John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "Okay, you were just asking. What I have, I guess, is a kind of dumb reluctance to go back North. When I go back up there, Lindy will be missing out of the life I had up there. I was never with her down here. But the longer I stay down here, the tougher it is on Janie. This is... there's a word for it... oh, a hiatus. I was thinking last night, maybe I could make some kind of long-term arrangement down here. Get a private phone line, and put in a personal computer and a modem and stay in touch with the markets. And maybe go get Janie and bring her down. I wouldn't be getting all the daily gossip and rumor, but maybe that's just as well. I've never needed a lot of people around."

  "But you'll have to go back."

  "Sooner or later. Sure. But I'm not going to force anything. I just have the feeling there is something I am going to find out about Lindy, by being here. And maybe Janie has to be told what really happened."

  She had to speak up to be heard over a louder roar of the rain.

  "I wish I could get out of here."

  "You don't like it here?"

  She made an all-encompassing gesture.

  "This is all we got, Fred and me. We can scratch a living, but I don't know for how long. Trying to sell it would be like giving it away. Look at all the spots on the arm of this chair. And the burn. It makes me feel helpless because it keeps on going downhill, with no money ever to catch up. I ought to have the guts to walk away from it. But Fred's the only family I've got left. He loves to putter. This old place will just keep on sliding downhill. All the action is the other side of the Interstate." She scowled.

  "Basically, I guess I just don't like this kind of work. And they say that when you don't like what you do, you get cranky and you get lines and you get older faster. I look at myself and I look a lot older than thirty-one."

  "No boyfriends?"

  "Don't patronize me, Roy. I married a real charmer. And it got annulled, for reasons I won't go into, except to say I wasn't the one at fault. Got the good old maiden name back. Who needs to be Peggy Endelbarger anyway? I met him over at the State University and got married and dropped out in the middle of my junior year."

  "I wasn't patronizing you. I was trying to sound friendly."

  She smiled.

  "So, okay. We're friends. Maybe all I'm trying to do is tell you that there doesn't seem to be any place anybody can go and find the best of all possible worlds. Okay?" She jumped up and went over to the window.

  "That office phone is probably ringing its fool head off. Fred won't hear it from the next room. He's getting a little bit deaf. It's letting up a little."

  "Not noticeably."

  "There's a roof most of the way, and I've got this plastic."

  After she had fashioned it into a cape, she looked solemnly at him and said, "Whatever you want, I hope it comes out okay for you."

  "Thanks, Peggy."

  He had wanted to say the same sort of thing to her, but before he could word it, she was out the door. The wind helped bang it shut. She trotted along, head lowered, clutching the cape, the used linens under her arm. She went out of sight off to his left and then reappeared heading out the left arm of the 17 toward the office. She ran well, he thought. Lithe and limber.

  It happened to people, he thought. Like the little eddies you find in a trout stream, where some leaves get caught there and will go around and around and around until the next heavy rain breaks them free. People have such a reluctance to change their lives even when they know they should try. He could not imagine how great the misery must be for people to spend their entire working life doing something that bored them and irritated them. Maybe, he thought, that was in part the reason for the success of the Eternal Church of the Believer and all the other evangelical sects which had sprung up lately. It was a way out of a life of dreariness and despair. It made them part of some great shiny thing that overshadowed their workday, and gave them a source of both pride and a kind of humble arrogance. I am forever saved and you are forever damned.

  Hooray for me.

  The Reverend Sister Mary Margaret Meadows sat in the living room of her suite on the third floor of the Manse, listening intently to the specialist on Alzheimer's disease who had flown over from London at her request, and with John Tinker's approval. They had sent one of the Gulfstreams to pick him up at Kennedy the night before, and had brought him back ahead of the storm front and domiciled him in the Manse. He was a tall plump man with a long bald narrow head, a tiny white goatee and glasses with yellow lenses. His name was Winton Narramore, and she had filed the name under the mnemonic clues Winton for Winston, Narramore for Narrow-more. He spoke in a rumbling monotone which made it difficult for her to concentrate.

  The room was decorated in pink, white and maroon and the windows looked out toward the slope of the cemetery hill behind the Manse. She was wearing a long white dress patterned with pink, and she reclined on a chaise. He sat on a straight chair near the foot of the chaise.

  "What we should do, I think," she said, 'is I will tell you what I think you told me, and you can correct me."

  "Of course."

  "With various methods you can actually see the plaques and tangles of dead and dying nerves in the brain."

  "Yes. In quite a few of the cases, more frequently in the more advanced ones."

  "Only five percent of people over sixty-five in this country and England ever get senile dementia."

  "Yes, but we have seen Alzheimer's in rare cases in the late thirties and early forties, and we have increasing evidence that there can be some genetic predisposition to the disease."

