For Love of Audrey Rose

by Frank De Felitta

  “You see?” Hoover said after a while. “Nothing changes here.”

  Janice looked anxiously out the window. Fat flakes continued to fall. The sills were blocked up with snow.

  “The roads will be closed by morning,” Hoover said. “At least two feet. That’s what the radio forecast.”

  Janice sipped the soup, fondling the cup. The trembling did not go, even though she was finally warm. She put her coat across a child’s desk and leaned wearily against the wall. The stairwell light went off. After several minutes the upstairs lights went off. A thin outline of luminosity rimmed Hoover’s forehead.

  “Good night, Mr. Hoover,” came Mrs. Concepcion’s voice from above.

  “Good night, Mrs. Concepcion. Thank you.”

  “Good night, Mr. Hoover,” followed Mr. Radimanath’s voice.

  “Good night and peace to you, Mr. Radimanath.”

  Another light went off. Hoover slumped against the wall, head down, massaging his face.

  “What next, Janice?” he whispered.

  She walked to him slowly. He felt her presence, but did not move.

  “I’ve tried everything,” he said hoarsely. “I’ve given everything I have. Everything.”

  She put a hand against his neck, gently pressed on the knotted muscles, slowly eased the tension there.

  “Poor Elliot,” she whispered ironically, and yet afraid that she was all too correct. “I’ve ruined you, haven’t I?”

  “Saved me, Janice. You saved me. That’s the miracle.”

  Suddenly his cold finger traced a curve against her cheek.

  “Miracle,” he whispered gently. “So utterly miraculous.”

  She hesitated, then let him come forward. It made her feel real again. The silence was an ally, not a horror. Janice waited, and, like the falling snow, was content to be moved by the night.

  “An extraordinary woman,” he whispered, in all-consuming awe.

  She closed her eyes and rested against him. She felt his heart beat through his shirt. A fragrance of lotion filled her nostrils.

  “Elliot, I’ve been so lonely.”

  She moved, and her breasts were warm under his palms. He pressed against her until her back pushed up against the wall.

  “Not here. Mr. Radimanath may come.”

  But whatever he whispered back, she caught only the urgency of it. Her back was pressed hard against the wall. His breath was hot against her ear. Her fingers hesitated, then clutched at the back of his neck.

  The urgency of his entry surprised her. The violence of his insatiable need. She faltered, holding him at the wall, in the darkness. But then there was a soft, slow explosion within her belly, and she gasped, and she felt limp as a rag doll. It seemed to go on forever, exhausting her, until everything stopped, and she hung on to him for dear life itself.

  “Oh God,” she whispered after a dizzy moment.

  “Janice, darling Janice…”

  “Oh—I feel so—Oh, God…”

  She hung on to his neck, leaning on his chest. He rocked her gently side to side, as though they danced. Partially dressed still, their hair and faces passed in and out of the glow cast by the streetlamps and the snow. She felt soft inside, transformed, and she pressed her body closer to his, though her mind remained troubled. For the wages of sin, she knew, was death.

  “Hold me, Elliot. Don’t ever let me go!”

  Gently he rocked her, and his large hands rested against her back and neck.

  The snow stopped. Darkness gleamed from the recesses of the neighborhood. Janice leaned, breasts against his chest, so that he might love her again. The rising and falling of his breathing comforted her. Against the window, she had descended, at long last and painfully, into a different kind of night.

  27

  Bill lay on his cot. His wrists chafed against leather restraints. Turning his head, he perceived the rotund outline of the orderly by the window. A vicious storm of sleet and jagged ice pellets beat against the cardboard taped there.

  “Untie me,” Bill mumbled.

  “Have to get two more orderlies if I do,” replied the man without looking up. “And we ain’t got nobody to spare.”

  Bill let his neck rest, the muscles strained, and his head rolled back on the mattress.

  “Untie me, for God’s sake,” he repeated.

  The orderly turned a page in his magazine.

  Then the storm brought a bulge at the cardboard. Wet stains showed in long striations. The orderly shivered and drew his white shirt tight about his throat.

