For Love of Audrey Rose

by Frank De Felitta

And why now, after a year, have I written? Remember I told you that things had to be worked out, they had to be ready before I could help you and Bill?

  In despair, he crumpled the note and dropped it into the wastebasket. There was nothing “ready.” He was no more prepared to help Bill now than he had been when he returned from India. Maybe the clinic had taught him humility, if nothing else.

  Jennie walked past the open door. Her elbows were held high, over her shoulders, as though an invisible board or pole were slung over her neck, and her arms dangled from it. She shuffled slowly, absentmindedly, on tiptoes, engrossed in the thick weave of the hall carpet.

  “Jennie!” he called, smiling.

  But his loneliness was not eased. The child paused slightly, but she kept shuffling away. He knew better than to follow. Soon it was silent again.

  A shuffling returned to the door. A small face, elfin, with a fringe of dark hair, peered in. Hoover turned.

  “Five—four—three,” Jennie said in a tiny three-year-old voice.

  Hoover smiled, but he bent over the wastebasket, scooped up the discarded notes to Janice, and mashed them into a single angry wad.

  “Yes, my little elf,” he said. “Five, four, three. What comes next? Two, one, zero?”

  “Six—nine—eight.”

  Hoover looked at her in consternation. The girl slipped away from the door and walked, self-absorbed, down the corridor. Hoover sat for a while, depressed, then cheered himself with the idea of examining the playground to plan a small flower garden there.

  It was warm, sunny, and a subtle aroma of grit hung in the air. It was a nostalgic smell—distant rubber factories, something like linseed oil hovering in the air, the kind of lazy day when he and Audrey Rose had gone looking for deer in the suburban parks.

  Walking along the protective fence, he looked out at the hostile slum. Sometimes it felt less like a refuge at the clinic than a form of incarceration. In the dirt yards around the clinic, nothing grew. There was only the debris, the worn rubber tires, piles of rubbish, mattresses ripped open, cars up on jacks and wooden blocks. Hoover squinted at a smashed black Ford, its glass and upholstery littering a vacant yard. A battered license plate dangled from the rear. It read 543 698.

  A weird, electric thrill ran into his nerves. 543 698. So Jennie observed the world! Now she could play it back, at least a few numbers.

  He ran across the street. Under the gaze of a white-haired, elderly black man who angrily tapped his cane, Hoover ripped the license plate from the Ford and ran back to the clinic. But when he raced upstairs to Jennie’s room, the child was asleep.

  A small victory in hell, he said to himself, standing over Jennie’s cot. He slipped the license plate into her desk drawer. Like the monsoon flood that had thrown him and Janice together, Hoover reflected, time seemed on the move again. In its dark currents, where were they being taken? Only time itself, Hoover knew, would decide when and where their mutual destinies would be unveiled.

  21

  September, and Elliot Hoover found no way to assuage his isolation except by throwing himself into his work. The problem of writing to Janice followed him. In some manner the clinic was preparing him for something. But what? He meditated on the roof of the clinic, during the long, hazy sunset that scattered vermilion through the smoke over the hills, but the answer did not come. So there was nothing but the work.

  A second operation enabled Jackson to work the steel pincers of his prosthetic arm. Fortunately, his aggressive instincts began to lessen, or else the other children would have been endangered. Lily remained the same, as did Uncle Earl. But the raging Roy suddenly broke down and wept in Mrs. Concepcion’s arms, and his small arms clutched her neck, and from that day he made no sound, only followed her with his eyes. Mrs. Concepcion slept in the same room as Roy. The boy began to realize that she was there, she would always be there; and instead of rage he began to show signs of curiosity. He climbed into the curtains, examining the pattern of the weave, and he poked among the pots and pans in the kitchen, peering into his reflection in the stainless steel.

  But the weirdest case was Jennie. She had grown still more independent, more sure of herself. Her withdrawal now seemed to mask a decisive personality that refused to reveal its complexity. She watched Hoover with soft green eyes that were as distant as Jupiter’s moons.

  Hoover typed a reply to the University of Ohio, which had agreed to publish a favorable report on the clinic and its “love” therapy. Far in the distance Henry was crying, a singsong, monotonous lament that had no cause and no end. The door opened in the office, and Hoover saw Jennie peer up at him. She walked coolly to his desk, pulled out three felt-tip pens and walked back to the door.

