The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  As she took me over to the bed to show me what she meant, I saw the small electric cord that led from the heavy pair of glasses to a piece of equipment on the bedside stand. It looked like a small ham radio receiver. There were three dials. A tiny orange light winked constantly. She explained that it was an electrosleep device invented in Germany and distributed in England and the United States by one of the medical supply houses. There were electrodes in the headset, covered with a foam plastic, two which rested on the eyelids, and one at the end of each earpiece where they made contact with the mastoid bone behind each ear. She said that you moistened the foam rubber pads with a salt solution and put the headset on the patient. The control unit was a pulse generator that sent an extremely weak electrical impulse—in fact a thousand times weaker than the current a flashlight bulb requires—through the sleep centers in the thalamus and hypothalamus.

  “It’s perfectly safe,” she said. “It’s been used on thousands and thousands of patients. You just adjust the strength and the frequency with these two dials. The other is the on and off switch. Doctor Sherman got it for us and trained me in how to use it. You see, he was afraid of the side effects of making her sleep with medication, in her condition, whatever it is. We do have to give her shots when she gets too upset, but this is usually enough.”

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Very … odd. No discomfort at all. All I felt was a kind of flickering in my eyes. Not unpleasant, really. I was trying to fight it. I was telling myself that this certainly wouldn’t put me to sleep. And then there wasn’t the flickering sensation anymore, and kind of … a slow warm delicious feeling all over me, like sinking slowly in a hot sudsy perfumed tub. And I was gone! It is marvelous sleep, really. Deep and sweet and refreshing. Once she’s asleep, you can take them off and the Dormed sleep will just turn into absolutely natural sleep. Or like now, I’m leaving it on at very low strength, and she will sleep on and on until I take them off. You could parade a brass band through here, and she’d sleep like a baby. It’s a marvelous invention. It’s a portable unit, with a neat little gray suitcase thing it fits into, with a place for the salt solution and all.”

  “Is there anything I have to do about it while you sleep?”

  “Nothing. Well … what I do isn’t necessary. I just come in and look at her and see if that little light is going on and off. It hasn’t ever stopped or anything. And only once did she ever move her head enough to move the headset out of place.”

  “But you’d feel better if I did the same thing?”

  “I guess so. Yes.”

  “Off with you, then.”

  We went into the hall and she pointed out her door. “Just knock until I answer. Don’t settle for a mumble. Get a real answer.” She looked at her watch. “And don’t let me sleep past five o’clock. Okay?”

  “Five o’clock.”

  “If you get hungry or thirsty or anything—”

  “I know where things are. Bug off, Bridget. Sleep tight.”

  In thirty minutes the house was filled with that special silence of Sunday sleep. Little relays and servo devices made faint tickings and hummings. Refrigerator, deep freeze, air-conditioning, thermostats, electric clocks. Kids water-skied the lake, outboards droning, a faint sound through the closed windows.

  Where do you look when you have no idea what you are looking for? An alcove off the living room apparently served as a small home office for Tom Pike. The top of the antique desk was clean. The drawers were locked, and the locks were splendid modern intricate devices, unpickable, except in television drama. On a hallway phone table I found a black and white photograph in a silver frame. Helena, Maureen, and Bridget on the foredeck of the Likely Lady. Boat clothes, sweaters for cool sailing. Mick Pearson’s girls, all slender, smiling, assured, and with the loving look that could only mean that it had been Mick’s eye at the finder, Mick’s finger on the shutter release.

  So roam the silence and up the padded stairs, long slow steps, two at a time. A closed door at the back of the house, unlocked, opening into a master bedroom. Draperied windowwall facing the lake. One end was sitting room, fireplace, bookshelves. An oversized custom bed dominated the other end. It seemed too sybaritic, a bit out of key with the rest of the house. Two baths, two dressing rooms. His and hers. Sunken dark blue tub in hers, square, with clear glass in the shower-stall arrangement. Strategic mirroring there, as on the walls nearest the oversized bed.

