For Love of Audrey Rose

by Frank De Felitta

  Janice saw the taxi grow small, then vanish into the night. The rain blew in vicious veils around her.

  “Elliot…” she whispered.

  No one heard. She turned. The lights blazed inside the hospital. Through the rain she saw the pattern of windows and doors, the labyrinth of dementia and rage awaiting her. The rain was so cold it seemed to have seeped into her body and begun to rot away her will to act, her will even to live. Numbly she walked slowly through the oil slicks and black puddles, back toward what remained of Bill.

  19

  The abrupt departure of Elliot Hoover left a horrifying vacuum. It was identical to the vista of mud-swallowed mass death that she had seen after the flood. Instead of a black bull, its forelegs broken, dead or dying in the foul waste, there was Bill. Her husband lay inert in her future, accusing, wasting away in the awful solidity of decay.

  Janice did not know whether Hoover had fled to find help or to escape her. There was no knowledge of his plans at his hotel. He had simply disappeared.

  The months passed.

  Elliot Hoover made no sign. The universe had swallowed him up as inexplicably as it had disgorged him. Janice stared dumbly into the future, and she found there only an endless, sterile moonscape.

  Three times a week she took the long train ride to the hospital. Three times a week, Bill abused her verbally. He screamed at her, he accused her of sexual acts which she barely understood. Dr. Geddes sat calmly in his chair, observing, listening. Two orderlies discreetly stood at the door. Bill raged incoherently, and there was no limit to the explicitness of his accusations. She endured them, saying nothing. But something inside her died. Their former life, in its most intimate details, was dragged out into the mud, where it was made repulsive and loathsome.

  Every visit the wound reopened. She believed—she made herself believe—in human trust, but the assaults of a demented husband crushed her. He seemed to be boundless in his vehemence. He jumped, pranced, roared, and the veins bulged apoplectically in his neck, until she longed for some dark night to cover her up.

  Janice married her job. She spent days, including weekends, at Christine Daler’s Ltd. Her skills had rapidly returned and continued to develop. The summer slipped through to autumn, to the cold rains of November, beating against the studio windows. She preferred not to go home. There the silence of Ivy’s room mingled with the silence of the bedroom and whispered hopelessness in her ear.

  Late one night, she listened to the murmur of the building, the battering of the sleet against black windows, the creaking of Ivy’s door.

  As a child, Janice had had a fantasy when bad times came. She had called on the white figurine of Christ perched on her mother’s dresser. An absurd piece of kitsch, arms outspread in crass forgiveness for one and all of his forgotten lambs. But she believed then, and he came for her—outstretched arms, a painted beard and all—and served as a talisman to protect her. Now, listening to the radio turned low to keep away the permanent isolation, she did not believe. No Christ came to her through the dark skies to shield her this time.

  That night, Elliot Hoover came to her in a dream. He was smiling broadly, very excited, as though he had found something. Something she would very much like to see or to have. The dream changed. They were walking through the russet autumnal fields in upstate New York. She did not know if it was Bill or Elliot Hoover walking beside her, as their daughter gamboled among the fat, ripe pumpkins in the stalks. Then the dream changed again. There was a stinking hut in South India. Elliot Hoover cleaved against her as they lay on the ground. She felt his hard, hot breathing, and she pressed his hands closer against her own breasts and nearly fainted with desire. Then something dark happened and he was gone, and she woke up. Outside the sleet fell. Ice covered the windows, and a cold draft billowed through the seams of the panes.

  By Christmas, it was clear that, legally, Bill would never see the inside of a courtroom. He was declared non compos mentis; the sanitarium signed reams of documents, and the one small fear of an impending trial for kidnapping was removed. Bill did not observe the legal proceedings. When Dr. Geddes explained it to him, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  At the end of December, Janice sent a note to Sesh Mehrotra, asking if he had seen Elliot Hoover or knew of his whereabouts. By late January, a reply came in a battered envelope, in misspelled English, that Elliot Hoover had not returned. Had he returned, he would certainly have looked up the Mehrotra family. The letter contained best wishes.