  “You’re damn lucky you didn’t ruin her,” the orderly said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Child molesters rot in here. Take it from me. That’s the one kind of pervert never gets out of here.”

  “I didn’t molest her.”

  “Sure you didn’t.” The orderly turned a page of the magazine. “Goddamn kook.”

  Bill stared at the ceiling. The room was going cold, and only a light from the hall glinted off the metal shapes inside. Bill did not know why the window was broken, why there were no lights, only assumed that he had smashed them somehow. He closed his eyes.

  “I need her,” he whispered. “She was all I had.”

  “Then you shulda kept your fingers off her.”

  “I never touched her!”

  “Keep your voice down!”

  Bill’s head arched upward, his neck throbbing.

  “She remembered! That’s why she started screaming! She remembered what happened in Darien!”

  “Calm down!”

  Bill glared at the obsequious, immovable man at the desk chair, then settled back to the mattress.

  “I saw it in her eyes,” Bill whispered. “It was a kind of horrible memory…. But it came too fast for her. Much too fast. It frightened her.”

  The orderly yawned, checked his watch, and rubbed his eyes. There were footsteps in the hall. Eager for company, the orderly went to the door, poked his head out, and engaged two other orderlies in a bantering conversation. One was tall and black, the other equally tall, but with a limp that made him look diminutive. A pint of whiskey made the rounds. In the darkness there was the sound of cards shuffled.

  Bill shivered in the cold that seeped into the room.

  For thirty minutes the orderlies played poker and drank. The dimes and quarters glinted in the dim hallway. The whiskey bottle went empty, and was carefully hidden behind a radiator. A groan emerged from Bill’s room.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” said the first orderly.

  He rose and lurched into Bill’s room. Bill smelled whiskey-laden breath just over his face in the darkness, and felt the straps being removed from his wrists and ankles.

  “Now you be good,” the orderly warned. “I’ll leave you loose for ten minutes, so make the most of it.”

  Bill flexed his wrists, but the sensation of constriction remained. Slowly he rubbed his wrists and then reached down to massage his ankles. He was too tired to sit up, and lay back again on the blanket.

  The orderly’s large hand tapped him lightly on the chest.

  “Behave yourself. We ain’t in no mood to be interrupted. You hear?”

  Bill nodded.

  “What’s that you say?”

  “I hear you, I said.”

  “Goddamn right you do.”

  The orderly lurched back to his game. For a while the coins clinked onto the glazed wooden surface. Bill shivered and crawled from under the blanket. He rose to his feet unsteadily, his senses keened, and tiptoed to the door.

  For fifteen minutes the orderlies played cards. Their curses became more frequent, more amiable. Their laughter was stifled with difficulty.

  “Roy, did you lock the door?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Are you sure, Roy?”

  “Sure of what, fat man?”

  “The goddamn door, and watch your language.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Go check it, Roy.”


  With annoyance, the orderly went to the door and gave a violent pull. It opened.

  “Jesus Christ,” he shouted. “You’re sure you done something and it turns out you ain’t done it.”

  Alarmed by his tone, his two companions quickly joined him. In the density of their drunkenness they stared at the bed. The rumpled forms coalesced into a human shape, then receded into a mixture of pillow, mattress, and blankets. With a sudden lurch all three orderlies jumped toward the bed. The black orderly’s hands threw the blankets high into the air, onto the floor.

  “He’s gone!”

  “Jesus Christ! He jumped!”

  They ran to the window, laboriously stripped away the cardboard and peered down in the storm. The hospital lights illuminated a small patch of white snow below, obscured in the driving sleet.

  “Do you see him?”

  “There’s something dark on the snow—I can’t tell.”

  The sleet drove down, almost horizontal to the ground. The lights were small bulbs of opaque light in the dizzying storm. The ground was caked in ice, and the whistling wind covered the sound of a man’s feet over the frozen earth.

  Bill wore a long black overcoat, stolen from a closet on the first floor. It stretched from his shoulders clear down to his knees; an expensive, severely styled black coat with thin strips of fur along the collar and down the lapel. His feet were still in slippers, and they slipped painfully over the ice.

