The Three Roads

chapter 1

From the veranda where she had been left to wait she could see the golf course adjoining the hospital grounds. Along the distant hillside, still green from the winter rains, a tiny man in faded suntans was chasing an invisible ball. She had been watching him for some time before she noticed that he handled his club in an unusual way. He was teaching himself to play golf with one hand. She hoped he had been left-handed to begin with.

She forgot the tiny man when she heard Bret’s footsteps behind her. He turned her toward him, holding her by the shoulders in a grip that almost hurt and studying her face. Looking up into his calm eyes, she understood the doubt that lay behind them. She felt it in her own mind whenever she came to see him after a week’s absence, uncertain and bereft, like a relative called upon to identify the victim of a drowning.

Bret hadn’t really changed, but he had taken on weight during his nine months in the hospital. It had altered the lines of his cheek and jaw and made his old gray uniform seem too small for him. She could never wholly free her mind of the suspicion that this Bret Taylor was an impostor, living a healthy vegetative life in a dead man’s clothes, battening on the love she owed to the man that was lost.

She shivered against him, and he tightened his arms around her. She had no right to such fantastic notions. It was her job to bring reality to him. She was his interpreter of the outside world, and she mustn’t forget its language. But even with his arms round her she was chilled by the old terror. During the first few minutes of their meetings she always skated on the thin ice at the edge of sanity. Her whole concern was to keep her feelings from showing in her face.

Then he kissed her. The contact was re-established and drew her back to her emotional center. The lost man had been found and was in her arms.

The orderly who had accompanied Bret as far as the door reminded them of his presence. “You want to stay out here, Miss West? It gets kind of chilly in the afternoons.”

She looked at Bret with the deference that had become instinctive with her. Since he had no large decisions to make, let him make all the small ones.

“Let’s stay out here,” he said. “If you get cold we can go in.”

She smiled at the orderly, and he disappeared. Bret placed two deck chairs side by side, and they sat down.

“And now I’d like a cigarette,” she said. The case in her bag was full, but she preferred to have one of his. Apart from the fact that it was his, which was important, it helped build up the illusion of casualness and freedom.

“They always call you Miss West,” he said when he lit her cigarette.

“Inasmuch as that’s my name–”

“But it isn’t your real name?”

For a moment she was afraid to look at him, afraid that his mind had reverted to the time when he didn’t know her. But she replied in a sweetly reasonable voice: “Well, no, it isn’t. I explained to you that I started to work in Hollywood under my maiden name. I never use my married name except on checks.”

“I didn’t remember,” he said humbly.

“Nobody can remember everything. I’ve even forgotten my own telephone number.”

“I’ve forgotten my own name. My memory’s getting better though.”

“I know it is, every time I come.”

He said with sober pride, like an explorer announcing the discovery of a new island: “I remembered Kerama Retto the other night.”

“Really? That’s the news of the week.”

“The news of the year for me. I remembered the whole thing. It was so real I thought it was happening over again. I could see the rice paddies above the harbor in the glare of the explosion. It was so bright it blinded me.”

She was dismayed by his sudden pallor. Along his hairline there was a row of minute sweat drops that the February sun did not account for.

“Don’t talk about it if it’s painful, darling.”

He had turned away and was looking across the lawn, which sloped down from the veranda into the valley holding the sunshine like a lake of light. Its very peace, she thought, must make it seem more dreamlike to his unpeaceful mind than the remembered terraces of that island off Japan.

The silence between them was too full of echoes, and she broke it with the first words that entered her head. “I had fruit salad for lunch. I had to wait twenty minutes to get into the dining-room, but they do make good fruit salad at the Grant.”

“Do they still put avocado in it?”

“Yes.”

“I bet you didn’t eat the avocado.”

“It’s always been too rich for me,” she answered happily. He was remembering everything again.

“We had avocado salad for lunch on Wednesday or Thursday. No, it was Wednesday, the same day I had my hair cut.”

“I like you with your hair cut short. I always have.”