  The big bed was neatly made, so on Sunday, at least, Biddy was maid, cook, and housekeeper. Maureen’s bath had been cleared of the daily personal things. Winter clothing in her dressing room closets. Bottles of perfume and lotion on her dressing table just a little bit dusty. But he lived here, very neatly. Sport shirts here, dress shirts there. Jackets, slacks on one bar. Suits hanging from another. The shoe-treed shoes on a built-in rack. Silk, cashmere, linen, Irish tweed, English wool, Italian shoes. Labeling from Worth Avenue, New York, St. Thomas, Palm Springs, Montreal. Taste, cost, and quality. Impersonal, remote, correct, and somehow sterile. Apparently no sentiment about an ancient sweater, crumpled old moccasins, baggy elderly slacks, or a gummy old bathrobe. When anything showed enough evident signs of wear, it was eliminated.

  I searched for more clues to him. Apparently he did not have anything wrong with him that could not be fixed by an aspirin or an Alka Seltzer. He did not leave random notes to himself in the pockets of his suits and jackets. He did not seem to have a single hobby or a weapon or a book not devoted to economics, law, securities, or real estate.

  So I gave up on Tom Pike and walked quietly down the hall and into Maureen’s room. The deep breathing was just the same. She had not moved. The little orange light on the face of the control unit of the Dormed went off and on as before. I went to the side of the bed. Her arms rested at her sides, atop the blanket. I cautiously picked her left hand up. It was warm and dry, and complete relaxation gave it a heaviness, like the hand of a fresh corpse. The back of the hand was scratched, and welted with insect bites. I turned the inside of the wrist toward what light there was and, bending close to it, I could make out the white line of scar tissue across the pattern of the blue veins under the sensitive skin. I placed the hand the way it had been and looked down at her. The heavy glasses made her look as if both eyes had been bandaged. I could see the slow, steady beat of a tiny pulse in her throat. Even welted and mottled, dappled with the dry orange-white spots of lotion, she was a cushioned and luxurious and sweetly sensuous animal.

  Sweet outcast. All the lovely, wifely tumbling in that outsized bed, mirrored hoyden, romping in sweet excitements with the lean and beloved husband. But then paradise is warped and the image becomes grotesque. Instead of babies, two sudden agonies, and two little bloody wads of tissue expelled too soon from the warm black safety of the womb. Then a world gone strange, like something half dreamed and soon forgotten. Exchange the springy bed for the sacking on the floor of the little storage room at the truck depot where, booze-blind, lamed, and sprung, you are kept at the rough service of the Telaferro brothers. Excuse me, my dear, while I pry around your outcast room looking for answers to questions I haven’t thought of. Or one I have: Would you really rather be dead?

  But there was nothing. There was a steel cabinet in the bathroom, resting on a bench, securely locked. Medicines, no doubt. There seemed to be nothing left in the bedroom or bath that she could hurt herself with. There was a rattling purr at the end of each exhalation. Her diaphragm rose and fell with the deep breathing of deep sleep.

  I was glad to leave her room and leave the sound of breathing. Somehow it was like the coma that precedes death. I went down and found a cold beer, turned on the television set with the volume low, and watched twenty-two very large young men knocking one another down while thousands cheered. I watched and yet did not watch. It was merely a busy pattern of color, motion, and sound.

  Blue handles of kitchen shears. Helena climbing naked in the red light of the Exuma sun, rising to teeter on the rail, t
hen find her balance, then dive into the black-gray water of the cove at Shroud Cay and then surface, seal-sleek, hair water-pasted flat to the delicate skull contours. Penny Woertz snuggling against me in the night, her back and shoulders moist with exertion, making little umming sounds of content as her breath was slowing. Biddy sobbing aloud as she trotted into my bathroom, her running a humble, awkward, clumsy, bovine, knock-kneed gait. Memory and digital skills. The bleeders don’t jump, and the hangers don’t bleed. Twenty thousand to a tall man. Jake saying “Bon voyage.” The ’Bama Gal erupting into the sunlight after all the weeks on the murky bottom. Tom Pike lifting his face from his hands, eyes streaming. Mick thumping the cabin trim with a solid fist as he showed me the honest way the Likely Lady had been built. Substantial means more than comfortable and less than impressive. Maurie streaking greasy fingers across the rounded, pneumatic, porcelain-gold of her thigh. Rick Holton flexing and rubbing his wrists after I’d unwound the tight bite of the hanger wire. Blue handles of kitchen shears. Penny’s clovery scents. Five dozen silk ties with good labels. Orange light winking. An umber-orange mole, not as big as a dime. Huddled nude in a Gauguin jungle.

