“What?”
“Because of the kidnapping. They say it’s a formality, but—”
“Then he really is better. They don’t try sick men.”
“Elliot, you don’t understand. The media; they’d love to roast us a second time.”
“Pay them no attention. I never did.”
“They’ll drag up everything. They’ll find out about us.”
There was a long pause. Janice heard him sigh after a while.
“I see,” he said.
Janice waited, but he said nothing more. “I miss you,” she said simply.
“If you knew how I miss you.”
They spoke generalities, pleasant hopes for the future, but it did not stall the gnawing doubts within. They did not want to hang up. It was like being together, only more ethereal. When Janice cradled the telephone, a pleasant lassitude came over her. Talking with Elliot Hoover usually did that. She relaxed on the couch, nearly asleep, and it seemed that nothing on earth could disturb the deep pleasure of listening to the city move and breathe far away in the early evening.
But in Pittsburgh, Elliot Hoover could not sleep. He stared at the vermilion icons lost in the gloom of the bedroom, and he listened to the silence where Jennie had once slept in the adjacent room. It had been thirteen days since he had prayed. Something inside him had altered, frozen to stone.
Bill was right. He had not stood firm. He was corrupted. Utterly lost.
Hoover’s fingers went cold. He was divided now and he knew it. It brought upon him a peculiar fear of spiritual death. He was chained again, in the great cycle of being, in the passions of those who love and fear to lose. It made the night cold, even horrifying. The frost sparkled against the window glass, and the pane rattled in the bitter wind.
Woman made the life energy concentrate upon the body. And the body was the cage of the soul. Yet Hoover knew, staring into the cold night, lying naked on top of the bedcovers, that he was capable of preferring the unholy prison of earthly love to anything.
There were prayers, soft and insistent, but high in the sanitarium in New York. Bill was one with the night, its cold, its inhuman stars. He cherished the winds that battered the windows, for they were harbingers of liberty. He was disciplined now, enough to wait; only he did not want to wait beyond February.
“February,” he whispered.
February was the darkest month. It was the month the winter sucked children into its craw. February had been the end of the trail, he reflected. The month Ivy Templeton had stopped breathing. The month all her fibers, bone marrow, and flesh had turned to ash and smoke. But the darkness gave birth once again. He looked out the window. The frost against the darkness pleased him. The crystalline structure of universal forms, producing white perfection. Beyond, small lights glittered on the sound. Whether a bridge or ship he did not know. The vastness of night pleased him. It was another form of perfection, another harbinger of the greater liberty.
Far away the hospital staff made preparations for Christmas and New Year’s. Bill lay back on the bed, arms under his head, and smiled. The earth as it moved dragged along the accumulated karma of its billions of living beings. It impregnated the cosmos with sorrow. None but the very few dreamt of liberation as he did.
“February,” he murmured, like a prayer.
Soon it would be February again, as it had been before, and it would signal his time to reenter the world of the living… with Ivy.
26
Jennie recovered on Christmas day, spoke numbers on the telephone, which Bill heard with delight. By New Year’s, she and Bill tramped long circles in the snow behind the dormant rose garden. Jennie recognized him now by the scent of his after-shave lotion, and gravitated toward it.
The birthday party was scheduled for the afternoon of February third.
Janice accompanied Jennie from the elevator. The girl knew the way to Bill’s room, but she always hesitated, walking in big circles, before she entered. As usual, a bored orderly sat in a chair outside the door. Janice marveled at the brilliance of the room, festooned with flowers, small wooden carvings, and bright aluminum shapes.
“Come on in, darling,” Bill said, smiling, extending his arms to Jennie. “Happy Birthday!”
Janice watched Bill seat the girl on his knee. On the bed were gaily wrapped presents. Somehow it always hurt her to see Bill reduce himself to win the affection of a child who, by definition, could not love. Bill noted her pitying expression.
“You can leave,” Bill whispered. “If it disgusts you.”
“It doesn’t disgust me, darling.”
“Well, why don’t you just let us get on in private for a while?”
Janice sighed, watched for a while, and then went outside. The orderly looked up, smiled, then turned the page of his magazine.
