For Love of Audrey Rose

by Frank De Felitta

“Will you not be her mother?” he asked, his voice oddly husky. “She needs that kind of care. The kind of love you can provide.”

  “No. She’s a lovely girl, but—”

  In the predawn gloom they spoke in soft voices, as though the long night had rid from them any anxieties. Janice felt she had been at the clinic for a month. She was familiar with its every sound, its every smell, and the children seemed, oddly, extensions of herself as well as Hoover. She slumped against the white basin, as the sleeplessness danced into her eyes. Jennie seemed to float in the light where the sheets were visible across the room.

  “And the frightening shall not be frightening,” Hoover said gently.

  She looked up at him. Odd glints of light swarmed in her vision where he stood.

  “That’s what he told me. My master, the guru,” Hoover said softly. “The frightening shall not be frightening.”

  Suddenly he leaned down over her, his lips against the soft warmth of her neck.

  Her left hand instinctively went up around his neck and drew him closer. They were both exhausted, their blood racing, and the moment seemed to undulate in a slow motion, a giddiness as though the earth had wobbled from its foundations. Nor did she object when his hand slowly rested against her breast. Her breathing pushed out against him, and one by one he unbuttoned the buttons of her blouse.

  She sighed, turned against his cheek, and his fingers slid across the hollow of her throat. For a long time they found comfort in each other’s proximity, a dreamlike stillness, the pressure of breathing so near each other’s ear. His fingertips pressed down, soft as velvet, to her undergarment, flowed down under and found the breast very warm, and there was a soft but sudden intake of her breath against his cheek.

  “Elliot,” she whispered, “I’m so confused without you. I’m even more confused with you.”

  “I am never without you,” he whispered.

  She felt the warm comfort of his hand against her bare breast, and was, in her confusion, grateful for it. She leaned her head against his shoulder and watched as the tinted lamp illumined her blouse, making it look as though it belonged to someone else, and watched his fingers remove the next button, felt the soft sliding of the fingertips around and under the other breast.

  Her body belonged to someone else, to a Janice long buried under time’s sorrow and the fatigue of survival. From far away she seemed to sense her dulled limbs awakening, pushing heavy weights away, and yet the disembodied feeling was unnatural. It made her feel anxiety in the warmth of his friendship.

  “Kiss me, Elliot,” she whispered.

  He moved slowly toward her face, and their lips pressed together, an almost discreet encounter, a mutual signal of their desolation. She stood up from the basin counter, his hand found the nipple of her breast, and she pressed herself against his lips.

  The alienation went away. Janice felt herself rising from the dead, from the corridors of the asylums, from long journeys that lead to death, from the abstraction of pretending she was no woman. She closed her eyes. When they kissed again, it was delicate, though his tongue found hers; a sudden thrill passed through her, a shudder of surprise, and his hand ran down the length of her body, resting on the small of her back.

  She clung to him, standing with her weight against him, on the quiet threshold to Jennie’s room. It seemed to be an eternity thus, while the child slept. Dogs barked, unseen in the neighborhood, and a heavy truck rumbled past the clinic. The street became quiet again. She felt as though she were falling asleep, that in fact there could be nothing more blessed than to sleep forever in his arms, in view of the mysterious child who, in some inscrutable way, blessed their being together and reminded them of their own lost children.

  She laughed softly in his ear. He raised his head, smiled, and raised an eyebrow, questioning.

  “I don’t ever want to move,” she whispered, her face flushed. “Not ever.”

  He lowered his face against her neck and pressed her close.

  “Then we shall not,” he said softly.

  “I feel like I’m dancing,” she said in a faraway voice.

  She sighed and accepted his tongue softly in a second kiss, a longer thrill, and did not seem ready when he broke it off, smiling. In a sudden burst of happiness he squeezed her to him. It was unmistakable, the desire that pressed against her.

  “Elliot,” she murmured, and her hand slipped down from his arm, hesitated, and nervously squeezed his elbow.

  She was confused when there was a movement, and abruptly he had lifted her into his arms, like a child, and carried her into the red sweep of his bedroom. It swirled past like a sensuous dream, and except for the pounding of her heart, like an animal gone wild, the whole world seemed to flow swiftly and silently like a river of mist.