  "Signals go along nerves by electrical means, but where two nerves meet, the signal is chemical. The transmitting nerve releases a package of... of..."

  "A packet of neurotransmitters that bind it to the receptors on the nerve nearby. And the nerves specialize, apparently, with some able to dispatch and receive only specific neurotransmitters. One such chemical is acetylcholine."

  "All right. I have that. Now then, you said a certain enzyme makes the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. And in autopsies on people like my father, you find the enzyme very, very reduced in the brain tissue."

  "Yes."

  "And the problem is with the transmitting nerves and not with the receptor nerves?"

  "That is correct. Or at least up until now that is what we have come to believe."

  "Then why can't you get that enzyme into his brain somehow?"

  "Madam, it has been tried in England and in West Germany.

  The results have been almost imperceptible. Alzheimer's seems to be the result of the death of the cholinergic nerve cells deep in the brain below the cortex, way down in the medial septal nucleus, the diagonal band of Broca and particularly in the nucleus basal is of Meynert."

  "I can't remember all that."

  "There's no need for you to remember. What I am telling you is that we have taken the first few tiny steps toward what could be, someday, a solution just as we use L-dopa to improve the production of the neurotransmitter dopamine in Parkinson's disease. It is not my wish to crush your hopes for your father, but I would say, after a brief examination, that he has deteriorated too much for any hope of improvement. The dead nerves will not regenerate. I would guess that fifteen or twenty years from now we might be able to give perceptible help to people in the first stages of Alzheimer's."

  "What will happen to him?"

  Narramore shrugged.

  "Any remaining motivation and drive will decline. There will be a severe blunting of affect, to the extent you may well see a shallow, famous euphoria. It is an atrophic process, and will end with a catatonic lack of response, incontinence and the need for constant nursing care."

  "When?"

  "From the history you have given me, I would suspect he also has some multi-infarct dementia which has hastened the decline. I would estimate eighteen months to two years before he reaches a total blunting, a vegetative state."

  She closed her eyes tightly for a few moments, and then asked him, "Would
a million dollars donated to your research efforts enable you to help Matthew Meadows in any way?"

  "It's a great deal of money."

  The Gulfstream III which brought you down here from New York cost fourteen million dollars, Doctor."

  "It would be very difficult for us to put an immediate one million dollars to effective use. We are way out at the far limits of a very esoteric area of research. We are dissecting brains which show a marked atrophy, with dilated ventricles and wide sulci. We use chemical analysis on the neurofibrillary tangles and the senile plaques, and also on those portions of the brain which seem to have remained in reasonable condition. At the same time we are following the progress of the disease in dozens of patients, administering tests, measuring behavior. We do not yet know the most basic fact, why brain cells are being lost. A million dollars would help, yes. It would be tucked away and the interest on it would enable us to train some young interns. But it would not give us any way to help your father. One hundred million dollars would not enable us to slow the destruction of the cells of his brain." He smiled in a sad way." Your generosity makes it very tempting to lie to you."

  "When he dies, Doctor, and when it can be made public what he died of, then I will see that you get a sizable grant for your work, provided you use his name in some way to identify it."

  "That's very generous. I am grateful."

  "I'm grateful to you for your straight talk, Doctor. I think we will be able to keep on taking care of him here."

  "He will need nursing care twenty-four hours a day."

  "That won't be a problem."

  He hesitated.

  "I am probably stepping beyond the bounds of proper medical advice, but I can see how deeply this affects you." He tapped his temple with a forefinger.

  "The identity of a human being lies inside the skull. His personality, hopes, dreams, capacities for love and affection, everything that makes up the whole person. As the brain dies as his is dying the identity fades. He becomes someone else. When you are with him and try to think of him in the old terms, in the way he once was, you only punish yourself for no good reason, and you confuse that new limited being which has taken over his brain. The father you knew is dead."

  "My father will live forever in heaven!" she said in the voice that could fill the Tabernacle.

  He gave a little start of surprise and said, "Of course, of course." He stood up.

  "I would like to get back as soon as possible."

  "Nothing is going to take off in this. Not until late tomorrow, I'd guess. But we'll do the best we can. Thank you again.1 A moment after he left, the lights flickered and she knew that the power had failed and the Meadows Center generators had cut in almost instantaneously. She wept.

  Rick Liddy sat behind his big walnut slate-top desk in his small concrete office on the ground floor of Communications and watched Eliot Erskine take off his transparent raincoat and shake the drops off it onto the gray carpet before hanging it up.

  "Frog strangler out there," Liddy said.

  "Radio says nine inches in Lakemore since ten this morning. That comes to near two inches an hour."

