For Love of Audrey Rose

by Frank De Felitta

  She said good-bye to him in his small, private room high on the ninth floor of the institution. There were bars on the windows, the furniture had no corners, and there were no implements of any kind in the drawers—no pens, no pencils, no scissors. Even the coat hangers were rounded plastic. Janice kissed Bill on the forehead.

  “I’ll get help for you, Bill,” she whispered, stroking his cheek.

  Now the airplane banked slightly, a warm shaft of light fell over her eyes, and she woke up. Janice strolled the aisles, her body lethargic and anxious from the two weeks

  of conferences, arguments, and cables back to Elaine. At least that tension was gone. But it had been good for her.

  Janice looked out the round window at the endless, hot sky over the ocean. A curved horizon demarcated the end of things that could be known, things that could be felt. Beyond, an obscure haze, born of heat and dry wind, desert dust and the glare of the sun, faded to a blue white.

  One senses these things. One has training. My perceptions, after the holy utterance, were heightened….

  Janice remembered pounding on the door of the Temple. No one was in the sanctuary. When she went to the alley and looked into the Master’s room, it was empty. A pane of glass was already broken, and beyond it a few bare shelves were visible. Even the makeshift desk had been removed. At the front door black graffiti had been sprayed in large script. Two men stood there, contemplating the dimensions of the room inside through the glass panes.

  “Excuse me,” Janice said. “I’m looking for the Master.”

  “Who?”

  “The Master of the Temple, Sri Parutha.”

  The two men looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Lady, this here is a vegetarian restaurant.”

  They turned away, examining small diagrams and a section of blueprint.

  It was true. There was not the slightest evidence that there had ever been a temple on the site. Not a flower remained inside or in the garden behind. None of the neighboring shops had cared to learn what had happened to the Master or his dwindling group of would-be ascetics.

  At Des Artistes, Janice telephoned thirteen religious study centers in Manhattan. None had heard of the Temple. None had any answer for her.

  One has to go by impressions—strong impressions—in the divination process.

  Janice started, caught herself staring vacantly into the blue white haze, so evanescent, yet so impenetrable that it seemed the place to which all answers had fled. Reluctantly, she sat back in her seat and tried to nap.

  The first days of seeing Bill had been an all-too-familiar kind of torture. He sat unresponsive, dead to her and the rest of the world. By the end of the week, however, he had begun speaking. Incoherent secrets whispered out of his mouth. He begged Janice to bring his daughter to him. He did not hear her answer that the Hernandez family had virtually boarded itself inside its dark apartment. Bill only leaned forward, finger gently tapping her forearm, insisting that his daughter was waiting, crying; she wanted him, he wanted to see her.

  By the end of the second week, Bill seemed oblivious to the presence of humans. He stepped on their toes, bumped into them, as though they were fixtures of furniture. Halfway through the third week, Bill was reduced to violent gestures, moody silences, and occasional periods of gentle crying.

  “He’s slipping,” Dr. Geddes admitted. “Slipping badly.”

  “Maybe if he could be disabused of his obsession,” commented the chief psychiatrist. “This fantasy of reincarnation.”

  But Bill was not disabused of his fantasy. He clung to it with a passion that startled Janice. Unable to articulate coherent sentences, he wrestled with his emotions, his neck muscles straining, the veins in his forehead bulging. He pleaded, wept, and collapsed in misery on his bed. The hospital staff began to consider mild drug therapy if his symptoms turned self-destructive.

  When April ended, Janice felt ruined. She had neither the strength nor the hope for continuing the marathon trips to Long Island. A feverish, permanent fatigue assailed her, and her work became confused. It was late twilight with the rush-hour traffic already thinning out, when Elaine pulled up a chair near Janice’s drafting table.

  “Janice,” she said softly, “I think we’d better talk.”

  Janice looked up with foreboding.

  “Am I slipping that badly, Elaine?”

  Elaine smiled thoughtfully. “You’re tired, Janice. You’re exhausted. Running back and forth between Manhattan and Long Island. You’ve got all the symptoms of being worked to death. I’ve seen it happen. I want you to take a break.”

