I let them lead her back to her room. “I’ll come see you later,” I shouted after her, and I went back to the cottage and finished my coffee. Then I walked up to the big house and sought out Walker and asked him about the baby.
He told me. “When we found Anna, on the riverbank, she was dying. You already know that, but Anna didn’t choose to tell you that she was pregnant at the time. She was bleeding profusely. The child was lost.”
“Who was the father?”
“Anna said that you were the father.”
“I couldn’t have been,” I said.
Walker nodded his head. “I know. You were in a stockade at the time of the child’s conception. Anna has never been good at lying, as I am sure you know. She can lie without guilt, which should make her a good liar, but she lacks the attention to detail that is at the heart of really fine lying.”
“Who was the father?”
Walker shrugged. “Anna has never chosen to tell me.”
I sensed, that morning, that Walker knew more than he chose to tell me. He was abrupt; his gestures suggested irritation, an irritation that included me.
“I am glad Anna is improving,” he said. “She has a clean strong spirit, but the demands on it have been great. Now you must excuse me. I have much to do this morning.”
I went back to the cottage and tried to work on the new book, but I was too restless to settle into the required frame of mind.
I went out again and walked to the top of Anna’s favorite hill and gazed out over a long, rolling expanse of meadow. A single, king-sized oak tree towered in the middle of the field amid a cluster of short, scrubby evergreens. Anna, laughing, had told me one day that the oak tree looked like it was teaching the smaller trees.
“What’s he teaching?” I asked.
“Bullshit oak tree stuff,” Anna had said, eyes blazing with sudden anger. “Telling them little pines to grow up to be oak trees. Worthless bullshit.”
Anna always surprised me. I could anticipate some of the things that she would do or say, but it was the things that I did not anticipate that somehow bound me to her. I was always afraid for her, and it was this unexpected quality within her, this wild thing darting in its cage, that frightened me. It seemed so arbitrary, so willful, so damnably elusive.
I thought about what Walker had said. Anna never told me she was pregnant, I thought, and I realized that my hurt and sense of loss was a product of my massive self-involvement. Why should she tell me? I felt a dizzy self-loathing. Clearly I was more concerned with a betrayal of trust—an ancient blow to my ego—than with Anna’s suffering.
Perhaps Walker had seen to my atrophied heart and that explained his present disgust.
I had too much time to think that day. If Anna did come out of her darkness, what would I do? My presence in Anna’s life had never been very benign. “Bad luck,” to quote Anna.
By afternoon, I was back in my cottage watching a businesslike rain obscure the infirmary and thinking self-pitying thoughts.
That evening I called Sharon. I don’t know why I called her. Perhaps I was simply tired of hearing my own thoughts rail like bedridden philosophers.
Sharon told me not to call anymore. I said okay.
“Jesus,” she said. “You might sound crushed. A gentleman would sound crushed even if he were delighted to be let off the hook.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
Sharon said, “Hell, it is okay. There wasn’t anything between us. I can take care of myself. Come to think of it, that’s what turns you off, isn’t it? I can take care of myself.”
“Huh?”
“Forget it. I really don’t mean to be nasty. It ain’t a broken heart on this end of the line, it’s just a shit-on ego. But shit-on egos are meaner, so I’m hanging up before I say anything I’ll regret. So long.” And she hung up.
I was a long time going to sleep that night. I felt harried, feverish. But when I finally did sleep, I slept soundly, and I didn’t waken until late the next morning, and I felt inexplicably refreshed. Anna was getting better. The sun was out again. Yesterday’s recriminations seemed foolish. My concerns were with the future, not the past.
I whistled briskly and cooked eggs.
12
Richard Parrish kissed his wife goodby after slamming the BMW’s trunk. She would be gone for the weekend, off to New York with girlfriends to see a hot new play and descend on Bloomingdale’s like piranhas on a dead cow. On Monday she would return, breathless and gift-laden. She would talk and talk, assuming, he supposed, that sheer volume would cover the lie. She didn’t realize that she could, as easily, have told in detail every nuance of the multiple fucks she had received during her spurious New York jaunt.