  “You’re welcome, Jennie,” he chuckled.

  “Three-two-one,” she said softly.

  Hoover shrugged.

  “One-two-three,” he answered, looking for a stamp.

  He licked the stamp and patted it onto the envelope. He wearily tossed it into the “out” wire basket. He lay back in his chair. It was a quiet afternoon. It was nearing three years since he had first seen Janice and Ivy outside the School for Ethical Culture. A rainy day, in a sea of umbrellas. Janice had looked as he had imagined. Brunette, a bit chic, something decisive about her, but fragile. Upstairs, Mr. Radimanath roared with Neville. A new turn of therapy—to let the boy know that rage was not offensive so he might as well give it up.

  Jennie remained at the door.

  “What is it, darling?” he asked. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  Jenny instinctively retreated.

  “Do you want a number?” he asked. “I’ll give you a number. Listen. Five-five-three-three. Five-five-three-three. Can you say that?”

  “Five-five-three-three,” she said shyly.

  So Jennie was willing to acknowledge that she understood a spoken number! She was hungry for numbers. Hoover did not have to write them down anymore.

  “One-four-two-one,” he tried, smiling.

  “Six-nine-five-four.”

  “What? Let’s try again. Five-five-three-three.”

  “One-two-four-eight-seven.”

  Hoover laughed, scratching his head in amused frustration.

  “That’s more numbers than I gave you,” he said. “What are you doing, adding them?”

  His smile froze. Something cleared at the back of his mind as though he had crossed a strange threshold, into a room where he was now awake, where he breathed a different atmosphere than he had ever breathed before. Jennie waited at the door. For what?

  “Jennie,” he said, leaning forward, “are you adding the numbers?”

  She smiled like a leprechaun, unable or unwilling to understand what he asked. Hoover licked his lips, trying to fathom what she wanted.

  “Seven-three-two-six-four,” he said.

  “Seven-three-two-six-four.”

  “Okay. Let’s see. I’d better write this down. Two-five-five-one-eight.”

  “Nine-eight-seven-eight-two.”

  Not a second’s hesitation. Hoover added the numbers: 98782. It was correct. He could not believe it.

  “Eight-eight-one-five-six-three-two-two-four-eight,” he said.

  She repeated the number in that soft, elusive voice, a voice that sounded like gauze curtains rustling in the autumn breeze.

  “Nine-seven-three-five-one-one-four-two-nine-three,” he said.

  “One-eight-five-five-no-seven-four-six-five-four-one.”

  It took Hoover a few seconds to add his numbers. She was correct. Except that she said “no” instead of “zero.” He stared at her, amazed. He stood and walked toward her, but she darted down the corridor, and when he found her again, at the edge of the grass, she showed no signs of interest in him or numbers.

  Hirsch remembered studies of autistic children who fixated on numbers, but he had never read of one who could manipulate them at such extraordinary speed. What was the meaning of her ability? And what was the extent of her gift? Did it en
d with addition or could she perform other feats? And was she trying to say something with the numbers? Hoover and Mr. Radimanath spent the rest of the evening preparing logical and numerical tests for Jennie.

  In two weeks they determined Jennie’s limits. There were none. She could add any column of numbers, no matter how long, provided they were enunciated clearly. And her answer, in that quiet, whispered voice, came back faster than they could write down the numbers themselves. Suddenly she began to come up with extraordinarily long numbers. She was multiplying. Hirsch bought an electronic calculator to keep up with her. Jennie could divide. Strangely, she never subtracted. Nor did they know why she sometimes added the numbers, sometimes divided, other times multiplied. And who had taught her? She was not old enough to have been even in nursery school.

  “Perhaps, in a previous incarnation, she was a mathematician,” suggested Mr. Radimanath.

  Hoover’s head jerked around.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Her gift is extraordinary, is it not? So fast. And never mistaken.”

  “Yes. Extraordinary. I’ve written to Penn State. Maybe they’ve hit on cases like this.”