The direct compliment embarrassed him. “It’s convenient for swimming anyway. I didn’t tell you I was swimming on Thursday.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“I expected to be afraid of the water, but I wasn’t. I swam under water the full length of the pool. I soon get tired of swimming in a pool though. I’d give anything to get into the surf again.”

“Would you really? I’m so glad.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I may have had an idea you’d hate the sea.”

“I hated the idea of it for a while, but I don’t any more. Anyway I could never hate La Jolla.”

The happiness inside her pressed tears into her eyes. La Jolla had only one meaning for her; it was the place where they had met. “Remember the day the seals came in?” She winced at her word “remember.” It was always coming up, like the word “see” when one was talking to a blind man.

He leaned forward abruptly in his chair, his hunched shoulder muscles stretching his uniform tight. Have I made a mistake? she thought in terror. It was so hard to preserve her balance between a soothing therapeutic attitude and the irrational love she felt for him.

All he said was: “We’ll have to go back there together – soon. It seems incredible that it’s only fifteen miles from here.”

“I know you’ll be able to go soon. You’re getting so much better.”

“You honestly think so?”

“You know you are.”

“Some days I feel perfectly well,” he said slowly. “I can hardly wait to get back to work. Then my mind comes to a blank space, and I feel as if I’m back where I started. Have you ever imagined a total vacuum? A place where there’s no air, no light, no sound? Not even darkness, not even silence. I guess it’s death my mind comes up against. I guess I’m partly dead.”

She put her hand over his taut fingers, which were gripping the arm of his chair. “You’re very much alive, Bret. You’re making a perfect comeback.” But his gloomy tension alarmed her and set her thinking. What if she wasn’t good for him? What if he’d be better off without her? No, that couldn’t be true. The doctor had told her more than once that she was just what he needed, that she gave him something to live for.

“It’s taking a long time,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get out of this place. Sometimes, I don’t really want to. I feel a little bit like Lazarus. He couldn’t have been very happy when he came back and tried to take up his life where he left off.”

She told him sharply: “You mustn’t talk like that. Your life isn’t half over, darling. You’ve only been ill for less than a year.”

“It feels as long as prehistoric time.” He had enough humor to smile at his own hyperbole.

“Forget the past,” she said impulsively.

“I have to remember it first.” He smiled again, not a good smile, but it was something.

“You are remembering it. But you can think of the future too.”

“I’ll tell you what I do think about a good deal of the time.”

“What?”

“I think of us together. It’s thinking of that that keeps me going. It must be hard for you to be a hospital widow.”

“A hospital widow?”

“Yes. It must be hard for a woman to have a husband in a mental ward. I know a lot of women would clear out and get a divorce–”

“But, darling.” It would have been so much easier to pass it over or to humor his delusion, but she stuck to the difficult truth. “I’m not your wife, Bret.”

He looked at her blankly. “You said you didn’t use your married name–”

“My married name is Pangborn. I told you I divorced my husband.”

She watched the manhood draining out of his face and could think of no way to rescue it. “I thought we were married,” he said in a high, weak voice. “I thought you were my wife.”

“You have no wife.” She didn’t trust herself to say anything more.

He was searching desperately for some excuse, for anything to mitigate his shame. “Are we engaged then? Is that what it was? Are we going to be married?”

“If you will have me.” There was no atom of irony in any crevice of her mind.

He got out of his chair and stood awkwardly and miserably in front of her. His blunder had shaken him badly. “I guess it’s time for you to go. Will you kiss me good-bye?”

“I’d die if I couldn’t.”

His mouth was soft and uncertain, and he held her very gently. He left her abruptly then, as if he could not bear to stay with her any longer after his humiliation. She was proud of the way he went back to his room alone, like any normal man retiring to his hotel room, but his mistake had shocked and worried her. She had had him in her grasp for a moment, and then he had slipped away again, to a place where she did not dare to follow.

chapter 2

Commander Wright raised his arm and pointed across the valley. “See that chap with the golf club?”

