THE MADNESS OF DR. CALIGARI

by Dennis Weiler

  Alan slept deeply, as he had before. He finally woke up when the other children began to arrive. Miss B fed him breakfast. At noon he ate a light lunch. When his mother didn’t show up at one o’clock he ate an afternoon snack with the kids who stayed until six. Then he had dinner with Miss B, who finally gave him his bath and put him to bed.

  Remembering all of this, she said she knew it seemed strange but at the time she just couldn’t think what else to do. She tried calling Roberta but no one answered the phone. Her instinct, to alert the authorities, was quickly muted by apprehension. Roberta had warned her not to bring in the police. If she did, there was no telling what they might find. And if Frank Granger was the kind of man who resented people interfering in his domestic life, anything might happen.

  The next evening, after all the other children had been picked up by parents Miss B was beginning to view as paragons of virtue, Roberta showed up on the doorstep with a new collection of bruises on her wrists and neck. This time Miss B insisted on more than a gift and a promise.

  “Tell me one reason why I shouldn’t contact the authorities,” she said.

  “No one can help,” Roberta told her.

  “I think the police might want to hear about what’s going on.” This was the first time Miss B had encountered such a problem, and she had no real sense of how it should be handled.

  “No!” Roberta shouted. “No, please! You’re the only one who can help me, by not saying anything. I can’t call anyone. It’s my fault! It’s all my fault!”

  “How can that be?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Roberta. “I’ll tell you, if you promise to keep it secret. Promise. Please promise.”

  This is how Pauline Bingham allowed herself to be compromised by a client she barely knew. For the rest of the evening Roberta sat sipping tea and recounting her story.

  Being a telephone operator wasn’t glamorous but it was a good job for a girl who lacked a college education and hated the servile nature of secretarial work. As Roberta put it, “I didn’t want to spend my life typing letters and pouring coffee for some fat, bald man in a tacky suit.”

  Her parents had died the year she turned fourteen, leaving their meager savings and Roberta’s care to her older brother Gary.

  “I saw myself as a hick. My brother’s a hick too but he’s seen the world. He wanted to study medicine but there wasn’t enough money for that. He’s a career Army man. He took a transfer and moved back home to raise me. He calls me Bird Brain and he ought to know. Pauline, do you mind if I have a cigarette?”

  Miss B ushered her guest outside to the glider swing. Both women settled in and lit cigarettes.

  “My brother’s not a bad man,” said Roberta.

  This surprised Miss B. She hadn’t given a thought to the brother, only to Roberta’s husband Frank.

  “I stayed home as long as I could stand it. I wasn’t much of a student, so I dropped out of high school. These other two girls and me, we shared an apartment. I was just doing what I could—cashier, car wash, waitress at a truck stop, greeter at a shoe store, anything. I was barely paying the rent.

  “I heard the phone company was about to open another branch, and I applied. They said it might be a year before they were hiring. Pauline, I lived on lettuce sandwiches and spaghetti noodles. I got so skinny my clothes didn’t fit. I was like a ghost, a ghost in a mini-dress. Can you imagine?

  “Now you’ll think I’m the worst thing in the world. I used to wander the aisles of the grocery store and steal food when I could get away with it. I also made a habit of picking up eyeliner, lipstick, hairspray, and Marlboros. I’m not showing off. I’m embarrassed about it now but when I did it I had to. I couldn’t stop myself. I just took what I needed. I’d see some lady fiddling with her change purse and I’d get mad. It’s not right. But I’d get mad. Why did she have everything she wanted?

  “This sounds awful. I’m sorry. But I was so broke, and my brother wouldn’t help me unless I moved back home. I was only about twenty when I finally got a chance to apply for a real job, as a telephone operator. I can’t tell you how happy I was, just to be chosen for the aptitude test and the interview. Somehow I got the idea only women worked at the phone company. But it was a man that hired me. I flirted with him. It’s true. I stuck my boobs out and I smiled and flirted, and he gave me the job.”