  The mind is a cauldron and things bubble up and show for a moment, then slip back into the brew. You can’t reach down and find anything by touch. You wait for some order, some relationship in the order in which they appear. Then yell Eureka! and believe that it was a process of cold, pure logic.

  Finally, on my fourth visit to the electrosleep bedside, it was exactly six o’clock, so I gently removed the headset, put it aside, and turned the Dormed off. I watched her, ready to go awaken Biddy if Maureen woke up. For several minutes she did not move. Then she rolled her head over to one side, made a murmurous sound, then rolled all the way over onto her side, pulled her knees up, put her two hands, palms together, under her cheek, and soon was breathing as deeply as before.

  As the room got darker I turned on a low lamp on the other side of the room. I sat in a Boston rocker near the bed, watching the sleeping woman and thinking that this was probably where Biddy sat and watched her, while she thought about the marriage and thought about her own life.

  At a little after eight I knocked on Biddy’s door. After the second attempt I heard a groggy, querulous mutter. I waited and knocked again and suddenly she pulled the door open. She had a robe around her shoulders and she held it closed with a concealed hand. Her hair was in wild disarray and her face was swollen with sleep.

  “What time is it!”

  I told her it was a little after eight, that I had unhooked Maurie from her machine at six, and that she was still sleeping. She yawned and combed her hair back with her free hand. “The poor thing must have been really exhausted. I won’t be a minute.”

  When she was dressed, she sent me downstairs, saying she’d bring Maurie down in a little while. I found the light switches. As I was making a drink the phone rang. It was just one ring. No more. And so I decided Biddy had probably answered it upstairs. As I was carrying my drink into the living room it rang again, and once again it was just one ring.

  Soon they came down. Maurie wore a navy blue floor-length robe with long sleeves and white buttons and white trim. She was scratching her shoulder with one hand and the opposite hip with the other, and complaining in a sour little voice. “Just about eaten to pieces. How do they get in with the house all closed up?”

  “You’ll just make them worse by scratching, dear.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Say hello to Travis, dear.”

  She stopped at the foot of the stairs and smiled at me, still scratching, and said, “Hello, Travis McGee! How are you? I had a very good nap today.”

  “Good for you.”

  “But I itch something awful. Biddy?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “Is he here?” Her tone and expression were apprehensive.

  “Tom went on a trip.”

  “Can I have peanut butter sandwiches, Biddy, please?”

  “But your diet, dear. You’re almost up to a hundred and fifty again.”

  Her tone was wheedling, sympathy-seeking. “But I’m real tall, Biddy. And I’m starving. And I had a good nap and I itch something awful!”

  “Well …”

  “Please? He isn’t here anyway. He won’t know about it. You know something? Some son of a bitch must have kicked me or something. I’m so sore right—”

  “Maureen!”

  She stopped, gulped, looked humble. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Please try to speak nicely, dear.”

  “You won’t tell him?”

  Biddy took my glass and they went out into the kitchen. In a little while Maureen came walking in very slowly and carefully, carrying my fresh drink. I thanked her and she beamed at me. Somehow she had managed to get a little wad of peanut butter stuck on the end of her nose, possibly from licking the top off the jar. She went back. I heard them talking out there but could not hear the words, just the tone, and it was like a conversation between child and mother.

  When they came back in, Maureen pulled a hassock over in front of the television set. Biddy plugged a set of earphones into a jack in the rear of the set and Maureen put them on eagerly and then was lost in the images and the sound, expression rapt, as she ate her sandwiches.

  Biddy said, “She loves to watch things Tom can’t stand.”

  “Does she remember running away last night?”

