But Barbara had left her there, called a taxi, and gone home. In the taxi she had wondered what would happen to Catherine if Mary Emerson died. She presumed that Luke Emerson would come over from America, ask her if she was prepared to continue looking after his sister, and make the same deal with her as his mother had made; then he would return to America and Catherine would be hers forever. If Mary Emerson were to die, she wondered, where did that put David; but she supposed it didn’t matter very much. She remembered the deep Southern voice: “You know as well as I do he’ll never come back.” Sitting in the back of the taxi, she shivered, and wished Mary Emerson were dead.
She remembered all this later in bed, and thought that if Mary Emerson were dead, Catherine would be hers forever, or for as long as she wanted her; Catherine and the villa and Iva and a more or less inexhaustible supply of money; and with that money — she smiled bitterly as she thought of it — she would justify her mother’s years of hard work, her years of deprivation and self-denial. She would be making use of the education her mother, with such sacrifice, had bought for her; making use of it beyond her mother’s wildest dreams. For her mother had educated her in order that she could get a good “job” — the job of a perfect secretary, for example. But if Mary Emerson were to die, and Catherine were hers forever, she would no longer be in the position of a secretary; she would be the boss. She smiled.
She sat up and lit a cigarette. There was no point in thinking like that. One couldn’t live for villas and housekeepers or inexhaustible supplies of money; one couldn’t live on the assumption that Mary Emerson was going to die some lonely and miserable death; one couldn’t live on theories and money, as Marcello did; one could only live — or rather she could only live — for Catherine at the moment; or, better, David. She didn’t know why she couldn’t live only for herself, but she suspected that there wasn’t really quite enough to live for if she did that. She drew on her cigarette and supposed that it was the same for everyone, which was why love, in one form or another, was generally considered to be the highest good by people who thought about such things. Even Marcello might shamefacedly have claimed this to be so, if pushed to it.
Meanwhile it was Saturday. She had a Saturday and a Sunday to get through, alone, without David; and another six Saturdays and Sundays alone before she even had Catherine.
*
She didn’t have to spend all Saturday alone, however. Mary Emerson called her at eleven to apologize for getting drunk the night before, and asked Barbara to forgive her if she had said anything dreadful.
“Not really,” Barbara said, “I think I was as drunk as you.”
Still apologetic, Mary Emerson asked, “What are you doing today, my dear? You’re not going to spend the day on your own, are you?”
Barbara remembered Marcello saying that Mary Emerson was guilty, and wondered whether it was guilt that made her ask the question, or pity.
“No,” she said. “I mean yes, I am. I haven’t really got anything to do.” She thought that if Mary Emerson felt sorry for her it was hardly surprising, because she felt sorry for herself; and if Mary Emerson felt guilty that was hardly surprising either, because she had something to feel guilty about. She, and Marcello, and the unknown Luke, and her mother — they were all guilty. They had all helped take David away. She supposed they had all loved David. Perhaps even her mother, though it was difficult to tell; her mother was like an immensely old dog whose tail had been cut off because it could work harder without a tail, but which remembered how, when it was a puppy, it had wagged its tail when it was happy. Perhaps David reminded her of what it was like when she had a tail to wag, and she hated being reminded.
“Please come and have lunch with me then, and I promise I won’t get drunk again. We can drink milk or something.”
“Oh no. I mean — I’d love to have lunch, but I don’t like milk.”
It must be because they all loved David that they resented her having him; they loved him, knew they couldn’t have him, but couldn’t bear to see him with anyone else. It was for this they had all plotted to free him. She wondered if this had been David’s secret — not that he wanted to be free, but that he was obliged to be.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Is one o’clock all right?”
“Yes, fine.”
“See you then, my dear. Bye.”
Or, she wondered, was David simply spoiled and selfish and beautiful, and had she loved him for that, and was that the reason everyone else loved him, and her mother professed to hate him? It was more likely; David, who pretended that he didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone — though, of course, it wasn’t true, really; because truly not to give a damn about anything was a major feat that, she was sure, not even David was capable of. What he did was make a secret of what he cared for.
She wondered what further confessions she would be told at lunch — to make up for having been told the truth at dinner the night before.
*
In fact, she was to hear two different versions of the death of Catherine’s father.
According to Mary Emerson, her husband had adored Catherine when she was small. Then, as it became apparent that there was something wrong with the child, he began to turn against his wife, accusing her of not looking after Catherine properly, of secretly mistreating her, of neglecting her in favor of her twin brother, Luke — of being, in some way, responsible for whatever was wrong with the girl. The more Catherine grew, and the more apparent it was that her development was to be limited, and the more the doctors were pessimistic, and the more Luke grew healthy and good-looking, the more husband and wife grew apart.
“And honestly, before that we had been very happy together. But it all happened so slowly and we were both so worried about Catherine that by the time we had got used to the fact that there was something irreparably wrong with her and started looking at ourselves again, we realized we had drifted too far apart to ever really come together again. And anyway, we had damaged each other too much in the process of drifting apart to make it wise to think of coming together.”