  “We’ve all done things we wish we didn’t have to do,” Miss B said.

  “I’ve done a lot of things,” Roberta told her. “See, the guy who hired me, who gave me the job I wanted so much, was Frank.”

  “Your husband?” Miss B shook her head and lit a second cigarette.

  “Yes, ma’am. Except when I met him he was somebody else’s husband.”

  Now Miss B raised an eyebrow. She poured tea and smiled at her guest but she started to wonder what she’d got herself into.

  The man of Roberta’s dreams was stocky, middle-aged, and going bald. He was a shift supervisor and it was a boring job. No surprise he fell for a woman half his age. Maybe he didn’t see how desperate Roberta was. Or maybe he did see.

  “My brother found out I was dating a married man and I thought he was going to kill me. You know what he did?”

  Roberta told two stories about her brother. In the first he tailed Frank home one night and filled his gas tank with sugar. The second was less destructive but more frightening.

  The sugar prank left Roberta’s suitor without a vehicle. Frank couldn’t see her again until he had his car repaired. On their usual date night she was home alone.

  She showered and put on her nightgown. She turned out the lights in the apartment she now enjoyed by herself since Frank paid part of the rent. She could hear a radio faintly humming outside, down the street. The tune caught her attention because it was one of her favorites, “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.” Quietly she hummed along to the bittersweet refrain about laughing and singing and then leaving the one you love.

  The song ended and the radio faded in the distance. Roberta was drifting off when she heard breathing. She opened her eyes, assuming she’d been startled awake by her own gentle snoring. She lay very still. In a few seconds she realized the sound she heard was not her own breathing. Someone else was in the room.

  She had to struggle not to make a sudden movement, not to jump up or scream. She measured each intake of air and tried not to tremble as she exhaled. She kept her eyes open. As they adjusted to the dark she glanced up at the ceiling, and then across the room at the door. Nothing moved. The closet was shut and the window was locked. As she lay there perspiring, trying not to call out, her hearing finally located the steady breathing. It was coming from underneath the bed.

  As smoothly and quietly as possible she slid the covers off her body and rolled to her right, facing the door. She prepared every muscle for flight. She lay coiled and ready until she heard the breathing lapse into a kind of snuffling noise, almost a snore, and then she sprang from the bed. She landed halfway to the bedroom door, reached out and yanked it open, tore across the living room and out the front door. Unable to stifle it any more, she let out a scream all the way to the next-door neighbor’s apartment. She was shivering and hysterical by the time police arrived. She led two officers through the apartment but no one was found and nothing was out of place.

  Roberta broke down when she told this story to Frank, who wanted to track down her brother and beat him up. Instead he comforted Roberta. He comforted her all night, and fooled his wife with a lie about an old friend, a drinking buddy. Two months later Roberta broke the news that she was pregnant.

  She had a good job, she told Frank, and she liked living the way she wanted. Every time the subject came up, she refused his money for an abortion and she told him to go back to his wife. As she told Miss B, her plan was to scare him off. She didn’t know whether or not she wanted a baby but she knew she didn’t want to marry this pot-bellied o
ld man who treated her like a child. Unfortunately her plan backfired. Frank told his wife about the affair and she filed for divorce.

  Next thing Roberta knew, Frank had moved in with her while he waited for his divorce to come through. At first they had fun. Staying in bed all day on Sunday, eating cold spaghetti for dinner, watching old musicals and cartoons on TV, they felt like children getting away with murder.

  Eventually the pregnancy began to show. Roberta bought zip-up go-go boots and dangling earrings to offset the feeling that she was turning into an elephant. The other operators started gossiping. Frank insisted she cut back her hours and work part-time. He was gruff about it, insisting his salary would be plenty for both of them.

  When the divorce was final, Frank had to pay his ex-wife alimony. The amount, based on charges of cruelty and adultery, was devastating.

