I backed away, backed up against the coffins. Oh, Mommy, please …
“Elizabeth.” She whispered my name again. “Elizabeth.”
I kept turning this way and that. Trying to find her. I knew she was there. Her hair all tangled around her face like seaweed. Her eyes like glass, staring and staring at me. I knew. She was smiling. This soft, kind-of-dreamy smile. I couldn’t say anything. I just wiped the snot off my face with my sleeve and shook. My whole body shook and my teeth chattered.
But then—something happened. Mommy—my mother—she changed. Her voice changed, the sound of her voice. All of a sudden, it was … different. It was … it was more the way she was at the Sunshine School. When she would stand near the yard and watch the children play and she would call to them. She was nice, I mean. Her voice was nice and she said, “Don’t be afraid, Elizabeth. It’s me. I’m here.”
And it was funny. I mean, it was strange. It was her, it was her voice. But it was, like—it was Billy’s voice too. I mean, it was coming from the same place. It was, like, the same person speaking in different voices, sort of, inside my head, right in my ear. And the voice said, my mother said, she said very sweetly, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry, Elizabeth. You’re not alone anymore. I’m here. I’m your friend. From now on. I’ll be your secret friend.”
And I felt better after that, a little. I sat in the dark truck and I wasn’t so afraid. After a while, I even crawled around—crawled from place to place with the truck floor bouncing under me. I crawled around and looked more closely at the boxes. Each of them had a white tag taped to one end. There was a name typed on the tag and a number, and spaces for the dead person’s age and religion too. I read all the tags, looking for my mother’s name, but I couldn’t find it. At first, I thought maybe she wasn’t here and that maybe Katie Robinson was wrong about what they would do with her.
But then—then I saw one box—marked UNIDENTIFIED WHITE FEMALE. I can still see it so clearly in my mind: the name and the number typed in next to it, and then question marks in the age and religion spaces. I realized, that must be her. They must not have known her name because I wasn’t there to tell them. And that must be her and they’re taking her off to her funeral.
I laid my head on top of the coffin. I pressed my cheek against the rough wood. The truck bounced along and I hugged the box tightly. And the voice spoke to me out of the box.
“I’m with you, Elizabeth,” it said. “I’m still with you. I’m still in here.”
Jeepers creepers! thought Conrad. He nodded at her sympathetically.
The girl hugged herself gently, rocked herself, and smiled. “I’m with you,” she murmured again. Tears were still coursing down her cheeks. “I’ll always be with you.”
Conrad waited a moment until her chin sank down to her chest, until her tears slowed. Then he asked, “What happened next?”
Slowly, Elizabeth raised her eyes. She dried her cheeks with her palm. She let out a shuddering breath. “Oh, well … We drove and drove. It seemed like a very long time,” she said. “Then, I heard rumbling noises and voices … I think we must’ve been on a boat, on the ferry going out to the island. Finally, the man in the plaid shirt lifted the back door. The light was so bright. I had to hold my hand up in front of my eyes. And the man—he just started screaming. ‘Oh, Jesus! Holy Mother! Oh, God! Oh, God!’ I think he thought I was a ghost.”
At that, Elizabeth laughed. A strangely normal sound. Her cheeks flushed with her smile. Her hair rippled as she tossed her head. Watching her, Conrad felt his body stir. It made him ache to see that quick picture of the woman she might have been.
I’m still in here.
She went on, “Other men came running over. One of them, a white man, climbed into the truck and carried me down.
“We were in a dirt lot at the end of an old dock. The water was behind me, and in front of me, in the distance through some trees, I saw some gray barracks surrounded by barbed wire.
“There were more men now, crowding around me—mostly black men, wearing dark green clothes. And then there were a few white men too, only they were wearing white shirts and blue pants. The white men also had badges on their shirts, and they had holsters with big guns on their hips.
“All the men made a big fuss over me. They were prisoners—the men in the green suits, I mean—they were convicts from one of the city jails. They were the men who worked in the cemetery. They were the ones who buried the bodies of the poor people. The other men, the men with guns, were their guards.
