight and ornamented facade.

  Janice walked the long hall, past voices behind doors, electric typewriters, obscure silences, and she looked around at the blank, dirty white ceilings, the old scrollwork nearly obliterated with curls of dust.

  A young woman with short blond hair looked up.

  “May I help you?”

  “Am I in the birth registration department?”

  “Sure are, ma’am.”

  “Could you… That is, are these open to the public?”

  The girl nodded. “Sign the register,” she said, turning a massive book around and handing Janice a black pen attached to the book by a beaded chain.

  Janice quickly scrawled her name and the date and the girl swiveled the book back, squinting at the penmanship.

  “What’s the name?”

  “Templeton. Mrs. Janice Templeton.”

  “Not you. The infant.”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t know the infant’s name. Just the moment of birth.”

  The girl raised an eyebrow, sighed, and came out from behind her tiny desk.

  “That doesn’t make it easy, you know,” she said.

  “I’m prepared to do all the work myself,” Janice said quickly. “If you could just show me how—”

  “What year?”

  “Nineteen Seventy-five.”

  “You’re in luck. Anything before Nineteen Seventy-three and you’d have had to go down to the crypts. That’s the storage facility underground.”