  “No. It’s all gone now. Slate wiped clean.”

  “She won’t say Tom’s name?”

  “Sometimes she will. She’s so terribly anxious to please him, to have him approve of her. She just gets … all tightened up when he’s here. Really, he’s wonderfully kind and patient with her. But I guess that … a child-wife isn’t what a man of Tom’s intelligence can adjust to.”

  “If you think of her just as a child, she’s a good child.”

  “Oh, yes. She’s happy, or seems happy, and she likes to help, but she forgets how to do things.”

  “It doesn’t seem consistent with suicide attempts, does it?”

  She frowned. “No. But it’s more complex than that, Travis. There’s another kind of child involved, a sly and naughty child. And the times she’s tried, she’s gotten into the liquor and gotten drunk first. It’s almost as if alcohol creates some kind of awareness of self and her condition, removes some block or something. We keep it all locked up, of course, ever since the first time. But the time she locked herself in the bathroom and cut her wrist, I’d forgotten and left a half quart of gin on the countertop with the bottles of mix. I just didn’t see it, somehow. And she sneaked it upstairs, I guess. Anyway, the empty bottle was under her bed. Then the time Tom found the noose, we know she got into something, but we don’t know what it was or how. Vanilla extract or shaving lotion or something. Maybe even rubbing alcohol. But of course she couldn’t remember. It’s quite late. Can I fix you something to eat?”

  “I think I’ll be moving along, Biddy. Thanks.”

  “I owe you, my friend. I was irritated you let me sleep so long. But I guess you knew better than I how badly I needed it. I was getting ragged around the edges. The very least I can do is feed you.”

  “No thanks, I …”

  She straightened, head tilted, listening, and then relaxed. “Sorry. I thought it was that damned phone again. I think something’s wrong with the line. For the last two or three months every once in a while it will give one ring or part of a ring and then stop, and there won’t be anybody there. Just the dial tone when you pick it up. Did you say you would stay?”

  “I’d better not, thanks just the same.”

  Maureen’s good night was a smile and a bob of the head and a hasty return to the color screen where a vivid-faced girl was leaning over a wire fence amid a throng, cheering a racehorse toward the finish line. The only sound was the insectile buzzing that escaped from Maureen’s padded earphones.

  As I walked to the car in the drive I heard the clack behind me a
s Biddy relocked the heavy front door.

  Eleven

  Sunday dinner was finished by the time I got to the motel dining room, but they could provide steak sandwiches. There was one whispering couple on the far side of the room and one lonely fat man slumped at the bar. Both the couple and the fat man were gone when I went to the bar for a nightcap. I sat on the far stool by the wall, where Penny had been sitting when I had first seen her.

  Jake, the bartender, wore an odd expression as he approached me. “Evening, sir. Look, if I got you in any kind of jam—”

  “I told Stanger he could check it out with you, that I met her right here Friday night.”

  He looked relieved. “What happened, he mousetrapped me. He came up with this thing about we let them come in and hustle, we could lose the license. And one thing and another, he worked it around to you and that girl, and I thought he had been tipped and I couldn’t exactly deny it, so I said sure, they left together, but how could I know they weren’t friends or something already. Honest to God, sir, I didn’t know it was the same one in the paper this morning until he said so. Then I’m left hanging, wondering if you were some kind of crazy that took her home and … there are some very ordinary looking guys who are very weird about hustlers. But I couldn’t imagine you doing … Anyway, when I saw you come in, I felt better, I don’t know why.”

  “I think maybe some Black Jack on one rock.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. McGee.” When he served it with a proper flourish, he said, “Jesus, I’ve felt half sick ever since. And … I guess you’ve got a right to feel a lot sicker than me.” The implied question was very clear.

  “Jake, we walked out of here and shook hands and sang one small hymn and said good night.”

  He flushed. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I was just thinking she didn’t have the right moves, you know? So what she is doing is trying to get even with a boyfriend who’s cheating on her by doing some swinging herself, so she takes you home and the next day she tells him how she got even, and he can’t stand it. She’s laughing at him. He grabs the first thing and—”