For Love of Audrey Rose

17

Alarge city rotated underneath like an octopus, its radiating arms busy with slow-moving metallic gleams. Around it were green marshes and reflective bits of cold water.

“New England,” Hoover whispered to Janice. “Down there is Hartford… that must be the Interstate Thruway… See the sand dunes on the coast?”

He paused. They both realized that Darien, Connecticut, also lay somewhere underneath them. A nondescript town with its hopes, fears, ambitions, and its hospital. A hospital where Ivy died, surrounded by thirteen physicians and assistants, in full view of the horrified court. Where Bill broke apart like the glass around the hypnosis chamber. Unlike the chamber window, he could not be replaced, and he still pawed through life, suspicious, half dead, threatening to come apart still more.

Hoover licked his lips slowly, and Janice thought she saw his eyes grow moist. They avoided looking at one another, but they became intensely aware of each other’s breathing. Then Connecticut passed slowly under the fuselage, the thruways grew dense and tangled, and the great metropolis came into view.

“It feels like a lifetime since I was here,” Janice said in a distant voice.

“It is. You have become a different person.”

Suddenly the great World Trade Towers, twin steel structures, light blue and gray where the clouds were reflected, rolled underneath. The warning chime sounded and the seat belts were requested. Seats were pushed upright, cigarettes extinguished, and with a sudden lurch the jet began to roar and Janice saw the flaps move downward.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, suddenly frightened. “Are we doing the right thing?”

“I believe so,” he said, holding her hand. “As firmly as I have ever believed anything.”

The jet suddenly screamed. Janice looked out the window, saw white clouds stream past like smoke. White concrete appeared, racing by in streaks, and beyond it the familiar layout of Kennedy International. With dread and horror she saw the ground leap up, slam against the tires, and a blast of air resounded in their ears. Then they were slowing, the great engines in reverse, slower and slower, taxiing to the terminal.

“Manhattan,” Hoover said to the taxi driver. “West Sixty-seventh Street.”

The taxi maneuvered slowly through the traffic crowding around the various terminals. Finally it inched along a thruway ramp, out to another system of highways, and then picked up speed on the south shore of Long Island. As they passed the rippling marsh grass, the shivering gray ocean in the sound, Janice turned to look out the north window.

“Somewhere up there,” she said. “That’s where the institution is.”

Hoover crowded closer to get a look. “May God grant him peace,” he said, peering into the dark, rising clouds to the north.

Then the taxi slowed, crawled onto the Tri-Boro bridge, and a cityscape spread before them. Brown and gray tenements, crowded streets, all slow-moving and dull, as though life had nowhere to go, no place to grow but only went round and round in dilapidated rituals.

Janice found herself staring at her homeland as though it had become a foreign country. The dizziness refused to go away. It seemed as though something were missing, either in the landscape or in her.

“It’s all like a big vacuum.”

He smiled. “You see? India has changed you.”

Then the taxi drove rapidly into the canyons of the city and passed through Central Park. Against the leafy, humid summer afternoon were roller skaters, elderly people on small benches, and boats on the lake. Suddenly Janice’s heart constricted in an old pain as they approached the west side. By the time they got to Sixty-seventh Street her heart was beating rapidly and the dizziness was now troubling. Des Artistes stood in front of her, implacable stone, rain-stained, gray, like a prison and a fortress, full of threats and nearly forgotten promises. Janice found it difficult to step from the taxi. She was afraid that the slow maelstrom of despair would once again suck her in. And when she saw Mario, the doorman, emerge from the lobby, she quickly turned to Hoover.

“Elliot,” she whispered, “it would be better if they didn’t see you. Some of them will remember your face.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll find a hotel. Give you a call when I have a room.”

Hoover ducked his face as Mario opened the door and helped Janice out.

“Why, Mrs. Templeton!” he exclaimed. “We sure missed you. You’ve been gone a long time.”

“Hello, Mario. Just a little vacation. I’m entitled, no?”

“Yeah, sure,” Mario laughed.

He escorted her into the lobby as the taxi drove off with Elliot Hoover.

The shock of seeing the familiar white-covered tables in the restaurant, the chandeliers, and the elevator — all signs and symbols of past joys and terrors — overcame her and she felt an arm reach for her as she swayed.

“I’m all right,” she murmured.

But she was sitting on the bench in the elevator. The door was closed, she was riding up, and Ernie stared at her in concern.

“Ernie,” she said weakly. “How are you?”

He laughed, his teeth gleaming against his light brown face, an infectious laughter.

“How are you?” he exclaimed. “You stay away for two months and come back without a word and as soon as you walk in the door you start to pass out.”

“Did I?” she said softly. “How embarrassing.”

“You want a doctor?”

“No. Thanks, Ernie. I just haven’t eaten today.”

“Well, I’ll bring you up a sandwich, okay?”

She smiled gratefully. When they got to her floor and the doors opened, her knees once again felt weak. Ernie assisted her to the door.

“Oh, I’ve lost my key,” she said.

Ernie produced a ring of keys, found hers, and opened the door. The vista of stained-glass windows, familiar carpets, and the lovely painted ceiling was too much for her. It wanted to reclaim her, to drain away every bit of strength she had gained in India, to reduce her once again to an automated shell struggling for the smallest spark of life.

“Have you been sick, Mrs. Templeton?” Ernie asked. “You look like you lost twenty pounds.”

“A little bit, Ernie. But I’m fine now. Has there been much mail for me?”

“I can check for you. You want me to open some windows before I go?”

“Thank you.”

As he opened the kitchen window, fresh air began to circulate through the apartment. Already the familiar sensation had risen like dust in a breeze: Ivy’s door that was always ajar, the wedding portrait, now a perpetual reproof, the souvenirs of happier times, all now bitter mockeries. And yet she felt that this time, for the first time, she was equipped to fight them all, even conquer them.

The telephone rang: a harsh, strident shriek that startled her. It was Elliot Hoover.

“I’ve gotten a room at the Windsor-Newton. It’s only three blocks away. How are you feeling?”

“Very strange. It’s very weird to be back.”

“Have you called Dr. Geddes?”

“No. I’ve been afraid to.”

“Well, call him. He’ll have to prepare Bill to accept my presence.”

Janice sat down again, unsteadily, on the couch.

“It seems so sudden. Everything seems to be rushing ahead so fast.”

“You’re worn out. Get some sleep. There’s a restaurant on the corner of Columbus and Sixty-eighth. We can have breakfast there. Right now call Dr. Geddes and arrange a meeting for tomorrow.”

He waited for Janice to respond.

“Isn’t that what we want, Janice?”

“Fine. That will be fine.”

After she hung up, a peculiar emptiness circulated around the apartment. Her confidence was evaporating. She began to think it might have been a terrible mistake to have brought Elliot Hoover to New York. She remembered the hostility Bill once had for him. True, Bill now was a believer, a purer believer, in some ways, than Hoover. But did that mean he would accept the man who had disrupted his life? Whose existence stood for everything he had once hated? But then, Bill was different now. And she fought the doubt that threatened her.

The doorbell rang, Ernie brought a plate of sandwiches with hot tea. She thanked him. As she ate the roast beef and bread, a bit of confidence returned. After the hot tea, she felt remorseful that she had ever doubted what she had done.

But when she telephoned the Eilenberg Clinic Dr. Geddes was adamant. He would not permit Elliot Hoover to speak with Bill. Janice had the distinct impression that Dr. Geddes was trying to shield Bill from her. But at last he agreed to meet Elliot Hoover for a short interview the following afternoon. That was no guarantee that he would let him speak with Bill.

That night Janice slept uncomfortably in her bed for the first time in two months. She had bathed, and then examined her naked body in the full-length mirror. Her hips now jutted out, angular, and her breasts seemed slimmer. But mostly it had been the face that shocked her. What a stranger she had become to her own eyes. Then came the silence. The silence of lying in bed in an apartment vacated for so long, doubly vacated by two others, one dead, the other emotionally dead, but both leaving residues of sorrow at every corner, every object in the place. So she lay, her body oriented halfway between India time and Western time, listening to the vague sounds of the city.

Elliot Hoover was a welcome sight in the small restaurant at the corner of Columbus Avenue. He rose politely as she came in and beamed a lovely smile.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“I was a little anxious,” she confessed, sitting down beside him. “It’s so strange to be back. I feel I’m living someone else’s life.”

“Your previous kind of life will soon try to catch hold of you,” he warned in a kindly way. “Don’t let it. Now, this restaurant seems to specialize in palachenka, those breakfast crepes from Vienna, filled with cream and fresh jam.”

“Sounds lovely.”

The palachenka were delicate as a layer of snow and about as thick. The jam was country-fresh, homemade, and it was so peaceful to sit in the corner booth, among the sagging East European faces that hung over the nearby tables, arguing in Yiddish, Russian, or Hungarian, that neither wanted to break the spell. Outside, the sunlight bathed Columbus Avenue in a crisp, clear light, and small pools of water from night rain reflected the shops upside down.

“When will Dr. Geddes speak with us?” he finally asked, as gently as he could.

“Not until late this afternoon. He can’t leave Ossining until three o’clock. He’ll meet us about four o’clock at the hospital.”

He touched her right hand, which had begun to crumple the white napkin into a ball.

“Don’t be nervous,” he said softly. “In some way, Bill must know that help is on the way.”

She smiled and relaxed. “I hope you’re right. So much rides on this.”

“Trust me. And trust yourself.”

He looked around the restaurant, enjoying the babble of European voices, the easygoing, inelegant comfort of the place, where the customers and the staff knew each other as old friends.

“Then we have the whole morning to ourselves,” he said, turning slowly back to her.

“Do you want to see the little girl?” she asked simply.

He nodded, very slowly, a gesture of serious determination. “God knows I shouldn’t. And yet—”

“It may be difficult, considering all that’s happened. Still, we can try.”

“Is the child…pretty?”

“Yes, Elliot. She’s a lovely girl.”

His eyes seemed to soften and he smiled a gentle, sad smile as he settled back in his chair and signaled the waiter for the bill.

When they arrived at the Hernandez address he stepped very slowly onto the pavement. He smoothed his hair back, adjusted his coat, and looked up and down the street.

She took him by the arm and escorted him into the dark and fetid gloom of the tenement, stumbling over broken toys strewn over the cracked floor. As they climbed, the echoes of their steps preceded them like an ominous, bass tremolo.

She felt resistance in his arm, but he resolved to go farther, climbed the next flight, and then his body tensed again. He perspired heavily. He was ashamed, but he could not hide his nervousness.

“I don’t think I can go on,” he whispered.

“Elliot, you’ll haunt yourself for the rest of your life if you don’t.”

He started to answer her, then grimly closed his mouth and followed her into the darkest part of the stairwell. She thought she saw his lips move, as though he purified himself by some quiet prayer.

They emerged onto the top landing. Graffiti had been sprayed in huge black swirls since she had last been there. Parts of the tile on the floor had been badly marred, even dug up, as though by heavy boots or some sort of portable equipment. There was no other sign of the police having occupied the place. It was a scene of sadness, the dinginess relieved only by the light at the very far end, at the fire escape, where the Master had escaped from her grasp so suddenly and so terribly.

“Was it here that Bill…?”

She nodded. Their footsteps now sounded heavy and dull as lead. She brought him to the fire escape and they looked downward into the brown alley at the garbage spilling out of broken cans and the cats that slinked along black rails.

“It was the dead of winter,” she said softly. “Everything was covered in ice. Bill was up there, on the roof.”

She pointed to where the black metal steps twisted up toward the roof.

“He was holding the girl in his arms. I remember the wind kicking the snow across like a blizzard, and waiting, and being afraid. And then the Master came to talk to him, and Bill listened and handed over the child to him. Then they shot him.”

Hoover licked his lips, looking up and craning his neck to catch a glimpse of the roof, as though by so doing he could better imagine the scene.

For a long time he stood at the bright window, wondering at the sad, incomprehensible mingling of destinies that had brought him, a second time, to New York.

He looked significantly at Janice, waiting for her to make the first move. She said nothing, but walked briskly to the door by the stairwell. Quietly he followed.

“This is the apartment?” he asked gently.

She nodded. She found it difficult to speak. He reached in front of her and softly rapped against the door. There was no answer.

He rapped louder and waited. She saw the perspiration appearing a second time on his forehead, and then he made a fist and hit the door three times, squarely, so that the blows reverberated into the rooms behind it.

“Don’ have to break it!” said a voice with a Spanish lilt in it.

Hoover whirled around, focusing his eyes at the darkness behind him.

“It’s not locked,” said the voice.

A thin, almost emaciated janitor, wearing a denim cap and overalls, stared back at them. He was barely thirty years old, but the face was slightly squashed, as though a heavy weight had pressed in the right cheek and temple, and the right eye wandered uselessly as he spoke.

He gestured at the door.

“You can go in,” he said kindly. “Nobody there.”

“Nobody?” Hoover asked, then turned to Janice.

She looked into his eyes, as confused as he was, then abruptly she pushed open the door.

A smell of dust, decayed food odors, and old paint billowed out. On the floor were balls and strings of dust, and specks of black that looked like dead bugs, and huge black stains covered the wall over where the stove had been. The apartment was utterly empty. Not a chair, not a shred of gauze curtain, not a piece of carpet remained. The breeze blew in from the window over dusty, scarred floors, and seemed to accentuate the desolation.

“You from welfare?” the janitor asked.

“No…” Janice stammered.

Hesitantly Janice took a single step onto the grimy kitchen floor. Hoover stepped past her, examining the living room where four rust spots marked the position of the absent television set. The windowsills were cracked, stained by mud and something like oil, and Janice surmised they were souvenirs of police activity at the apartment that February night.

She turned to the janitor, who had followed them, his dim mind perceiving a kind of game being played by these strange people. He lolled at the kitchen door, a simpleton’s smile on his face.

“Didn’t Rosa Hernandez live here?” Janice demanded.

“I don’t know if her name was Rosa.”

“But it was Hernandez?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Where are they now?” Hoover asked.

“Home.”

Hoover turned to Janice. She shook her head, uncertain what “home” meant. Hoover turned back to the young janitor.

“Where is home?”

“Puerto Rico.”

Hoover stared at the janitor.

“There was trouble. Bad trouble. This man come, he take the little girl. Police shoot him down. So they go home, be with friends and family.”

“Oh, dear God,” Janice sighed, closing her eyes.

Hoover turned to Janice.

“It doesn’t matter, Janice,” he said gently. “It really doesn’t matter.”

“It’s just that I wanted so much for you to see her.”

He gently touched her arm.

“It’s just as well,” he said quietly. “Don’t you see? It’s a sign to let well enough alone.”

Taking one last look, studying the apartment, Hoover held open the door for Janice.

Outside, the Hispanic janitor dragged his broom across the floor as they approached.

“Police everywhere,” he burbled, “screams, crying! They shoot down the man! He look dead! Yelling! Cursing God!”

Hoover took her by the elbow and led her into the dank stairwell. The janitor followed right behind, breathing in their ears.

“Blood on floor! Crazy man! Everybody go crazy!”

They stumbled over the broken toys on the ground floor, and struggled toward the door. As though afraid of the gloom, they moved faster and faster. They burst through the door and into the sunlight and the noise of the day’s ordinary summer.

A taxi, looking forlorn and isolated in Spanish Harlem, got caught in a one-way street. Backing up furiously, it passed them, and Hoover signaled the driver. They were driven quickly crosstown, Janice glancing anxiously at her watch. It was already 2:39, and in bad traffic, Long Island was a long way from them.

Throughout the drive, Hoover’s eyes were closed, his lips moving silently, and the passing sunlight flashed intermittently over his sensitive face. He was organizing himself for meeting Bill. She bit her lip and looked away. At last, the institution was visible, brown and gray, and suddenly the sun was completely gone. By the time they stepped from the taxi small droplets of rain fell, an invisible mist that hurtled down in a south-driving wind.

Standing in the parking lot as the taxi drove away, Hoover smiled nervously at her.

“The ten-thousand-mile journey,” he said gently. “It ends here.”

18

The monstrous facades of the psychiatric complex, stained by the veils of blown mist, rose over them like the craggy cliffs of Chinese paintings, obscure and vaguely menacing.

“Come,” he said simply; they walked into the lobby.

As the mist turned to an uncertain rain, the lights went on throughout the lower wings. A nurse walked briskly past them, ignoring Hoover’s question. Then a young man in casual clothes and a security pass stapled to his sweater pointed them toward a conference room.

Dr. Geddes was bent over a stack of folders at a long table. A damaged fluorescent light flickered fitfully on his white coat, his pale hands, and his broad, pale forehead. He seemed to have aged in the two months Janice was gone. He looked diminutive, fussy.

“Dr. Geddes,” Janice said.

He looked up at them, studied the tall man, examining him carefully but nervously.

