She took down the receiver, but when the girl at the switchboard answered, she hung it up again. Perhaps she’d better call Deb McIntyre instead. Deb would ask her to come out to Darien for the night, perhaps, and they could talk about J.D. But the McIntyres were in Nantucket, the telephone girl informed her. Well, if the Montagues knew she were here, they’d insist that she come out to Glen Cove. After a twenty-minute wait the telephone girl reported that there was no answer. With the determination of despair she looked up Ham Hunneker’s penthouse number, and put in the call herself. A Japanese voice informed her that “Mees-ter Hun-na-ka sail lass week for Eu-rup.” She had exhausted her resources!
She got up and walked to the window. The mist was not so thick but that she could see the flat tops of the low buildings surrounding the hotel, and between them, far below, the streets filled with traffic—small, moving spots from here.
She wondered, as she gazed, if she could spring over the stream of traffic just below and land on the roof across the street, or if gravitation would pull her body straight down. She would hold up traffic for a while! And a group of those spots down there would leap aside to avoid her, and tonight at various dinner tables the incident would be described with all its details.
She had no intention of jumping. She contemplated it simply to relieve her suffocating ennui. It was just a ghoulish form of daydreaming, in which she had often indulged before her illness. Daydreaming was a pernicious habit. Action, of almost any kind, was preferable.
She turned away from the window, walked back to the telephone, and put in a person-to-person call for J. D. Durrance. As she waited, she could feel her heart thumping. Finally, “Mr. Durrance has just left his office for the day,” the report came back.
Jerry had just left his office! Probably he was on his way to the train for Mount Vernon. It was now after five. Coming nearer and nearer to her every second! It could do nobody any harm if they should chance to run across each other in the Grand Central Station.
She put on her hat and coat and descended to the street. At the Information Booth she asked about the trains to Mount Vernon. There was one that left in five minutes and others later. She hovered in the vicinity of the gate through which Jerry must pass with as much excitement as if they had an appointment.
He didn’t take the first train. Well, she’d wait for one more. She waited for three more. She didn’t feel that it was wasted effort. Her pall of lassitude had dropped away.
She recognized him from a long way off when finally she was rewarded, though he was neither strikingly tall nor short, and wore today an unfamiliar stiff straw hat. He walked briskly, as always, though laden with various bundles, a hat-box among them, and a leather businessman’s bag.
He was not alone. There was a woman following along several steps behind. She was dressed in dark shapeless clothes, and there was no buoyancy in her step. Charlotte felt sure it was Isobel even before she had come near enough to recognize her from the kodak picture. Half a step behind Jerry on his other side were two young women, also carrying packages, the two older daughters. They had been in town shopping for the day evidently.
Charlotte stepped behind a concealing post. There was Jerry, dragging along his whole domestic load, except the youngest child. Charlotte was reminded of what Deb had said once, that J.D. was like a dog between shafts pulling a cart. As Jerry passed close by Charlotte, she saw that his forehead was shining with a light coating of perspiration. He looked tired and anxious. She was filled with compassion and admiration.
When she returned to her twentieth-story room her sense of desolation had disappeared. Jerry hadn’t seen her. He hadn’t known she had seen him. But she knew now she was not alone in her unhappiness. Lack of sympathetic companionship was his lot, too. Tonight the same storm that beat her window-pane was beating against Jerry’s a few miles away. She wondered if he slept, and wondering, fell asleep.
DOCTOR JAQUITH’S NEW YORK office was as unconventional as he himself. It was in an old dwelling house with a brownstone front located west of Fifth Avenue. It was as far removed from the “right” district of doctors’ offices as west is from east, when the dividing line is Fifth Avenue. Doctor Jaquith had inherited the house. And when, in response to the increasing demands of his patients, he consented to spend one day a week in New York, it seemed sensible to put the empty old house to use again. However, he put far less thought into his house than into his patients, and the house showed it. Its high-studded walls were bare, its heavy marble mantels empty, its windows innocent of draperies. There were no books, no plants, no flowers; but it had a certain homely charm, and struck one as genuine as the man who had been born in it.
Doctor Jaquith saw his patients in the long narrow room at the right of the front door. The walls were a mottled red. One day he had given a boiled lobster shell and a Paisley shawl to a local house painter, and told him to mix a color for the walls the nearest he could get to a cross-breed of the two, and paint all the woodwork black. It reminded Charlotte of the inside of an old Chinese lacquer box.
It was the most unusual doctor’s office she had ever been in. Whatever Doctor Jaquith’s interests and hobbies were, there was no trace of them here. Whether he was married or not, had children or not, liked music, art, antiques, ships, fishing, or not, the room gave no indication. Was it, perhaps, because of the impression it gave of Doctor Jaquith’s detachment from his own personal life that made confidences run so freely inside the red-lacquered box?
The room lacked even the tags of his profession. There was no flat-topped desk before which he was seated like a king on a throne. There was no upholstered armchair facing him in which one sat and looked up. There was no desk at all. There was no upholstered armchair at all. There was no doctor at all, when one first entered the room. The only articles of furniture that Charlotte could recall after her first visit were two East Indian cane armchairs, a faded-faced banjo clock and an enormous Bokhara rug of the texture of velvet, and of the tones of a wild hydrangea leaf.