Paula heard the words without grasping their meaning. It seemed to her that the afternoon was repeating itself. Her meeting with Bret had only been a rehearsal, and the set was being arranged for a final retake. The tiny man in suntans was pursuing his invisible ball back and forth along the hillside. Soon Bret would come out on the veranda, and he and she would read their lines again. But this time there’d be no mistakes, no hideous sting in the tail of their conversation. She’d have a chance to tell him the good news about Klifter, and they’d part on a note of hopefulness for once.

Then she felt the chilly touch of the wind that always sprang up from the bay in the late afternoons. It brought her back to reality with a pang. Bret had come and gone, and the mistake he had made could not be changed by dreaming.

Wright cocked his finger impatiently and pointed again. The heavy black hair on the back of his hand glistened like iron in the sun. “You see him, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. I’m afraid Bret’s notion that we were married got me down.”

The doctor grunted and shifted his body in the creaking deck chair. “That’s precisely what I’m trying to explain. That chap with the golf club has a simple problem compared with Taylor’s. He lost an arm, and that’s no fun, but he can get along without it. He’s only got a physical adjustment to make, and he’s doing that now. That’s what Taylor would like to do.”

“I don’t quite see the analogy.”

“Taylor would rather suppress certain memories than live with them. He’d rather go armless than grow a new arm. But so long as he suppresses those memories of the past he can’t make a healthy adjustment to the present. Past and present are so intertwined that you can’t abandon one without losing your grip on the other. Loss of the present is a fair description of insanity.”

“But he’s not insane!” The words flew out in protest, almost of their own accord.

He turned to smile at her, baring his strong white teeth. “You shouldn’t get excited about words, Miss West. They’re all relative, especially the ones we use in psychiatry. I think he’s listed in the files as ‘traumatic neurosis with hysteric symptoms.’ Does that suit you better?”

“I have no deep respect for words. They’re my business after all. But ‘insanity’ sounds so hopeless.”

“It isn’t necessarily hopeless. But I didn’t mean to imply that Taylor is insane. Insanity is a legal concept, and from the legal point of view he’s compos mentis. He goes through intelligence tests in a breeze. His orientation is still uncertain, but he could probably leave here tomorrow and get along for the rest of his life as well as most.”

“Could he really?”

“If he didn’t have to face any serious crisis.”

“But there seem to be such dreadful gaps in his memory. In some ways he’s worse than he was four months ago. He didn’t think we were married then.”

“I wasn’t surprised when that cropped up. He’s taken a little step back in order to take a big step forward. Four months ago he refused to admit the possibility that he had been married.”

“Doesn’t he remember his wife at all?”

“No, but he will. I see a great deal more of him than you do, and I’m honestly not worried by these temporary setbacks. He’s on the point of total recovery, and unconsciously he knows it. His mind is fighting that prospect with every weapon at its disposal, and fighting a losing battle.”

“You think he doesn’t want to get well? He said something like that today.”

“Why do you think he became ill in the first place?”

“Isn’t it fairly obvious? He had two terrible shocks in rapid succession. The bombing and then his wife’s death–”

“Nothing about the human mind is obvious.” There was a trace of professional pomposity in his tone, which shortly became more apparent. “As a matter of fact the healthy mind is quite as mysterious as the unhealthy mind. I’ve often wondered, for instance, why a woman like you–”

His hand, like a fat and hairy spider, was gently approaching hers along the arm of the chair. She withdrew her own hand into her lap. “Since Lieutenant Taylor and I are going to be married–”

The hairy spider stopped in its tracks.

“–I have to ask you whether his brain could have been damaged by the explosion. Physically damaged?”

“Not a chance. It’s a purely psychological problem, Miss West. It’s hardly oversimplifying it to say that he lost his memory because he wanted to.”

“But you’ve said yourself that the shocks had a great deal to do with it.”

“They precipitated his condition, but they’re not the basic explanation. Taylor’s mind was vulnerable, you see. Other men have endured similar shocks without resorting to mental blackout.”

“Resorting?” She picked out the word and threw it back like an insult. She was beginning to hate him again; and she had an impulse to brush the inert and hairy hand from the arm of her chair.