But they didn’t know what to do about Catherine if they separated, so again they turned away from themselves to consider the child, to consider what effect their separation would have on her. While they were fighting and crying about Catherine they were falling not only apart but to pieces; one day Mary Emerson came home and found that her husband had tried to kill himself. She saved him. He was in the hospital for about a week, and she went to see him every day and it was as it had been just after their marriage, before Catherine had come between them. They were able to talk to each other about themselves, about the past, and even about the future.
The day before he was due to be discharged from the hospital Mary took Catherine to visit him; he seemed pleased to see her, and thanked Mary for bringing her. That night he discharged himself from the hospital and disappeared.
The police looked for him everywhere, but no trace of him was found until two years later. A man was found dead with a shotgun beside him in a cheap boardinghouse in Dallas. He had no documents on him, but he had a photograph of a girl — Catherine. Mary Emerson identified the body.
It was never discovered where or how he had passed the two years from the time of his disappearance to the time of his death.
Mary was told she could, almost certainly successfully, contest her husband’s will, which he had made six months before his disappearance, on the grounds that it had been made when the balance of his mind was disturbed. But by its terms she would have money enough until Catherine was twenty-one, and after that she expected that her son would look after her, or that Catherine’s trustees would, or that someone would — she might even marry again — and so she didn’t bother to waste time and money in court proceedings.
“Where were you living when all this happened?”
“We were married in California just after the war. Then George decided he wanted to move to Europe,
and we chose Rome for various reasons. Then four years after we were married the twins were born. I went back to New York to have them; I brought them back to Italy when they were four months old. It wasn’t until Catherine was six that we started to suspect something was wrong, and it wasn’t until she was eight, nearly nine, that we knew it for certain. The doctors kept on saying that she might just be very slow, that sometimes one twin is slower, all sorts of things. But, as I say, by the time she was nine we knew definitely. The doctors told us even then, that there could, possibly, be nothing wrong — but what they meant was that they had no idea what caused Catherine’s form of retardation, and couldn’t do anything about it.”
It was from that time that the marriage started to break up.
“We had moved back to New York when Catherine was seven, so she could see all the best doctors and speak the language properly. We closed this house down and rented an apartment in Manhattan.”
“What about your husband’s work? Didn’t he do any?”
“No, not unless he worked in the two years he was missing. I guess he must have worked then because we had always had a joint bank account and he never drew on that, or got in touch with his lawyers to get money from them. So he must have worked. But all the time we were together he —” she laughed, — “studied.”
“Was Catherine very upset when he died?”
“She was very upset when he disappeared. I mean very. She seemed to go backward physically. She got fat, and had a terrible vacant stare and made me think for a time I’d really have to have her put in a home.”
“How old was she?”
“Ten, when he disappeared. Twelve when he died.”
“Were you here when he died?”
“Yes. We moved back to Rome after George disappeared. I sort of felt he might turn up here. He loved it.”
“And the doctors have never been able to tell what’s wrong with Catherine?”
“No. She has a fairly common case of retardation — but they don’t know what causes it, and can’t cure it. There are absolutely no signs of physical damage to her brain, as far as they can tell.”
“So it’s something psychological?”
“Psychological, something physical they can’t see, who knows? No one can tell. They’ve tried hypnosis, but she’s the same hypnotized as unhypnotized. One doctor told me frankly that there is no hope at all. And the tragedy is that Catherine is so nearly normal sometimes. She can sort of reason, and sort of think. But then why can’t she read? And why is her speech quite normal sometimes and other times she sounds as though she’s got a sock in her mouth? I guess she just can’t cope with anything outside herself, and sometimes with anything inside. But anyway, you’ve seen all this, and I can’t explain.”
“I think she can talk and think in her way,” Barbara said, “but it’s like when we go abroad on holiday and don’t speak a foreign language too well. We can ask questions, and say things, but all the time we’re translating back into our own language, thinking that we’re not really saying those strange foreign words, but ‘Do you have a match?’ or ‘What time does the train leave?’ We feel we’re really just talking our own language in disguise and that our own language is the real, true one.” She paused; she was, she realized, speaking very fast, as if what she was talking about was a subject of urgent concern for herself. “For Catherine, talking is like speaking a foreign language — but without a language of her own to translate back into it. Catherine’s got nothing that she can think is really what she means, nothing she can think is true. To her it’s all just a foreign language that she’ll never learn well enough to think in very much, because she’s had no training in a language of her own. Somewhere inside her there’s total, absolute darkness. The real and the true are in that darkness, so she simply has to live with her foreign language and remember what she can. That wouldn’t be so bad if she could look out and see beautiful things when she’s not trying to remember something — but I’m sure even when she goes out there into the garden she never actually looks at the sky, never actually looks at a flower. She’s always having to try and remember what she’s been told they are, she’s always trying to recall the idea of the sky or of a flower, to see if it matches what she’s looking at. And so ultimately she’s only trying to match memories and ideas, only seeing someone else’s idea of the sky. The real sky, and the real flower, are inside her in the darkness, and she knows it. So when she goes out there into the wilderness she’s looking into the darkness and wondering what a real flower is like.”