  “Please—”

  Her voice was cut off by a playful kiss on the mouth. He put her down. The light was still on. The Indian deities, the red curtains, the rumpled bed, all stretched out in front of her, a landscape more uncertain, more inviting, more dangerous than any subcontinent.

  She was transfixed with fear.

  Behind her, Hoover softly closed the door. Autumn leaves blew against the window, and the blood throbbed in her temples. He did not advance, but only put his hand against the small of her back, and she suddenly whispered, as though unwilling to walk any farther, unable to move paralyzed limbs.

  “Carry me, Elliot.”

  With a slow, simple movement, as though raising an almost holy icon, he carried her as before, in his arms, and lowered himself with her to the bulging mountains and valleys of the madras bedspread, sheets and a single pillow.

  He said nothing. Quickly he removed her blouse, kissing her on the eyes, so that her eyes remained closed and she saw nothing. He carefully unhooked her undergarments and removed them, and though her eyes were closed, she gasped slightly, aware that he observed her.

  He did not cover her with sheet or blanket, but left her nude. She lay like a sculpture in the soft light, the rounded forms of hip and thigh clearly modulated. She felt her face was flushed and finally opened her eyes and watched Hoover’s eyes and wondered if her own burned with the same radiance.

  Far, far away he seemed to be, obscure, formless, and he went through motions, removing his shirt and trousers. His uncovered chest startled her with its smoothness, a pale white skin like marble against the bloodred curtains behind.

  It was as though they were fighting—the two hearts like impatient birds beating their wings—and in their fatigue there was dark, driving joy. Pleasure accelerated, until Janice grew unconscious under its demands. Shamelessly she sought the last barrier to oblivion. An abrupt pulsating filled her throughout, she became dimly aware of her leg twisted around his hip, and there was the sound of her own moaning, and his, dying away like a receding thunderstorm.

  Nor did he remove his body to her side, but repeated her name over and over, almost silently, in her ear. She smiled, stroked the back of his head in a dreamy, sensuous softness that had no outer definition. She had triumphed in some way, and her every sensibility had flowed to the far corners of the earth.

  She felt once again that her breath was coming short. Once again he was extended deep within her. Her leg twisted slowly, languorously at first, around his hip. Now they rolled in a deep of their own making. At the bottom of an ocean known only to themselves, in a dreaminess where she commanded him, just as he commanded her, they pursued the relentless goal through the darkness. There was a sensation of a slow, irresistible welling, as though the floor of the earth, like a bubble, had begun to expand, and then she heard his small cries. Slowly then, through her exhausted body, the bulging, demanding pressure flowered a second time, and her cries followed his like an echo.

  She felt that she was already asleep. He was at her side, his arm across her breasts. There was a relaxation surpassing anything she had known. The girl in the next room burbled softly, like a nightingale, and Janice slipped like a feather into the welcome and blesse
d purity of dreamless sleep.

  BOOK IV

  JENNIE

  “He who with a clear vision sees me as the Spirit Supreme

  Knows all there is to be known, and he adores me with his soul.”

  The Words of Krishna

  24

  Blue grit hung in the early summer air in slow currents, wallowing in the baking haze of day. New York was bottled in a smoky, whitish presence that sucked the oxygen from the river basins. Noise muffled itself in the stone canyons like muted thunder, boiling with the horrid hostility of ten million people jammed together. Day after day the atmospheric layers burned, until a putrid smell of something decomposed laid itself on everything that moved below.

  Within Goodland Sanitarium, the air conditioners failed to keep pace with the heat, though water dripped from them onto towels on the floor, and steady throbs of machinery echoed down the dank corridors. Staff and patients perspired freely, and the grit flecked each and every window.

  Janice nervously twisted the straps of her handbag. She was in a small lobby, an alcove where the tiles were stained by coffee and shoes, and the ashtrays stank of old cigarettes. She listened to the sounds of approaching footsteps, disappearing conversations, the vaguely threatening murmur of activity that was so horrible because it was never defined, only whispered and hinted at in the labyrinth of corridors.