  But the clinic at Penn State had not run across such mathematical quickness in autistic children. Only cases of memory of numbers, never manipulation of them. They suggested tests with letters and words. Memory tests, manipulation tests. The tests were performed, but Jennie stared blankly through the colored boards of objects, words, and letters, and went dead, signifying that she was through with the game.

  Hoover became obsessed with Jennie. He knew that she was trying to communicate with him, but her only language was the one of pure number. What was the meaning behind her burgeoning and fixated talent? In some way she knew the mystery of the autist, the landscape of the lost, the universe of the undeveloped soul. Was that a pure soul? Did she know things that normal children forget when their personalities develop?

  Behind it lay another hope. That Jennie could tell him, even in an intuitive way, what it was like to be himself. Somehow Jennie observed him in a pure and untutored way, a whole and trusting way, the way Audrey Rose had known him.

  It was in the tiny girl that he detected a response—and even an answer—to his own motivations, to the meaning of his trials.

  Hoover pondered long hours over the enigma of Jennie. Was she part of some grand design sent to him by divine providence to validate his work at the clinic? Was she a messenger from heaven sent to salve his troubled spirit and quiet the guilts he so keenly felt about Bill?

  Hoover reread her data sheet from the Bureau of Welfare: Jennifer Dunn. No birth certificate. Admitted to Temple University Clinic, 1977. Diagnosed retarded, possible nervous disorder. Before that, three separate hospitals in Pittsburgh. Tendency to fevers, coordination markedly poor, no speech. A handwritten form was stapled to the dossier. Hoover turned his folder sideways. The girl, now called Jennifer Alice Dunn, found in the rubbish depot of a Woolworth’s store in central Pittsburgh in August of 1974. The woman who found her, Mrs. Ora Dunn, kept Jennie nineteen months in foster care, then, unable to deal with the child’s problem, brought her to the county relief agency.

  And now he had her. In a sense he had adopted her; he took care of her, even, in a fashion, loved her as a father. She knew no other man as father. Why this need to see her as a substitute for Audrey Rose? Had he not finally purged the past from the present? According to the welfare records, Jennie was born between five and six months before Ivy Templeton died. Absurd, but it relieved his anxiety. Was it not a second sign? A sign to let the past recede into the past, a test of the soul’s strength?

  Mr. Radimanath and Hoover spoke late into the night. Jennie, they agreed, had a force over him, and Hoover did not like it. There was a desire to possess her, to claim her soul, that was absent in all the other children. So he turned her case over to Mr. Radimanath and contented himself with elaborating Jackson’s unique fixation on car crashes.

  But Jennie was never far from his sight or mind. Finally her sly, elfin, presence so tantalized him, that he took charge of her case once again and proceeded to a thoughtful series of video preparations, none of which elicited the slightest response from the girl.

  The tragedy of autism was that retardation has the aspect of being willed, Hoover thought, watching Jennie squirm in the seat of the video cubicle. She refused to learn. Refused to be aware. Yet she was physically able to learn. Sometimes she tried to be deaf. It was all a deception. Why? To shut out pain. But there was no pain in the clinic. Something deep down had shut off, had left its imprint where the personality should have begun developing through language.

  “You’re just a deception,” he whispered sadly, running his fingers through her fine, jet black hair. “Just a lovely, quiet little deception.”

  Through the day he exhausted his prepared video tapes. Nothing worked. He detected a sly smile of triumph on her face. He grew angry. He wanted to break down the barriers, remove the potential locked up behind the grim walls and make a wonderful person of her. But she refused, willfully countered his every stratagem.

  She was deception.

  The idea lingered with him long after she went to bed. Jennie was a deception. Why did that have an odd ring? Something awesome toyed with his brain, edging into consciousness, dying away again. Jennie, the deception. Deceiving whom? Himself? Herself? Bill?

  Suddenly he stopped. He had been walking along the side of the pool in the basement, so lost in thought that he barely realized where he was. The light flickered on the gently moving water. The banners and mobiles looked pitiful against the cold pipes, the dirt of the windows, the grime of Pittsburgh that seeped into everything, even floating on the surface of the water near the filter.