“Mrs. Templeton,” he said, as graciously as possible. “You’re looking very well. Please, won’t you and Mr. Hoover sit down?”

Dr. Geddes closed the topmost folder, pulled a chair closer to them, and said nothing. It was his habit not to rush into an encounter, to maintain silence until he felt ready, but even so, Hoover’s presence disturbed him. He stared at the pale blue eyes that did not flinch, the foreign-made brown suit so incongruous against the sunburned face and neck.

Dr. Geddes stood up and lit a cigarette. As the smoke curled up past his balding profile, he pressed a switch at the base of a coffee-maker and the machine began to gurgle. He stood without speaking during the entire duration of the process. At length black liquid trickled into a glass beaker, steam rose, and Dr. Geddes filled three cups. He carried two cups to Janice and Hoover.

Hoover ignored his cup, studying Dr. Geddes with the same dispassionate, cool analysis with which Dr. Geddes examined him. Dr. Geddes slowly drank his coffee, and then he sat down again and turned to Janice.

“I showed Bill your cable,” he said. “But there was no mention of Elliot Hoover.”

Janice faltered, looking down at her own hands intertwined nervously in the straps of her handbag.

“I was afraid to tell him.”

Dr. Geddes nodded, sipping his coffee slowly. An eternity of silence passed as he studied her. He no longer acknowledged Hoover in the seat next to Janice.

“Why were you afraid to tell him?” Dr. Geddes asked.

“Because…You know why. Because of what happened. Because Bill holds Elliot responsible.”

“Sensible,” Dr. Geddes agreed. “Then why do you wish for this meeting to take place now?”

Janice swallowed, found the courage to face Dr. Geddes, and leaned forward on the table until their faces were less than two feet apart.

“Because Bill does not listen to you. He does not listen to me. He does not listen to anybody in this hospital. But he will listen to Elliot Hoover because he’s the only man who could have saved our daughter’s life, and Bill knows it!”

“Did Bill tell you that?”

“He didn’t have to.”

“I see.”

Dr. Geddes found his cigarette was out. He relit it and exhaled slowly toward the ceiling. For a long time he said nothing. Hoover leaned forward, but Janice restrained him by putting a hand on his knee. Dr. Geddes caught the gesture.

“Mr. Hoover.”

“Yes, Dr. Geddes?”

“What is your purpose in seeing Bill Templeton?”

“To cure him.”

Dr. Geddes raised a sardonic eyebrow.

“Are you a psychiatrist?”

“No.”

“A psychologist? A medical specialist of any sort?”

Hoover licked his lips, though whether in irritation or nervousness Janice did not know. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the long conference table, and stared directly into Dr. Geddes’s eyes.

“I have been through exactly what Bill has gone through,” he said. “And I know his pain.”

Hoover swallowed his coffee, more to buy time, to feel the situation, than for any taste for the bitter brew.

“I too lost a daughter,” he continued with difficulty. “Like Bill’s, an only daughter. I searched for her — for a justification for her death. And I know the torture that Bill must feel.”

“Do you? And how do you propose to help him?”

“What I have learned from my own ordeal,” he said distinctly, “is the error I committed in the name of love. Bill must not make the same error. He must renounce the child. Give her up.”

Dr. Geddes softened. He nodded. But then his eyes narrowed suspiciously.

“But suppose one believes in reincarnation?” he asked. “What then?”

“All the more reason to give up the child. The scriptures are clear. One does not possess a child’s life. A child is only an honored and much-loved guest in one’s home.”

Janice seized the opportunity and leaned closer to Dr. Geddes, in front of Hoover.

“And this is what Bill must learn, and accept,” she pleaded. “To let the child go.”

“Especially if he believes she has returned,” Hoover added.

Dr. Geddes examined them both, his eyes darting back and forth from Hoover’s face to Janice’s. Janice touched Dr. Geddes on the wrist to get his attention.

“The point is that Elliot Hoover and Bill both believe in the doctrine of reincarnation. They have that in common. They are linked by their beliefs.”

Dr. Geddes backed away. He went to the coffee machine and wiped up some spilled coffee with a paper towel.

“The sick treating the sick,” Dr. Geddes muttered.

Janice rose to her feet and stepped closer to him.

“That too is the point,” she said earnestly. “You don’t accept the doctrine. I’m not sure what I believe. That’s why Bill rejects us both.”

“True.”

Hoover came to his feet, sensing Dr. Geddes’s weakening position.

“And Bill and I are intimately connected. We were together through it all.”

“At least,” Janice persisted strongly, “it could open an avenue, just a little. Just to make Bill feel there are human beings who believe and are ready to help him.”

“Could you sit down, please? It’s disquieting to have everybody jumping around the room.”

After a long silence, Dr. Geddes daubed perspiration from his forehead.

“What, actually, would you say to Bill?” he asked. “Assuming that I let you see him?”

“Exactly what I’ve said to you. That he must renounce the child. He must accept his loss.”

Dr. Geddes nodded.

“That is what we’ve been trying to tell him,” he observed somewhat doubtfully.

“The difference is,” Hoover said, smiling, “that Bill understands my language.”

“The jargon of religion, you mean?”

“Yes. He will respond to that. He’s been studying it for months now. That’s all he will respond to.”

“Will you wait here?” Dr. Geddes asked.

Then he turned and abruptly left the room. Janice and Hoover waited in silence. The conference room was a chilling, antiseptic environment.

After ten minutes no one had come to the room. Then there was a distant, low-rolling rumble. Janice and Hoover looked up.

“Even in this hospital nature finds its voice,” he murmured.

Janice stopped fidgeting. Once again the deep bass reverberated in the clouds piling over the island.

“Like the thunder before the monsoon?” she said softly.

For a moment they smiled at one another, exhausted by the long day of waiting, and remembering the subcontinent that devoured them, changed them forever, and spit them out again.

The door opened. Dr. Geddes walked in, and behind him was Dr. Boltin, the director of the hospital. Behind the director were two more physicians and a lanky staff assistant who carried the relevant files in his arms as though they were religious totems. The door closed.

“Be seated, gentlemen,” Dr. Geddes said, extending a cursory hand at the chairs around the table.

As the thunder rolled Dr. Boltin reached for the pile of folders at his right hand. Looking through them, he pulled out a stapled pair of tissue-thin, typed reports.

“Templeton, William. Severe depressive and delusionary. Well, you gentlemen know the case as well as I do,” the director said, turning his attention to Janice. “Mrs. Templeton, before we proceed you should be made aware of certain changes in the direction of the case. During your absence your husband attempted suicide.”

Hoover’s face blanched. Janice rose, stunned.

“Suicide…?” she stammered.

“Attempted asphyxiation,” Dr. Boltin elaborated.

Janice’s hand involuntarily went to her mouth.

“The facts are,” Dr. Geddes interrupted, “that Bill was able to procure some matches and oily rags from the kitchen. He barred himself in the room by pushing his bed against the door, and sealed the windows. He filled the air with fumes and smoke.”

“He was unconscious when we broke the window from the ledge outside,” Dr. Boltin concluded.

The director and the rest of the assembled physicians seemed to wait for a response.

“The same death as Ivy’s,” Hoover said. “He was trying to atone.”

Dr. Boltin eyed him balefully. “For what, Mr. Hoover?”

“For feeling himself responsible. For allowing the death of his daughter. Which he might have prevented.”

“We consider this was a serious act toward suicide,” Dr. Boltin said, peering first at Janice and then at Hoover. “It was not a mere gesture, a cry for help, as it were.”

“I understand,” Janice said, barely audible.

“That is why we are willing to let you talk to him, Mr. Hoover,” broke in one of the physicians.

“We’re very grateful for your understanding,” Hoover said.

“Yes,” Dr. Boltin said ambiguously as he drummed his fingers on the table, exchanging glances with Dr. Geddes. Neither Janice nor Hoover could decipher what the signals were, but after a long pause, Dr. Boltin raised an eyebrow and the lanky assistant went quickly from the room.

“When Bill comes in,” Dr. Boltin said more kindly, “he may be disoriented. He may not know you, or feel uncertain about expressing his feelings at seeing you, Mrs. Templeton. He may break into tears. You must just accept whatever he does as natural and support him.”

“Does he know I’ve come?” Hoover asked.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what did he say?”

“I don’t believe he said anything at all, Mr. Hoover.”

The door opened. Janice gasped. A travesty of Bill stood blinking in the doorway. His collarbones protruded sharply and his shoulders bent inward. His trousers hung loosely at the waist. He looked as though he were recovering from an operation.

“Bill!” Janice whispered, standing up, taking a step closer.

He gazed at her blankly, and then his face made a mask with a smile on it.

“Hello.”

Pathetically, he took a step closer to her, tried to mumble something, but only blinked rapidly. He looked around at the assembly of white-coated physicians and seemed terribly ashamed to be under their scrutiny.

“I’m so happy to see you,” he whispered, edging still closer.

As though he had recognized one friend out of the multitude, Bill shuffled in tiny steps sideways toward her, to protect him from the onslaught of the eyes that examined him and dissected him.

“I’m — okay,” he whispered confidentially. “Just — just a bit cold — and — and — it’s good to see you….”

He stood now next to her, his arms uncertain whether to touch her or not, until she put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him forward. Suddenly he trembled like a baby.

“So — good to — see you,” he cried into her shoulder, shaking.

“Oh, Bill. Darling Bill. I’ve worried so much about you.”

“Don’t go away again. Please don’t go away….”

Hoover, much affected, now felt the attention of the assembly shift slowly but inexorably onto him. Bill, with Janice holding his hand, was seated next to Dr. Geddes. It took Bill a full two minutes to realize that they were not going to ask him any questions. Slowly he became aware of the tension filling the room. Overhead, the thunder cracked abruptly, viciously.

Bill turned slowly, following his instincts, following where Dr. Geddes stared, where the two physicians gazed, where Dr. Boltin had stationed the lanky staff assistant. Down at the other end of the table, perspiring in the humidity, confident, boldly immobile and staring back, was Elliot Hoover.

Bill blinked rapidly. He looked at Janice, then at Dr. Geddes. He looked back down the long table at Elliot Hoover. He smiled an awkward, pathetically inappropriate smile. Then the smile vanished. He simply stared.

“Hello, Bill,” Hoover said softly.

Bill rubbed violently at his eyes, the way an infant might, as though some piece of grit had gotten lodged under the eyelids. It was an abrupt gesture, as though he tried to rub out what he was seeing.

“I’ve come to talk to you,” Hoover said hesitantly. “Do you mind?”

Bill pressed his lips together, stared down at the table, and his fingers violently pressed into the cheap veneer and polish. He looked up quickly at Hoover, opened his mouth, but said nothing.

Janice put a hand gently on Bill’s shoulder. A tremulous shudder rolled through Bill, and he brushed the hair from his forehead.

“I–I knew you were here,” he said in a stilted voice. “They told me.”

“Things have changed, Bill. For both of us.”

“They told me,” Bill said, louder, fighting off the mental anarchy by raising his voice against the confusion. “They told me Elliot Hoover was here.”

Hoover leaned forward, his features softened by compassion.

“Listen to me, Bill. We’ve suffered. Both of us. In the same way.”

“What?”

Bill turned, his face in a grimace, as though he was hard of hearing. His movements were jerky, exaggerated, like an abnormal child who playacts his aggression.

“I can’t hear you!” Bill complained.

Hoover slid into a seat closer to Bill, and kept his voice soft and distinct.

“We must help each other, Bill. We must forgive each other.”

“What?”

Janice had never seen a display of willed autism before. Bill was only partially in control of himself, driven by some twisted mechanism inside, some machine perpetually breaking down, trying desperately to defend itself against one more wound.

“I’ve come to talk to you, Bill — in humility — about what happened — and why.”

Bill nodded vigorously.

“Good, good,” he said in a strange monotone. “I’m glad to hear that.”

Hoover looked nervously around the conference room. Dr. Boltin gave him an almost imperceptible nod of encouragement. Hoover licked his lips and leaned forward. Janice’s grip on Bill’s shoulder tightened.

“When I heard that you were searching, Bill, as I had searched,” he began, “my heart was filled with… with sorrow. And with understanding. Because I’d gone through just that very search.”

Bill stared disconsolately down at the tabletop.

“And I knew the torment of that search. The doubts, the trials, the doctrines that leap against the mind like a dark and angry sea.”

Sensing contact, Hoover moved closer. His voice took on more confidence, and Janice heard the familiar charisma of his passion, the love and strength that knew no obstacles, admitted to no impediments, the iron will that penetrated any soul placed before it.

“But the error is not renouncing,” Hoover explained gently. “Do you recall in the Vedas, in the description of the progression of the soul, that beautiful description wherein it is written that the passions must renounce ere they possess? There is that extraordinary passage of the dawn of the soul, where the verse begins—”

“How did you know about me?” Bill interrupted, suddenly whirling to look at him, his expression sly as a wolf.

“What… what’s wrong, Bill?” Hoover said, frightened by the grinning intensity, the malevolence of the gaze.

“How did you know about me?” Bill whispered.

“Well, I–I heard…”

“Little birds in India? Singing in your dreams?”

Hoover shot a glance at Dr. Boltin, who was staring at Dr. Geddes. Dr. Geddes had gone pale. Janice and he began whispering feverishly. Meanwhile Bill’s haggard, tortured smile grew into something worse than a smile.

“Bill, listen to me. The Vedas exist for the benevolence of all mankind.”

“Who told you about me?” he shouted.

Hoover gazed helplessly at Dr. Boltin, who cleared his throat.

“Your wife went to India, found Mr. Hoover there, and brought him back for you.”

Bill clapped his hands over his ears. “No! No!” he shouted.

“Bill,” Janice said, touching his cheek. “I told you I would get help.”

Bill threw off her hand. He suddenly lurched to his feet and stared into Hoover’s startled face. A thousand emotions shot across Bill’s lips, cheeks, and eyes, and he seemed uncertain, then enraged, and then the trembling got the better of him and he could not speak without stuttering.

“H — h — has she—?” he began.

“Has she what?” Hoover asked defensively.

Bill came closer, whispering confidentially, his eyes gleaming, bloodshot.

“H — h — has she — she — a nice—cunt?” he said, almost inaudible, hoarse, as though his throat had been torn out.

“Bill!” Hoover said, shocked, standing.

Bill leaped forward, tried to strike him, but found his hands too tightened up to make fists or direct a blow, and fell on Hoover, his teeth clamping onto Hoover’s neck.

Janice screamed, jumped forward, chairs fell backward, Dr. Geddes threw himself at Bill, and the lanky staff assistant found his own fingers bleeding profusely where he foolishly tried to restrain Bill’s jaws. But in just that second Hoover managed to free himself. Gasping in disbelief and shock, he rolled to a kneeling position.

“I — is she…” Bill whispered, restrained by Dr. Geddes and the assistant, oblivious of Dr. Boltin and the physicians standing in paralyzed terror over the table, “is she a good fuck?”

Dr. Geddes edged backward to protect Janice. Bill sensed the change, broke free, and threw himself forward. He clubbed at Hoover with a heavy glass ashtray from the table. With sickening thuds the blows landed repeatedly at the base of Hoover’s skull, smashing at the hands which tried in vain to cushion the force of the blows.

The two physicians, stumbling, launched themselves onto Bill. The door opened and two burly orderlies appeared and instantly ran across the room, knocking chairs to the wall. In the tumult Janice saw a thin, awful spray of red blood fly outward as Bill was catapulted toward the wall. As they doubled him up by bending his arms behind his back, exerting pressure at his neck, she watched in numb horror as the tiny trickle of blood, like a symbol of total disaster, oozed slowly down the pale green wall to the floor.

“Take him…Take him…” Dr. Boltin faltered.

“To the restraint room,” one of the physicians ordered, his voice trembling. “And stay with him!”

“Sedation,” Dr. Geddes called after them. “No physical restraint.”

The other physician accompanied Bill while the orderlies and staff assistant simultaneously locked him in their arms and trundled him toward the door. Janice saw the grisly sight of Bill’s mouth drooling. He had lost control of his own throat in his pathological rage, and a roar of pain shook his thin frame. He glared at Janice like a tiger from a cage, and she knew that if he were free he would certainly at that moment have killed her.

“WHORE! WHORE!”

He lost coherence. The orderlies dragged him out into the hall, his ravings echoing, growing louder in the corridor, like a demented bull elephant, screaming obscenities about Janice’s body, about her lust, about her death; then it subsided and faded into the distant north wing.

Janice reeled from chair to chair, and finally sat down heavily. In her shock she gazed about vaguely, apprehending nothing, seeing horrific caricatures of the men she had trusted to heal Bill. Dr. Geddes stood, half poised to sit, paralyzed, trying to think of something, anything, to end the horror. Dr. Boltin trembled like a leaf, knocking over cups of coffee, as in a dream, trying to get to Elliot Hoover on the floor.

“It’s — it’s all right,” Hoover said, pushing the physician away.