“I told the men I had come to see my mother’s funeral. I explained that she was in the box marked ‘Unidentified White Female’ and I told them the number of it; I’d read it so many times during the trip I knew it by heart. The men sort of looked at each other. One man—this small white man with a round head and a funny-looking eye—I think he was the man in charge. His name was Eddie. He gave me to one of the other guards and he climbed into the truck for a while by himself. When he came out, he took me by the hand and led me to a tree at the edge of the lot. He told me to sit there and wait.
“I sat and watched as the prisoners unloaded the truck. They brought the big boxes out first, then the little carton-sized ones. Eddie wrote names and numbers on the side of each coffin. Then the prisoners loaded them onto another truck, a dump truck, and they drove them away down a small asphalt road. I waited under a tree. One of the guards waited with me.
“After a while, Eddie came back with the dump truck. He helped me into the cab and drove me down the little asphalt road too. On one side, the road went by the shore, a pebbly beach with the water lapping at it. On the other side, on the island, there were just trees, thick green trees all tangled with bushes and weeds and vines. Sometimes, I’d look over and see buildings set back there, old brick buildings set back behind the trees. They were abandoned. They had broken glass in their windows. They were peering out at me through the branches.
“And then the trees were gone. We came into an open dirt field. And I saw a ditch.
“It was a long trench with a pile of earth and broken weeds on one side of it. All the boxes had been put into it. They were piled up on each other, three at a time. Eddie told me that they had put my mother’s box right on top so I could see it. He stood next to me and held my hand and we watched as they covered the tops of the boxes with dirt.”
An image rose in Conrad’s mind: a memory of his dream. For just a second, he saw the mourning angel’s smile again. He saw the coffin opening. He rubbed his eyes, chasing the image away.
Elizabeth continued, “Eddie said some things. A prayer, I guess. He asked God to take good care of my mother because I must have loved her very much, he said, to come all that way out to Hart Island. And all the time he was talking, I was looking down at my mother’s coffin. And I was thinking … I was thinking that I was glad. I was glad that Billy had done what he’d done. Because now, you see, now Mother was nice. Mother was my secret friend now. Not like before when there were men and drugs and she was mean. Now she was nice. She would always be nice. Do you see?”
She gave a solemn nod. She fixed him with her eyes. She leaned forward in her chair as if to tell him a great secret. “That’s why the Secret Friend got so angry,” she whispered. “You see? My mother is better the way she is, much better. And if she came back, she might be mean again, and … and dirty the way she was before. The Secret Friend doesn’t want that. That must be why he cut that man, that Robert Rostoff. That’s why he cut him and … and cut him—his eyes and his neck and his chest; his face and his belly and his thing and …” She stopped herself. A breath came hissing out of her.
“I think …” Conrad had to clear his throat. He said, “I think that’s enough for now.”
Good Morning, Dr. Conrad
“I have to be honest with you: I just don’t have any answers.”
It was Friday evening now. Conrad was sitting again in what he had come to think of as The Painful Chair. Somehow, Sachs had managed to stee
r him to it again. The curved top rail was searing his shoulder blades. The hardwood seat was eating into his buttocks like red ants. Conrad kept shifting from one side to the other as if he were doing some sort of seated dance.
Across the desk from him, Sachs kept nodding his huge bald head. Almost as if he were listening, Conrad thought.
“First, with you, she won’t talk at all,” Conrad went on. “And then suddenly, in two sessions, she’s telling me everything. I mean, she’s laying out her whole background for me—schizo stuff, but you know, cogent in its own way. I … I just don’t know how much of it is true, how much is delusional—and how much, if any of it, is just a fake to get out of going to jail. I mean …” He sighed. “Lookit, Jerry. Given her case history, a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia seems unavoidable, okay? How much of the story about her mother is true …” He shrugged. “You got me. Again, my guess is, Elizabeth suffered a severe trauma at her mother’s death, which led to an early first break of the disease. As for getting locked in a truck with her mother’s coffin—well, it sure sounds like a fantasy to me, but … All I can say is that it accurately charts her fixations. She objectifies her own sexuality in terms of her mother’s body. And she refers to any attempt to arouse her sexually as an exhumation of her mother’s corpse—a plot to ‘take her mother out’ of the ground. And that seems in turn to stir up her rage at her mother’s failure to protect her from molestation—and so the rage materializes in terms of her dead parent returned finally to play the protector role: the Secret Friend.”