  Janice paled. “Elaine, please, my job is my life.”

  “Don’t jump to conclusions. There’s a couple of assignments in Europe that we need to look up. I want you to go.”

  “But I couldn’t,” Janice protested. “Bill needs me. He’s helpless.”

  “So will you be in another week. Janice, you look like wet newspaper. You’re going to disintegrate at this rate.”

  Janice put down her ink brush and swiveled away from Elaine. The idea was totally unexpected, yet it had the clarity of a burst of sunlight through dark clouds.

  “I suppose I could tell Dr. Geddes.”

  Elaine smiled. “Excellent,” she said. “And if I were you, I’d start packing. The first conference starts next Tuesday.”

  Janice nodded, but the suddenness caused a strange vertigo. Somehow, she had never thought that any kind of escape was possible, not now, and not in the future. Guiltily, she realized how she hungered for a few days’ liberty. She needed it the way a drowning animal needs air.

  Suddenly Des Artistes did not feel so dark, so cold. The sight of her packed luggage was a visible symbol of a new possibility: a resurgence of hope. She checked and rechecked her itinerary. Brussels, Marseilles—and now Elaine had added the Israeli market. The passport on her desk, the letters of introduction, her confirmed hotel reservations made hope not only real, but imminent. Late at night, she spoke one last time with Dr. Geddes.

  “Perfectly appropriate idea,” Dr. Geddes said. “I’ve told you that. You need a break.”

  “But what if something happens? Suppose he calls for me?”

  “I doubt very much that Bill will be calling for anybody in the near future. Except Ivy.”

  It was shortly after the Brussels conference that the idea came to her. Back in her hotel room, she raced to her luggage and pulled out her battered leather address book. There was a name, a name that had known Hoover, though she could not remember it.

  Halfway through the address book, she found, simply: Mehrotra, Sesh. Hindu University Benares (Varanasi), U.P. She recalled very well that after Ivy died, she had written to Hoover, to explain to him her feelings. It was to Mehrotra that the letter was sent.

  As the warm spring night drifted in, she thought of Hoover. She thought of his pale, almost recessive eyes, eyes that were handsome except that they had seen too much suffering. Pale skin and a burning sincerity that swept everything away—reason, logic, normalcy—in one tidal wave of charisma. It was Hoover who had told her Ivy was in danger. It was Hoover who could have saved her child. If Juanita was, in some way—if Juanita could be in a god-awful but logical way—Ivy, then Hoover would know.

  I’ll get help for you, Bill.

  Janice cabled Elaine from Tel Aviv, asking for another five days. Elaine quickly agreed. A half day at a branch of the Chase Manhattan finally produced a draft for nearly a thousand dollars.

  The travel agent looked up, his tie loosened, an ashtray bulging with half-smoked cigarettes.

  “I’d like to go to India, please,” Janice said softly.

  “Where would you like to go? India is a big place.”

  “I must go to Benares.”

  “Ah. You’re one of those pilgrims,” he said, smiling. “It’s Varanasi now. Not Benares. Though to everyone, it is still called Benares. You will transfer in New Delhi.”

  That night, Janice watched the concrete runways g
lide by as she walked toward the gleaming steps of an Air India jet. It was all a dream, she thought. Life had become a series of disconnected dreams. The engines roared into life, there was a terrific pull at her stomach, and she seemed to wake up in some mysterious way. She was truly flying to India.

  Below, a series of white lines, in immense parallel curves, came quickly to view. Beige sand. Dark green of tropical plants. Wide roads, where trucks carried clouds of white dust. Then an immense continent, so large it seemed to bend with the earth, dark and mottled, glinting with small patches of moist ground, paddy fields, and tiny rivers. It was India. It looked like an untended world, violent and crude.

  Janice swallowed. It was really India. Anxiety overcame her. She drew back into her seat, away from the window. There was no escape. The idea that she should have come so far, so suddenly, to look for Elliot Hoover, seemed obscene. Nervously, she checked for the hundredth time that Sesh Mehrotra’s address was still in her travel bag, though she had long ago memorized it. She tried to imagine Mehrotra. She tried to imagine Elliot Hoover. All she saw was a kind of nervous cloud, where everything was unclear, turbulent, unformed.