  The new couple lived in a kind of fog after that, pretending nothing had changed. They went on watching movies on TV and singing along to the radio. But there came a day when Frank complained about eating stale donuts for breakfast. Then he informed Roberta they were moving to a smaller apartment, in a part of town where she had formerly vowed she would never live. “Hick Town” is what she called it, where hillbillies and their cousins shacked up when they couldn’t find work in Atlanta.

  After Alan was born Roberta tried to get full-time work again but Frank refused. He said she should stay home and care for the baby. But he wasn’t bringing home enough money for that. So they argued. They argued about their budget. They argued about the money she spent on clothes. Most of all they argued about her smoking. She had smoked cigarettes while carrying the baby, and twice as much after he was born. The less money the couple had the more they argued, and the more Roberta smoked.

  “It was the only thing that felt like it was just mine and nobody else’s. After Alan was born we couldn’t do anything any more. No takeout dinners. No shopping. All I did was take care of the baby.

  “Then somebody finally told on us, I don’t know who. The phone company let Frank go, and refused to put me back on full-time.”

  “I can imagine how he handled the news,” Miss B said.

  “He tried everything. Finally he got afternoons and weekends handling inventory at a grocery store. You should have seen his face, Pauline. He kept shaking his head and saying this was the kind of work he did in high school.”

  “We all have to do what we can,” said Miss B. “It wasn’t your fault he got fired.”

  “It’s nice of you to say, but it was my fault in a way. And then, after all the things that happened, I couldn’t leave him. I mean I have to think of Alan, too. Right? I don’t know.”

  At this point Roberta Granger broke down. Miss B put a hand on her shoulder, and the woman let loose and just sobbed. Once she calmed down she lit another cigarette.

  “This,” she told Miss B, “is my lover, my real boyfriend, right here. I swear, under the right circumstances I think I’d do anything for a cigarette. God, Frank hates it. Nothing helps. I’m already taking—what is it called, a tranquilizer, or a sedative? I can’t keep up with all these new medical terms. Seems like it’s all bad news these days, don’t you think? I try to tune it out. The doctor said these pills would help me drink less. But they’re not enough to make me calm down. I smoke like a chimney.

  “Frank says if I don’t quit, he’ll divorce me and take Alan. Maybe he should. Maybe he doesn’t mean it. I can’t tell any more. But I feel so bad about everything, Pauline. I had to do something.”

  “What did you do?”

  “On my break, one day, I was reading the paper and I saw this ad. Madame Vivian, a hypnotist who specializes in non-smoking therapy.”

  “Madame?”

  “I know,” said Roberta. “But I was at the end of my rope. I needed a miracle. I went to see her the next day. She has a place downtown. Not really an office, it’s more of a studio. There was a sign out front with a picture of a woman with her eyes closed and she’s floating in the clouds. Inside the studio’s painted white and gold. I expected Madame Vivian would come out wearing a turban and a caftan, carrying a crystal ball. But she was this petite, elderly lady in Capri pants and a white blouse and ballet slippers. She asked me to talk about myself, and all I could say was that I’m a mom and I want to quit smoking. Isn’t that pitiful?

  “She guided me to another room, smaller and very quiet, and asked me to sit in this sort of recliner. When I was settled in she let the seat back so I was looking at the ceiling. There were tiny lights up there, twinkling just like the night sky!

  “Madame Vivian removed my shoes and loosened my clothes. For the first time all day I could breathe. She was speaking to me the whole time, nothing special, just how good it feels to relax and think about nothing, to let all the little worries and fears drift away. I could feel my body letting go, sinking deeper into the recliner, and it was almost like falling asleep except I could hear her voice. And I noticed a fragrance in the room. As I fell under the spell of her words the fragrance grew stronger, and it surrounded me and seemed to embrace me. I began to imagine myself as a caterpillar inside a—what do you call it—”

  “Chrysalis,” said Miss B.

  “Yes. Not sleeping exactly but asleep and aware at the same time. Moving through a series of rooms with painted panels. People wandered behind the panels, whispering. The air was heavy with this scent. It was deep and sweet like an exotic flower, all around me, inside my head and all over my skin. I crossed a courtyard and saw a woman standing beside an open door. She was beckoning to me, and I obeyed.