Sachs did some more solemn nodding. He pulled his glasses off the top of his head and gestured with them pompously. Conrad shifted his aching backside, praying for the end of this.
“Well, the big point here is whether she’s capable of standing trial,” Sachs said. “Is her memory good?”
“Yeah, it seems to be excellent. I’ve gotten her to repeat her stories, and the details are always the same. But her affect is all off, totally inappropriate; she’s got paranoid ideation coming out the ears … .”
Sachs leaned forward in his chair. “Can she assist in her own defense, Nathan?”
Conrad opened his mouth to answer, but something in Sachs’s demeanor—some eagerness—made him hesitate. Then, finally, he said, “No. Hell, no. She’s acutely schizophrenic, Jerry. Paranoid schizophrenic. That’s my diagnosis. No.”
“And you would testify to that?”
Again, Conrad hesitated. But then he said, “Yeah. Yeah, sure I would. I mean, she can’t stand trial. There’s no way.”
That was obviously the answer the director of Impellitteri wanted. He leaned back in his tall—his soft—recliner. He slipped his glasses back on his great domed head. He clasped his hands on his great domed belly. A pink smile played at the corner of his wide mouth. “Good,” he said. “Good.”
Conrad just couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up. He let out his breath as the blood rushed into his aching posterior. “Well … I’ve got to go but …”
Sachs practically jumped to his feet. He extended a hand the size of a hamhock. “Well, great work, Nate,” he said. “The great Nate, that’s what we’ll call you.” Conrad winced as his own hand was squeezed in the enormous paw. “I mean, the thing is, the girl has really come to trust you, hasn’t she? She’s talking to the aides a little. She’s taking her medication, eating well. Next thing you know you’ll have yourself a little romantic transference neurosis going on, you’ll be in fat city.” He laughed and slapped Conrad’s arm. “She’s a pretty one, Nate,” he said.
Before Conrad could answer, Sachs had his heavy arm around his shoulders and was quickly propelling him toward the door.
Next thing you know you’ll have yourself a little romantic transference neurosis going on, you’ll be in fat city. She’s a pretty one, Nate.
God, Conrad thought, the man is unspeakable.
He drove his little Corsica across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, heading back toward Manhattan. The clustered skyscrapers of Midtown gleamed in front of him out of the gathering dark. Cars went by him, whooshing at the open window.
A little romantic transference neurosis …
God, God, God.
He drove straight through the dodging traffic. He clung to the right lane. He gazed at the taillights swinging and weaving ahead of him. The cold autumn air played over his face. He thought about Elizabeth.
He had spoken to her every day that week. On Tuesday, he had once more shuffled appointments in order to go see her. On Thursday, he’d done it again. He had listened as Elizabeth talked about her childhood. About orphanages and foster homes. About tough children who taunted and beat her. And about the voices that called to her though no one else could hear.
And he had listened as she talked about the Secret Friend, about the things the Secret Friend had done.
There was the incident at the Manhattan Children’s Center, for instance. Elizabeth had been lonely there, the way she had been at home. She held whispered dialogues with Billy, the red-haired boy from the imaginary Sunshine School. Billy had grown older now, just as she had. His personality, however, had apparently not changed very much.
There had been a black girl at the Center who bullied Elizabeth—or so Elizabeth said. The black girl had made Elizabeth do some of her chores and had stolen some of her food. One day, the black girl threatened to make Elizabeth submit to what she called “feelies.” That made Billy—the Secret Friend—mad. Billy stole a knife from the cafeteria. He attacked the bully-girl that night and slashed open her cheek. Elizabeth was eleven at the time. According to a report in her files, it had taken four adult male custodians to wrestle her down and get the knife out of her hand.