  It was on the anniversary of Juanita’s kidnapping that Dr. Geddes told her that Bill’s condition showed signs, if not of improvement, then at least of no further deterioration. Bill could not distinguish the psychiatrists from the staff members, he did not remember names, but his memory could often be otherwise surprisingly acute.

  “We’ve achieved a modified success. Not a full success, but a minor amelioration of symptoms, based on substituting another symbol of Ivy.”

  Janice looked up, surprised.

  “We’re trying doll therapy, verbal suggestion. If we can turn his interest, even partially, to something under our control, we can relate to him through it. You see, we must come in under his umbrella of defenses.”

  “I suppose the best thing would be to bring back Juanita,” she suggested.

  “No. Absolutely not. That would trigger off the same obsessions as before. The secret of the transfer mechanism is that the emotional charge becomes slightly weaker. That is why we must try to deal through the transfer object.”

  “Well, then find a doll that looks like Juanita!”

  Dr. Geddes smiled warily. “I see you remain cynical about the whole thing. I don’t blame you. Bill’s case was terribly underestimated for a long time. Still, I wanted you to know that there may be a brighter future, even a partial cure.”

  “A partial cure? What does that mean?”

  “Living at home. Minor medications for the depression. Psychotherapy to explore the guilt piecemeal. A long, slow recovery.”

  “How many years?”

  “Difficult to say. Five. Ten, possibly.”

  Janice stared at Dr. Geddes. His projection seemed worse than the disease. Not for Bill. For her. She could not hide the resentment bubbling slowly from the depths of her feelings. That she should spend ten years caring for someone who barely resembled the man she had loved and married, who hurled abuse at her—pornographic abuse—and she knew she would not, could not, refuse even the smallest part of that fate.

  When she arrived home, she stared at the walls for nearly an hour. With a heavy heart, she dragged herself up the stairs into the studio that once had been Ivy’s room, and began sketching. Then she turned on the radio. After another hour, the antidote of work performed its magic, and she rapidly filled pages with watercolor treatments. As night fell, her thoughts turned, once again, to Elliot Hoover.

  Hoover must be in the United States still. She felt it. She felt him thinking of her, aware of her. He had promised to contact her when he knew what to do. That might take another week, another month, another year. But the time would come, and knowing it would come made the night softer, less desolate. The radio sent easy melodies through the room, and she worked until 3:30, then showered and slept easily. There were no dreams, only a vague presentiment that Elliot Hoover had been there during the night.

  Elliot Hoover woke in the slums of Pittsburgh with a vague presentiment that Janice had been with him during the night. It was still dark. No sun appeared over the black silhouettes of tenement roofs. Only the cold ribbons of blue and dark gray of the winter clouds. He huddled in an army blanket on the edge of a cot, shivering. He rubbed his eyes, trying to restore energy to them.

  Far away came the shrill, drunken hoots of a young man. Then the crash of a bottle. Hoover reached over to a small propane stove, lit it, and then shoved a beaker of cold coffee over the flame. He was oblivious to the bits of plaster falling from the roof when a cat scampered over it.

  The autumn had turned t
o ice. Christmas and New Year’s had passed in oblivion. Elliot Hoover was still driven by the image of Bill Templeton, who, under the scrutiny of no less than four physicians, had thrown himself forward like a rabid dog, teeth bared. Hoover felt the healed scars along his neck. He filled his cup with tepid coffee and drank it.

  The images came, as they always came in the predawn, rapid and confused, like a commercial for insanity. There had been the flight to Florida, the long, purposeless days along the beach, barefoot but still wearing the absurd brown suit he had bought in Calcutta. Days in Catholic churches, gazing at violently painted plaster saints. Afternoons in a dubious meditation center. And alone in cheap motels, thinking, just thinking, ignoring the television sets blaring through the walls of his room.