“You’re letting words bother you again. I used that word advisedly and without prejudice. He had several years of arduous sea duty, much of it under combat conditions. He took it standing up, like thousands of others. Then he was bombed into the water at Kerama. No doubt that weakened his resistance, both mentally and physically. But he came out of it without any overt mental condition. It was the second shock, coming on top of years of strain, that broke the camel’s back.”

“You mean her death?”

“Evidently. The murder coincided with his final breakdown. That camel’s back isn’t a good metaphor. Really his whole image of the world and of himself was strained by a series of hard blows. He finally withdrew from a situation that was too much for him. I can’t help feeling that he wanted to escape from it even before she was killed. There’s his complete refusal to remember her at all.” He looked sideways at her from under his thick brows. “He wasn’t happy with her, was he?”

“He hardly knew her. He married her on a three-day furlough and went to sea immediately afterward. He married her in the fall of 1944 and never saw her alive again.”

“How on earth did he come to do that?”

She paused to take charge of her feelings. This memory was as painful to her as it must have been to Bret. “He married her when he was drunk. He picked her up in a bar in San Francisco and married her the next day.”

“Good Lord, what kind of a girl was she?”

“That kind,” she said.

“You knew Taylor at that time, did you?”

“Oh, yes, I knew him.” She lit a cigarette in a series of quick, nervous movements and said: “I suppose I’d better tell you about it if you think it might have any bearing. Perhaps I should have told you long ago.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It’s not an anecdote I tell around for laughs,” she said harshly. “When his ship came in to San Francisco I thought he was going to marry me. So did he, I think. I flew up from Hollywood to meet him. He’d been at sea for nearly a year that time, and in spite of his letters it was almost as if he’d risen from the dead. Does that sound romantic? I am a romantic, I suppose, or I was. I was crazy with happiness when he came back. But it turned out that he wasn’t. He quarreled with me on the first night and left me flat. The next I heard of him he was married to this girl Lorraine. I thought I was going to be the object of a whirlwind courtship, but it turned out to be somebody else.”

“It seems strange that you should quarrel so suddenly and finally. Had you known him long?”

“Less than a year, but it seemed longer. I’d met him in La Jolla the winter before, the winter of ’43, when he was on leave. We spent nineteen days together before his ship went out, and then there were his letters. He was my personal stake in the war, and I had the feeling that I was his stake in the future. I counted too heavily on that, I guess.”

“What was your quarrel about?”

“It was his quarrel, not mine. He resented my having more money than he had, but it wasn’t money that made the trouble. He was looking for an occasion for a fight, and that happened to be it. He called me a few names and walked out. It’s occurred to me since that his actions, even then, were a little – a little abnormal. I suppose that’s nothing but hindsight.”

“Is that why you’ve forgiven him?”

“Did I say I’d forgiven him?” She threw away her cigarette with a gesture that was unnecessarily fierce. It curved over the veranda railing in a steep parabola and lay smoldering in the grass.

“You evidently have, Miss West. Is it because you feel he was not, shall we say, quite master of himself when he left you?”

She noticed the change in the doctor’s tone from the personal to the professional, and it pleased her. His hands had forgotten her and were busy filling his pipe. She lit a new cigarette before she answered, and blew out a cloud of smoke as if to veil the clarity of her thoughts.

“Oh, he was master of himself, all right. He carried on his naval duties for another six months. He even won a commendation off Iwo. My head was bloody but his head was unbowed.”

“But you yourself suggested that his conduct was abnormal.”

“Maybe it wasn’t for him,” she said quickly. “I knew from the first that he was terribly shy. He was shy of love, and I may have tried to rush him.”

“You must love him very much.”

“Because I tried to throw myself at his head?”

“Because you’re being so honest,” he answered soberly, “telling me of your humiliation because you think it might help him.”

“I do seem to be a bear for punishment, don’t I? Do you suppose I’m a masochist?”

“I doubt it.” His answering smile withdrew his eyes far under the thicket of his eyebrows. “About your theory that he was afraid of love – how does it fit in with this whirlwind courtship of his and his marriage to this girl?”