Another time, one of the custodians had tried to slip into Elizabeth’s bed at night. Elizabeth said that the Secret Friend had turned into a lion and pounced on him. By the time the lion could be subdued, the custodian’s face was a mask of blood. The Center’s report said bits of his flesh were caught between Elizabeth’s teeth.
As for the Dutch sailor, Elizabeth’s dead mother had returned to teach him a lesson:
She broke both his arms and stomped one of his testicles to pudding. It took three cops to pull her off the guy.
Conrad had listened to all these stories. He had spent a good deal of time thinking about them, reading the girl’s files. He had tried to separate the reality from the delusions and hallucinations. But his mind kept wandering. He kept thinking about other things. The sound of Elizabeth’s voice. The look of her.
She was becoming a little more animated around him now. She no longer spoke in that blank singsong all the time. Occasionally, it gave way to her own smoky murmur. And occasionally, she laughed. And when she laughed, her high white cheeks turned pink and her green eyes glittered. The sound of her, the sight of her like that, made his breath catch.
She’s a pretty one, Nate.
Every time he drove to Impellitteri, he hoped he would hear her, see her that way: murmuring, laughing.
You’re in fat city.
And he had dreamed about her again. On Wednesday night. He had dreamed she was standing in the doorway of a house. She beckoned him and he went toward her. As he neared, he saw that it was the house that he had grown up in. He knew there was something terrible in the house, but he kept going forward anyway. She withdrew inside and he knew he had to follow her. But before he reached the door, he woke up. His heart was hammering. His pillow was drenched with sweat.
Then, the next day, Thursday, yesterday, he had had a fantasy. He’d been wide-awake when he had it. He was with a patient, in fact: Julia Walcott. Julia was in the armchair, talking about the amputation of her leg. Conrad was breathing steadily, completely tuned in to what she was saying. And then he wasn’t. He was thinking about Elizabeth. He was thinking about her lying naked on a bed. Her white arms were reaching up toward him. She was grateful to him for curing her. She wanted to show how grateful she was. “Don’t you want to touch me?” she whispered. Conrad had ha
d to battle hard to get his mind back on Mrs. Walcott.
Now, in his car, he shifted uncomfortably. Remembering the fantasy, he was getting an erection.
The Corsica came off the bridge, turned into the crush of cars on Second Avenue. Conrad reached out quickly and turned the radio on. He listened to the news as he drove the rest of the way home.
When Conrad came into his apartment, he found Agatha sitting at the dining room table. She was bowed forward unhappily. Her auburn hair was spilling down. She was supporting her head in her two hands.
“Maa-meee …” A despairing little wail drifted through the nursery wall behind her.
“Sweetheart, go to sleep,” said Agatha. She said it through her teeth.
“But I can’t sleep,” said Jessica tearfully.
“Then close your eyes and lie quietly,” Aggie said more gently. It was a good imitation of patience, Conrad thought.
Conrad closed the door. Agatha looked up and saw him. “Oh, thank God, the cavalry,” she said. Conrad managed a smile. “Would you please go in there and murder our child? We have been doing this for the past hour and a half.”
Conrad nodded wearily. He set his briefcase on the floor and headed into Jessica’s room.
The nursery was Agatha’s masterpiece. She had painted it beautifully. The walls were sky blue. There was a rainbow painted on one, a crystal palace on another. Clouds and unicorns all around. The walls grew darker toward the ceiling. The ceiling itself was night black. It was studded with stars and the faint, ghostly outlines of constellations.
Just under these stars lay Jessica. She was atop the loft bed, level with Conrad’s chin. When he came in, she was lying curled up on her side. Her Big Bird quilt was in a tangle at her feet. She was wearing a pink nightgown and had a pink stuffed turtle tucked under her arm. It was a Turtle Tot, as Conrad recalled, and it was named Moe. Jessica was hugging Moe hard. She had a frown on her face. She had tears brimming in her eyes.
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