  Hoover spit out the grounds that inevitably filtered into his coffee. Why had he stayed away from New York? It had something to do with growing forward, not regressing. One’s karma improved with severance of ties to the earth. And besides, what could Janice possibly gain by his presence? He had as yet discovered no formula to solve Bill’s problem.

  Hoover showered, shaved, and went to the closet. The brown suit, badly torn and shockingly filthy, still hung on the rack among the newer garments. There were oil spots on the elbows, courtesy of the Greyhound bus ride back to the north. Was it Kansas City where he had been pushed into the mud by a drunken day laborer? Or was it in Wheeling? Hoover tried to recall when he had first realized that the drifting would have to come to an end. He remembered standing at a truck stop, picking up a ride west, not east to New York, sharing the cab with a dull, hostile driver who was red-eyed from dodging highway patrols and weigh stations. Somewhere during those confused days, the filth and grit of the country seeped into the brown suit. That was why, when he arrived in Pittsburgh, the police stopped him on sight and shoved him into the drunk tank, there being no room anywhere else.

  Hoover smiled as he buttoned his shirt. Now he had other coats, other trousers. But the brown suit reminded him of Janice, of Calcutta, their nights together in the South of India. And anyway, when the Pittsburgh police checked his identity and learned he was a man of wealth and property, they quickly had the suit dry-cleaned by way of apology. Hoover chuckled out loud, and the sound was strange in the large building as it died to a melancholy, lonely echo.

  As he had left the police station, Hoover pulled the coat closely around his throat, ducked into the fierce wind that promised sleet or snow before the day was out, and walked along the sidewalks of the city. Something had led him back to Pittsburgh. Why had he not flown to Benares from Florida? Was it some kind of habit, a yearning, even a kind of nostalgia? Hoover found himself walking along stately rows of elms, where the suburban homes were not so very new anymore, and the elms had grown from spindly, protected saplings, girdled by wire mesh, into massive, and now bare explosions of branches. Then he knew why he had returned to the city.

  His home lay across a gently sloping yard, filled with dead leaves, curiously unpleasant leaves, curled and dusty. It seemed as though nothing had really changed in the eight years. A bit dirtier; the garage needed to be scrubbed; some trimming required on the hedge that curved around into the backyard; but it was still the home Hoover vividly remembered.

  He remained rooted and let the chill wind blow through him. It was as though he had just been inspecting new plans for additions to the pig-iron distribution systems along the Allegheny—a late meeting with charts, wearing his gray wool three-piece suit, in his office overlooking the industrial wasteland in all its magnificence at the curve in the river—and now he had come home for the day, and Sylvia was inside cooking, or studying French, or preparing a cocktail for him.

  And the door would open. Audrey Rose would come running up to him, throw her small arms around his neck, and he would lift her up off the ground and happily trundle her back inside. Audrey Rose. The small girl with the dark hair, the black eyes, the sly gamin of his heart. A secretive girl, with a secret life. She shared it with him on condition that he told no one. They were only little-girl secrets, joyful mysteries. So self-assured, life held no terror for her then.

  Hoover wiped his eyes. The masters of the Ganges were right. One never truly severs one’s heart from the places wherein one has learned to love. But the mind can transcend such attachments, that was the instruction. So Hoover came back to watch the house with its sloping redwood porch and its large picture windows. He walked through the parks where he and Audrey Rose had run, and along the small stream that eventually cut its way into their backyard. He willed all the memories, good and bad, to return, in order to make peace with them. He even rented a car and drove along the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the very spot where, so many years before, Sylvia’s car had hurtled over the embankment and down the steep incline, carrying both her and Audrey Rose to their fiery deaths. He stood among the fat green weeds and clods of earth and forced his mind to conjure the terrible image of Audrey Rose, his darling, trapped within the burning wreckage, her tiny fists pounding and pounding against the scorched panes of glass, and screaming: “DADDYDADDYDADDYHOTHOTHOT!”

  In time he did make peace with the memories. They nestled within him like warm friends, and the torment slowly dissipated.