Parrish wasn’t interested. He knew she was sleeping with someone, knew almost exactly when it had begun, two weeks earlier. If anything, he was relieved. It kept her busy fashioning her needless lies, and so she left him alone.
He watched the car drive away and then he walked back into the house. The phone rang. It was Parrish’s father-in-law.
As usual, the old man wasted no time coming to the point. “I got a call from a crazy man today,” Dr. Solomon said. “This fellow calls up out of the blue, and what do you think he says? He says, ‘I want Richard Parrish to resign.’”
Silence while the old man let this statement—in all its absurdity—settle. Parrish felt a stillness in his bones, a wary animal listening.
Solomon continued, “Turns out this fellow is named John Walker, runs some kind of commune out on the edge of town. I checked up on him later on, and the man does have some money, so maybe he can make some noise, hire him some lawyers and raise a stink, but he’ll regret it if he does. Likely it’s all wind, and we’ll never hear from him again. He’s shouting malpractice; one of his flock has been brutalized. You ever hear of a Hannah Shockley?”
“Anna.”
“What’s that?”
“Anna Shockley. Her name is Anna Shockley.” Richard found that he was nodding his head. Yes. Yes. This was what he had been waiting for. The ugliness. The scandal. The vultures. You could almost hear the sound of their wings.
“You there, Richard?”
He nodded his head, realized that that wouldn’t do, and said, “Yes, I’m here. I was treating Anna Shockley for schizophrenia. She left the hospital with a friend. I have reason to believe she is in Virginia.”
“Well, that may be. I got the impression that she was with this Walker fellow, but that’s beside the point. The point is, there isn’t anything special I should pass on to our legal department in case this Walker follows through with a malpractice suit?”
“There’s no basis for such a suit, if that’s what you mean.” Richard heard the prim righteousness in his voice. It wasn’t assumed. It was real; he was genuinely offended.
“Don’t get hot, Richard. That’s not what I mean, and you know it. I just thought you might be able to anticipate the direction such a suit would take.”
“Anna Shockley is a deeply disturbed woman. She is inclined to fixate on bizarre conspiracy theories. No telling what she thinks. I’m surprised that anyone would be taken in by anything she said.”
“That is odd. But Walker is the lunatic fringe himself. Maybe he’s as gullible as all those aging hippies that worship him.”
“Maybe.”
“Anyway, I just wanted you to know what’s happening in case this unpleasantness escalates. Has Jane left yet?”
“You missed her by about half an hour.”
“Give her my love when she gets back.”
“I will.”
Parrish hung up the phone. Well, there it was. He had expected it. A month had passed since Anna Shockley had left the hospital, and the passing of time hadn’t settled his mind. With each passing day he had grown more aware of the danger, the inevitable explosion of her will. She had bit him once. He smiled wryly. Her teeth were still good. The phone call from Solomon had confirmed his intuitive conviction. She mean
t to destroy him.
He went into the study and unlocked the desk drawer. He took out the latest volume in his diary, but didn’t open it. There was no salvation in these black volumes anymore. Upstairs in the attic, dozens of these little black books were stored in a locked trunk. He dreamed of that trunk exploding, pouring forth rotted corpses, ugliness beyond belief, naked things with purple sores and skin like yellowed cheesecloth.
His solitude was violated forever. Something was happening within him, as though subterranean armies were gathering, their shouts filling the air. Now it seemed that everyone else possessed secrets, powerful secrets. Jane had her secret lover, and Anna had her secret protectors.
His own secrecy was no longer a source of power. He had tried to live a decent, self-contained life, but events had refused to let him live an ordered existence.
He poured himself a drink and drank it quickly. He refilled the glass.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
13
“My favorite book,” Anna said, “is The Summer Troll. I like the way Troll changes, becomes a better person.”