The sound of Hoover’s voice restored a sense of reality. Janice reached out, touched Hoover on the cheek, and saw thin flecks of his blood stain her fingers.

“Dear God,” he whispered, “what have we done?”

“We’ve killed him. Inside,” she whispered. “He’s broken. Completely.”

“God forgive us.”

Dr. Boltin cleared his throat. At the sound, Dr. Geddes stirred, lifted his head, and his eyes were red.

“I must go see Bill,” Dr. Geddes said. “I–I will stay the night with him.”

Compassionately, Dr. Boltin nodded. “We’ll confer in the morning.”

Dr. Geddes sensed his impotence, muttered a few more words, and left the conference room, heading for the north wing of the complex.

Dr. Boltin went to Hoover.

“Is your neck all right?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ll be all right.”

Janice stood next to him, needing his strength, his warmth, his solidity, even under the gaze of Dr. Boltin.

“I am so sorry that this happened,” Dr. Boltin said. “We had no way of predicting.”

“Have we destroyed him?” Hoover asked after a pause.

“It is most serious now,” the doctor conceded. “I believe that we must be prepared to accept the worst.”

Janice sagged against Hoover’s chest. “Don’t go,” she said, frightened.

Hoover’s eyes looked bloodshot. His face was pale.

“I came to atone,” he said incredulously. “I’ve only compounded the sin.”

“Please don’t leave me. I need you.”

He looked down at her.

“Let me go,” he pleaded. “Let me pray. Let me understand. Perhaps then I can help you. But now it’s all too confused.”

He stumbled toward the open door. The corridor was filled with nurses and doctors who peeked into the room where the disturbance had rocked the hospital. Hoover stopped at the door.

“Pray for Bill,” he said, adding, “and for me, Janice.”

He walked quickly toward the lobby. Janice followed him into the corridor, caught a glimpse of his retreating form at the double glass doors to the parking lot.

“Elliot!”

He slowed ever so slightly, then painfully opened the door, stepped outside, and saw a taxi discharging a patient with family. He raised his arm, shouted, and ran through the night rain toward the twin shafts of headlights.

“Elliot!”

Janice ran through the double doors into the cold rain. Instantly her hair was drenched, and a foul smell of the marsh assailed her nostrils. She ran through the puddles and caught Hoover just as he opened the rear door of the taxi.

“Please,” she wept. “Don’t leave me now.”

He touched her cheek softly. “I’m no good to you now. I can’t help you. I can’t help Bill. When I understand, when I know what to do, I’ll contact you. And we can make right everything that we’ve done wrong. Trust me. For Bill’s sake, trust me.” With a tortured look he got into the taxi and closed the door.

Janice saw the taxi grow small, then vanish into the night. The rain blew in vicious veils around her.

“Elliot…” she whispered.

No one heard. She turned. The lights blazed inside the hospital. Through the rain she saw the pattern of windows and doors, the labyrinth of dementia and rage awaiting her. The rain was so cold it seemed to have seeped into her body and begun to rot away her will to act, her will even to live. Numbly she walked slowly through the oil slicks and black puddles, back toward what remained of Bill.

19

The abrupt departure of Elliot Hoover left a horrifying vacuum. It was identical to the vista of mud-swallowed mass death that she had seen after the flood. Instead of a black bull, its forelegs broken, dead or dying in the foul waste, there was Bill. Her husband lay inert in her future, accusing, wasting away in the awful solidity of decay.

Janice did not know whether Hoover had fled to find help or to escape her. There was no knowledge of his plans at his hotel. He had simply disappeared.

The months passed.

Elliot Hoover made no sign. The universe had swallowed him up as inexplicably as it had disgorged him. Janice stared dumbly into the future, and she found there only an endless, sterile moonscape.

Three times a week she took the long train ride to the hospital. Three times a week, Bill abused her verbally. He screamed at her, he accused her of sexual acts which she barely understood. Dr. Geddes sat calmly in his chair, observing, listening. Two orderlies discreetly stood at the door. Bill raged incoherently, and there was no limit to the explicitness of his accusations. She endured them, saying nothing. But something inside her died. Their former life, in its most intimate details, was dragged out into the mud, where it was made repulsive and loathsome.

Every visit the wound reopened. She believed — she made herself believe — in human trust, but the assaults of a demented husband crushed her. He seemed to be boundless in his vehemence. He jumped, pranced, roared, and the veins bulged apoplectically in his neck, until she longed for some dark night to cover her up.

Janice married her job. She spent days, including weekends, at Christine Daler’s Ltd. Her skills had rapidly returned and continued to develop. The summer slipped through to autumn, to the cold rains of November, beating against the studio windows. She preferred not to go home. There the silence of Ivy’s room mingled with the silence of the bedroom and whispered hopelessness in her ear.

Late one night, she listened to the murmur of the building, the battering of the sleet against black windows, the creaking of Ivy’s door.

As a child, Janice had had a fantasy when bad times came. She had called on the white figurine of Christ perched on her mother’s dresser. An absurd piece of kitsch, arms outspread in crass forgiveness for one and all of his forgotten lambs. But she believed then, and he came for her — outstretched arms, a painted beard and all — and served as a talisman to protect her. Now, listening to the radio turned low to keep away the permanent isolation, she did not believe. No Christ came to her through the dark skies to shield her this time.

That night, Elliot Hoover came to her in a dream. He was smiling broadly, very excited, as though he had found something. Something she would very much like to see or to have. The dream changed. They were walking through the russet autumnal fields in upstate New York. She did not know if it was Bill or Elliot Hoover walking beside her, as their daughter gamboled among the fat, ripe pumpkins in the stalks. Then the dream changed again. There was a stinking hut in South India. Elliot Hoover cleaved against her as they lay on the ground. She felt his hard, hot breathing, and she pressed his hands closer against her own breasts and nearly fainted with desire. Then something dark happened and he was gone, and she woke up. Outside the sleet fell. Ice covered the windows, and a cold draft billowed through the seams of the panes.

By Christmas, it was clear that, legally, Bill would never see the inside of a courtroom. He was declared non compos mentis; the sanitarium signed reams of documents, and the one small fear of an impending trial for kidnapping was removed. Bill did not observe the legal proceedings. When Dr. Geddes explained it to him, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

At the end of December, Janice sent a note to Sesh Mehrotra, asking if he had seen Elliot Hoover or knew of his whereabouts. By late January, a reply came in a battered envelope, in misspelled English, that Elliot Hoover had not returned. Had he returned, he would certainly have looked up the Mehrotra family. The letter contained best wishes.

It was on the anniversary of Juanita’s kidnapping that Dr. Geddes told her that Bill’s condition showed signs, if not of improvement, then at least of no further deterioration. Bill could not distinguish the psychiatrists from the staff members, he did not remember names, but his memory could often be otherwise surprisingly acute.

“We’ve achieved a modified success. Not a full success, but a minor amelioration of symptoms, based on substituting another symbol of Ivy.”

Janice looked up, surprised.

“We’re trying doll therapy, verbal suggestion. If we can turn his interest, even partially, to something under our control, we can relate to him through it. You see, we must come in under his umbrella of defenses.”

“I suppose the best thing would be to bring back Juanita,” she suggested.

“No. Absolutely not. That would trigger off the same obsessions as before. The secret of the transfer mechanism is that the emotional charge becomes slightly weaker. That is why we must try to deal through the transfer object.”

“Well, then find a doll that looks like Juanita!”

Dr. Geddes smiled warily. “I see you remain cynical about the whole thing. I don’t blame you. Bill’s case was terribly underestimated for a long time. Still, I wanted you to know that there may be a brighter future, even a partial cure.”

“A partial cure? What does that mean?”

“Living at home. Minor medications for the depression. Psychotherapy to explore the guilt piecemeal. A long, slow recovery.”

“How many years?”

“Difficult to say. Five. Ten, possibly.”

Janice stared at Dr. Geddes. His projection seemed worse than the disease. Not for Bill. For her. She could not hide the resentment bubbling slowly from the depths of her feelings. That she should spend ten years caring for someone who barely resembled the man she had loved and married, who hurled abuse at her — pornographic abuse — and she knew she would not, could not, refuse even the smallest part of that fate.

When she arrived home, she stared at the walls for nearly an hour. With a heavy heart, she dragged herself up the stairs into the studio that once had been Ivy’s room, and began sketching. Then she turned on the radio. After another hour, the antidote of work performed its magic, and she rapidly filled pages with watercolor treatments. As night fell, her thoughts turned, once again, to Elliot Hoover.

Hoover must be in the United States still. She felt it. She felt him thinking of her, aware of her. He had promised to contact her when he knew what to do. That might take another week, another month, another year. But the time would come, and knowing it would come made the night softer, less desolate. The radio sent easy melodies through the room, and she worked until 3:30, then showered and slept easily. There were no dreams, only a vague presentiment that Elliot Hoover had been there during the night.

Elliot Hoover woke in the slums of Pittsburgh with a vague presentiment that Janice had been with him during the night. It was still dark. No sun appeared over the black silhouettes of tenement roofs. Only the cold ribbons of blue and dark gray of the winter clouds. He huddled in an army blanket on the edge of a cot, shivering. He rubbed his eyes, trying to restore energy to them.

Far away came the shrill, drunken hoots of a young man. Then the crash of a bottle. Hoover reached over to a small propane stove, lit it, and then shoved a beaker of cold coffee over the flame. He was oblivious to the bits of plaster falling from the roof when a cat scampered over it.

The autumn had turned to ice. Christmas and New Year’s had passed in oblivion. Elliot Hoover was still driven by the image of Bill Templeton, who, under the scrutiny of no less than four physicians, had thrown himself forward like a rabid dog, teeth bared. Hoover felt the healed scars along his neck. He filled his cup with tepid coffee and drank it.

The images came, as they always came in the predawn, rapid and confused, like a commercial for insanity. There had been the flight to Florida, the long, purposeless days along the beach, barefoot but still wearing the absurd brown suit he had bought in Calcutta. Days in Catholic churches, gazing at violently painted plaster saints. Afternoons in a dubious meditation center. And alone in cheap motels, thinking, just thinking, ignoring the television sets blaring through the walls of his room.

Hoover spit out the grounds that inevitably filtered into his coffee. Why had he stayed away from New York? It had something to do with growing forward, not regressing. One’s karma improved with severance of ties to the earth. And besides, what could Janice possibly gain by his presence? He had as yet discovered no formula to solve Bill’s problem.

Hoover showered, shaved, and went to the closet. The brown suit, badly torn and shockingly filthy, still hung on the rack among the newer garments. There were oil spots on the elbows, courtesy of the Greyhound bus ride back to the north. Was it Kansas City where he had been pushed into the mud by a drunken day laborer? Or was it in Wheeling? Hoover tried to recall when he had first realized that the drifting would have to come to an end. He remembered standing at a truck stop, picking up a ride west, not east to New York, sharing the cab with a dull, hostile driver who was red-eyed from dodging highway patrols and weigh stations. Somewhere during those confused days, the filth and grit of the country seeped into the brown suit. That was why, when he arrived in Pittsburgh, the police stopped him on sight and shoved him into the drunk tank, there being no room anywhere else.

Hoover smiled as he buttoned his shirt. Now he had other coats, other trousers. But the brown suit reminded him of Janice, of Calcutta, their nights together in the South of India. And anyway, when the Pittsburgh police checked his identity and learned he was a man of wealth and property, they quickly had the suit dry-cleaned by way of apology. Hoover chuckled out loud, and the sound was strange in the large building as it died to a melancholy, lonely echo.

As he had left the police station, Hoover pulled the coat closely around his throat, ducked into the fierce wind that promised sleet or snow before the day was out, and walked along the sidewalks of the city. Something had led him back to Pittsburgh. Why had he not flown to Benares from Florida? Was it some kind of habit, a yearning, even a kind of nostalgia? Hoover found himself walking along stately rows of elms, where the suburban homes were not so very new anymore, and the elms had grown from spindly, protected saplings, girdled by wire mesh, into massive, and now bare explosions of branches. Then he knew why he had returned to the city.

His home lay across a gently sloping yard, filled with dead leaves, curiously unpleasant leaves, curled and dusty. It seemed as though nothing had really changed in the eight years. A bit dirtier; the garage needed to be scrubbed; some trimming required on the hedge that curved around into the backyard; but it was still the home Hoover vividly remembered.

He remained rooted and let the chill wind blow through him. It was as though he had just been inspecting new plans for additions to the pig-iron distribution systems along the Allegheny — a late meeting with charts, wearing his gray wool three-piece suit, in his office overlooking the industrial wasteland in all its magnificence at the curve in the river — and now he had come home for the day, and Sylvia was inside cooking, or studying French, or preparing a cocktail for him.

And the door would open. Audrey Rose would come running up to him, throw her small arms around his neck, and he would lift her up off the ground and happily trundle her back inside. Audrey Rose. The small girl with the dark hair, the black eyes, the sly gamin of his heart. A secretive girl, with a secret life. She shared it with him on condition that he told no one. They were only little-girl secrets, joyful mysteries. So self-assured, life held no terror for her then.

Hoover wiped his eyes. The masters of the Ganges were right. One never truly severs one’s heart from the places wherein one has learned to love. But the mind can transcend such attachments, that was the instruction. So Hoover came back to watch the house with its sloping redwood porch and its large picture windows. He walked through the parks where he and Audrey Rose had run, and along the small stream that eventually cut its way into their backyard. He willed all the memories, good and bad, to return, in order to make peace with them. He even rented a car and drove along the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the very spot where, so many years before, Sylvia’s car had hurtled over the embankment and down the steep incline, carrying both her and Audrey Rose to their fiery deaths. He stood among the fat green weeds and clods of earth and forced his mind to conjure the terrible image of Audrey Rose, his darling, trapped within the burning wreckage, her tiny fists pounding and pounding against the scorched panes of glass, and screaming: “DADDYDADDYDADDYHOTHOTHOT!”

In time he did make peace with the memories. They nestled within him like warm friends, and the torment slowly dissipated.

But there was one paradox. Sometimes he imagined the life as it had been with Sylvia — the intelligent, somewhat retiring woman who had shared his deepest hopes and dreams. But now, to his own confusion, after eight years, he had difficulty recalling the features of her face.

He pictured coming into the house, listening to the Bartok string concerti, putting his arm around her — but no clear face was there, hardly any memory at all of her figure. It disturbed him. Instead of his wife, there was now a vague sensation of Janice Templeton.

That was even more true now, he thought as he combed his hair, examining his face in the mirror. It was Janice who accompanied him through the horrors of the slums. It was Janice who believed in him, waited for him, needed him. Without her, he would have no faith, no attempt would have been possible. But now, as he caught a glimpse of the teenagers drunk in the streets outside, the old man sleeping on an iced porch in nothing but a greasy overcoat, the smoke pouring from factories just beyond the low tenement houses, he felt a purified faith, an ability to act that knew no obstacles. And more — the true purpose behind his seemingly accidental return to Pittsburgh.

The building he purchased, and in which he was now living, was an abandoned motel, condemned by the city, but still standing after thirteen years of neglect. In three more hours, the workmen would arrive, bringing more trucks of wiring, planks, and plaster. Inevitably, the neighborhood children would cluster around the piles of sand that accumulated at the base of the motel. The noise would be, as usual, deafening. But as Elliot Hoover walked slowly through the wet, rotted debris in the hall, the moldy newspaper and bottles strewn in the corners, the icy pipes visible through dilapidated walls, there was not the slightest sense of depression. There was only the feeling of going forward. A mandate for construction. These dark corridors, he hoped, would help save the world, even if only in a small way.

Rounding a corner of unlit darkness where the walls of two adjoining rooms had given away entirely and frozen ivy twirled among the rusted nails and bits of timber, Hoover stopped short. In a sudden flash he sensed Janice by his side, smiling at him, approving all he was attempting. A warmth radiated through his body. If she was indeed here in spirit with him, he thought, then his work was bound to succeed and be the pride of them both. Eagerly, he blew into his frozen hands and paced the sodden hallways, impatiently waiting for the workmen to arrive.

20

Elliot Hoover was well pleased. A smell of fresh paint greeted him. As the workmen passed him, carrying glass for the windows, he examined the pastel yellow and green walls of the corridors. A warm, sensuous light dappled through the budding branches outside.

He was well pleased, too, with the two men who had joined his staff. One was named Hirsch, a conscientious objector in the Vietnam War, who wore his sandy-colored hair in a long ponytail. The other was Mr. Radimanath, a North Indian, father of a bookseller in Bombay. Mr. Radimanath looked like Nehru and shuffled along the newly-laid carpets in his slippers, head down, urgently, as though answering a silent summon.

And there was much to do. Hoover drew them into his office, where he issued instructions, drafted letters, negotiated long legal forms. Mr. Radimanath gently closed the red curtains behind the desk. They drank jasmine tea and rested on cushions. The sounds of the slums drifted from his consciousness.

