Angel

by Nicholas Guild

  To cheer himself up he ordered a glass of white wine, to which the waitress, who was about sixteen and looked as if she had never in her life drunk anything stronger than milk, took exception. “You sure you wouldn’t rather have red? It goes better with the prime rib.” In the end the wine tasted like paint thinner and left him feeling no more cheerful.

  But it was foolish to blame the restaurant, or even his solitude—he wanted to be alone. There was even a sense in which he wanted to be depressed, since there was a certain propriety in the emotion. After all, he was in this tiny hamlet to visit the gravesite of his youth’s great illusion, and perhaps if he allowed himself to mourn for it he could at last put it behind him and get on with his life.

  Which was why he didn’t allow himself to think about Lisa Milano, who gave him her body whenever he wanted it and who he was perfectly aware only waited for permission to offer him the grownup version of everything he thought he had missed with Angela Wyman. Everything which, he now realized, had never been there in the first place.

  When he returned from this journey, of which the trip to Sherman’s Crest was no more than an emblem, he wanted to do Lisa justice, to be the sweetheart she deserved. He was looking forward to giving it his very best effort. But in the meantime he had to find a way to put ten years of transcendentalized puppy love to rest.

  He declined dessert and, as a kind of penance, ended dinner with a cup of strong black coffee, which normally he never touched. It was as bitter as death, but a few swallows were enough to bring reality back into focus.

  It was about six-thirty when he came out of the restaurant, and there was only just a hint of twilight. A couple of boys wearing their baseball caps backwards whizzed down the main street on bicycles. There seemed to be no other traffic. On the other side of the bridge was a shopping center with a grocery store, a post office, a laundromat and a pizzeria, but at this hour the parking lot was not even a quarter full. In New Gilead the commuter trains would be disgorging passengers for at least another hour and the roads would be jammed, but it seemed that existence here followed a somewhat different rhythm. For the most part, people were already safe inside the walls of their houses, living their purely private lives.

  Feeling a stranger here, Kinkaid speeded up his pace. He was back in his motel room within five minutes.

  A swim would have been nice but he hadn’t brought any trunks and there was no pool anyway, so he settled for a cold shower. He came out gasping and refreshed and no longer quite so cozily sorry for himself. He dropped into a chair and began studying his notes. After all, that was what he was here for.

  M.L. Werther. Kinkaid sat staring at the name for what seemed like forever before he realized that the next move was obvious.

  Werther was retired. “I saw him just the other day at the Food Mart.” The grocery store on the way back had been a Food Mart. The guy was right here in Quincy.

  The phone book, which was no more than half an inch thick, confirmed that there was a Morris Werther, M.D. residing at 62 Jasmine Road. His number was 355-3115.

  Kinkaid dialed the number and a man’s voice answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Dr. Werther?”

  “Yes, speaking.”

  “Dr. Werther, I would very much like to talk to you about one of your former patients. Her name was Angela Wyman.”

  There was a pause lasting perhaps five or six seconds, and then, “Did you know Angela?”

  Not, “Who are you?” or “What do you want to talk about?” or any of the dozens of other things he might have said while he considered what might be the wise or prudent or even the professionally ethical response, but “Did you know Angela?” And spoken with a certain longing eagerness. This was our man.

  “Yes, I knew her,” Kinkaid answered, for once not finding it necessary to hide his feelings. “I knew her when she first came to this country, and then she disappeared. It was only a few days ago that I found out what happened to her.”

  “And you wish to know more,” the doctor said, with a slightly liquid trilling of the ‘r’ that suggested his first language had not been English. The sentence was phrased not as a question but as a statement of fact.

  “Yes. That’s why I’ve come up here.”

  “Where is ‘here’? Where are you now?”

  “I’m at the motel here in town. I’ve come a long way, Doctor, and it would mean a great deal to me if you could spare me just a little of your time. My name is James Kinkaid.”

  This time Werther didn’t hesitate at all.

  “Perhaps I’d better give you directions . . .”

  . . . . .

  The house had a screened-in porch around the front and side, and the lights from the windows filled the space with a patchy, yellowish light. Doctor Werther was standing in this enclosure, near the front door, which was open. He looked as if he had been waiting there ever since he had hung up the phone.

  As he got out of the car, Kinkaid could hear insects pinging against the screen. There was a certain desperation to the sound.

  Werther said nothing as Kinkaid came up the flagstone walkway that looked as if it had been dribbled over the lawn while the rock was still molten. He was waiting to be acknowledged.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Doctor,” Kinkaid said as he stood just beyond the arc of the screen door, waiting for it to be opened. “It was good of you to take the time.”

  Angela’s psychiatrist seemed to consider this for a moment and at last apparently decided that, yes, it was good of him and opened the door. He stepped back a little as Kinkaid entered and then offered his hand in a gesture that involved only his right arm. He did not smile.

  Was he having second thoughts? No, Kinkaid decided. He was merely proud, after the fashion of wounded men, and perhaps a little frightened.