  11

  Taxi? Taxi? You like a taxi?” said six men together, running up to her.

  “Yes, I—”

  “Come. You come with me. Cheap.”

  “Please, miss. Beautiful Buick. You come with me.”

  “Lowest price. No detour. Come on, miss.” Distraught, Janice fumbled in her purse for the card upon which was printed the name of her hotel. In that instant, three drivers grabbed for her suitcase; one was successful and, alarmed, Janice ran after him. The lucky driver opened the trunk of a small black Ford, dropped in her suitcase, and slammed the lid. He turned to her and smiled.

  “Where to?” he asked, proud of himself.

  Janice had no choice but to show him the card.

  “Varanasi Palace Hotel,” he read slowly. “Number one in city. Get in, please.”

  Janice’s heart was racing so fast, she felt the pulse in her throat. There was no retreat, no going back. The highway raced forward to glide under the wheels of the taxi. To the sides were patches of mud and clumps of grass, littered with white paper and broken bottles. Filthy goats stood by mud ridges and chewed, unblinking, at pieces of fabric.

  By the time the taxi entered the outer reaches of Benares, Janice’s face was covered in perspiration. It plastered her blouse to her skin, her hair to her scalp. Dust and grime coated her shoes and even her fingernails. Exhausted, she stared out at the city that rapidly approached.

  The highway was filled with groups of old men wearing absolutely nothing but loose, skimpy loin cloths. They seemed not to be casually walking but to have a mission, a barely concealed energy behind their movements.

  “They have come to Benares to die,” said the driver in a gentle English. “It is blessed to die in Benares.”

  “Benares,” Janice whispered to herself. The sound of the city conjured frightful images. The Ganges, she knew, flowed through the city, and it was holy—and it would be noisy, and somewhere deep in the outskirts perhaps, at a study center or in a small home, was Elliot Hoover. It was as if she were keeping a rendezvous. Was he waiting for her, too, in some disturbing, almost occult foreknowledge? Or would he close his door in her face?

  The Varanasi Palace Hotel was small, only five floors, and it was old. It was located at the edge of the “containment,” or residential compound once built for the British and still mostly Western in character. The avenues were straight, clean, but the noise of Benares submerged the elegant palm trees in a turbulence of sound: a thousand bulls lowing, ten thousand men shouting, and everywhere, clanging through the sky, the hundreds upon hundreds of temple bells, some heavy as gongs, some light as tinkling glass, making a cacophonous music that shook the city.

  The taxi came to a halt in front of the doorman. Under the awning, a turbaned Punjabi slowly opened the door for Janice and waited for the driver to take the suitcase from the trunk. She paid, took a brisk look at the spare lines of the Varanasi Palace, and followed the doorman into the hotel.

  “To the desk, please,” the Punjabi said, pointing.

  Inside, lazy black fans turned high overhead against white ceilings. Enormous red rugs covered the floor, and the couches and chairs were also red, so that the interior looked like a huge Matisse. Glass chandeliers glittered in regular sequences through the lobby. A gentleman in white cloth read a newspaper with the aid of a magnifying glass. Janice walked slowly to the desk.

  “Yes, please?” inquired a short, dark-haired clerk with a red coat.

  “Mrs. Templeton. Arriving from Tel Aviv.”

  Fingers the shade of cocoa rapidly skimmed through a rolling file. Then he looked up, smiling, and raised an eyebrow in the direction of an aged porter. The old man immediately hobbled to the desk. There was a brisk command and then the clerk smiled obsequiously to Janice.

  “Room 507, please,” he said.

  Janice nodded, still confused by suddenly being in India, but now reassured by the Western efficiency, even impersonality, of the Varanasi Palace.

  The old man, who also wore a red coat, heaved the suitcase onto a back already bent with age. Strangely, at the elevator, he only instructed the operator, then proceeded to walk the entire five floors up to her room. Puzzled, Janice waited for him. At length he arrived, breathing hard and sweating. His hands were permanently curled by a life of hard labor.