Elliot Hoover, in his trance, felt the memories of his legal battles disintegrate. The arguments with the workmen, the vandalism of the neighborhood children, and the threatening inquiries of the county health association, all faded like a distant sunset on the horizon. The teachings of his first guru returned, not so much in words, but in the form of a spiritual harness that reestablished itself within. The trance became deeper, darker. He felt the proximity of souls he had never known, passed down for countless millennia. Abruptly, he opened his eyes.

“Excuse me, Mr. Hoover,” said a workman, peering in holding two boards under his arm, “but could you show us about this here swimming pool?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“That’s quite all right.”

In the cellar of the former motel, the supporting floor beams had been removed, and now a gaping hole, vaguely rectangular, leered out of floodlights perched in the muddy bottom.

“The whirlpool should go here,” Hoover said, pointing. “Orient the blueprints from this angle. Do you see? The swimming lanes will go across to the north.”

“Right you are, sir. Now, about the heating…”

“Yes, yes. It must be heated to the precise degree specified.”

“It’ll be expensive as hell. I hope you know that.”

“Any more questions?”

The workman shook his head. He did not like Hoover. He did not like Mr. Radimanath. Above all, he did not like Hirsch, who struck him as effeminate. Nevertheless, the job was handsomely paid. Hoover was in a hurry.

Hoover inspected the exterior yard, piled with debris, derelict with muddy tires, newspaper, bottles, and stiff rags. Children of the neighborhood watched him. How favored they were, Hoover thought to himself. Even as they judged him crazy, they were blessed by the gift of healthy spirit and lively mind.

Huge rolls of security fence were carried to the yard and unrolled, and pipes were slammed into the earth to hold it. Hoses ran water, created mud holes everywhere. Cement covered Hoover’s shoes. Some of the children threw stones, but he did not mind. For they were blessed with the light within the mind, a light he himself had doused in Bill Templeton.

Blueprints were brought for his inspection. Bizarre red and yellow shapes were carried to the yard, partially covered in brown paper, waiting for installation. Hoover’s eyes crept to the children again. They found him amusing. He studied them carefully, how their animal nature mingled uneasily with the innocence of their lives.

He remembered too well the crippled children he had met daily in Calcutta, in Bombay, and even in Kotagiri. Diseases that had no name in English. Forms of malnutrition. Deliberate deformity to produce beggars for parents. And the worst, the lowest of the low, at the bottom of any caste system, were those who were insane. Those were written off — by parents, by other children, by nature it-self — and they died by the scores of thousands, unable to comprehend the brief torture of their own misplaced incarnations.

Even in Pittsburgh, one saw them.

Thou art a healer of children, thou shalt make their souls to rejoice again.

He smiled and leaned against a sapling recently planted. Those had been the words of his first guru. A quiet man whose ashram was located on the north bank of Benares. After Hoover had confessed his search for his own daughter, the guru had told him that, with a light, pleasant lilt in the voice that comforted him.

“Where do you want the floodlights, Mr. Hoover?” yelled a gruff voice.

“Along the wall, please,” he answered.

Even now the words of his guru extended a protective hand over the transformation of the derelict motel. But there was precious little time. Hoover went back inside and locked himself in his office. For the rest of the afternoon he studied textbooks, the experimental data, and newsletters printed on cheap paper. He worked until he found his eyes blurring with fatigue.

Why was he doing all this, he wondered? Was it simply a pathetic and frantic effort to atone for the spiritual murder of Bill Templeton? Or did his motivations, deeply hidden in his unconscious, rise from another, less pure wellspring? It was at this moment that the image of Janice Templeton came to him: the quick intelligence, the strange mixture of hesitation and need that drove her to India, and quite simply the perfect outline of her neck and shoulders; and instead of feeling qualms of guilt, he felt better. Strangely empty, but the comfort was there. He rose, turned on a small Tensor lamp, and studied until well past midnight.

Janice sat under a gaily colored umbrella with Elaine Romine. Lunch in the park was a novel idea, but the sunshine seemed to demand it. Children raced among them, throwing bread to the pigeons, balancing their new bicycles, falling from skateboards. Elaine basked in the sunshine, then looked lazily at Janice.

“Thank you,” she said.

Janice looked up, puzzled. “For what?”

“For giving us both a break this afternoon. In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve been driving yourself like a piston.”

Janice smiled. “You should be the last person to object.”

“Well I do. Your zeal is contaminating. You’ve got the whole shop going at full tilt. Everybody’s looking over her shoulder. Honestly, Janice, even the QEII pauses occasionally to recharge her batteries.”

Janice said nothing.

Elaine pursued. “You don’t date at all, do you?”

After a while, Janice simply said, “No.”

“Would you like to?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“Because I know several men.”

Janice laughed pleasantly. “I’m sure you do.”

“Well, then? What do you say?”

It was not until they entered the studio and the familiar sight of tables, pin-up sketches, and brushes and pens surrounded them that Janice answered.

“About that invitation — if it’s just company. You understand, Elaine, that has to be clear.”

Elaine smiled. “Trust me.”

It happened very casually. One of the salesmen for a photography firm, who affected a blue pinstripe suit but had a pleasing white smile on a well-tanned face, was introduced. He shook Janice’s hand carefully, and evidently found it reassuring that she and Elaine were good friends.

Two nights later, he called on Janice. That weekend, they attended a Broadway show with very expensive tickets. Afterward, they had espresso coffee in a small club on a side street. Apparently, he was heir to a small fortune, his father having invented something in the electronics business. As he talked, it became obvious that he had an obsession about his father, about competing with him. He needed someone to support him in his struggle.

They walked along the southern edge of the park, where he seemed to feel very much at home among the wealthy international set that flowed in and out of the Plaza Hotel and into Harry’s Bar. He seemed preoccupied with something as they said good-night. He shook her hand outside Des Artistes and apologized for having talked so much. Janice assured him she had loved the play, and he smiled gratefully and left in the taxi.

Janice walked alone into the elevator, rode to her apartment. The one thing about a date, for all its illicit qualities, that she had never expected, not in her wildest fantasies, was its utter sexlessness.

She sat in a melancholy mood on the couch. The television was on, but she did not bother turning up the volume. The entertainment was so vapid, it passed like a dream in front of her. A curious fatigue overcame her, and she remembered, as she did nearly every night, the first time Bill had brought her to Des Artistes. He had been filled with enthusiasm for New York, for her, for Ivy — his very steps bounced along and his nighttime passions knew no stopping. She smiled. Once she had tried to count the number of times they made love. She gave up as they approached the thousands. Even now she felt a blush in spite of herself, and she remembered how surprised she had been, not only at his ingenuity, but at his athletic prowess.

She turned off the television, felt her stomach, still flat, and wondered if other men might find her more tempting than the overgrown boy who had taken her to the Broadway show. She went slowly into the bathroom and filled the gleaming tub, adding flakes of powder that richly cascaded into luxurious foam. She undressed. She examined herself in the full-length mirror. How old did she look? She could not tell. Was it the way she dressed, which subtly but unmistakably gave signals — signals that whispered, Stay away?

She lay in the steaming water. She remembered how carefully Bill had looked after his body. The gym he religiously went to, the dumbbells at home, jogging every weekend. She pictured the well-sloped shoulders, the powerful calf muscles, the slim forearms. As she lay, she recalled how the pectoral muscles were so nicely defined, how symmetrical he was, the strange, heavy way a man looks when he is naked. And suddenly, an immense vacancy was in her life, an awful emptiness; and no one to fill it, no one to ease the oblique, insistent demands of her physical self, not now, not anymore, except in some small way, like a little girl, without even happiness, herself.

That night she dreamt she performed in a Broadway play. The lights were very hot, and they burned on her face and hands. In the audience, barely visible in the darkness, she thought she saw her date, except that he looked like Dr. Geddes. She escaped by running backstage, and suddenly she was in a red bus kicking up a strange pink dust that had an almost sexual tinge in the sun as it climbed high into yellow mountains. Once again she was on a journey, an urgent journey, to meet…to meet…in the landscape of India… Elliot Hoover.

Through the skylight poured an inexhaustible light, and below, in the whirling baths, arms obscured by the churning white water among the yellow tiles, was a child. Elliot Hoover squatted on his heels, talking to his staff member, Mrs. Concepcion, who stood in the waist-high whirlpool, holding the child tightly in her arms. The child screamed, raged, his fists pummeled her thick neck and shoulders, and his face had turned an awesome shade of purple. Elliot Hoover nodded encouragement. Mrs. Concepcion merely held the boy tighter, rocked him slowly side to side through the hot bath, and sang a soft lullaby. The screams resounded through the tiled swimming area, echoed from the cheerful painted tiles, like the roars of a stunted lion.

The child, Roy, at age four, had been the first patient admitted to Hoover’s recently completed clinic. Most autistic children stiffened upon being touched. Or they went dead. Or they ignored whatever human being was there. But Roy fought for his life. He bit, he went for the eyes, he clawed at exposed necks, screaming that awesome, animal roar. Not even the merry bubbling of warm water could begin to drown it out. Something inside the boy, something unreachable, unknowable, was like an incessant raw nerve of distilled hatred. He was like a fish on the line. The more he struggled, the more he weakened. And he fought so terrifically because he knew instinctively that he was losing now, bit by bit, but inevitably. Mrs. Concepcion, a registered nurse, had only recently been admitted to the staff, but she had immediately understood Hoover’s method. The boy was being broken — by love.

Elliot Hoover indicated, with gestures, some encouragement for Mrs. Concepcion. She nodded and held the boy tighter, pushing the head toward her voluminous breasts, letting him feel the warmth there, learning to smell her. Hoover waved, gestured to his watch, and went along the pool to the accompaniment of Roy’s bellows.

A short but narrow series of stairs led up to the main clinic. Even when he closed the door, Roy was audible.

In the first floor corridors, the staff members and children filled the rooms. Screams and whimpers filled the air, and now and then the crash of plastic dishes or toys. But considering the number of children at the clinic — thirteen — the astounding thing, the frightening thing, was the long spates of pure silence.

Hoover walked slowly down the corridor. In the first room, James, aged five, rocked furiously on his cot, back and forth, so violently that he began to pass out from sheer dizziness. Mr. Radimanath entered the room, fresh from the garden, where he had been cultivating the clinic vegetables, and went to the cot. Keeping his own head safely out of the way, Mr. Radimanath embraced James, not so tightly as Roy needed to be held, but firmly enough. And when the rocking started again, Mr. Radimanath rocked with him, two bodies in simultaneous motion, the one holding the other, eyes closed, in a curious embrace of both love and indifference.

James had been found as an infant, literally in the rubbish heap. No one knew who his parents were. No one knew even what his race was, a handsome mixture of African, Hispanic, and possibly Indian. But he was sealed off from reality. His defenses were so impenetrable that he had been diagnosed as deaf until he had been sent to the clinic and Mr. Radimanath had tricked him into revealing that he heard. He not only heard, but there were words he understood—ball and supper and, inexplicably, teakettle. So it was to Mr. Radimanath that the case was given. The old Brahmin was trained in the Vedic disciplines. Of all the staff members, he had the best control over his soul’s strength, its capacity for boundless but directed love.

Elliot Hoover nodded his approval. He left the room. James saddened him. But in the next room was an even worse case. Lily, the girl who ate sand, who ate bugs, who ate anything repulsive and dirty. She had an inexhaustible hunger for grit. By the time she was three, she had been on intravenous feeding at the County Hospital. But Welfare had no objection to letting Hoover’s clinic have a try at Lily. So Mr. Radimanath disguised her scrambled eggs with brown food color and let her eat it off the bookshelf in her room. Lily was a case which would never improve. She was very ugly, with a shower of freckles over a pointed, misshapen nose, and her eyes squinted almost shut. Hoover detected in her a soul so withdrawn that it floated as though helpless and disconnected through her being.

As Lily slept, a peculiar grace settled on her face. The dappled light from the exterior garden floated over her, glinting on the touch of spittle at the corner of her mouth. Elliot Hoover loved her. He loved her for her helplessness. In her mentally retarded state, she never quite understood that other human beings cared for her. Right now, it was all they could do to teach her to walk without shuffling her feet uselessly.

He closed the curtain so the sunlight would not wake her. Then he went back into the corridor, turned the corner, and gently opened a white door.

Inside were five video screens in front of five self-enclosed cubicles. A boy named Henry stared so wide-eyed at imagery of himself that Hoover chuckled. Henry was learning that he existed. The boy’s face drew near the screen, where an image of Henry sat upright on the bed in his room. It was a moment of discovery, with an almost holy awe radiating from the boy’s eyes. Hoover stopped smiling. Henry slapped the green plastic button and the tape began over again. At a small booth in the corner of the room, Hirsch waved cheerfully.

A second boy sat in the next cubicle. This was Jackson, the daredevil. No one remembered how he had gotten the name, but it suited him well. The small black face, the impish manner of crawling, twisting, eluding the staff members, often exploded without warning into violence. The tiny black hands beat in uncontrolled excitement on the console. Jackson had frozen the image: a test car, piling into a wall of bricks, hurled a dummy driver through the shattering glass. The film, courtesy of the Motor Vehicle Department of Pennsylvania, elicited the identical response at the identical moment. The image of the man being crushed against the bricks fired some nerve deep in Jackson’s primordial personality.

Hoover left the video room. There was Mary Ann, suspected of having sustained brain damage after being beaten by her parents in her crib. She simply gave up the use of arms and legs. Hoover tried to induce her to exercise the atrophying muscles, but without success. There was Earl, the lanky seven-year-old, nicknamed Uncle Earl because of his white hair and grave demeanor. Uncle Earl looked the most normal of the children. There was none of the dead look in the eyes, the lusterless, vapid absence of life there. But after a few moments, it was apparent to anyone that Uncle Earl was just not there. He grinned a lot. Hoover was fascinated by him. The boy carved out his own planet with its own rules and formations, and his body moved obliviously through the obstructions which the earth beings called reality. And nothing reached him. Not even the Popeye cartoons on the video.

The other children were in the playground. Red and yellow jungle gyms, slides, and a merry-go-round rose up from the packed dirt and grass. Vines covered the security fence. Within the compound, six children — Neville, Randy, a girl nicknamed Suzie-Q, an obese deaf girl named Janeen, Duncan, and a slight dark-haired girl named Jennie— played, stood, or sat without the slightest awareness of one another. As far as they were concerned, the world was barren of all life forms save their own frightened psyches. Hoover caught a glimpse of the staff members discreetly observing at the far corner of the playground.

The staff numbered seven. In addition to their professional excellence, they had been chosen for their spiritual reflexes. Hoover judged applicants ruthlessly. Only these seven had passed the test.

Before lunch, Hoover rose and left the office. He went to his bedroom, which was next to Jennie’s room. He lay on the edge of the bed, and he felt comfortable looking at the few icons and carvings he had brought back from the Tamil region. They restored his confidence.

But there was no sleep. No tranquility. Strange thoughts buzzed through the back of his mind like sinister hornets. The clinic was a means. But it occurred to him that he might never know to what end. He pulled out a note pad and a pen from a table under the window. He sighed, brushed his hair back, sat up, and began to write:

My dear Janice,

I beg you to forgive me for this long silence. I can only tell you that I have tried to come to terms with the confusion caused by Bill’s breakdown. After I left the hospital, I went to Florida

He crumpled the note into a ball and threw it into a wastebasket. He began again.

Dear Janice,

My long silence must not be construed as a flight from either you or Bill. On the contrary, not a night goes by that I have not thought of you both, or wished that things might not have turned out as they have

He tore the note in half. For a while, he stared at his shoes. The urgency of writing was peculiarly blocked. With an almost muscular trembling, he tried a third time.

Janice,

It is so strange to write to you when I feel that I have never been absent from you. You must know that I have undertaken a work — a great work — and though it taxes me and troubles me, I have always sensed that you were, somehow, here with me, and it vitalizes me, it gives me strength that I–I should say we—can carry on.

I have, by the grace of God, been able to establish a home in Pittsburgh, a clinic where the ill of spirit among the city’s poorest children — many abandoned — can come to be healed.

He paused, looked out the window at the trees rustling in the warm breeze. He turned back to the note, eyes glazed in abstract, faraway thoughts, and put his pen to paper again.

For children have always meant for me — for us—

He crossed it out, resolved to recopy the letter.

And why now, after a year, have I written? Remember I told you that things had to be worked out, they had to be ready before I could help you and Bill?

In despair, he crumpled the note and dropped it into the wastebasket. There was nothing “ready.” He was no more prepared to help Bill now than he had been when he returned from India. Maybe the clinic had taught him humility, if nothing else.

Jennie walked past the open door. Her elbows were held high, over her shoulders, as though an invisible board or pole were slung over her neck, and her arms dangled from it. She shuffled slowly, absentmindedly, on tiptoes, engrossed in the thick weave of the hall carpet.