It was still raining and as cold as October when Charlotte kept her appointment. She caught the fragrance of a cannel coal fire the minute she entered. Flames were leaping in the open grate in the room when she crossed the threshold, filling the space from floor to ceiling with crackle, shadows, and warmth. It drew one toward it, like a bonfire at night.
Doctor Jaquith had something of the same magnetic quality as the fire. His motions were also quick and alert. When he shook hands his fingers were virile to their very tips. His eyebrows and hair were as black as coal, his black eyes as scintillating as the highlights on the curves of the black marble mantel. One would say offhand he was a man of about fifty, but he could easily have been either forty or sixty. He was as clean-shaven as was possible. The lower part of his face was a dusky purple compared to his ruddy cheeks and high white forehead. He was neither tall nor short. “Wiry” described his figure.
After shaking hands and a few sentences in way of greeting he asked Charlotte to be seated in the chair with its back to the windows, thus removing at least one well-known cause for self-consciousness, offered her a cigarette, held a lighted match to it, lit a cigarette for himself, then sat down in a chair identical to hers, facing the windows.
From behind a thick smoke screen, “Well, let’s get down to business,” he said in his bluff, blunt manner, as free from any display of his profession as his consultation room.
His speech, whether conversing with an old friend or a new patient, was always filled with homely similes, and frequently emphasized by rugged terms. This was due to his two outstanding characteristics—he liked people, he disliked pomp.
There was no telephone in the room. Doctor Jaquith never allowed an appointment to be interrupted, except in an emergency, nor an appointment of one patient to trespass on that of the next. He produced no formidable history of Charlotte’s case, he took down notes as she talked. All he did now was to cross his legs, fold his arms, gaze down into the flaming coals, ask an occasio
nal question, and listen.
This was Charlotte’s first interview with Doctor Jaquith since J.D.’s reappearance. She had written Doctor Jaquith about Elliot Livingston and later of the broken engagement, giving as an explanation that she found she simply didn’t have the “right feeling” for Elliot. Also she had written him briefly of her mother’s death. She had never written him or told him about J.D. At the interview immediately after her return from the cruise she had referred to “an awfully nice man” who had put her on her feet at the start of the voyage. She hadn’t mentioned his name.
“We poor psychiatrists are always wishing for ‘an awfully nice man’ to put a patient on her feet when we send her on a voyage, and then clear out,” he had replied. “But they’re scarce as hens’ teeth. Usually the patient reports the people were dull and stodgy, or else loud and common, and the whole experience turns out a dismal failure. You’re lucky.”
Today his first question after getting down to business was, “How’s the troupe been behaving?” He referred to her troupe of instincts and emotions.
“I’m afraid I’m in another breakdown, Doctor Jaquith,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he replied instantly, his keen eyes observing her closely. “But let’s hear about false symptoms anyway.”
For the next half hour Charlotte did most of the talking. Usually ten or fifteen minutes before the end of an appointment, Doctor Jaquith rose and took the floor. Sometimes he walked up and down the room. Sometimes he stood with his back to the fire as he held forth. Today he chose to warm his back, thumbs in trousers pockets, fingers spread.
“Well, I’m still of the same opinion about the breakdown,” he began. “But I must say it looks to me as if several members of your cast have gotten pretty well out of hand lately. Why all this remorse about your mother’s death? I thought I relegated remorse, compunction, New England conscience, et cetera, backstage left and right. I’m surprised at you! You’ve let ’em sneak up to center and front.”
“Have I?” meekly Charlotte inquired.
“And look here,” he went on, “to what obscure corner have you consigned intelligence? Why, you’re no more to blame for your mother’s death than for an electric light bulb, nearly worn out, going black just after you happened to turn on the switch. Any feeling of guilt on that score I shall have to ascribe to sentimental emotionalism. Also in the same category is that sense-of-failure you say you’ve felt ever since your mother said you’d never done anything to make her proud. You know as well as I you had about as much chance to make your mother proud as a baby in a perambulator. You also know as well as I that she got a big kick out of you, since she discovered you’d got it in you to stand on your own two feet.”
“Possibly. But my mother’s very last intelligible words to me were spoken in rage. I feel as if I don’t deserve her money or want it.”
“Nonsense! The very last words spoken by a wise man are of little significance. That last scene with your mother is of no more importance than a fly speck on the window pane. Stop riveting your eyes on the fly speck, and look at the view. You did a swell job when you broke away from your mother. You did it kindly too. You didn’t tramp roughshod over her feelings, and you controlled your own. You had your cast under darned good control. You’re the stage manager, you know,” he smiled. “I’m just the director—ex-director. It’s really up to you to keep the troupe in shape now.”
He glanced up at the banjo clock. Three minutes had ticked away since he had risen. He now clasped his hands behind his back.