“You just like it because you’re in it,” I said.
Anna frowned at me, then her features brightened. “I’m Gloria!”
I nodded my head. “You are Gloria, the Princess of Upover and True Dreamer.”
Anna beamed. Her eyes widened. “And you are Troll. Poor David. Always changing because Gloria dreams you different every summer.”
“Hey, wait a minute. I’m not Troll at all. I don’t write autobiographical stuff. You are Gloria, and that’s it.”
Anna laughed. “Okay. You aren’t Troll.”
I got up and poked the fire. It coughed sparks, blazed. I looked back at Anna, whose deep eyes celebrated the firelight. I had never seen her so beautiful.
We were sitting by the fire in Walker’s study. Anna had decided that she was going to write a children’s book of her own—which she would let me illustrate—and she had written portions of plot and odd bits of poetry on sheets of lined paper that were scattered around the room.
Anna’s book was going to be about a house in the mountains. The house is filled with laughing, loving people. Something happens, and the people move to the city and abandon the house. The house becomes very lonely and kidnaps a kid who has gotten lost while hiking with his Boy Scout troop. Something like that. It wasn’t entirely clear. Anna admitted it needed work.
“Will you marry me?” I asked.
Anna frowned. “Stop it. It isn’t funny.”
“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”
Anna glared at the fire. “I could marry you. I could say ‘sure’ and you’d do it, because you are crazy.”
“I love you.”
“You don’t even know who I am.” Anna rolled over on her back and blinked at the ceiling. “My brain feels like someone ran it through a blender. Behave for awhile, okay?”
“Okay.” I logged “awhile” in the wide territory of hope.
Anna reached up and drew me to her. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, running her fingers through my hair.
“Me, too. I’m glad I’m here.”
One day, when I went to the infirmary to visit Anna, I found her in the television room with young Dr. Simms. Anna was laughing and Dr. Simms looked flushed and somewhat confused, like a puppy who has been praised without knowing exactly why.
“We are talking about medicine,” Anna told me. “Dr. Simms knows everything.”
Dr. Simms, flustered, stood up and locked the medicine cabinet. He was wearing the same smile, but he seemed to be shaking himself out of a daze. Anna did have a mesmerizing quality. I pointed that out to Walker later on, when Walker had occasion to be less than delighted with young Simms.
Anna’s recovery was miraculous. She had cast off the terrified, leaden-eyed husk of her hospital stay and emerged with a fierce, butterfly brightness that eclipsed even my nostalgia-powered dreams of her. Walker explained it in spiritual terms that eluded me. Anna’s solemn Dr. Simms may have been the victim of infatuation, but who could blame him?
Anna moved out of the infirmary and back into the main house. I waited. Anna was glad I was there. That was as good a reason as any for remaining. I could work on the book here, in the cottage. Christmas was edging toward us; I intended to celebrate it with Anna.
“You are a patient son of a bitch,” Diane told me, sitting on the floor drinking coffee.
“Huh? No one has ever accused me of being patient,” I said.
“But you are. You are waiting for Anna to leave with you, and you are willing to wait until she comes around.”
“Once again, you are making me out to be far more calculating than I am.”
Diane put the coffee cup down and stood up. She walked to the window and looked out. “And once again you are trying to appear more innocent than your years warrant. It’s snowing.”
I joined her at the window and watched the first large, wet flakes float down, slowly, dreamily, barely licked by gravity. The afternoon dimmed. The windowpane caught the first flakes, which instantly melted, running in crooked silver streams.
“I better get back,” Diane said. “I hate driving in snow.”
I walked her to her car and kissed her goodby. “It probably won’t amount to anything,” I said.
The snow began to hurtle down. Darkness came, and the snow rushed through the black air with a heavy, purposeful silence.