  He was small, even a bit dainty, and he wore dark trousers and a sleeveless sweater over a white shirt. He was not bald, but his hair was thinning badly. His eyes were the only thing about his face that anyone would ever remember. They were a clear, cold blue and make him look desperately unhappy.

  The sweater was odd, considering the time of year, but it might have been intended to give his appearance a touch of formality.

  “Come in, Mr. Kinkaid.” He made a gesture toward the open front door. “You must forgive the untidiness of things. I’m not accustomed to visitors.”

  In fact there was nothing particularly untidy about the inside of the house—at least as much of it as Kinkaid was able to see from the foyer, which opened directly into the living room. Instead, what one noticed was a certain barrenness, a lack of ornament or color, the absence of anything to suggest that there had ever been a woman within these walls. The furniture looked as if no one had ever sat on it and there were no pictures.

  “Perhaps we would be more comfortable in my study.”

  The entrance to Doctor Werther’s study was toward the back of the living room and there was another door that probably led to a backyard of some kind, although the curtains over the only window were drawn, so it was impossible to know. There was a roll-top desk against the wall, with a wooden chair. In the center of the room there was another chair, upholstered in worn green leather, and a reading lamp.

  There were books everywhere. The walls were covered with an eccentric collection of bookcases, into which books and the small-format magazines that Kinkaid recognized as academic journals were stuffed at all angles. There were piles of books on the floor. Werther even had to clear a stack off the reading chair in order to offer his guest a place to sit down.

  There were also several ashtrays, most of them filled with cigarette butts. It was obvious as soon as they came in that this room was the real center of Doctor Werther’s house and probably of his life and there was no difficulty in imagining the character of that life.

  “As you can see, I am a great reader,” he said. He glanced around the room with just a hint of smug pride. “My profession is one which demands a wide background of i
nformation, and the habit has remained with me in retirement. When one loses interest in the things of the mind one is as good as dead, don’t you think?”

  He did not wait for an answer but reached into the pocket of his trousers for a pack of cigarettes, which turned out to be unfiltered and foreign. He shook one out and lit it with quick, impatient gesture that suggested long-ingrained habit.

  “I trust you do not object. It is my only vice.”

  Kinkaid shook his head and grinned. “Mine is vanilla ice cream, which is probably worse.”

  Doctor Werther appeared not to have heard. His unhappy eyes wandered about as if he was already bored and searching for a means of escape. When he spoke again it was with the air of having cleared away all the preliminary nonsense of the conversation.

  “So—how well did you know Angela?”

  “Well enough to have been in love with her,” Kinkaid answered. It was no more than the truth but, stated as such, it was also a deliberate provocation.

  And it worked. For just an instant a shadow of pain seemed to move across Werther’s face, a hint of something like jealousy. He took a drag from his cigarette, looking as if the stuff made his lungs ache.

  “Was she in love with you?” he asked, his voice a little too even.

  “There wasn’t time to find out.” Kinkaid decided it was time to relent. “You were her doctor, so if you have to ask I guess the answer is probably no.”

  Werther smiled. It was the benign smile of the Father Confessor, for whom there are no sins which are not forgiven in advance.

  “She never mentioned your name,” he said. “But for the first year she never mentioned anyone’s name—she never spoke. And after . . .” He shrugged his thin shoulders. “Love is not a particularly resilient emotion. In the sea of troubles that flooded across Angela’s young life just then, it might easily have been overwhelmed.”

  “What was the matter with her?”

  The question seemed to amuse Doctor Werther. “Catatonia—will that do as a label? In psychiatry diagnostic terms are often next to useless because they describe the behavior an illness produces rather than the illness itself. It is thus rather circular, like saying that a patient is unconscious because he is in a coma. But let us by all means agree that Angela was catatonic when she first came to Sherman’s Crest.”

  “Did you cure her?”

  “Oh yes.” The doctor shrugged again, as if the matter was of only peripheral interest. “I cured her of catatonia, and of other things. She responded very well to drugs and finally, when her mind became more accessible, to psychotherapy. She was, in many ways, the triumph of my career. And then, of course, they murdered her.”

  19

  “I shall always blame them,” Dr. Werther continued, as he moved toward describing his first encounters with Angela Wyman. “Her family and the institution both were more than eager to bury her alive in that place. And they did so without the slightest inkling of what they so casually destroyed. It was a tragic waste. I suspect that in all the world I was the only one who understood what she suffered . . . .”

  Morris Werther would have been nearing sixty on the day Angela was admitted to Sherman’s Crest. He had graduated without particular distinction from one of the New York State medical schools and turned to psychiatry in his forties, after nearly fifteen years of general practice in upstate New York. Instead of the teaching position he had hoped for, his career had led him to a number of large public mental hospitals, at each of which he would stay for a few years before moving on. In every profession it was a typical pattern for disappointed men.

  Sherman’s Crest had been his last refuge, and he stayed until he qualified for a pension. He had been there not quite two years when Angela arrived.