  During the three years Erskine had worked for Liddy, the two men had arrived at a moderately comfortable relationship. They were both loners, both dedicated to the law, both intent on keeping fit. They often worked out together at the University gym. They both liked neatness, liked the ends tied firm and tight. And they both sometimes wished they were back in actual law enforcement even at lower pay and less comfortable living conditions. They trusted each other, as much as they were capable of trusting anyone.

  Erskine had asked for the appointment with such formal ceremony that Liddy knew it was important. Before he sat down facing Liddy, Erskine put a canvas zipper bag on the desk with such care that Liddy knew it contained whatever the hell Erskine wanted to talk about.

  Beyond Erskine, on the wall twelve feet away, was a large map of the Meadows Center areas, with all the security areas and stations marked in different color codes.

  This could take a little time," Erskine said.

  "Who's going anywhere? I told the girl to hold the calls."

  "In the last week in January, Rick, you put me on what I guess you could call part-time detached service to the Reverend F. Walter Macy. You told me you didn't know what it was about, but Macy wanted me to keep it to myself. Which I have. Until now. You told me that if what he wanted me to do interfered with my regular duties, I should come to you. I was able to handle it okay."

  "Has Walter Macy released you to talk to me?"

  "No, sir. It's just that I think I should."

  Rick Liddy leaned back and frowned at Erskine. Liddy was a ruddy and muscular man with stone eyes and black hair parted precisely in the middle. Silence is at times a useful way of asking a question.

  "I think I finished the job he asked me to do," Erskine said, 'and I just don't see the point in keeping on with it. He's not going to get any more than he's got already."

  "And you do know, Elly, that Macy is number one in line after the brother and sister. In one sense we're both working for him."

  "Rick, I just don't know how to explain why I thought it was time to come to you unless I show you this stuff. There's another thing, too. Walter Macy ordered me not to keep any copies of anything. But when I realized what he wanted, I knew I had to save my own ass by saving at least some of it."

  "Up until now, I've trusted your judgment," Liddy said.

  "The way it all began, the way Walter told me it began, it seems that right after Christmas there was some kind of foul-up on the phone lines and he heard John Tinker Meadows making some kind of date with a woman, time and place unknown. He tried to find out about it on his own, but he was afraid John Tinker would discover that Walter was trying to tail him. So he got you to assign me, without telling you what he wanted me to do."

  "So you tailed John Tinker Meadows. That's really beautiful."

  Erskine unzipped the canvas case and took out a sheaf of color prints. He came around the desk saying, "I did the lab work myself, of course. Made extra prints of some of them, and turned the others and the negatives over to Doctor Macy.

  It took me three or four weeks to unravel it. It was kind of delicate work, because they hole up in a pretty remote spot.

  Here is a photograph of the old white double-wide trailer. The two cars are parked over there to the left of the picture beyond that stand of live oaks. Her yellow Rabbit convertible and the blue Ford van he draws out of the motor pool. That water in front is Burden Pond, and I took these from a little ridge up the hill from the pond, in the scrub-pine woods.

  "Now here are a dozen I took with the twelve hundred lens when they'd come outdoors on nice winter days for what they call a little al fresco. I took maybe ten rolls of the outdoor fun and games but these show the faces best. It's like a sixty-power telescope."

  "I know. Say! This here is Mrs. Wintergarten!"

  "The very same."

  "Oh Christ! Oh holy bleeding Christ!"

  "They aren't in any special order."

  Liddy went through them like a man playing a very slow game of solitaire.

  "Absolutely great ass on that woman," he murmured.

  Erskine had gone back to his chair. He took out the little tape recorder and put a cassette on it. Before he pressed the key for playback, he said, "I wired the place and used a voice actuated recorder. It didn't work real great. You miss the first word or half the first word every time it starts up again. I gave all the tapes to Doctor Macy, but before I did, I played them back and copied some parts of them on to this tape. I got about an hour here of this and that. I pulled the recorder and I haven't told Doctor Macy I'm quitting. This damned thing has turned into overkill. And it's boring, and, speaking as a police officer, he's got all he needs to make his case. The son of the founder is screwing an employee's wife."

  "Where is this place?"

  Erskine explained how to get there, and told him that it was land w
hich had been donated to the Church.

  "Let's hear what you've got."

  Erskine turned it on. The fidelity was reasonably good. It was a rackety bed. In extremis, the woman liked to yell dirty words. Erskine had selected excerpts which confirmed identity through the specifics of their conversations.

  "That's enough," Liddy said, and Erskine punched it off.

  "What's happening is, it is winding down," Erskine said.

  They used to do a lot of laughing and tell jokes and try a lot of different ways of doing it. I could tell about that from the way they would tell each other what to do next. But now they grouse and fight, and from the way they complain, the sex isn't as good as it was."