“Jennie!” he called, smiling.

But his loneliness was not eased. The child paused slightly, but she kept shuffling away. He knew better than to follow. Soon it was silent again.

A shuffling returned to the door. A small face, elfin, with a fringe of dark hair, peered in. Hoover turned.

“Five — four — three,” Jennie said in a tiny three-year-old voice.

Hoover smiled, but he bent over the wastebasket, scooped up the discarded notes to Janice, and mashed them into a single angry wad.

“Yes, my little elf,” he said. “Five, four, three. What comes next? Two, one, zero?”

“Six — nine — eight.”

Hoover looked at her in consternation. The girl slipped away from the door and walked, self-absorbed, down the corridor. Hoover sat for a while, depressed, then cheered himself with the idea of examining the playground to plan a small flower garden there.

It was warm, sunny, and a subtle aroma of grit hung in the air. It was a nostalgic smell — distant rubber factories, something like linseed oil hovering in the air, the kind of lazy day when he and Audrey Rose had gone looking for deer in the suburban parks.

Walking along the protective fence, he looked out at the hostile slum. Sometimes it felt less like a refuge at the clinic than a form of incarceration. In the dirt yards around the clinic, nothing grew. There was only the debris, the worn rubber tires, piles of rubbish, mattresses ripped open, cars up on jacks and wooden blocks. Hoover squinted at a smashed black Ford, its glass and upholstery littering a vacant yard. A battered license plate dangled from the rear. It read 543 698.

A weird, electric thrill ran into his nerves. 543 698. So Jennie observed the world! Now she could play it back, at least a few numbers.

He ran across the street. Under the gaze of a white-haired, elderly black man who angrily tapped his cane, Hoover ripped the license plate from the Ford and ran back to the clinic. But when he raced upstairs to Jennie’s room, the child was asleep.

A small victory in hell, he said to himself, standing over Jennie’s cot. He slipped the license plate into her desk drawer. Like the monsoon flood that had thrown him and Janice together, Hoover reflected, time seemed on the move again. In its dark currents, where were they being taken? Only time itself, Hoover knew, would decide when and where their mutual destinies would be unveiled.

21

September, and Elliot Hoover found no way to assuage his isolation except by throwing himself into his work. The problem of writing to Janice followed him. In some manner the clinic was preparing him for something. But what? He meditated on the roof of the clinic, during the long, hazy sunset that scattered vermilion through the smoke over the hills, but the answer did not come. So there was nothing but the work.

A second operation enabled Jackson to work the steel pincers of his prosthetic arm. Fortunately, his aggressive instincts began to lessen, or else the other children would have been endangered. Lily remained the same, as did Uncle Earl. But the raging Roy suddenly broke down and wept in Mrs. Concepcion’s arms, and his small arms clutched her neck, and from that day he made no sound, only followed her with his eyes. Mrs. Concepcion slept in the same room as Roy. The boy began to realize that she was there, she would always be there; and instead of rage he began to show signs of curiosity. He climbed into the curtains, examining the pattern of the weave, and he poked among the pots and pans in the kitchen, peering into his reflection in the stainless steel.

But the weirdest case was Jennie. She had grown still more independent, more sure of herself. Her withdrawal now seemed to mask a decisive personality that refused to reveal its complexity. She watched Hoover with soft green eyes that were as distant as Jupiter’s moons.

Hoover typed a reply to the University of Ohio, which had agreed to publish a favorable report on the clinic and its “love” therapy. Far in the distance Henry was crying, a singsong, monotonous lament that had no cause and no end. The door opened in the office, and Hoover saw Jennie peer up at him. She walked coolly to his desk, pulled out three felt-tip pens and walked back to the door.

“You’re welcome, Jennie,” he chuckled.

“Three-two-one,” she said softly.

Hoover shrugged.

“One-two-three,” he answered, looking for a stamp.

He licked the stamp and patted it onto the envelope. He wearily tossed it into the “out” wire basket. He lay back in his chair. It was a quiet afternoon. It was nearing three years since he had first seen Janice and Ivy outside the School for Ethical Culture. A rainy day, in a sea of umbrellas. Janice had looked as he had imagined. Brunette, a bit chic, something decisive about her, but fragile. Upstairs, Mr. Radimanath roared with Neville. A new turn of therapy — to let the boy know that rage was not offensive so he might as well give it up.

Jennie remained at the door.

“What is it, darling?” he asked. “What are you trying to tell me?”

Jenny instinctively retreated.

“Do you want a number?” he asked. “I’ll give you a number. Listen. Five-five-three-three. Five-five-three-three. Can you say that?”

“Five-five-three-three,” she said shyly.

So Jennie was willing to acknowledge that she understood a spoken number! She was hungry for numbers. Hoover did not have to write them down anymore.

“One-four-two-one,” he tried, smiling.

“Six-nine-five-four.”

“What? Let’s try again. Five-five-three-three.”

“One-two-four-eight-seven.”

Hoover laughed, scratching his head in amused frustration.

“That’s more numbers than I gave you,” he said. “What are you doing, adding them?”

His smile froze. Something cleared at the back of his mind as though he had crossed a strange threshold, into a room where he was now awake, where he breathed a different atmosphere than he had ever breathed before. Jennie waited at the door. For what?

“Jennie,” he said, leaning forward, “are you adding the numbers?”

She smiled like a leprechaun, unable or unwilling to understand what he asked. Hoover licked his lips, trying to fathom what she wanted.

“Seven-three-two-six-four,” he said.

“Seven-three-two-six-four.”

“Okay. Let’s see. I’d better write this down. Two-five-five-one-eight.”

“Nine-eight-seven-eight-two.”

Not a second’s hesitation. Hoover added the numbers: 98782. It was correct. He could not believe it.

“Eight-eight-one-five-six-three-two-two-four-eight,” he said.

She repeated the number in that soft, elusive voice, a voice that sounded like gauze curtains rustling in the autumn breeze.

“Nine-seven-three-five-one-one-four-two-nine-three,” he said.

“One-eight-five-five-no-seven-four-six-five-four-one.”

It took Hoover a few seconds to add his numbers. She was correct. Except that she said “no” instead of “zero.” He stared at her, amazed. He stood and walked toward her, but she darted down the corridor, and when he found her again, at the edge of the grass, she showed no signs of interest in him or numbers.

Hirsch remembered studies of autistic children who fixated on numbers, but he had never read of one who could manipulate them at such extraordinary speed. What was the meaning of her ability? And what was the extent of her gift? Did it end with addition or could she perform other feats? And was she trying to say something with the numbers? Hoover and Mr. Radimanath spent the rest of the evening preparing logical and numerical tests for Jennie.

In two weeks they determined Jennie’s limits. There were none. She could add any column of numbers, no matter how long, provided they were enunciated clearly. And her answer, in that quiet, whispered voice, came back faster than they could write down the numbers themselves. Suddenly she began to come up with extraordinarily long numbers. She was multiplying. Hirsch bought an electronic calculator to keep up with her. Jennie could divide. Strangely, she never subtracted. Nor did they know why she sometimes added the numbers, sometimes divided, other times multiplied. And who had taught her? She was not old enough to have been even in nursery school.

“Perhaps, in a previous incarnation, she was a mathematician,” suggested Mr. Radimanath.

Hoover’s head jerked around.

“Do you really think so?”

“Her gift is extraordinary, is it not? So fast. And never mistaken.”

“Yes. Extraordinary. I’ve written to Penn State. Maybe they’ve hit on cases like this.”

But the clinic at Penn State had not run across such mathematical quickness in autistic children. Only cases of memory of numbers, never manipulation of them. They suggested tests with letters and words. Memory tests, manipulation tests. The tests were performed, but Jennie stared blankly through the colored boards of objects, words, and letters, and went dead, signifying that she was through with the game.

Hoover became obsessed with Jennie. He knew that she was trying to communicate with him, but her only language was the one of pure number. What was the meaning behind her burgeoning and fixated talent? In some way she knew the mystery of the autist, the landscape of the lost, the universe of the undeveloped soul. Was that a pure soul? Did she know things that normal children forget when their personalities develop?

Behind it lay another hope. That Jennie could tell him, even in an intuitive way, what it was like to be himself. Somehow Jennie observed him in a pure and untutored way, a whole and trusting way, the way Audrey Rose had known him.

It was in the tiny girl that he detected a response — and even an answer — to his own motivations, to the meaning of his trials.

Hoover pondered long hours over the enigma of Jennie. Was she part of some grand design sent to him by divine providence to validate his work at the clinic? Was she a messenger from heaven sent to salve his troubled spirit and quiet the guilts he so keenly felt about Bill?

Hoover reread her data sheet from the Bureau of Welfare: Jennifer Dunn. No birth certificate. Admitted to Temple University Clinic, 1977. Diagnosed retarded, possible nervous disorder. Before that, three separate hospitals in Pittsburgh. Tendency to fevers, coordination markedly poor, no speech. A handwritten form was stapled to the dossier. Hoover turned his folder sideways. The girl, now called Jennifer Alice Dunn, found in the rubbish depot of a Woolworth’s store in central Pittsburgh in August of 1974. The woman who found her, Mrs. Ora Dunn, kept Jennie nineteen months in foster care, then, unable to deal with the child’s problem, brought her to the county relief agency.

And now he had her. In a sense he had adopted her; he took care of her, even, in a fashion, loved her as a father. She knew no other man as father. Why this need to see her as a substitute for Audrey Rose? Had he not finally purged the past from the present? According to the welfare records, Jennie was born between five and six months before Ivy Templeton died. Absurd, but it relieved his anxiety. Was it not a second sign? A sign to let the past recede into the past, a test of the soul’s strength?

Mr. Radimanath and Hoover spoke late into the night. Jennie, they agreed, had a force over him, and Hoover did not like it. There was a desire to possess her, to claim her soul, that was absent in all the other children. So he turned her case over to Mr. Radimanath and contented himself with elaborating Jackson’s unique fixation on car crashes.

But Jennie was never far from his sight or mind. Finally her sly, elfin, presence so tantalized him, that he took charge of her case once again and proceeded to a thoughtful series of video preparations, none of which elicited the slightest response from the girl.

The tragedy of autism was that retardation has the aspect of being willed, Hoover thought, watching Jennie squirm in the seat of the video cubicle. She refused to learn. Refused to be aware. Yet she was physically able to learn. Sometimes she tried to be deaf. It was all a deception. Why? To shut out pain. But there was no pain in the clinic. Something deep down had shut off, had left its imprint where the personality should have begun developing through language.

“You’re just a deception,” he whispered sadly, running his fingers through her fine, jet black hair. “Just a lovely, quiet little deception.”

Through the day he exhausted his prepared video tapes. Nothing worked. He detected a sly smile of triumph on her face. He grew angry. He wanted to break down the barriers, remove the potential locked up behind the grim walls and make a wonderful person of her. But she refused, willfully countered his every stratagem.

She was deception.

The idea lingered with him long after she went to bed. Jennie was a deception. Why did that have an odd ring? Something awesome toyed with his brain, edging into consciousness, dying away again. Jennie, the deception. Deceiving whom? Himself? Herself? Bill?

Suddenly he stopped. He had been walking along the side of the pool in the basement, so lost in thought that he barely realized where he was. The light flickered on the gently moving water. The banners and mobiles looked pitiful against the cold pipes, the dirt of the windows, the grime of Pittsburgh that seeped into everything, even floating on the surface of the water near the filter.

Bill? Jennie deceive Bill? What odd thoughts were coming? He sat down on the diving board at the dark end of the underground chamber. He pictured Bill with Jennie, but it made no sense. What was the connection? There was a missing equation. He walked the tiled floor, his shoes squeaking on the wet surface. He sensed the missing connection in this grand deception that he was plotting, but could not quite put his finger on it.

So he stared into the water. His own reflection was so distorted in the dark, moving hideously against the single bulb dangling from the far wall, that he appeared to be some form of monster come from the deep. So his thoughts worked into the idea of monster, and to heavy animals, and dark water; and, as always, he remembered lifting the enormous black bullocks from the dead children of the Indian villages, and the ugly masses of dirty, dead chickens that got stuck among the stinking boulders where the road had been, now all sucking mud. And the soldiers shooting diseased dogs. Rifle cracks echoing horrifically through the hills. A looter shot. Hoover scrambled through masses of brush, tangled debris, carrying his pitifully small canister of antibiotics, white cloth bandages, and water purification tablets.

The monster that was himself smoothed out as he remembered Janice as he had found her and washed the mud slowly from her legs. The small undulations of her hips and breasts, the navel so oddly smeared with grime, her unconsciousness throwing her pelvis forward in such deep sleep. So Janice was the missing equation, he thought.

He walked back to the diving board. Jennie was the deception. Bill was the object. Janice was the missing equation. Nothing else came to his fatigued mind, except that the meaning of the clinic was emerging. And the meaning of the clinic was more than the rehabilitation of thirteen vulnerable children. It was much more, and its purpose was on the verge of coming into the light of day.

Lying awake in his room, staring at the dark ceiling, listening to the sounds of the clinic — the warm-air heating ducts, the underground motor for the swimming pool, the kitchen refrigerators that hummed, and Uncle Earl moaning in his sleep — Hoover felt a presence in the darkness. And that presence took control of him. It was the way the growing root of a plant will insinuate itself into the crack of a rock, and with time, split it, the power so strong. Hoover’s lean physique had become leaner with the hard work at the clinic, his legs thinner even than they had been in South India. But it made his body taut. It vibrated with an interior desire. It insinuated itself into his very purpose on earth. The muscle and flesh began to take on a life of its own, and he felt overwhelmed by it.

Was it the continent of America? Its absence of spirituality? Its hardness, its meanness, its grasping for the material world? Or was it the isolation? Where even Hirsch and Mr. Radimanath could not form a strong enough brotherhood to raise his spirit to its former level? Or was it Pittsburgh, which awakened the dormant memories of Sylvia — the slender arms, the soft smell of her perfume, the Bartok string quartets long after Audrey Rose was asleep upstairs and the late autumn dust filtered into the house from the neighboring woods, like the fragrance of nature itself, until their blood burned and they were consumed, the one within the other.

He was washing dishes late at night in the kitchen. All the staff shared the menial tasks in rotation. Steeped in the hot steam, the water sloshing to his elbows, the tiny radio full of tinny voices as inconsequential as the rest of the world had become to him, a different memory came to Hoover. As he carefully hosed the red plastic dishes under the spray, his yellow gloves like emblems of a foreign life, he recalled the vermilion and yellow cloth that swirled through the bazaars of Benares, the cloth that floated into the holy Ganges, where the dead and the dying came to be bathed one last time.

A rapid mélange of imagery flashed through him. Dusty hills, debates at the brotherhood, Sesh Mehrotra, rain in the hills and soldiers everywhere — like a speeding train crashing through time and space, a movie film gone hay-wire — and he remembered, not the flood, but afterward. Not the safety of the mountains, or the loveliness of the Tamil ashram, but, again, inevitably, it was the dirty hut that he recalled, when his breathing had felt warm and difficult and Janice Templeton lay on the hard floor, her breasts rising and falling at the same rapid rate. Like some dark dream, as though following himself out of himself, unconscious of everything, as though the self tarried behind an unknown dimension of his own body, he had gotten close to her. He had pressed against her and her warmth had intoxicated him until he felt dizzy. His two hands pressed forward until the small, delicate softness of her breasts responded, and her hands pressed on his, and he had never in all his life been so awakened to any woman, so transformed without embarrassment by the strength of his need.

Remembering, almost dizzy with the remembrance, Hoover awakened to find himself standing in the brilliantly lit kitchen of the clinic. The water had filled over the sink and was cascading onto the floor, over his shoes, being sucked down into the drain. He turned off the tap. What had happened afterward? He remembered vaguely how he had trembled, gone off alone, to be safe, to sleep in the isolation at the edge of the tiled field. There he had prayed for deliverance, for strength, for even a portion of the purity once promised him by the master of his very first ashram. So the night had passed in prayer and in agony, in meditation and in hell, and somewhere in the blackness he had heard the sudden rumble of heavy hooves, the snorting of a bullock and a cow in the mud, locked in bestial, explosive copulation — or had that been a dream? Had it all been a transference of his own torment to the innocent night? There were sects, after all, which taught that the spirit may, in fact, infuse the spirit of an animal, to perform those acts which may not be performed by a religious pilgrim.

Depressed, Hoover mopped the floor. He turned off the radio. His mind felt as though it had gone through a shredder. Sleep was something of a luxury now. Every time he lay down, Janice Templeton came close to him in the darkness, and her spirit tortured his, not to mock him, but to challenge him, for he knew now, that like him, she had not forgotten the pressure of their bodies that distant night.

Hoover felt the need of prayer.