  Janice reflected bitterly as she sat in the steaming lobby. Upon the guilts and maneuvers of administrators depended the lives of so many broken people. Dr. Geddes was reluctant at first to enter into their conspiracy with Jennie. Palming the sick child off to Bill as an Ivy substitute offended his professional and moral ethos. But Elliot Hoover’s persuasive arguments for the ultimate good that would accrue not only to Bill, but—and especially—to the orphaned child, at last mitigated the doctor’s qualms and drew him wholly into their compact. In his best eloquence before Dr. Boltin, Dr. Geddes explained his approach to transfer-therapy, how Bill responded ever so slightly to objects of transference. Why not a real girl? Indeed, a girl of the right age, attractive, and with similarities of personality to those of his own late daughter? Finally, Dr. Boltin acquiesced, but demanded safeguards for the sanitarium. Dr. Geddes executed an application to the State of Pennsylvania for permission to transfer the continuation of Jennie’s treatment to the Goodland Sanitarium in the State of New York, and Pennsylvania responded by agreeing to a six-month trial period of treatment. It took all of May and June to accomplish, but it was done.

  As Janice exhaled slowly, she watched Jennie. The small girl wore a red jumper, sneakers, and a red plaid shirt. The black silken hair was freshly washed, brushed into a hundred soft curls that lost their form in the sultry heat. A small area of rash threatened to break out inside her elbows. Jennie’s movements were now more fluid. Passing doctors and hospital personnel took no notice that the little girl on the vinyl couch looked into the air at nothing. From a distance, Jennie looked only bored, fidgeting by the tall aluminum ashtrays, waiting for a father or brother swallowed up somewhere in the recesses of the institution.

  “Mrs. Templeton—”

  Janice turned, and saw Dr. Geddes.

  “Have they started?” Janice asked.

  “No. They’re waiting for Mr. Hoover.” He sat down beside her on a worn brown chair.

  “I don’t want you to build your hopes up too much,” he said. “What we’re attempting is a long-shot at best.”

  “I only wish it were over,” Janice whispered.

  Down the corridor there was a blurred motion. An orderly carried a brass canister from a storeroom and disappeared into the darkness. A slow parallelogram of light diminished as the storeroom door silently shut and locked.

  That was how the light had gone out behind Bill’s eyes, Janice thought. It just got locked up. It took sixty days for him to realize that they wanted him to see a child. Forty-five days before he stopped cursing them all. Depriving him of his rightful daughter, he yelled. Illegitimate fruit of their lust. A scheme to falsify his religious quest. It was not until the beginning of summer that the silence began. That was worse. A slow, cynical smile on his lips, dark hostility in his eyes, and saying nothing—nothing at all.

  He tore up Jennie’s photograph. Laughed at their claims. But finally, maybe out of boredom or a hideous despair, he assented to see Hoover. Just once. There were a few religious questions to pose. And they damned well better be answered, he warned.

  That was when matters began to spiral in. Elliot Hoover procured a copy of a birth certificate from the Pittsburgh Hall of Records, paid an engraver to duplicate the scrolls and objects embedded in the margins. Then another man was found to forge the inks and signatures. A kind of evil began to filter into the entire enterprise.

  “I’d better go,” Dr. Geddes said. “See if Hoover’s arrived.”

  Behind the locked door, vague premonitions of voices insinuated themselves into Bill’s mind. He could not distinguish them from other, exterior voices. Sweat broke out along his forehead. In an agony of horror he shook himself from side to side, but the voices insisted, stung, and poked icy fingers through the nerves within his temples.

  Bill’s wrists chafed against leather straps connected to the bar of a hard, iron bed. He could sit up, feet on floor, but his arms were bound down beside his thighs.

  Suddenly the door opened. Bill stared at the incoming figure through the dampness of sweat fallen along his eyes. Bill’s slow, grinding teeth were audible. In the doorway, Dr. Boltin paused, breathing heavily, mopping his neck.

  “Well, Bill,” he said breezily. “How are we doing? Not too badly, I trust?”

  Bill’s gaze followed the portly director.

  “Where is he?” Bill whispered, his forearms bulging against the restraining straps.