  “There was no sense of time. But when I woke up and checked my watch, two hours had passed. My hands, the palms of my hands were scarlet, smeared bright red with something like finger-paint. Madame Vivian used a soft cloth to wash the color away.

  “She asked how I felt and I told her the truth. I felt better than I had since I was a little girl, when my parents were alive and I would play outdoors all afternoon, finding beetles in the blades of grass and following their adventures. I took a deep breath and smelled nothing. The air was clean and bright. There wasn’t a hint of the fragrance I’d smelled before.”

  “Well,” said Miss B. “My goodness!”

  “I know!” Roberta laughed. “When I walked out of Madame Vivian’s studio I felt like a million bucks. I felt so good I went shopping. Not for anything in particular, just wandering around in a nice department store like a lady who could buy anything she wanted.

  “I have no idea what drew me to the perfume counter. Every day, Frank was complaining about how I spent money. All I know is that I opened a bottle, right there in the middle of the counter, in the middle of the store, and when I inhaled the fragrance it carried me right back to the little room in Madame Vivian’s studio. It was the very same scent!”

  “How odd.” This is when Miss B had her first inkling that Roberta might have problems beyond her marriage. “Did you buy a bottle?”

  Roberta picked at the filter end of another cigarette. She resisted for a second and then lit up.

  “Yes,” she said. But she seemed uncertain. “I took three bottles. I hid them at home. If Frank knew he’d kill me.”

  “I’ll give back the one you gave me,” said Miss B.

  “No! Oh no, no.”

  “I never wear perfume,” Miss B insisted.

  “I can’t return it,” said Roberta. “I didn’t pay for it.”

  Miss B had to make a conscious effort to close her mouth at this point. She couldn’t imagine a woman showing the audacity to shoplift three bottles of expensive perfume.

  “See?” Roberta said. “I told you, Pauline. I knew you were going to hate me. I’m hopeless.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Miss B. Before them the back yard glittered with lightning bugs. “I’m surprised, that’s all. You must have had some lingering effect from the woman, the hypnotist, what w
as her name?”

  “Madame Vivian…”

  “What a ridiculous name,” said Miss B. “She was a con artist. She took advantage of you. How much did you have to pay her?”

  “Fifteen dollars.”

  “Well, that isn’t too bad. But she cheated you. You’re still smoking.”

  Roberta nodded. She crossed her legs and smoked in silence.

  “I think I’m sleepwalking too,” she said after a while.

  “Sleepwalking?”

  “I’ve been waking up in Alan’s room. Don’t know how. I wake up, but I’m standing next to his bed. One time I was holding a pillow in my hands.” Roberta stopped. When she realized Miss B was staring at her, she laughed.

  “What?” Miss B asked, amazed by her strange behavior.

  “You know what I do? I wear the perfume whenever I smoke. Now, what do you say, do you think it’s strong enough to cover half a pack of cigarettes?”

  “No,” said Miss B.

  “No, I don’t believe it either,” said Roberta. “But you know what? Frank can’t smell smoke on me when I’m wearing the perfume. He can’t tell at all! Is that crazy?”

  In fact Miss B had begun to wonder if the Grangers might be unbalanced. Not merely troubled but somehow, in a deeper sense, unwell.

  “What do you say, Pauline?” Roberta asked. “Am I going crazy?” She laughed again and this time her voice had a nasty undercurrent, a streak of real madness.

  “Maybe all you need is some rest,” said Miss B. “Maybe you should leave Alan with me for a day or two and get a good rest. Might do you a lot of good.”

  The night was still except for the lightning bugs. The porch light was dim on purpose. Miss B didn’t like neighbors to spy on her evening smoke. In the shadows her guest’s face lit up suddenly, illuminated by the tip of her cigarette when she took a draw. Her eyes were dark and fierce like a nocturnal animal’s. She exhaled and smirked.