  But there was one paradox. Sometimes he imagined the life as it had been with Sylvia—the intelligent, somewhat retiring woman who had shared his deepest hopes and dreams. But now, to his own confusion, after eight years, he had difficulty recalling the features of her face.

  He pictured coming into the house, listening to the Bartok string concerti, putting his arm around her—but no clear face was there, hardly any memory at all of her figure. It disturbed him. Instead of his wife, there was now a vague sensation of Janice Templeton.

  That was even more true now, he thought as he combed his hair, examining his face in the mirror. It was Janice who accompanied him through the horrors of the slums. It was Janice who believed in him, waited for him, needed him. Without her, he would have no faith, no attempt would have been possible. But now, as he caught a glimpse of the teenagers drunk in the streets outside, the old man sleeping on an iced porch in nothing but a greasy overcoat, the smoke pouring from factories just beyond the low tenement houses, he felt a purified faith, an ability to act that knew no obstacles. And more—the true purpose behind his seemingly accidental return to Pittsburgh.

  The building he purchased, and in which he was now living, was an abandoned motel, condemned by the city, but still standing after thirteen years of neglect. In three more hours, the workmen would arrive, bringing more trucks of wiring, planks, and plaster. Inevitably, the neighborhood children would cluster around the piles of sand that accumulated at the base of the motel. The noise would be, as usual, deafening. But as Elliot Hoover walked slowly through the wet, rotted debris in the hall, the moldy newspaper and bottles strewn in the corners, the icy pipes visible through dilapidated walls, there was not the slightest sense of depression. There was only the feeling of going forward. A mandate for construction. These dark corridors, he hoped, would help save the world, even if only in a small way.

  Rounding a corner of unlit darkness where the walls of two adjoining rooms had given away entirely and frozen ivy twirled among the rusted nails and bits of timber, Hoover stopped short. In a sudden flash he sensed Janice by his side, smiling at him, approving all he was attempting. A warmth radiated through his body. If she was indeed here in spirit with him, he thought, then his work was bound to succeed and be the pride of them both. Eagerly, he blew into his frozen hands and paced the sodden hallways, impatiently waiting for the workmen to arrive.

  20

  Elliot Hoover was well pleased. A smell of fresh paint greeted him. As the workmen passed him, carrying glass for the windows, he examined the pastel yellow and green walls of the corridors. A warm, sensuous light dappled through the budding branches outside.

  He was well pleased, too, with the two men who had joined his staff. One was named Hirsch, a conscientious objector i
n the Vietnam War, who wore his sandy-colored hair in a long ponytail. The other was Mr. Radimanath, a North Indian, father of a bookseller in Bombay. Mr. Radimanath looked like Nehru and shuffled along the newly-laid carpets in his slippers, head down, urgently, as though answering a silent summon.

  And there was much to do. Hoover drew them into his office, where he issued instructions, drafted letters, negotiated long legal forms. Mr. Radimanath gently closed the red curtains behind the desk. They drank jasmine tea and rested on cushions. The sounds of the slums drifted from his consciousness.

  Elliot Hoover, in his trance, felt the memories of his legal battles disintegrate. The arguments with the workmen, the vandalism of the neighborhood children, and the threatening inquiries of the county health association, all faded like a distant sunset on the horizon. The teachings of his first guru returned, not so much in words, but in the form of a spiritual harness that reestablished itself within. The trance became deeper, darker. He felt the proximity of souls he had never known, passed down for countless millennia. Abruptly, he opened his eyes.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Hoover,” said a workman, peering in holding two boards under his arm, “but could you show us about this here swimming pool?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “That’s quite all right.”

  In the cellar of the former motel, the supporting floor beams had been removed, and now a gaping hole, vaguely rectangular, leered out of floodlights perched in the muddy bottom.

  “The whirlpool should go here,” Hoover said, pointing. “Orient the blueprints from this angle. Do you see? The swimming lanes will go across to the north.”