  Bill thought he saw a smaller figure emerge from the sanitarium, limping under the small globes of light. He ducked his head and ran south, cutting across the parking lot. A man’s voice called out to him.

  “Dr. Henderson!”

  Panicked, Bill whirled, lost his balance, and nearly fell. Two enormous headlights swirled slowly toward him out of the darkness, blinding him. He held his hand in front of his face. The door of a taxi opened.

  “Here, Dr. Henderson, climb in.”

  In the distance, a limping figure made its way under the windows of the dormitory wing of the building. His feeble arms were waving.

  Bill scrambled quickly into the cab.

  “Sorry,” laughed the cab driver, “but I had my lights off. You couldn’t see me but I spotted you.”

  Bill craned his neck backward through the rear window. He saw an orderly running toward them, losing ground.

  “Hell, I’d recognize that black coat anywhere, Dr. Henderson,” the driver chuckled.

  Under the gentle noise of the radio, Bill heard the sound of the wheels spinning out of control, digging down to the asphalt beneath the ice. The taxi went slowly sideways in a great arc, then straightened and skidded slowly ahead.

  “It’s a lot better on the main road. Pisser of a night, isn’t it?”

  Bill coughed. He felt the severe chill penetrating the overcoat, through to his legs covered only with thin pajamas. He felt nothing at all in his feet. Dimly he saw them and thought they had turned blue. Ice melted very slowly from his ankles, sliding off in crinkling little cakes of light.

  The taxi swerved, jolted, and finally found traction. The sanitarium very gradually glided past them. Bill ducked as far back into the seat as he could, and he kept his face averted from the driver. For several minutes they drove in silence, and the storm buffeted the car, while the driver wrestled it back to control.

  Bill stared wide-eyed at the vision of the night. Headlights swarmed in his mind. It had been a lifetime since he had seen the manic jaws of civilization so close about him. From time to time he saw his own reflection in the dark panes, pale as dirty snow, the eyes deep in sockets of shadow, like two tiny animals hiding in caves.

  “You’re going the wrong way!” Bill shouted.

  “You’re not going home to Glen Cove?” the driver asked, surprised.

  “Manhattan!”

  The driver noted a different inflection in the voice than the one he was used to. He peered in the rearview mirror. Bill huddled in his coat and did not look up, but shrank against the door, in the shadow where the driver could barely see. The driver shrugged.

  “To the city, then,” the driver mumbled, changing lanes.

  The taxi fought its way back around a jug-handle, then up a ramp, and bumper to bumper with traffic on a single lane. Flashing red lights everywhere revealed the touch of a thousand brakes on the slippery road. Then they were moving west again.

  The taxi picked up speed, occasionally slipping on ice patches. The city was a hallucination of glimmering yellow and red lights, streaks of blinking neon in the black, and clouds livid with painfully bright reflections.

  The driver set his lips hard and fought his way down into the Queens Midtown Tunnel, dipping and rising toward the main heart of Manhattan. He leaned back. Heading north on the East Side Drive, the driver glanced in the rearview mirror.

  “Where exactly did you want to go?”

  “Des Artistes.”

  The driver screwed up his face.

  “Where?”

  “Home!”

  “Home?”

  The driver turned. His eyes widened.

  “Hey, you ain’t Dr. Henderson!”

  A violent screech of brakes, horns, and shouts snapped his head back to the slapping windshield wipers. The cab skidded to the center divider, bounced lightly off it, and regained its momentum as Forty-second Street momentarily came into view.

  “I ain’t go no money,” breathed the driver quickly, his eyes darting back and forth. “See that sign? Driver carries no more than five bucks change—”

  “Des Artistes!” Bill roared, leaning suddenly forward.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, mister!”

  “Home!”

  “You’re a goddamn loony! That’s what you are! I’m taking you right back to the asylum!”