“Now I want to say something about this marriage question. You say you’ll never marry. Well, maybe not. I won’t question that. But what I do intend to quarrel with you about are your conclusions. You say you’ll never marry, therefore will never have a home of your own, a child of your own, or a man of your own. Good Lord! What are you going to do with all that money of yours? Why, you can have a home of your own, which all your brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, and friends, and friends’ friends will flock to in hordes, if you want to. No man is necessary for that in your case. As for a child of your own, the maternal instinct can be satisfied by a child you didn’t happen to bear. It doesn’t make any difference to a hen whether she hatched her own eggs or not. As for a man of your own, if it’s the masculine point of view you want, no unmarried woman with brains needs to feel any impoverishment on that score. If it’s male companionship and male admiration you enjoy (and God pity the woman who doesn’t), an unattached lady can have as many male companions as she has capacity for, and with no objections from a possessive husband. But some satisfactory substitute must be found for her sex instinct. In this age and part of the world incontinence usually leads to nothing but misery. It isn’t a good idea either to have a lot of repressed energy bottled up inside us. We must find some worthwhile activity on which you can expend effort freely and with benefit to yourself and others. The first thing to do is to consider what you have a talent for.”
“I see what you’re suggesting. Sublimation. I have no talent for anything except possibly for bridge. Perhaps I could give bridge lessons and donate the proceeds to an orphans’ home and so pacify my feminine craving! Oh, that sounds horribly sarcastic, I’m afraid. I’m sorry, but I’m one who prefers to face facts to being deceived by a false pacifier called sublimation.”
“Wait a minute! How much do you know about sublimation?”
“Not much!” she shrugged. “All I know is it’s something false and artificial instead of the real thing.”
“Ever study chemistry?”
She shook her head.
“Well, there’s nothing false or artificial about the process of sublimation in the chemical laboratory, I assure you. When a substance passes from one solid state into another, it is as definitely a fact as any of nature’s processes. So also in the mental laboratory. When a source of energy, denied normal and healthy expression, is diverted to an activity on a high ethical plane, there’s nothing to suggest a pacifier in the definite effect it has on an individual’s life and happiness. I speak from personal experience.” He paused a moment. “I’ve never married. There were reasons why I felt I shouldn’t.”
Charlotte was aware that there was some taint in his inheritance, of which he bore no trace, but which could be passed on. She had heard that it accounted for his interest in medicine, and that he had chosen psychiatry because of his personal experience with fears, and his own excellent adaptation to his fate.
“I was convinced,” he went on, “that I ought never to have a child, and I made up my mind I would never ask any woman to share that sacrifice with me. Of course now that I’m older I might perfectly well marry some woman also older with children of her own, but my substitutes for marriage were so satisfying and have become so engrossing that I feel little sense of loss, no self-pity, and no sense whatsoever of having been deceived by a false pacifier. I have in fact had a bully good time in life.”
“Your case is different. You always wanted to be a doctor. It wasn’t a makeshift. You had a motive for it, and a strong driving motive too.”
“Motives, like muscles, have to be exercised to become strong and driving.”
“Besides, you had a high-minded and altruistic reason for not marrying. The reason I shall never marry anybody now is because the only man I care for in that way is already married.”
“I call that a mighty high-minded and altruistic reason!”
She ignored his comment. “Oh, there’s nothing to be done about me. There’s nothing I want to do, nothing I’m interested in. All effort seems utterly futile. Now that Mother is dead, I haven’t even my freedom to struggle for any more. I have no duty toward anybody, and no obligation.”
“What about that pile of money in your possession? Some wealthy philanthropist once said, ‘Every possession is a duty, every opportunity an obligation.’ It may sound preachy, but it’s good talk.”
“What I long for most,” Charlotte said, in a tone of despair, �
�is a state of unconsciousness, but I haven’t the courage to put an end to things myself, because of the sneaking fear it might not be the end.”
“That’s a sneaking fear I’d respect. Seems possible to me that suicide might prove to be a case of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, judging from the way nature usually reacts when anyone tries breaking one of her fundamental laws. She has methods of enforcing them that are often harder to take than the law itself. Besides—” He paused.
“I know what you’re going to say.” Charlotte interrupted with one of her sardonic smiles. “‘Besides, suicide is so cowardly,’” she mimicked.
“No, I wasn’t going to refer to cowardice. What I was going to say was, that a man contemplating suicide should bear in mind that his act is usually paid for by others. It is not just his personal affair. Everyone who takes his or her own life increases the fear in all his progeny of committing the same act during a period of depression. In fact, every blood relation he possesses gets a drop of the same poison. Nice parting gift. Suicide is not inherited, but the tendency to give in to it seems to run in families. Mighty bad example to set for one’s friends and associates, too. Look here,” he broke off, “I have a suggestion. Is there any reason why you can’t get into your car tomorrow or the next day and run up to Cascade for a week or ten days?”
“I’m giving my chauffeur a two weeks’ vacation, but when he comes back I suppose I can have him drive me to Cascade.”
“Why bring the chauffeur?”
“I’ve only just learned to drive. Cascade is over three hundred miles. Those ghastly attacks of weakness have come back again.”
“Well, if you feel too weak to sit up and steer, just stop off at a hotel anywhere en route, hire a room, and lie down.”
Now, Voyager Page 22