He needed guidance. And it had come from outside the clinic. It was clear now that the destinies of them all — Bill, himself, Janice, even Jennie, for all he knew — were in some perplexing way intermingled, and would find fruit together. Hoover took off his apron and toweled the perspiration from his face. He walked out of the kitchen, through the corridor, listening to Jennie mumbling incoherently in her sleep, and fat Janeen beating heavily against the protective rails of her cot. The sounds soothed him in some obscure manner. As he walked to his office, the desire of his body, aroused by the strong memory of the South Indian night, receded, relaxed, leaving only a vibrant, trembling sensation through his wracked frame.

He entered his office. The red carpet was now littered not only with cushions and a tea set, but with papers, photographs, dossiers, manuscripts, books, and correspondence. Perhaps the breeze through the window had upset the desk. Perhaps Henry had gotten into mischief during an unguarded moment. Hoover lit a small candle and brought it to the center of the room, set it on the floor, and made a clear circle in the midst of the envelopes and stationery there. There was no other light. He stuck two small sticks of incense into the quiet flame, and the ends of the incense stick sparkled, then glowed dully, and a smoke like jasmine circled lazily upward where the heated air from the candle flame issued toward the ceiling. He placed the incense sticks near him, between two fallen books, lowered his head slightly, and crossed his legs. As he sat, emptying himself of the days’ thoughts, slowly purging the weariness of the physical labor, the complexities of fighting the psychic defenses of the children, his awareness seemed to simplify. He found himself staring blissfully down at his own palms, outstretched, facing upward on his own knees.

He opened his eyes. Slowly, all thoughts, all fatigue, all desires that fixated onto earthly objects began to dissolve. Specifically, he shut himself off from the open window where the curtains stirred in the fragrant, dusty breeze. Then he closed his eyes. In the dissolving, curious reddish atmosphere of the inner eye, behind closed lids, he felt the familiar, comforting atmosphere of meditation. The subtle sense of becoming less substantial and vastly more expanded, as the body withdrew from consciousness. He concentrated on the breathing, control of the diaphragm, breathing through one nostril only, one of the most difficult exercises.

In the dreamy, sensuous atmosphere where there was no floor, no wall, no sound, but only sensations that intermixed freely, he felt a different kind of love. It was not the vague radiance that flowed from the interior of the spinal column, and translated itself into the gentle bliss. It was not the beneficence of the accumulated teachings of yogis through the countless generations, a softness and a melodious moral regeneration. It was more like an embrace. As though a love had come to restore him, to answer the love within him and make it whole. And the sensation terrified him.

Perspiring, he opened his eyes. He was breathing hard with the effort. Calmly he rose, closed the window, lit two more sticks of incense, and then paced the room in agitation. He shuffled through a series of books on a low shelf behind the desk and pulled out a worn volume of Vedic poems, given to him by Mr. Radimanath’s son, printed on his own small printing press in Calcutta.

Hoover read several poems. They seemed to exude a sweet peace, a consuming confidence that had become foreign to himself. Yet he needed them now as never before.

The verses treated of the Supreme Personality, the Godhead that inhabited and formed all moving and nonmoving entities, which passed over and through all the obstacles of growth and decay.

Though engaged in all kinds of activities, the pure devotee reaches the spiritual kingdom.

Work, therefore, always under the consciousness of the Godhead, through all the trials of conditional life.

The supreme Lord is situated in everyone’s heart O Arjuna, and directs the wandering of all living entities.

The room was so quiet that Hoover was unaware of himself, unaware of the noises of the clinic. There seemed to be only the thoughts of ancient yogis, and within that thought he now existed in pure spirit. The words burgeoned in a radiant charisma, flooding into his ego, transforming it with confidence and love. With tears in his eyes, Hoover read:

Under illusion you may decline to act according to the direction of the Godhead. But, compelled by your own nature, you will act all the same.

He reread the passage. He closed the book, mumbled the passage by heart. There was a sensation of purification, of intense potentiality to act, but he did not know exactly where and how. The answer was in the room, in the low-hanging ribbons of incense smoke, in the mundane noises and water pipes, scratched paint, crayoned murals of the clinic. The answer lay in his memories, in his fantasies. Above all, it lay in his body, the body he had been afraid to admit to his thoughts.

Compelled by your own nature, you will act all the same, he repeated to himself.

A bit confused, feeling the warmth radiating from his own face, he sat cross-legged once again on the floor and began to meditate. This time there was no difficulty. In seconds he slipped into a slight trance, a falling away of minute perceptions. In a few more seconds he slipped further, and was unaware of the smell of incense, or any noise, or even of his location.

A radiance spread out before him. A landscape of disintegrated form, bathed in a translucent glow. In it he recognized pieces of his ego, fragments of his past, his desires, his fears, actual experiences. The shards of himself were iridescent and floated rapidly, winking out of sight as he rose above and beyond them. He was without ego. Without pain. There was no turbulence or doubt, only a rich sense of trust, as though he had entered a destiny far larger than his own. He was not afraid. Several times he had ascended to these heights, but never with such a pulsating, relentless momentum.

The elements of his religious training flew past, as though he were riding onward in an incomprehensibly rapid freight train. Faces of his first Episcopalian minister, in Harrisburg, and of the choir master at his church in Pittsburgh. And a rapid series of faces, long-haired, some bearded, some clean-shaven, the faces softened by a lifetime away from manual labor, eyes closed in the depths of inward seeking. These were the gurus, the masters of the ashrams, each with a subtle variant of the doctrine, each contesting for disciples, each in his own way saintly and indifferent to the life of the earth. They flew by, more pure form than individual faces, and each bore the unmistakable stamp of radiance, a light which spread out from the center of the being.

But now Elliot Hoover was in a peculiar nonspace. He recognized none of the signs. A vast array of twinkling specks inhabited his awareness like dancing diamond dust. Vague clouds appeared on the far edges — holes which led toward the pure annihilation of Non-Being Itself, and he became frightened. He felt that he needed his ego, his personality, to survive the journey toward Non-Being, but the myriad essences of his previous spiritual master accompanied him, flowing with him, without his own essence, and Elliot Hoover ceased to be, except in pure form.

The great veil—Maya, the iridescent and irresistible curtain of phenomena — was rendered. Behind all that which was known and seen, smelled and tasted and touched, was the oblivion of Non-Being. It was like looking into the great death of the cosmos, the overwhelming magnitude of the universe’s hostility to living forms. And all that protected Elliot Hoover was the thin screen of deception. Deception of the forms of the earth. Beyond that was only a dim sense of a voice, like the deep bass voice of his first guru in Benares, still offering guidance and instruction, still speaking within the conscience of Elliot Hoover after seven years. The words were not spoken. They did not come to the ears. They rose from the most interior core of Hoover’s being, and he sensed this at the far reaches of the curtain of Maya.

The voice said that the deception shall not be the deception, and the frightening shall not be frightening.

There an image formed of bright leaves, yellowed where a mystical sunlight penetrated the ashram roof of vines, and beyond was busy Benares, full of dusty buses, oxen pulling carts of feces and straw, and the temple bells ringing furiously in the fetid air.

The deception shall not be the deception, said the guru, looking away from Hoover. The frightening shall not be frightening. The guru’s palms, upturned on the white-clothed knee, caught the bright sunshine, and twin auras of blinding white light shone upward through the heavens. And Hoover was more certainly in Benares, listening to his first religious teacher, than he had ever been in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It all went black, a cloudy black, and Elliot Hoover fell a thousand miles, growing fuller and heavier, until he heard his own breathing and tasted his own salt tears on his lips.

Opening his eyes, he did not move. He was surprised to find himself in a cluttered office, littered with books and strange-looking folders and papers. Was this a form of teleportation mentioned in the Vedas? Gradually he realized that he had been crying, and he rubbed his eyes with his sleeve. His breathing grew calmer, and his glance caught the open book of the Bhagavad Gita, still on his desk.

With a sigh, Hoover leaned forward, remembering everything now. He felt limp with exhaustion. That he had been elsewhere he did not doubt. He still had no sense of time. He could not focus on whether it was December or July, early evening or before dawn. He was conscious of the damp perspiration that stained his clothes, of the oppressive heat in his red office. Dimly he tried to recall the words beyond hearing, the revelation of his most difficult trance.

The deception shall not be the deception. The frightening shall not be frightening.

He did not understand. With great difficulty he uncrossed his legs. He remembered that the long meditation of the Gautama Buddha had so sapped the man’s strength that Buddha had to learn to walk all over again. Hoover pulled himself up by the edge of the desk. He massaged his calves and then walked slowly around the room, breathing in deeply, exhaling regularly, to reenter the normal rhythms of life.

Before him were all the complexities of application forms, bills, letters of inquiry on the desk and on the floor, charts on the wall, play-therapy schedules, cafeteria diets, medical dosages for several of the children — all grim reminders of the work at hand.

On the wall was Mr. Radimanath’s vocabulary sheet. Jennie’s numbers, five of which had been associated with specific commands. Hoover smiled. The little leprechaun. The little deception.

He bent over a cracked burner, lit the stove, and warmed some tea. Jennie was the small deception, the personality behind a facade of deafness and retardation. The great veil of Maya was the large deception, the delusion that things of the earth were real. Suppose they were both, in fact, not delusions? Hoover drank his tea and stared out at the darkness of the autumn through his window.

Well, if Jennie was not a deception, what did that mean? That she was real. What did that mean? Jennie could really love him, trust him as a daughter? That she really was his daughter? But that was impossible. Jennie was born a good six months before Ivy Templeton died. Besides, it had never been Hoover’s earnest desire that Jennie actually be his daughter. That was the kind of thought that obsessed Bill Templeton.

Pursuing onward, Hoover trained his thoughts on Bill. The man hovered between lucidity and madness, Hoover realized. All his thoughts fixated on needing a cornerstone on which to assuage his guilt. Bill Templeton needed to believe his daughter was alive and well, could be embraced and spoken to. Therefore, if Jennie were Bill’s daughter…

Of course she was not. But if Hoover could make it appear so… Then the deception would not be a deception— to Bill. Bill would find his fulcrum again. Jennie would be the therapeutic instrument of his cure, and more important to the orphaned child, the beneficiary of his love.

Hoover laughed out loud. Life had broken all the circles, and the destinies had crossed, a labyrinth of shattered illusions, destroyed hopes, and forbidden desires. It made his head swim. Nothing made sense. Everything made sense. It was all a mad whirl in which he was no longer frightened. Through Jennie they would cure Bill. It was all so fantastic that Hoover sat down abruptly, spun around in the leather chair, and stopped with his feet against the wall.

The frightening shall not be frightening.

He reached for the telephone. He called the all-night Western Union number. A telegram, he instructed. With his name, address, his telephone number. The message? One single word.

Hoover repeated. One word. That was all. He hung up. The night had grown cold. He shivered in his shirt and trousers, the damp of the perspiration grown chill. He knew he had best go upstairs, shower, and sleep. But it seemed a long way from where he sat. He, who had transcended all time and all space, who had flown inwardly ten thousand miles and ten years, found it impossible to go the fifty yards up the steps to bed.

He fell asleep in the leather chair, drifting into the more common bliss, the normal relaxation and rest, which had been denied him so long.

22

Janice was tired. She was tired of the long journeys thrice weekly into the precincts of the hospital. She was weary of the dark, dusty halls that echoed with the voices of unseen patients, mocking reminders of deformed human discourse. It was all she could do to force herself, again and yet again, into the tiny ward where the man who was legally her husband sat with his back to the wall, hearing nothing.

Bill nestled against the corner of the room, seated on his bed. It was warm, the windows closed against the chill outside. Dr. Geddes was also tired. It was as though he had run down. He sat slumped in a chair beside the bed, smiled wearily, and put a gentle hand on Bill’s shoulder.

“All right,” he conceded. “Maybe that’s enough for today. Have you anything to say, Mrs. Templeton?”

“No.”

Dr. Geddes was not surprised.

“Very well. Let’s go to my office.”

But even as he closed the door, locking it from the outside, their eyes sought each other’s, and a grim understanding flowed from one to the other.

“Have you given up?” she asked softly, but not without bitterness.

He shrugged. “One never gives up on a patient. Many times I’ve—”

“Don’t give me a pep talk, Dr. Geddes. Tell me the truth.”

“All right. Let’s look at this objectively. My feeling, Mrs. Templeton, is that we can expect very little change for a long, long time.”

She listened. In a small sense it was a relief to hear there was no hope. Hope had been the cruel illusion that kept her in agony. Now that there was none, life was suddenly simpler, reduced to cold practical problems.

“I think he should be moved,” Dr. Geddes continued, reaching for cigarettes in his pocket, finding none, “to a smaller place. It would be like a long-term sanitarium. Much less expensive. Kind of a nursing home.”

Janice paled. “Is that what it’s come to?”

“Yes,” he said, emotions violent and mixed, all savagely repressed so his voice remained smooth and professional. “That is what it has come to.”

“All right. I suppose you know of a good sanitarium?”

“I’ll make inquiries.”

After several minutes, several platitudes, nonsequiturs that hid accusations, apologies, and unspoken griefs, Janice said good-bye and walked to the main glass doors. She heard his footsteps coming rapidly behind her. She turned. Dr. Geddes’s face was all red, as though he had been crying.

“I’m so very sorry,” he blurted, “that it turned out like this.”

“We did what we could, Dr. Geddes.”

“But I had always thought…If we could only produce the key, open him up…”

“Nobody is blaming you. You’ve been extraordinarily kind and generous. Maybe it all boils down to a bit of bad luck.”

Suddenly overcome by emotion, she turned on her heels and walked rapidly through the parking lot. It was a dry, windblown day, and the husks of dead plants, whiskers of vines, stems, and twigs, tumbled over the cracked asphalt. The clouds were lead gray against the bright sky. Everything had gone sterile. If there was a way to be dead while still living, Janice had found it.

The taxi spun around, lurched violently away from the Goodland Sanitarium. For once she did not think of Elliot Hoover’s departure the night that Bill had shattered like a flimsy piece of glass. In fact, she barely saw any of the concrete, the dried mud along the sound, the towering gray and blue steel of the bridges. In her mind everything was abstract. Financial arrangements. A future that stretched out like a white sheet covering a corpse.

It did not help that a single telegram lay on the floor, shoved under by Mario. She opened it, eyes closed, and then stared at it. There was but one word, in Western Union’s square-cut, pasty typography. So bizarre, like a ransom note from Mars. It frightened her. One single word stared back at her.

COME.

Suddenly adrenaline flowed into her heart. A warmth, like a soft heat, pumped outward through her breast and she became dizzy.

“Elliot Hoover.

3546 South Tanner Street.

Pittsburgh, Penna.”

A telephone number was embedded within Western Union’s code numbers. That was all. She shook her head violently as though to clear the confusion from it, then stared at the single word again. The warmth now passed along her legs, through her arms, within her entire body. So he was alive, she thought. That meant that she was also alive. She went to the telephone.

Her hands trembled so much she sat down again, braced herself on the small table by the foot of the couch. There were clicks, strange whistles, as though she were underwater and the dolphins were speaking, and suddenly there was a loud click and a woman answered.

Janice was so distraught at hearing a woman’s voice that she did not hear the words.

“Is Mr. Hoover there?”

“He is with the State Board of Medical Review this afternoon. May I take a message?”

“No….I…He wrote to me. He is there, isn’t he?”

There was a slight pause.

“Mr. Hoover is the director of the Tanner Street Clinic,” said the voice calmly.

This time there was a long pause. Patiently the voice tried again.

“Mr. Hoover will return this evening. May I take your name and number?”

“Yes. No. I’ll call back. Thank you very much.”

Janice hung up. She walked quickly across the living room, rubbing her hands through her hair furiously, trying to calm down. She poured herself a brandy, left it on the end table, and went upstairs to her bedroom. She threw two skirts, two blouses, and a change of underwear onto the bed. Then she went downstairs, sipped the brandy, and looked in vain for a small suitcase in the hall closet. She suddenly remembered that her suitcase was still in South India. But there was Ivy’s in the closet upstairs. She ran back up the stairs into Ivy’s room, stood on a chair and carefully lowered a still-new brown leather bag.

The whirlwind of thoughts accelerated. She sat down on the windowsill, Ivy’s bag in her arms. Though the room had been converted to a small work studio, it was still Ivy’s room. With a shudder of horror, Janice realized the grim irony of combing Ivy’s closet for an overnight bag, to meet Elliot Hoover. Ivy’s presence, like an obtrusive emptiness, filled the room with accusations.

Do you understand, Ivy? she thought to herself, almost hearing the words dangle on the air like dust motes. Do you understand that I am still alive and hungry for life?

She threw her clothes and cosmetics, hairbrush and a pair of Delman shoes into the overnight bag and carried it downstairs.