  The cab skidded onto the Forty-second Street off-ramp, the driver pressed on the accelerator, the tires whined, spat snow in a long arc behind them, and then Bill reached through the small opening in the glass wall that divided driver from passenger, and grabbed the driver’s hair. With a murderous yank, he jerked the driver’s head backward.

  In incoherent rage and frustration, Bill beat the driver’s head back against the glass divider, then bit the man’s finger until red spurted into his mouth.

  “Help! Help!” the driver yelled, arms flailing, his legs kicking wildly, smashing into the dashboard.

  The taxi began to decelerate, finally crashing into the car ahead at a traffic light. Immediately there was an angry snarl of car horns. Bill looked around wildly. It seemed all of New York poured its alien, annihilating light directly at his heart. In a single, terrible lunge, he was out in the cold, white as a rabbit, stock-still in the middle of the street.

  The driver came out, holding his ear, wobbling, pointing at Bill.

  “Grab him! He’s a maniac!”

  Bill leaped across the snow that divided the road, slipped, and somersaulted in the black overcoat over the ice. His hands emerged bleeding. He picked himself up, and ran in his iced and torn slippers into the heart of the crowds and flashing, swirling lights.

  He ran down Forty-second Street, away from the tangle of red flashes, shouts, and glistening roads.

  The swirling storm turned to blankets descending in soft folds. Traffic was stalled. Disgusted, police stood by patrol cars.

  Pedestrians walked around Bill as he ran from the reflection of his own form in dark windows. Slipping, his ragged slippers torn in half, he went sprawling into a filthy snowdrift.

  “Here you go, friend. Up and easy.”

  Two strong hands grabbed him under the elbow.

  Bill looked into the eyes of two priests. They backed away from the intensity of his stare.

  “Dr. Geddes?”

  “What’s that? You want a doctor?”

  Bill stumbled backward, frightened, tore himself away, retreating down Forty-second Street. He ran into the lights that poked holes in the darkness, glittered through the falling snow. Evil followed him
everywhere, and he looked back over his shoulder.

  Bill reached an enormous structure that exhaled warmth. It smelled like New York. Gritty, sweaty, oily. Something seemed to click into place. Cautiously, he walked down the stairs, went through large glass doors, and looked around at the rolling, incessant crowds under brilliant lights.

  It was Grand Central Station. Bill smiled. He had been here before. In another incarnation. Bewildered, he ducked away from the vents that roared at him with hot air. A group of sailors jostled him. Businessmen pushed him out of their way. A teenager shot past him with a radio blaring rock.

  Instinct led him to a kind of bright tunnel. There was a series of urinals. Trembling, he relieved himself. Then he examined his feet. They were soaked, dirty, bleeding, and the toes tingled ominously, as though the flesh was barely alive. He tucked the black overcoat carefully over the pajamas and went to the shoeshine stand in a lobby.

  A crippled black boy bent over shining black shoes on metal forms.

  Bill waited until the last man left the washbasins, then he went to the stand, grabbed the shoes, and ran.

  “Hey—What the hell are you doing?” the cripple yelled.

  Bill escaped into the crowd.

  He was lost in Central Park. He stopped. The snow was cold and wet on his bare feet, shivering within the black shoes. But he recognized the park. The configuration of black trees, paths, and the hillock over the rowing lake. It triggered primitive memories. Carefully he retraced his steps, then struck out over virgin fields of white.

  “Ivy,” he whispered happily.

  Nobody heard him. The streets were deserted. New York at night was a study of black recesses in dull white. Snow filled the crevices of soot and oily asphalt. Bill sensed a maze of bizarre patterns gliding by, but he kept his head down, following his black shoes. They knew where to go.

  Disoriented now, he walked very carefully. He distrusted each side street that opened up—a truncated vista of fire escapes, back doors, stone steps.

  “Ivy!” he called.

  But the voice died away. The city absorbed all sounds. Slowly he continued toward the north.

  Silently, the soul that had been frightened peered out through the eyes of Bill Templeton. He saw Des Artistes. He stopped. That, certainly, had not changed. It haunted him, that image of a different life. It sent out unpleasant signals in the darkness and cold.