  He opened the door to room 507. Janice walked in. It was cool. The walls were white. Fresh flowers bloomed from glass bowls. The bedspread was white, patterned by its weave of fresh cotton. The bathroom was clean. There was nothing that indicated she was in India except the bent porter at the door. She gave him what she thought was a fair tip. He stared at her in mixed gratitude and defiant, almost hostile pride. For a second, she thought he would refuse it. Then he nodded, blinked his rheumy yellow eyes, and departed, closing the door.

  Janice sat down on the bed. It had silent springs, firm yet resilient. Strange, confused emotions swirled inside her. She felt like laughing. She felt like crying. She felt like running around the block, overflowing with nervous energy.

  Janice called down to the desk, found the correct time, and adjusted her watch. It was only 12:30 in the afternoon in Benares.

  She undressed, stepped under the shower, and found the water hot and delicious in its sting. She shampooed her hair twice, rinsed thoroughly, and combed her hair down. In the mirror, she looked into her own eyes and could not decipher the look she found in them. Was she courageous or insane? She dressed carefully in beige slacks, white blouse, and sandals. The afternoon was hazy, the clouds spread evenly over the serrated skyline of high-rise apartments and slums. Down at the desk she composed an express letter to Bill.

  Dearest. Am searching. Will find help for both of us. Trust and believe. All my love. Janice.

  She addressed it in care of Dr. Geddes, asking him to give it to Bill or withhold it, as he thought best. The stationery had the hotel’s address if Dr. Geddes needed to contact her.

  A taxi took her quickly from the hotel, out of the residential compound, and back into the morass of animals, bauble sellers, brass workers, fortune-tellers, precariously balanced fruit stands, pilgrims of various castes—some nearly naked, many with ash smeared across their aged breasts—and up a long hill, where Janice could see the breathtaking spectacle of nearly two thousand spires, domes, minarets, and towers rising like a vast rock crystal garden, glittering in mosaic brilliance against a pure blue sky. Now she could see the great brown river, the Ganges, rolling imperturbably toward the Bay of Bengal. The shores were hidden by clusters of shops and crumbling houses, but beyond was that same muddy wasteland of the great, hot flood plain.

  The taxi swerved around a corner and stopped. In front of her was an imposing white edifice, its top story on supports, creating the impression of a vast fortress. A sign read, in three languages, Hindu University.

  The entr
ance to the administration hall led to a series of foyers, each of which led to complexes of reception and office space. Janice walked slowly through the vast, black-tiled area, where the light came in through tall, narrow windows high over her head, and her heart was beating so violently she thought it would echo off the stone.

  A steel-framed door led to a narrow corridor. File cabinets made the corridor even more narrow. Janice walked down through the dusty channel and emerged at a second door that opened onto a large typing pool. The typists were all women, with brightly colored saris, and they typed with manic efficiency.

  Janice leaned against a marble-topped counter and looked around. The women clattered away, some at electric machines, others at older, upright models. Finally, a young girl with jet black eyes and hair, and a subtle mustache over her full red lips, sauntered to the counter. She said nothing.

  “I’m looking for Sesh Mehrotra,” Janice said. “Here. Let me write it down.” She spelled out the name. The girl stared blankly at it.

  “He is a student here?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know. He might be an instructor.”

  The girl walked to a horizontal steel bin. Her bracelets jangled as her dark arms riffled quickly among the entries there. From time to time, she pulled out a file, checked it against the name, and slid the file back into its holder. At last she copied something down on the slip of paper, and came to the counter. On the paper she had written: Department of Philosophy.

  It was a small office, dominated by a single desk with a middle-aged woman, her floral print sari and brass bangles glimmering like a fallen chandelier. Behind was the landscape of Benares, leading down to the warm brown Ganges. The receptionist had white hair twined into the black, and under her dense black eyebrows her eyes were soft and brown. She waited for Janice to speak.

  “I’m looking for Mr. Sesh Mehrotra,” Janice said softly.

  With a subtle nod, the woman disappeared toward the office in the rear. Janice waited. The receptionist returned brandishing a piece of paper. She handed it to Janice.