Hoover’s telegram lay on the couch. She slipped it into her purse. The woman who answered the telephone had mentioned it was a clinic. Was Elliot Hoover also in a clinic? Was it a cry for help? Was she now between two men, both crippled and needing her? Janice thought she recalled the voice saying that he was director of the clinic. Was it some kind of religious clinic, an urban ashram meant to establish a small movement in Pittsburgh?

Janice finished the brandy and poured herself a second. The whirlwind had died away. Thoughts came clear, analytical, and they were troubling. Why Pittsburgh? Of all the continents, all the cities on the face of the globe, why his hometown again? Janice felt, to her own surprise, a dark jealousy. Pittsburgh was Sylvia Hoover’s home. It was where he had had a life with her, and Audrey Rose, and that was why he had gone back.

She reread the telegram. One single word. Entreaty or command, she could not decipher. Nothing was decipherable anymore. She picked up the telephone, dialed information for the number of Allegheny Airlines, and booked a seat on the next flight. Next she called the Tanner Street number and told a Mr. Radimanath of her impending arrival.

Janice was jostled in the rush of the passengers exiting the airplane. She stepped down the metal stairs to the pavement, where puddles rippled in a stiff cold wind. The stewardesses behind her rolled up the bottom step and the ground crew trucked it back to the terminal base. As she walked, the desolation of the Pittsburgh airport magnified with each step, until there seemed to be an unending horizon of cold, damp cement leading in all directions, like the parking lot of Goodland Sanitarium.

“Janice….”

The voice stopped her dead in her tracks. She peered behind her, looking for its source, the way one searches for the source of light in a tunnel.

Elliot Hoover stood at the edge of the carpet by the terminal doors, his dark suit crumpled, somehow much taller than she remembered. Holding his hand was a small girl, lithe and dark-haired, who stared at her with a peculiarly aloof expression.

Janice’s hand went to her mouth.

Hoover stepped forward. His eyes anxiously searched hers. He seemed to bend slightly forward, as though desperate that she be there, yet hesitant, even unnerved by the sight of her in front of him.

“Are you all right?” he asked softly.

“Yes. I am now.”

She smelled the fragrance of his soap, felt the warmth of his hand against hers as he gently clasped it.

“Janice,” he softly uttered like a prayer, and she felt absorbed into him, his strength and his weakness, and only when he let her hand go did she really take notice of the tiny girl just behind them.

“Ah,” he said, his voice trembling through his uneasy smile, “this is Jennie.”

Confused, but curious, Janice stepped forward and extended her hand.

“Hello, Jennie,” she said softly.

The girl only stared back through Janice, a hostile glance, cold as the green of her eyes.

“Jennie doesn’t talk. Or shake hands. Do you, Jennie?” Hoover said, running a single finger gently through the girl’s hair.

He looked at Janice. He smiled awkwardly. Something deep inside him still seemed very sad, very lost, and the cold alienation of the airport terminal only made it worse.

“My car is outside,” he said.

23

Hoover’s car was an old Ford, littered in the rear with textbooks, folders, boxes of toys, even some used clothing for children. He sat down beside her and blew into his hands for warmth. After some hesitation, the Ford kicked into life and he eased into the exit lanes. They drove nearly to the thruway, Jennie between them, and all the while Hoover looked uncomfortable, as though he had a guilty secret.

“Jennie was diagnosed as mentally retarded,” he said, glancing into the oncoming traffic of the thruway. “But the truth is, she’s autistic.”

Unaccustomed to driving, he swerved at the last moment and endured abuse from a passing trucker. He rolled up the window.

“Autism is a condition in which the child refuses to learn. But she can. I know she can.”

He said no more. Nor did she press him with questions. The rural landscape fled past, an occasional large farm, a billboard, a white truck stuck in a muddy road. It was a clean, efficient countryside, where no surprises, or ruinous poverty or abnormal mysticism could shake the tranquility. Overhead dark rain clouds gathered under the general white cover.

“Things have become… become prepared,” he said. “You’ll see what I mean. But it was necessary for you to see it for yourself.”

“Is it true that you’re connected with a kind of clinic?”

He smiled modestly.

“Yes, it’s true.”

“And the clinic is part of being prepared?”

“It is. And so is Jennie.”

His hand ruffled the child’s silky hair. Jennie arched her back in distaste, then went limp, collapsing against Janice. Hoover smiled fondly and pulled her back toward him. He stroked her cheek softly with an expression that bespoke a heartbreak no longer hidden.

As they drove, an ominous silence grew up between Janice and Hoover. The rain increased from a few droplets spattered against the windshield to a major downpour. Though it was before noon, the traffic had its lights on.

“I’ve come to terms with everything that’s happened,” he finally said, glancing at Janice.

“Why did you come back to Pittsburgh?”

“If I have work to do, I can do it here as well as anywhere.”

Janice watched him. “You must have been curious to see your old home,” she suggested.

“I was. I’ve gone several times. I’ve purged it from my soul.”

Jennie suddenly exclaimed, “Five-nine-nine-two-two!”

Hoover laughed at Janice’s startled expression.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to Jennie’s own language. She speaks fluently in numbers.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t know. We’re trying to decode it. So far we’ve got about five phrases. Most of which translate roughly as ‘Bug off!’”

Janice, perplexed, studied the little girl who so suddenly had come to life. Jennie stared in animated wonder at the passing urban scene, bounced around in the front seat, captivated by the gleaming displays in shopwindows.

“Eight-eight-seven-nine!” she yelled.

“Maybe the numbers stand for letters in the alphabet,” Janice offered.

“We tried that. Nothing worked. But she’s developing fast. Something will blossom soon.”

The Ford choked and sputtered. Hoover started the ignition again. Ahead of them was Tanner Street, a small lane with an odd collection of broken cars and spilled garbage cans. The rain was letting up, and dirty streaks covered the front windshield.

Hoover stopped the car.

“When do you go back?” he said quietly.

“It depends — on a lot of things.”

He got out of the car, scrambled through the brisk wind that stirred up dust and grit in erratic gusts, and opened her door. When she got out, Hoover reached in and pulled Jennie gently to his shoulder.

“Poor little angel is tired out,” he said. “But I wanted you to meet her right away.”

Puzzled, Janice accepted his hand in the crook of her elbow, and he led her up three cement steps to a green two-story building. Tall bare trees poked up over the roof from behind. A tall security fence girded the structure. Other than that, it looked vaguely like a jerry-built motel.

They ducked in out of the wind, which still threw rainwater into their faces. Hoover slammed the door. For a second it was dark. Then he switched on the light. Janice saw a boy, totally limp, on the floor, crumpled into what appeared to be a lifeless heap.

“That’s James,” Hoover whispered. “Just step over him.”

Cautiously, Janice stepped past the inert form. Before she could ask a question a long, low, painful howl reverberated through the carpeted corridors.

“That’s Henry,” Hoover explained. “He’s been doing a lot of that lately.”

Astounded, Janice followed Hoover and Jennie into the recesses of the building. A tall man with brown skin held a screaming child. The man’s eyes were closed in what appeared to be holy rapture. The child kicked, bit, poked at the restraining arms in terror.

“The gentleman is Mr. Radimanath. He took your message. You’ll meet him later.”

“That child? Is he hurt?”

“No. Like Gertrude, in Hamlet, however, he protests too much.”

Hoover opened a door and they were in his office. The red carpet and red curtains gave a curious flavor to the room where the charts, typewriter, desk, and filing cabinets were located. So did the cushions on the floor in lieu of chairs. Hoover closed the door and the child’s screaming subsided.

“Henry fights against love,” Hoover said quietly, turning on a small lamp, “precisely because he needs it so desperately.”

He turned, smiling, Jennie’s hand reaching absently over his face. Janice, mystified, could only laugh in confusion.

“It will make sense,” he promised. “But you must keep your mind alert, and your eyes open.”

He slid Jennie to the floor, where she lay against a brightly colored cushion. Hoover watched her fondly. Then his shoe toyed with her stomach. She wriggled away.

Something seemed to trouble him again, and a look of distress crossed his face.

“I’ll tell you about Jennie later,” he said softly.

He reached down, found a small blanket at the foot of the desk, and tucked it around Jennie’s small shoulders. Evidently the girl had made a second home for herself in Hoover’s office. Janice saw a red plastic cup with Jennie’s name on the windowsill.

“Who are her parents?” Janice asked.

Hoover shrugged.

“The city of Pittsburgh considers her an abandoned child. A woman named Ora Dunn found her on a bench in a bus station. With a note on her. That’s all we know.”

“And they never tried to find her parents?”

“The city always tries, but seldom succeeds.”

Jennie sighed in her sleep and rolled off the cushion onto the floor. Hoover smiled as he watched her.

“Some day we will have her add numbers for you,” he whispered. “And multiply them. She’s a marvel.”

The awkwardness returned. The silence surrounded them as though a large question had been asked, much too large for either to answer. They found themselves looking at one another.

Hoover reached out a hand and touched her hand softly.

“When I asked how you were, that was no casual question,” he said.

“I know. I’m better than I would have thought, Elliot.”

“Then something worse has happened with Bill?”

“Yes. He’s been judged incurable. They don’t use that word, but he’s going to be transferred to a permanent sanitarium. Presumably to waste away.”

The strain showed in Hoover’s face by a sudden pallor. Janice instantly regretted her outburst.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” she added more softly. “It’s easier to live without false hope.”

Hoover came closer. Instead of touching her or whispering comforting words, he only waited for her to look up at him. She did, and found his eyes troubled and yet containing a spark of hope.

“Janice,” he said quietly, “I may not be too late.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Bill. We may find the key to open him up again.”

Janice turned away.

“We owe it to him to try,” he said, swallowing his guilt. “We can’t give up hope.”

Janice sat wearily against the desk. Her eyes fixed on Jennie, sleeping peacefully near her feet, but she barely noticed the girl, only a general impression of vulnerable sweetness.

“I don’t know,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I’m tired of hoping.”

He seemed to know what she meant. Though they stood isolated, only inches apart, a radiant silence permeated the space between. Neither could have met the other without thinking of how to help Bill; yet a healthy Bill, Janice knew, would mean that she and Elliot Hoover could never be together.

As though to dispel any abhorrent thought, or any suggestion wrought by despair and the pain of her own misery, Janice went to Jennie and knelt down. A ribbon had been wound clumsily into the black hair — by a man’s hand, she thought — and she slowly untied the ribbon and then tied it again.

“Does Jennie hope?” Janice asked.

“No. I don’t think she does. I expect the world is chaos for her.”

“Well, then, do you look for some key to open her up?” Janice asked.

“Yes,” he said eagerly. “That’s exactly how we work. We have to get into the child’s defenses, make her accept us because we accept her.” He knelt down by Jennie. “With Jennie, we accept her number language. With Jackson it’s fire, pictures of car explosions. With Lily we let her eat food from the floor.” Hoover’s face took on a tinge of excitement mixed with triumph. “You see? We worm our way into the citadel. Then we storm the last defenses.”

“And where is the key to Bill?” she asked, looking directly at him.

Hoover licked his lips, paused, then stood up.

“I’m hoping you’ll… that you’ll see that yourself,” he confessed. “I could tell you, but it would mean so much more if you saw it for yourself.”

Perplexed, Janice tucked Jennie’s blanket around the small shoulders.

“There’s only one thing Bill wants,” she said.

“Yes. I know.”

She looked up.

“Have you found Juanita?”

He turned from her. The vein along his temple throbbed, and she did not know what violent emotions caused him to retreat from her.

“No.”

“Did you look for her?”

“There was no point. Whether Juanita is or she isn’t, is not important. We don’t need her, Janice. Not now.”

She stared at him. Things were not making sense. “Why did you send for me? It wasn’t just to meet Jennie and see the clinic.” She was almost afraid to hear the answer.

“It was to meet Jennie and see the clinic,” he said gently. “I’d like you to meet the children. It will make you understand better. Then we can talk.”

“All right.”

The day passed for Janice like a deranged cinema. By darkness, she had witnessed the full range of human suffering. James rocked furiously on the corner of his bed. Lily smiled in their direction, seeing very little, her freckled face hopelessly ignorant of where she was. Janeen rolled her obese body onto the floor. When Janice touched her, the girl made absolutely no response.

Room after room, child after child, and Janice felt drawn deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of autism. It was a peculiar, silent world in spite of the howls, moans, and abrupt hyenalike chatter that erupted from the tiny throats. It was silent because there was no communication with the outer world. None of the children knew that there was anybody else in the building but himself.

“What are you thinking?” he asked after watching Jackson mechanically slam his prosthetic arm into his pillow, a robot as lifeless as the aluminum of his artificial limb.

“I feel as though I know what it’s like to be insane,” she said, looking back down the corridors. “All these rooms, all these terrifying rooms, and nobody can help you.”

Hoover led her on. Neville was sleeping in the next room. When Janice peered into the scrunched, anxiety-ridden face, she saw something that did not appear human. It looked like a lower order of hominid, something from the Malay jungles, an imperfect human being. In the next room Uncle Earl began his low, piercing howls that had no stop, no pause, as though he never breathed, but had all the patience in the world to slowly pour out his grief and pain to the unseeing void.

Janice peered into the room. Uncle Earl simply sat like a Hindu priest, lowing like a sick cow. With not the slightest desire to do anything else, ever, until he might die.

“What pain he must be suffering,” she whispered, “to simply sit there, hour after hour.”

“It’s almost religious,” he said. “Some primal pain that can be expressed in no other way.”

Energetic breathing now displaced Earl’s moaning. It was James. The boy flopped among the sheets of his bed in his pajamas, his limbs jerking, rocking mechanically, a pugilist among the bright mobiles, and Janice instantly thought of her own daughter. Ivy had been the identical focus of terror, an unreachable, self-destructive maniac in her nightmares, who saw nothing around her but sheets of psychic pain.

“What we do here,” he said, as they watched Roy, “is try to reach that primordial disturbance, and try to neutralize it.”

Janice began to grasp something of the spiritual force that dominated the clinic, an atmosphere of calm intensity that had slowly grown on her.

“With love,” he said. “We try to cure them through intense, spiritual love.”

He took her hand.

“Come with me, Janice,” he whispered.

And she sensed that he led her, not to another room, a different child, a different variety of torture, but into the labyrinth of his own heart. The children were analogues of his own psychic wounds. The clinic was the exhibition of his most secret motivations, and like a slow whirlpool, the passion of it grew stronger as he approached the center.

The next room was dark. One single bed. A blue light on at the floor, and then her eyes made out a child’s limp hand. It was Jennie, washed and tucked into the sheets by the staff. Hoover stepped quietly over the carpet.

“Janice,” he said, half in supplication, half in demand.

She slowly approached him and looked down at the sleeping child.

“Who does she look like?” he whispered.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you do, Janice.”

“She — she looks like a million children.”

“Janice, has your heart not been opened? Have I shown you suffering for nothing? Look!”

Jennie’s small face was cast in a blue shadow. At the nostrils, a black shadow suddenly began, like the eclipse of death over the pale skin.

“She reminds me…of Ivy…I suppose.”

“Exactly!”

“It’s the eyes. No, it’s the expression, really. Trust and fear…a little secretive…”

He smiled triumphantly.

“Janice,” he whispered. “She reminded me — so forcefully — of my own daughter.”

Janice sat down on the edge of the bed. For an instant neither spoke. Jennie’s softened face glowed like the rim of a distant planet, against the annihilating darkness. Life never appeared more fragile than in the face of the sleeping child.

“Listen to me, Janice. For months, I thought — believe me, I truly thought…”

“Jennie?”

“Yes. Amazing that my life should end in such a strange but certain destiny.”

He knelt down to be with her. His voice trembled, and his eyes glittered in the blue light.

“Elliot, this can’t be true.”

“No. Of course it can’t. She was born six months too early.”

Jennie turned in her sleep. The small hand flopped against Janice’s. Janice placed the hand on the carefully tucked sheet.

“Then what are you saying? What strange and certain destiny are you talking about?”

“Jennie is not my child. Nor could Juanita ever be your child. But we wanted them to be!”

The last words hissed out between clenched teeth. It startled her. The silence abruptly descended. He became afraid that he had frightened her. With a great will he resumed control of his voice, and he lowered it and tried to speak reasonably.

“It was the wanting that we perceived,” he said with an almost infinite sorrow. “Not the reality.”

Janice felt a pang of regret shoot into her heart. She knew all too well that he was right.

“Once life was filled with pretty things,” she said softly. “Now it’s all gone so dark. Was it really so much to hope for?”

Janice’s head slowly lowered onto his shoulder. He was surprised, then simply cradled her face in his hand. He felt the hot tears coming into his palm, and he blinked rapidly.

“I’m so alone,” she whispered.

He stroked her hair, but found himself unable to speak.

“So alone,” she repeated in a tone so desperate that it frightened him. “Alone… alone…”

“Each of us… equally alone,” he whispered.

She stirred. Something in Jennie’s sleep changed. The child’s eyes were open, looking at them, through them, the green irises now dark in the blue lamplight.