Janice walked down the hall. At a small alcove at the end of the corridor was a large window, two dilapidated chairs, and a cigarette machine. She sat down. Generations of nervous relatives had scraped the floor, and no amount of wax and polish had covered it completely.
The warmth of a radiator made her remove her coat. The winter light was steady and even, a blank absence of color. It soothed the limbs, emptied the mind. Janice found herself observing the whitish mass of clouds through the window, a symbol of peaceful oblivion that she cherished.
February third, she thought. The day Ivy had died. Janice stirred uneasily. Birth and death were the same. The deity of creation was also the deity of destruction. Janice felt herself tighten up inside. The orderly was gone. The door to Bill’s room was closed. Janice stood, paced the floor, sat down, then stood up again.
Screams shook the building.
From Jennie!
Horror swept through Janice. She ran down toward Bill’s room at the far end of the corridor. The door was shut. The orderly was nowhere to be seen.
“Bill!” Janice shouted as she ran.
Inside, Jennie screamed. Hysterical, as though her arms and legs were being twisted off. Glass shattered. Pieces of metal smashed against the door.
“Bill!” Janice bellowed, arriving at the door just as the orderly appeared and, twisting the knob, burst into the room. Bill stood by a broken window, in the freezing wind sweeping from the icy marshes. Janice stared down at the debris of the room.
Broken toys, creamed cakes, and incense sticks lay mutilated over the floor. In the center of the floor, Jennie sat, red-faced in terror, head held back, mouth open in a demented scream.
Then Bill reached down, shook the child, and yelled, “Ivy! It’s Daddy!”
But the girl’s arms and legs banged up and down in a manic tantrum. The small face was unrecognizable. It was as though an electric current was being shot into her mouth. Her nostrils quivered, her eyes nearly rolled back, and she struggled for breath.
“She just went crazy, started throwing things,” Bill panted. “It was her birthday party.”
He turned to Jennie again. The orderly had bent down to the screaming child. Bill spun on one heel and threw the ball of his fist square into the meaty face.
“Leave her alone, bastard!” Bill roared.
The orderly, smashed against the remnants of the pine boughs, slid down onto fragments of glass.
“She’s mine! Mine!”
The orderly tasted the trickle of blood from his nose, shook his head and bellowed, “Mrs. Templeton! Find Dr. Geddes!”
Janice backed away, but Bill raised the desk lamp over his head and staggered forward.
“Don’t take her from me!”
The orderly walked bearlike to grapple with Bill. Bill kicked, spat, and punched, but the orderly absorbed it with stifled grunts.
“Hurry, Mrs. Templeton!”
Janice ran to the elevator, rode it down, and burst upon Dr. Geddes in the annex to Dr. Boltin’s room. Together they ran back to the elevator. As the door slid open, they heard Jennie’s screams.
In the room, the orderly had Bill pinned onto the bed, one wrist strapped to the
rail, but the blood flowed freely from the orderly’s nose and ear. Bill’s shoes kicked viciously, and an inarticulate howl mingled with Jennie’s.
“Give me a hand, will you?” the orderly wheezed.
Mechanically the orderly sat on Bill’s legs, holding a handkerchief to his nose. Dr. Geddes, trembling, looking at Bill’s face, then at Jennie, strapped the ankles down.
“Christ, this guy packs a wallop,” the orderly mumbled.
Bill felt his other wrist confined by inflexible leather. His body arched, then spasmodically writhed. Slowly a high-pitched whine came from his lungs, and his back fell to the bed, as though he had died there in front of them.
Dr. Geddes stared at Bill, then picked Jennie from the floor.
“What—what the hell happened?” Dr. Geddes stammered.
“It was all going so well,” Janice said. “Then Jennie started screaming.”
Dr. Geddes loosened the girl’s blouse. “She’s burning up!” He rocked her, but she did not stop screaming. “I’m taking her to the infirmary.”
He began to leave.
“Ivy!” Bill howled, a long, drawn-out wail that sent shivers up their backs.