  “There are many types of catatonia, Mr. Kinkaid. Not all of them are the rigid marble statues of popular fiction. Some repeat a particular action endlessly, like this . . .” Dr. Werther put his two hands together so that only the palms and fingers were nearly touching. Then he let them bounce together in silent, mechanical clapping. “Some are as malleable as wax, allowing you to pose their limbs in any position you wish, only to droop slowly in a kind of slow-motion swoon. Some can walk if they are led, as if they must derive the will to motion from another person. It depends on the nature of the psychosis.

  “True catatonia is considered a subcategory of schizophrenia, which is probably chemical in origin. Thus it is treatable with drugs, but traditional psychotherapy, what has come to be known as ‘the talking cure,’ yields little in the way of clinical results. I never believed that Angela was a true catatonic.”

  He was working on his third cigarette by then, and he had grown sufficiently relaxed around his guest that he no longer troubled to brush the fragments of fallen ash from his sweater. From time to time a slight and no doubt completely unconscious smile played across his face. It was almost as if he had fallen into a trance of recollection.

  “In those early months Angela never spoke. She seemed oblivious to the presence of others. Yet if someone brought a spoonful of food to her lips she would accept it. If she was brought to a toilet and made to sit down upon the commode, she would empty her bowels. Once at night, while one of the nurses was putting her to bed, I heard her reciting ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’ to herself—very softly, as though having been reminded of something. One gradually developed the sense that she needed reminding that she was alive.

  “A true catatonic, you see, is perfectly aware of his or her surroundings. Their behavior is not retreat; it is, rather, a rational response to an irrational crisis. For instance, I once had a patient who, while in remission, told me that she had believed that the Battle of Armageddon was being fought inside her body and that she was personally so evil that any movement she made could only aid the forces of darkness. Thus for eighteen months she did not move a muscle—a reasonable, even an heroic response once one accepts her premises.

  “Angela was nothing like that,” he said, making a dismissive little gesture with his right hand, a motion which stirred the cigarette smoke as if he were trying to find something in it. “Angela had simply chosen to go away somewhere inside herself. And sometimes she could be briefly summoned back. After a time, she was summoned back to stay.”

  “Then what was the matter with her? Was it depression?”

  At first Werther appeared to be merely annoyed by Kinkaid’s interruption, but after a moment or two he seemed actually to be turning the suggestion over in his mind.

  “It was very like depression,” he answered finally. “But then so many things are very like and yet not. Was she unhappy in her private place? Was she anything at all? When she came out of it, she was never able to tell me.

  “And she did come out of it. About six months after she was admitted, the nurses found her one night sitting up in bed, her face buried in her hands, sobbing like a frightened child. She didn’t know where she was, she had no memory of attacking her grandmother, she had no notion of what had happened to her. It was as if she had been asleep for half a year and the time in between was nothing more than a confused dream.”

  “And she had no relapses?”

  “No, none. It was as complete a remission from a psychotic episode as I have ever witnessed.”

  “Did she ever remember the incident with her grandmother?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever speak to Mrs. Wyman about it?”

  For just an instant Werther seemed not to know whom he was talking about, and then he remembered.

  “She was not a particularly sympathetic character, was she,” he said, smiling through the blue haze of his cigarette smoke. “Strong-willed, but a stranger to herself. I never met her, although I spoke to her three or four times over the telephone. I only asked her general questions. I find that is best. Specifics do not reveal so much about the inner life.

  “She made only one glancing allusion, if that was what it was. ‘It is not to be lost sight of that my granddaughter is a mos
t dangerous person.’ Angela must have thrown a scare into the old woman, which I don’t imagine was easy.”

  For just an instant Werther seemed to be waiting for this assumption to be affirmed or denied. When it was neither he apparently lost interest.

  “She was not dangerous,” he went on. “If she were she would have killed her grandmother because she possessed both a systematic intelligence and considerable strength of character. Combine these with rage and you have a genuinely formidable lunatic. I am inclined to think that the attack, if there really was one, was probably more rhetorical than real.”

  Kinkaid found himself wondering what Dr. Werther would say if he knew that Angela Wyman had not attacked her grandmother, rhetorically or any other way, but had beaten a man’s face in until it was no longer even recognizably human. Sixteen years old, and she had conned her doctor so well that the con had lasted from that day to this.

  It made you wonder what else he had missed along the way.

  “And what happened then?” Kinkaid asked. “I mean, once she had come out of her trance.”

  “She returned to normal life—or as normal a life as is possible within the confines of a madhouse.”

  Werther made a vague circular gesture with his right hand, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke in the air and somehow implying, doubtless without intending to, that the madhouse was this very room.

  “She undertook a course of psychiatric treatment, which was still in progress at the time of her death. After a year it was judged no longer necessary to continue her medication and after two years she was given a clerical job, simply in order that she would have something with which to occupy her time.”

  “What did Angela talk about during her treatment?”

  If the question was an intrusion of anyone’s privacy, living or dead, Werther never gave any sign.

  “She talked about Paris, her childhood—her mother,” he replied, with that same touch of wistful longing Kinkaid had noted over the phone. “She loved her mother intensely, the way children tend to love a wayward parent. But that is blindness, not insanity. It soon became clear to me that there was no compelling reason why she could not have been released.”