  Bill? Jennie deceive Bill? What odd thoughts were coming? He sat down on the diving board at the dark end of the underground chamber. He pictured Bill with Jennie, but it made no sense. What was the connection? There was a missing equation. He walked the tiled floor, his shoes squeaking on the wet surface. He sensed the missing connection in this grand deception that he was plotting, but could not quite put his finger on it.

  So he stared into the water. His own reflection was so distorted in the dark, moving hideously against the single bulb dangling from the far wall, that he appeared to be some form of monster come from the deep. So his thoughts worked into the idea of monster, and to heavy animals, and dark water; and, as always, he remembered lifting the enormous black bullocks from the dead children of the Indian villages, and the ugly masses of dirty, dead chickens that got stuck among the stinking boulders where the road had been, now all sucking mud. And the soldiers shooting diseased dogs. Rifle cracks echoing horrifically through the hills. A looter shot. Hoover scrambled through masses of brush, tangled debris, carrying his pitifully small canister of antibiotics, white cloth bandages, and water purification tablets.

  The monster that was himself smoothed out as he remembered Janice as he had found her and washed the mud slowly from her legs. The small undulations of her hips and breasts, the navel so oddly smeared with grime, her unconsciousness throwing her pelvis forward in such deep sleep. So Janice was the missing equation, he thought.

  He walked back to the diving board. Jennie was the deception. Bill was the object. Janice was the missing equation. Nothing else came to his fatigued mind, except that the meaning of the clinic was emerging. And the meaning of the clinic was more than the rehabilitation of thirteen vulnerable children. It was much more, and its purpose was on the verge of coming into the light of day.

  Lying awake in his room, staring at the dark ceiling, listening to the sounds of the clinic—the warm-air heating ducts, the underground motor for the swimming pool, the kitchen refrigerators that hummed, and Uncle Earl moaning in his sleep—Hoover felt a presence in the darkness. And that presence took control of him. It was the way the growing root of a plant will insinuate itself into the crack of a rock, and with time, split it, the power so strong. Hoover’s
lean physique had become leaner with the hard work at the clinic, his legs thinner even than they had been in South India. But it made his body taut. It vibrated with an interior desire. It insinuated itself into his very purpose on earth. The muscle and flesh began to take on a life of its own, and he felt overwhelmed by it.

  Was it the continent of America? Its absence of spirituality? Its hardness, its meanness, its grasping for the material world? Or was it the isolation? Where even Hirsch and Mr. Radimanath could not form a strong enough brotherhood to raise his spirit to its former level? Or was it Pittsburgh, which awakened the dormant memories of Sylvia—the slender arms, the soft smell of her perfume, the Bartok string quartets long after Audrey Rose was asleep upstairs and the late autumn dust filtered into the house from the neighboring woods, like the fragrance of nature itself, until their blood burned and they were consumed, the one within the other.

  He was washing dishes late at night in the kitchen. All the staff shared the menial tasks in rotation. Steeped in the hot steam, the water sloshing to his elbows, the tiny radio full of tinny voices as inconsequential as the rest of the world had become to him, a different memory came to Hoover. As he carefully hosed the red plastic dishes under the spray, his yellow gloves like emblems of a foreign life, he recalled the vermilion and yellow cloth that swirled through the bazaars of Benares, the cloth that floated into the holy Ganges, where the dead and the dying came to be bathed one last time.

  A rapid mélange of imagery flashed through him. Dusty hills, debates at the brotherhood, Sesh Mehrotra, rain in the hills and soldiers everywhere—like a speeding train crashing through time and space, a movie film gone hay-wire—and he remembered, not the flood, but afterward. Not the safety of the mountains, or the loveliness of the Tamil ashram, but, again, inevitably, it was the dirty hut that he recalled, when his breathing had felt warm and difficult and Janice Templeton lay on the hard floor, her breasts rising and falling at the same rapid rate. Like some dark dream, as though following himself out of himself, unconscious of everything, as though the self tarried behind an unknown dimension of his own body, he had gotten close to her. He had pressed against her and her warmth had intoxicated him until he felt dizzy. His two hands pressed forward until the small, delicate softness of her breasts responded, and her hands pressed on his, and he had never in all his life been so awakened to any woman, so transformed without embarrassment by the strength of his need.