  “Come now, Bill. I was told you were calm. Calmness is everything now. Do you understand me?”

  Bill licked his lips, stared moodily at the floor, and made his body relax.

  The lock on the door gave off a metallic scratching, then it clicked. Dr. Geddes stepped in. Bill slumped against the wall. Dr. Geddes avoided Bill’s eyes.

  Dr. Boltin checked his watch. “Are you sure he knew it was for two o’clock?”

  “Absolutely,” Dr. Geddes said quickly.

  For a long time none of the men in the chamber moved. Their breathing was vaguely audible. Dr. Geddes stared at the discolorations on the floor. They looked like streaks left by dragging shoes. Fights, violent suppressions. He turned away.

  “You don’t think this is all a horrible mistake?” Dr. Boltin whispered.

  Before Dr. Geddes answered, the lock clicked again. An orderly opened the door, and beside him, forehead glistening with sweat, stood Elliot Hoover in a blue suit. The light picked up his light hair, like a bruised halo, and the heat had reddened his face as though he blushed.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said, catching his breath, smiling. “Sorry I’m—”

  “Let’s get on with it, Mr. Hoover,” Dr. Boltin wheezed, pointing to the single empty chair opposite the iron bed.

  Hoover hesitated. Bill’s body seemed to repel him with an almost magnetic barrier. Hoover seemed unable to stand the gaze of the manacled man on the bed. He stared at Bill’s shoes, at the standing orderly, back at the psychiatrists; then, he went slowly to the chair and sat down. He did not look at Bill. He licked his lips and swallowed heavily. The door closed behind them and a horrific silence drummed in their ears.

  “The, uh, certificate,” Dr. Geddes suggested.

  Hoover reached into his interior coat pocket. He produced a long brown envelope. Carefully, controlling nervous fingers, he slit it open. An elegant, scrolled document slid into his palm.

  He cleared his throat. “This is the birth certificate of Jennie Dunn.”

  Hoover looked up, recoiled from Bill’s stare, and in a kind of psychic defense, held out the document. Bill slowly pulled himself upright, using powerful forearms, until the two men sat facing each other,
less than two feet apart. Dr. Geddes now observed that Bill’s feet were unstrapped.

  “Look at it, Bill,” Dr. Boltin said.

  Bill glared at Dr. Boltin, but like a talisman the document slowly drew his eyes back.

  “Jennifer Dunn,” Hoover recited. “February 3, 1975. 10:43 A.M. Signed by the Registrar of Births.”

  Bill stared at the document for a long time.

  “What do you think, Bill?” Dr. Boltin asked.

  “Nice forgery.”

  “What makes you think it’s a forgery?” Dr. Geddes asked.

  Bill sneered, but he could not take his eyes from the document.

  “Look,” Hoover reasoned. “How could anybody duplicate the old scrollwork, the emblems, of the State of Pennsylvania? Only the Hall of Records in the City Hall has these plates.”

  Bill’s lips pressed together. He agreed to nothing, but he looked demoralized. Sensing the shift of moral power, Hoover quickly leaned to the attack.

  “Now listen to me, Bill,” he said. “Ahimsa requires it.”

  “Who?” Dr. Boltin asked.

  “The humility of universal love. Ahimsa.”

  “Oh.”

  Hoover turned slowly back to Bill. Bill had softened even more. Compulsively he twined his fingers at the restraining straps. It was pathetic, ritualistic, a bizarre muscular reaction to frustration.

  “Listen to me, Bill,” Hoover said softly. “Jennie Dunn is a lovely girl, Bill. She is fragile in many ways, but she is also full of tiny secrets. She moves as though afraid of disturbing the air.”

  Bill sighed, and let his hands fall back onto the iron rail. He sat inert under Hoover’s hypnotic monotone.

  “When she sleeps, she curls her left leg, as though ready to fly away into the night.”

  “Shut up.”

  “She’s delicate, Bill. She walks up and down, like a figure on a music box. She dances with herself in the morning sunlight.”

  “So does every kid.”

  “She needs a soft blue night-light. No other color will do. Her dreams make her sit up, still sleeping.”