“She does seem like Ivy,” Janice said, smiling faintly. “So mischievous, all-knowing. Why do I feel this kinship? Even when I know better?”

“I told you. It’s the wanting that you perceive.”

“No. It’s something else. Something that makes me feel strange.”

“Haven’t you guessed what it is?”

She turned. He was smiling at her, the pupils of his eyes catching glints of the night lamp. His face had softened.

“Because we both wish it to be so. Don’t you see why?”

“Because…”

“Because we share the wish to be together. And she makes it possible. Without guilt. Without sin.”

Janice acknowledged what he meant by “sin” and turned away. The silence remained. The darkness remained. And Janice remained, confused, uncertain.

“She is the medium through which Bill could be cured, and through which our relationship can be made whole,” he said in a dark, hypnotic voice.

She looked at him. He was more silhouette than man. He came closer but she felt only the darkness of his form, and the subtle rim of blue around his shape. Her own body seemed to have dissolved, leaving a residue of purest darkness, afraid of him, afraid of herself, as they edged together in a compact that knew neither reason nor patience.

“H-how can she do that, Elliot?” she stammered.

“If Bill were to believe that Jennie is his child, he would have reason to live again — become whole again.”

“But—”

“I said believe, not she is. But that he believe it.”

She was silent. Hoover reached for her and took her hand. “If he only thought it. And he could be made to think so.”

“Elliot, I can’t be a party to this. What if he found out?”

“The whole point is to establish a bridge into his fortress,” he said softly. “That’s what I’ve learned here. You must learn how to include yourself in the interior panic, in the terror, where the fantasy begins.”

She shivered in the cold. He drew her against him.

“It can’t work, Elliot.”

“It can’t fail! We’ll simply produce a suitable birth certificate….”

He ignored her glance, the surprise she showed at how well his plan was worked out, even down to forgery.

“Introduce him to the child. Time will take care of the rest.”

“It’s you who live in fantasy, Elliot. He believes that Juanita is his child.”

“Then I’ll convince him otherwise.”

She laughed bitterly.

“He’s in no condition to be spoken to.”

For a long time Hoover said nothing.

“I know that kind of deafness,” he said. “These children have it. But they do hear. Unconsciously.”

But she only shook her head in despair. And they both understood that behind the struggle for Bill’s sanity was the secondary struggle, the most complicated of their lives: if, through Jennie, they could be together while curing Bill. But it was Janice who suddenly broke it off.

She got up and began walking slowly from the room.

“Wait!” he insisted. “You could put a doll in the room and Bill would think it was his!”

Janice was startled by his remark. “They tried dolls in the hospital.”

“But how much better a real girl. And Jennie has that quality, hasn’t she? Of awakening love?”

“Elliot, how can it possibly succeed?”

“Because I know it will.”

His voice had an odd ring to it. It reminded her of his voice when he first came to New York. A disembodied, yet passionate voice, nervous because of fear of his own strength.

“How? How do you know it?”

“Because I’ve had proof.”

“Proof?” she asked vaguely.

The dreamlike quality of the moment dominated again. The seesaw of reality to unreality switched for the thousandth time. Once again there was a different system of rules, the kind of rules that one believes in India or in ashrams, places where the material world grows transparent and vaporous.

“I had a visitor,” he said strangely. “Let me show him to you.”

Hoover creaked open a door a door and they went inside. He flicked on a light. It was his bedroom. Long red curtains ran down to the floor across the windows. A disarray of books, stationery, a radio, and crumpled clothes lay over the floor. Artifacts from India: sculptured goddesses, the elephant deity painted crimson, incense holders, gold-spangled saddlebags, and teakwood carvings of Krishna lined the room. It was a voluptuous, softly lit environment, completely different from the analytical, cold corridors. Even the unmade bed, the sheets clean but rumpled in the amber light, seemed to glow softly like a hazy sunrise.

Hoover went to his desk. Behind a framed painting of the blue-skinned Krishna relaxing in the courtyards of pleasure in the moonlight of the Himalayas, Hoover gently removed a faded photograph. Shyly, he brought it forward. It was a small photograph, a passport photograph of an old man with surprisingly black eyebrows under white hair, with an unkempt white beard.

“I keep the picture protected,” he said softly. “It’s my only real treasure here.”

She stared at the unfamiliar countenance. She guessed the man was about seventy years old, stern, yet with soft eyes that showed pale, almost white in the photograph.

“My first teacher,” he whispered.

“In India?”

“In Benares. I don’t even remember how I got there. Somehow I ended up in an ashram speaking not a word of Hindi, very confused, and he knew some English. He saved my life.”

She looked at him, surprised at the trembling tenderness in his voice. His face had grown suffused in the amber light of the lamp.

“He began the process toward my enlightenment, many years ago.”

He took back the photograph as though it were a holy relic. Carefully he returned the photograph to its hiding place behind the painting. Hoover seemed oblivious of the disorder in the room, or its sensuous reds and ambers, the soft madras fabric crumpled on the bed, the long red curtains that illumined the walls like exotic pillars.

“He came to me, Janice. Five days ago.”

“From Benares?”

He laughed. “Benares? Who knows? Maybe I went to see him. Maybe I was the visitor.”

She waited, but he seemed almost too happy to continue. The flush of joy did not leave his face. Nor did he approach her, but instead remained near the wall where he had hidden the photograph.

“It was in a trance,” he said gently. “I… ascended… I suppose that is the best word for it. I ascended far beyond any place I had ever been, because… because…”

“Because what, Elliot?”

His face darkened.

“Precisely because of this …plan… with Jennie… with Bill. I was in despair, since it involved the element of deception.”

In the next room Jennie made a soft sound in her sleep.

“I suppose I disappeared in some way,” he explained. “Or should I say I reappeared in some way. In any case, I saw him again.”

“He’s still alive.”

“No. He died six years ago. But there he was, in the Benares garden, just as I always remembered him; the same sunlight, the same smell of the flowers and the incense, and his voice…”

Janice waited. She felt herself caught up in the passion of his remembrance. He seemed to use it to cast a wide net over her, as though she were one of the migrant butterflies that had startled them in South India, and she nervously watched him pace the floor.

“His voice was heard beyond the walls of oblivion,” he said ecstatically, “and it told me that there shall be no deception.”

He turned, happy that she did not disbelieve him, or at least made no sign of it.

“The deception shall not be a deception! That was what I heard! Don’t you see? To Bill, Jennie can be, will be, his child again! She will be the link, the bridge on which he can emerge again into the light of day.”

Janice had no doubt of Hoover’s vision. It seemed too potent to be confined to the small rooms and corridors of the clinic. It belonged in a vast landscape, like India’s, which could contain such dreams. Here, it threatened to burst the bounds of normalcy and sweep everything before it.

“Can you doubt it, Janice?” Hoover pleaded. “Can there be any doubt at all?”

“If it should misfire? What would happen to Bill?”

“There’s very little that can happen to him,” he said in a low voice, “that hasn’t already.”

In dismay she closed her eyes.

“Let me think about it. It seems too dangerous.”

Frustrated, he only clenched his jaw. His eyes looked lost, as though he had failed miserably, and having exposed the message of his trance, having shown her the sanctity of the room where his deities found their worship, he was even more vulnerable.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you have to give me time.”

“That’s all right, Janice. Perhaps I’ve rushed things.”

In the next room there was a small thump. Janice instantly remembered the nights when Ivy had fallen from bed, only to be driven half mad by the dream from which she could not awaken, the dream of her own coming death.

“Did you just think of Ivy?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes,” she said, startled. “I did.”

“You see? The child calls out to you. In your own heart, you can’t deny her. Go to her, Janice. Tend to her.”

Janice opened the door and fumbled into the darkness. Behind her Hoover followed, and they groped toward the lamp. Jennie lay on the floor, her pajamas rumpled, and a tiny trickle of red lay over her nostril.

“Elliot, she’s hurt herself!”

“It isn’t like her to fall out of bed. James does that with a vengeance, but not Jennie.”

Janice took a tissue from the night table and quickly dabbed at the tiny nose. Strangely, the child seemed only now to awaken to the touch of Janice’s hand. There was the fragrance that a mother instantly recognizes, the soft smell of a sleeping infant, and the warm cotton of the pajamas.

“F-five — T-two—” Jennie mumbled.

“She’s awake,” Janice said.

Hoover bent down.

“So she is. I wonder if she knows whether or not she’s dreaming?”

The green eyes of the child gazed through them. Though she took notice of their presence by virtue of being alert, even aware of everything in the room around her, she refused to look at their faces. Janice sensed the protective hostility of the child, the fear that wrapped around her like a robe.

“Jennie,” she whispered. “It’s me. Do you know who I am?”

“F-five — T-two—”

Janice looked at Hoover. He shrugged.

“Three-three means bathroom. Maybe this is a further refinement. Would you like to do the honors?”

Janice laughed. “I’d love to. I haven’t done it in a long time.”

Hoover stood in the center of the room, without moving. The light went on in the adjoining bathroom. He watched as Janice gently removed the bottom pajamas, sat Jennie on the small toilet seat. Then Janice washed Jennie’s hands, then her own. Hoover watched Janice comb down the girl’s hair. Time seemed to slow down and die as Jennie gazed into the mirror, held in Janice’s arm.

Slowly the small hand slid down Janice’s neck, down the throat, toward the curve of her breast. Jennie relaxed, and the other arm wrapped itself slowly around Janice’s neck. The light went off. Janice carried the sleeping girl back into the bedroom.

“What’s wrong?” Janice whispered. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“She’s never returned an embrace before,” he said slowly.

As Janice lowered the child to the bed, the small arm had to be pulled from Janice’s neck. Jennie turned to Janice, the sleeping body curled, the arms stretched lengthwise across the sheets. From Hoover’s room the amber light mixed with the blue, and a curious glow appeared on the girl’s forehead.

“She seems warm,” Janice said.

Hoover went to the bathroom and in the darkness wetted a towel. He brought it back, gave it to Janice, and she daubed it lightly over Jennie’s forehead. Then Janice rose, took the towel back to the sink, rinsed it, and hung it on the bar to dry. She turned and was startled to find that he had followed her, looking just as tired as she.

“Will you not be her mother?” he asked, his voice oddly husky. “She needs that kind of care. The kind of love you can provide.”

“No. She’s a lovely girl, but—”

In the predawn gloom they spoke in soft voices, as though the long night had rid from them any anxieties. Janice felt she had been at the clinic for a month. She was familiar with its every sound, its every smell, and the children seemed, oddly, extensions of herself as well as Hoover. She slumped against the white basin, as the sleeplessness danced into her eyes. Jennie seemed to float in the light where the sheets were visible across the room.

“And the frightening shall not be frightening,” Hoover said gently.

She looked up at him. Odd glints of light swarmed in her vision where he stood.

“That’s what he told me. My master, the guru,” Hoover said softly. “The frightening shall not be frightening.”

Suddenly he leaned down over her, his lips against the soft warmth of her neck.

Her left hand instinctively went up around his neck and drew him closer. They were both exhausted, their blood racing, and the moment seemed to undulate in a slow motion, a giddiness as though the earth had wobbled from its foundations. Nor did she object when his hand slowly rested against her breast. Her breathing pushed out against him, and one by one he unbuttoned the buttons of her blouse.

She sighed, turned against his cheek, and his fingers slid across the hollow of her throat. For a long time they found comfort in each other’s proximity, a dreamlike stillness, the pressure of breathing so near each other’s ear. His fingertips pressed down, soft as velvet, to her undergarment, flowed down under and found the breast very warm, and there was a soft but sudden intake of her breath against his cheek.

“Elliot,” she whispered, “I’m so confused without you. I’m even more confused with you.”

“I am never without you,” he whispered.

She felt the warm comfort of his hand against her bare breast, and was, in her confusion, grateful for it. She leaned her head against his shoulder and watched as the tinted lamp illumined her blouse, making it look as though it belonged to someone else, and watched his fingers remove the next button, felt the soft sliding of the fingertips around and under the other breast.

Her body belonged to someone else, to a Janice long buried under time’s sorrow and the fatigue of survival. From far away she seemed to sense her dulled limbs awakening, pushing heavy weights away, and yet the disembodied feeling was unnatural. It made her feel anxiety in the warmth of his friendship.

“Kiss me, Elliot,” she whispered.

He moved slowly toward her face, and their lips pressed together, an almost discreet encounter, a mutual signal of their desolation. She stood up from the basin counter, his hand found the nipple of her breast, and she pressed herself against his lips.

The alienation went away. Janice felt herself rising from the dead, from the corridors of the asylums, from long journeys that lead to death, from the abstraction of pretending she was no woman. She closed her eyes. When they kissed again, it was delicate, though his tongue found hers; a sudden thrill passed through her, a shudder of surprise, and his hand ran down the length of her body, resting on the small of her back.

She clung to him, standing with her weight against him, on the quiet threshold to Jennie’s room. It seemed to be an eternity thus, while the child slept. Dogs barked, unseen in the neighborhood, and a heavy truck rumbled past the clinic. The street became quiet again. She felt as though she were falling asleep, that in fact there could be nothing more blessed than to sleep forever in his arms, in view of the mysterious child who, in some inscrutable way, blessed their being together and reminded them of their own lost children.

She laughed softly in his ear. He raised his head, smiled, and raised an eyebrow, questioning.

“I don’t ever want to move,” she whispered, her face flushed. “Not ever.”

He lowered his face against her neck and pressed her close.

“Then we shall not,” he said softly.

“I feel like I’m dancing,” she said in a faraway voice.

She sighed and accepted his tongue softly in a second kiss, a longer thrill, and did not seem ready when he broke it off, smiling. In a sudden burst of happiness he squeezed her to him. It was unmistakable, the desire that pressed against her.

“Elliot,” she murmured, and her hand slipped down from his arm, hesitated, and nervously squeezed his elbow.

She was confused when there was a movement, and abruptly he had lifted her into his arms, like a child, and carried her into the red sweep of his bedroom. It swirled past like a sensuous dream, and except for the pounding of her heart, like an animal gone wild, the whole world seemed to flow swiftly and silently like a river of mist.

“Please—”

Her voice was cut off by a playful kiss on the mouth. He put her down. The light was still on. The Indian deities, the red curtains, the rumpled bed, all stretched out in front of her, a landscape more uncertain, more inviting, more dangerous than any subcontinent.

She was transfixed with fear.

Behind her, Hoover softly closed the door. Autumn leaves blew against the window, and the blood throbbed in her temples. He did not advance, but only put his hand against the small of her back, and she suddenly whispered, as though unwilling to walk any farther, unable to move paralyzed limbs.

“Carry me, Elliot.”

With a slow, simple movement, as though raising an almost holy icon, he carried her as before, in his arms, and lowered himself with her to the bulging mountains and valleys of the madras bedspread, sheets and a single pillow.

He said nothing. Quickly he removed her blouse, kissing her on the eyes, so that her eyes remained closed and she saw nothing. He carefully unhooked her undergarments and removed them, and though her eyes were closed, she gasped slightly, aware that he observed her.

He did not cover her with sheet or blanket, but left her nude. She lay like a sculpture in the soft light, the rounded forms of hip and thigh clearly modulated. She felt her face was flushed and finally opened her eyes and watched Hoover’s eyes and wondered if her own burned with the same radiance.

Far, far away he seemed to be, obscure, formless, and he went through motions, removing his shirt and trousers. His uncovered chest startled her with its smoothness, a pale white skin like marble against the bloodred curtains behind.

It was as though they were fighting — the two hearts like impatient birds beating their wings — and in their fatigue there was dark, driving joy. Pleasure accelerated, until Janice grew unconscious under its demands. Shamelessly she sought the last barrier to oblivion. An abrupt pulsating filled her throughout, she became dimly aware of her leg twisted around his hip, and there was the sound of her own moaning, and his, dying away like a receding thunderstorm.

Nor did he remove his body to her side, but repeated her name over and over, almost silently, in her ear. She smiled, stroked the back of his head in a dreamy, sensuous softness that had no outer definition. She had triumphed in some way, and her every sensibility had flowed to the far corners of the earth.

She felt once again that her breath was coming short. Once again he was extended deep within her. Her leg twisted slowly, languorously at first, around his hip. Now they rolled in a deep of their own making. At the bottom of an ocean known only to themselves, in a dreaminess where she commanded him, just as he commanded her, they pursued the relentless goal through the darkness. There was a sensation of a slow, irresistible welling, as though the floor of the earth, like a bubble, had begun to expand, and then she heard his small cries. Slowly then, through her exhausted body, the bulging, demanding pressure flowered a second time, and her cries followed his like an echo.

She felt that she was already asleep. He was at her side, his arm across her breasts. There was a relaxation surpassing anything she had known. The girl in the next room burbled softly, like a nightingale, and Janice slipped like a feather into the welcome and blessed purity of dreamless sleep.