“Good God!” said Mary Emerson, and laughed. But she looked, Barbara saw, almost frightened.
*
Catherine, as seemed to be usual, had had her lunch at midday, and was sleeping while they were eating; or, at least, so Mary Emerson said. She might, Barbara thought, have been listening to them. This was in her mind when, putting down her coffee cup, she said with the friendliest smile she could manage, and in a voice slightly louder than normal, “I suppose — with your husband — you must have felt sort of resentful against Catherine.”
Mary Emerson shrugged her shoulders. “Not really, I don’t think. I guess I’m not always as nice to Catherine as I should be, but — oh, over the years a person gets tired, and thinks ‘It doesn’t matter anyway.’ Catherine isn’t going to change, and I can’t go around feeling sorry for someone all the time and talking in a soft voice. Oh, she irritates me, yes, but—” she smiled, suddenly, softly, “I don’t regret anything you know. Not for myself. And Catherine knows that. I guess she understands me, even if she doesn’t like me.” She drew something with a finger on the table. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought of her being responsible for my marriage breaking up. Catherine’s sickness and George’s reaction to it were completely separate things. I think if there was any connection it would probably be the other way around, and I’d hold George responsible for Catherine’s sickness. George’s strangeness only came out when he saw that Catherine was strange, too. As if she’d given him away … but I really never think about it. There’s no point, is there? You just have to do what has to be done and try to enjoy it. And I’ve had a lot to be thankful for, too.” She gazed at Barbara for a moment before smiling again, gently, and Barbara felt, briefly, that she could be fond of the woman; that there was something honest and basically kind about her. She would have liked to smile back. But she couldn’t; she didn’t trust herself. Mary Emerson could afford to put all the tenderness on earth into a smile; she was waving from a departing ship. She could say, too, that she had no regrets; she was leaving her regrets behind, for someone else to look after. Catherine was her regret, even if she did deny it. Barbara felt that she had to convince herself of this; she had to be hard.
She would have loved to go with Mary Emerson, and she couldn’t. She would have loved to relax, to be floated away, to wake up comfortable, protected, belonging — and without having to struggle in any way. But she had made her choice, and for a while she had to be hard. For if now she smiled back at Mary Emerson she might start crying, and then she’d be lost before she’d ever started. She’d go back to England, to her mother, and Catherine would be lost, too. And both of them might never have another chance of being saved.
“You don’t think it’s possible that Catherine was just very very slow,” she said, “and that when your husband started going strange it affected her because she knew, or felt, anyway, that she was responsible, but couldn’t do anything about it? And so then she sort of took on herself your husband’s strangeness and when he died — it was like being cut into two.”
Mary Emerson shrugged. “My dear, I’ve heard so many explanations of Catherine’s condition that I could fill a book with them, and I’m sure they’re all quite true — but explaining doesn’t make very much difference. You just have to accept Catherine as she is and try not to be too subjective about her, or let your own feelings get in the way. That’s why it’s time for me to go. I’ve been with Catherine long enough. I have no feelings
left at all as far as she’s concerned. That’s terrible, but it’s true. And the only wonderful thing is that we’ve found you.” She stood up. “It’s hair-washing time.” She looked at her watch. “Catherine should be awake now. Why don’t you go up and see her! She’ll be very offended if you don’t.”
Barbara nodded. “I’ll go up right away.”
*
In Catherine’s bedroom Barbara said, “Can I open the curtains?”
Catherine shook her head. “Please don’t. I like it like this.”
Barbara sat down on the edge of the girl’s bed. In the half-light she said, “I’ve been talking to your mother about your father. Do you remember him?”
“Yes,” Catherine replied in a matter-of-fact voice. “Did she tell you that she killed him?”
“No.”
“She did. She tried once and it didn’t work, and then my father got so scared of her he went away, but she found him and shot him. She made it look like he shot himself, but he didn’t.” She laughed in the same tone as her speech, as if she were reading a script that she didn’t understand, “He fooled her though, because he changed his will when he was in the hospital after she tried to kill him the first time. Everyone thought that was suicide, too. But he fooled her. She thought she was going to get all his money.”
“How do you know all this?” Barbara asked.
“He told me. After she tried to kill him she took me to see him in the hospital. He sent her out of the room and told me that it was all her fault, that he hadn’t really tried to kill himself, but she’d done it, only I mustn’t tell anyone, because if I did she’d kill me. He said he hadn’t told anyone that she’d tried to kill him, otherwise she would have killed me then, and anyway he couldn’t prove that she’d done it but he knew. And then he told me that he was going to have to disappear because otherwise she’d try again, but that I wasn’t to worry because he’d look after me. I asked him if he’d take me with him but he said it was impossible because a man alone could disappear but a man with a child would be recognized and the police would tell her we’d been found and she’d come and kill us both, but he said I should love Luke as if Luke was my father and Luke would look after me when he was old enough, but until then he’d thought of a clever plan so mother wouldn’t be able to kill me or she’d have no money and he was going to make his will so that mother had to stay with me and look after me until I was twenty-one and then Luke would look after me.” She stopped her toneless monologue and sighed.
The Girl Who Passed for Normal Page 10