Mucus ran from Bill’s nose. His head thrashed back and forth. Suddenly Janice burst into tears, lowered her head, and sobbed. Bill moaned, arched his back, and the long wail began again.
Janice ran into the corridor, caught up with Dr. Geddes just as the elevator doors opened. Under the bleak light inside, Jennie was shaking uncontrollably.
“Is she epileptic?” Dr. Geddes asked.
“I—don’t think so.”
In the infirmary, a quick injection stopped the convulsion. The frail body lay on a white cot. A nurse daubed the limbs and forehead with rubbing alcohol. Cold water filled a small basin, and Dr. Geddes undressed and lowered Jennie into it. The brilliant lights overhead threw wrinkled shadows, like goldfish, around the girl’s legs.
“Might just be a return of the fever,” Dr. Geddes said, bathing her gently.
“Oh, God, Dr. Geddes! He just blew apart!”
“Forget Bill, Mrs. Templeton. We thought we had him cured, but—”
“Please don’t say that….”
“It’s over. There’s no chance. I’m sorry. Just pray to whatever gods you and Mr. Hoover believe in that he didn’t harm the girl.”
A nurse gently toweled Jennie dry. Jennie’s cheek twitched occasionally, but the color had returned. Her eyes remained closed. Janice stared at the small, soft face, and it seemed as though the child merely slept soundly. The nurse carried Jennie off to the examining room.
Dr. Geddes slumped down in an overstuffed chair next to a cabinet of gauze bandages, steel scissors, and vials of clear liquid. His hands trembled.
He leaned back, closed his eyes so tight the lids tremored. Janice saw the tears emerge from the ravaged face.
“Why?” he whispered. “We were so close….So damn, damn close…”
Janice leaned against the white cot. She bit her lip in anguish, but there was nothing to say. The sight of Dr. Geddes in despair removed her last support. For a long moment they waited. Dr. Geddes kept his eyes closed, his head immobile. Then he stared uselessly at the ceiling.
The nurse and a physician stepped into the infirmary annex. The physician smiled and held up thumb and forefinger in a circle.
“Are you sure?” Dr. Geddes asked.
“He never touched her,” the physician said.
“Thank you.”
The nurse picked up Jennie’s clothes and went back to the diagnostic chamber. The physician made a few brief entries into the infirmary logbook. Dr. Geddes stood up, and he lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, avoiding Janice’s pleading eyes.
“What’s going to happen to Bill now?” she asked softly.
“He won’t be facing any judge, that’s for damn sure. He’s going to a nursing home. Same one I picked out a long time ago.”
Janice turned on her heel, went through the corridors to the elevator, and returned to Bill’s room.
The orderly had torn down what remained of the decorations. They were swept, along with the broken glass, into a pile in the corner. A rectangle of cardboard was jammed over the broken window. With the roll of tape held between his teeth, he secured the cardboard onto the sill.
Bill moaned softly. Janice pulled up a chair. Gently she smoothed his hair back, cleaned the flecks of dirt from his lip. The face, once again, was not his. It belonged to an animal, a caricature of the man who sought love so desperately, so unforgivingly.
“She remembered,” he mumbled. “I know she did.”
“I can’t hear you, Bill.”
She leaned over, her ear to his face. The warm breath of her husband muttered sibilant syllables.
“She remembered…. She remembered….”
“That’s all he says,” the orderly ventured.
For nearly ten minutes she tried to speak to Bill. But his lips worked over and over those vague sounds as though he himself no longer knew what they meant. Janice felt the tears coming, so she rose to go.
She gave the orderly ten dollars.
“I’m sorry he hit you,” she said. “Please be kind to him.”
“Right, ma’am. And thanks.”
Then Janice slowly left, went down to the infirmary, and took Jennie home.
Janice dressed Jennie in new pajamas and covered her with several blankets. Chills alternated with the fever. She had relapsed into the December illness.
“Five-five-five—”
Mechanically Janice brought a glass of water to the cot, helped Jennie drink, and was glad to see the small eyelids close again.