It had been snowing the last time I saw my mother. That was my freshman year in college, and I was home for the holidays. It had been a meaner snow, with ice in the heart of each flake, and it rattled on the car, clicked against the windshield, clung in glittering chunks to the wipers.
I had come up on the train, spent the day with my father, brother, my brother’s several children, in-laws, aunts. The house was festive: a turkey cooking, Christmas carols chiming, toys clacking, football booming on the TV.
The next morning, I borrowed my brother’s car and drove out to see my mother alone, not telling anyone where I was going.
Calvert Hospital was celebrating its own Christmas. There was a large Christmas tree in the dayroom.
“That’s a beautiful tree, ain’t it?” a thin, uniformed woman with a round face said.
I agreed that it was.
“Course, we don’t have no glass ornaments on it, as you will observe. We learned our lesson there. You would be amazed the damage an ordinary Christmas ornament can make on mortal flesh if a poor soul takes a notion.”
It was a sobering thought.
My mother was in her room, propped up in bed, reading Pride and Prejudice. She smiled when I came in. “David, I’m glad you could come,” she said. My mother was an extremely formal woman, not because she lacked warmth, but because she loved the ritual of things.
I kissed her on the cheek. “How are you doing?” I asked.
“I am weathering these unfortunate circumstances.” She sighed. “Holmes”—my mother persisted in polling her doctor Holmes in wry homage to his deductive powers—“says I can leave in a few weeks, as soon as the medication makes me totally innocuous to all and sundry, I suppose. And how are you getting on?”
I told her that college was just fine, Father seemed just fine, et cetera. Hospital conversations always run down quickly, and this one was no exception. We talked about books, a favorite subject for both of us and one that kept us occupied until a nurse came in to tell me it was time for me to leave.
“Here, I’ll walk you to the door,” my mother said, and she got out of bed and walked down the hall, an arm on my shoulder.
“Buck doesn’t like to come,” she said. “I know that. He has always been a robust man, your father, and he has a mortal fear of frailty. I understand. It isn’t his fault at all. You do him an injustice—no, you do, I know you do. And you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t think ill of your father.”
I meant to say something, make some denial, perhaps even explain the exact and subtle nature of
my dissatisfaction with Buck Livingston, but my mother’s face suddenly altered, her eyes narrowed and she leaned forward and said, “Take me with you. Quickly. We’ll leave here. Just walk out. They don’t have any cameras here, not in the hall. In the rooms, they have hidden cameras, but not here. Now’s our chance.”
Her hand was clutching my shoulder, squeezing, and her head shook.
“I can’t, Mother. You know that.”
She didn’t say anything, just shook me with her hand on my shoulder. There was an odd swollen cast to her features, a determination that made her seem a stranger. I was frightened.
Then her grip relaxed. Her features shifted to resignation. I saw my mother as I knew and loved her. “No,” she said, patting my shoulder. “Of course you can’t. I don’t know what came over me. Well, off with you.” She kissed me on the cheek, turned, and walked quickly back down the hall.
I drove back to the aunts and uncles, back to the festivities. I never saw my mother again. One of Calvert’s cleaning staff left a can of drain cleaner in the bathroom. My mother availed herself of the opportunity. She killed herself on the third day of the new year, leaving no note.
The symmetry of my life is great shrink fodder, I suppose. Long ago, Ray had accused me of falling instantly in love with Anna because she was a suicide. If I could save Anna, I might win this time, at least wrestle the ghost of loss to a draw. That had been Ray’s theory, wilder than Freud at his woolgathering best (and Freud was no slouch).
If there was any truth in Ray’s theory, Anna seemed to be surviving in spite of me. My redemptive efforts stank.
I jerked awake in the coffin darkness of the storm, my heart racing. A sense of impending doom haunted me, made me get up and turn on the light and study the progress of the storm.
I looked out at the main house, through the blur of still-falling snow. I was reassured by the warm light that burned in the second-story window, Anna’s room. As I watched, the light went out.
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