She telephoned Allegheny Airlines, reserved two seats for the early evening flight. She telephoned the clinic, but Hoover was at Temple University. Miserable, she hung up. Outside, the wind screeched up Sixty-seventh Street, banging potted plants over the sidewalks. A garbage can rolled over and over, echoing against cement.
“No-no-no-no—!”
Upstairs Jennie recited the numbers. Was it a string of zeroes, or was she refusing something? Hesitating, Janice went slowly up the stairs.
Jennie’s eyes were open, but they were glazed in tormented sleep.
“No-no-no-no—”
The glassy face looked as though it were in the throes of denial. Denying something from within.
Janice took her temperature. Just under 100 degrees. She looked at the clock. They had two hours to catch the flight.
“No-no-no—” Jennie whispered plaintively.
“Nobody’s going to frighten you ever again, darling.”
In thirty-five minutes, the taxi deposited them at La-Guardia Airport. Through the blackness swirled the lights of departing aircraft, livid behind the falling sleet.
The flight was delayed due to the storm. When it took off, an uncomfortable shiver shook the wings, and the passengers laughed nervously. In her arms, Jennie grew warmer. Janice took her to the lavatory and kept her face cool with wet paper towels.
Sleet turned to heavy snow, flailing past the red light at the wing tip. White particles out of nowhere, flashing, then disappearing to nowhere.
A bang of tires on hard cement, a second thud, a third, and then the plane decelerated and taxied carefully to the terminal.
This time Elliot Hoover stood at the bottom of the steps. He raised his hat in mute, worried greeting.
“They told me you were coming.”
He took Jennie in his arms, kissed her, but it was not until they nearly reached the terminal building that he saw the flush on her face.
“She looks ill,” he stammered.
“The fever. It’s come back. Elliot, I had to get her out of New York! Bill’s collapsed! He’s become a raving maniac! Dr. Geddes wants to lock him up and throw away the key!”
“This is terrible,” Hoover murmured. Jennie stirred in his arms.
“It was during the birthday party,” Janice continued stridently. “They were alone together in
his room. Jennie started screaming. Wouldn’t stop. By the time we entered the room, the whole place was a shambles and she wouldn’t stop screaming.”
Hoover swallowed. A wave of despair passed over his face.
“Did he say anything?”
Janice took a deep breath. “He said, ‘She remembered.’ Over and over, Elliot.”
Hoover sighed. The sorrow of the night was softened in the deep snow. The warehouses, coal cars, and stacks of iron pipes looked like fanciful sculptures. Only a few red lights blinked high on the water tower, and then the Ford stopped in front of the clinic.
“Let’s get her to the clinic.”
“Elliot. What’s happening?”
He put a gloved hand on hers. “I don’t know.” Then gently, “Come. Let’s take her home.”
Inside the clinic most of the children were in bed. Roy peered suspiciously from behind a bookshelf. The carpet was littered with toys, pictures torn from magazines, and pieces of crayon. A smell of wet wool permeated the halls.
Mr. Radimanath, surprised, stood up from the desk in Hoover’s office and came into the hall.
“Mr. Templeton has had a relapse,” Hoover said calmly.
Mr. Radimanath’s hand went to his mouth.
“Please listen. I want you to fix up Jennie’s room. She has a bad fever.”
With an anxious glance at Janice, then at Hoover, Mr. Radimanath shuffled rapidly to the stairs.
Hoover hung his coat on one of a small series of pegs. He took Jennie from Janice’s arms and felt the girl’s neck and forehead. Mrs. Concepcion peered in from the hallway leading to the kitchen.
“Rosa,” Hoover whispered, “could you prepare a hot drink for Jennie?”
“Right away, Mr. Hoover.”
Hoover turned Jennie’s face to him, smiled, and kissed the small forehead.
“No-no-no—” she murmured sleepily.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said, smiling.
Mrs. Concepcion returned with two cups of steaming broth. Shivering, Janice accepted a cup. Then Mrs. Concepcion spooned the broth gently into Jennie’s mouth and carried her upstairs to her room. The clinic’s quiet was broken by a low moan upstairs.
For Love of Audrey Rose Page 35