“I don’t pretend to have a theory, doctor. But don’t forget he went on a binge when he left me. It may be that alcohol put his inhibitions to sleep. His natural sexual impulses broke through and fastened on the first object that was handy. He didn’t come right out with it, but that’s what I read between the lines of his letter.”

“You corresponded with him afterwards?”

“He wrote me one letter. It came about a month after he left San Francisco again.”

“I’d like to see that letter.”

“I can tell you what it said. He was too proud to admit that he’d acted like a fool, but that was the general idea. He was sticking with the marriage and doing his best to convince himself that he liked the setup, but he didn’t like it at all. There was a false, brittle cheerfulness in the letter that really got me down. He was so obviously unhappy and remorseful and apologetically defiant, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do – one of those letters it’s hard to answer.”

“I didn’t try to answer it. He asked me not to, so I didn’t. It was pretty hard for a while. I’d got into the habit of writing him everything I did and thought. Then suddenly he belonged to another woman, and I wasn’t even hearing from him any more. I finally broke down and went to see her.”

“All the way to San Francisco?”

“She’d bought a house in Los Angeles, and I found her in the phone book. It gave me a queer feeling to see that name in print: ‘Mrs. Bret Taylor.’ ” She paused and lit another cigarette from the butt of the one she had been smoking. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its emotional depth:

“It wasn’t curiosity about her so much, but I had to know what was happening to him, and she was the only one who could tell me. He’d been gone for nearly four months, and I hadn’t heard from him for three, not since the letter I told you about. I’d taken to lying awake nights. And I suppose one of the things I wondered about was the kind of girl that he’d preferred to me.”

“I’ve been wondering about that myself.” He accompanied the indirect compliment with a slow and calculated look that slid from her bosom down her body to her naked legs.

She was too preoccupied to notice. “I had a mean sort of triumph when I saw the girl for the first time. She was pretty enough – I’ve got to acknowledge that – but she used too much make-up, she didn’t know how to dress, she didn’t know how to wear her hair. Those are trivial things, but they can mean a good deal to a jilted woman. She wasn’t even a good housekeeper. There were used glasses and full ashtrays on the tables and chairs. I shouldn’t be catty like this, should I? Nil nisi bonum.”

“A touch of the feline is natural enough under the circumstances.”

“Anyway I suffered for my little moment of false triumph. She showed me the bundle of letters Bret has sent her, and even insisted that I read one of them. Bret had told her about me, you see, and she was perfectly willing to see me suffer. She was quite sweet to me, but in a deadly way. I didn’t want to read the letter, but I’m afraid I did. I felt compelled to.

“It was the sort of thing you write to a child, still and reassuring. He was at sea again; he couldn’t tell her where, but it was exciting; he loved her and looked forward to seeing her. It was painful to read but it gave me a certain consolation. He had nothing really to say to her, and she didn’t have brains or feeling enough to know the difference.”

“I gather she was pretty young.” There was in his voice an elegiac undertone that Paula resented in spite of herself.

“Nineteen or twenty, I’d say. She had nearly ten years on me, and that didn’t help. But she was no child bride. She went out of her way to let me know she’d been around. Frankly I had the feeling that Bret had been seduced.”

“It’s fairly evident that someone had to,” Wright said quietly.

“I know. I tried to, our last night together, but it didn’t take. He was a virgin, and I’d been married before. Yet I’m sure he loved me.”

“That may have been precisely the trouble. He’s a bit of an idealist, isn’t he?”

“You know him.”

“He’s an idealist all right. And that’s all very well, but when idealists break down, and they nearly always do, they tend to go to the opposite extreme. This girl, for instance. I presume his interest in her was primarily sexual. How did she feel about him?”

“I don’t believe she had any strong feeling one way or the other, but then I’m not an unbiased witness. She seemed to be proud of being married to a full lieutenant in the Navy, and having a little house of her own, though she wasn’t doing much to keep it up. She was a little tight when I got there, quite early in the afternoon. She offered me a bottle of beer, and I tried to get her to talk, but it was heavy going. I’m no giant intellect, but she was a featherbrain. Our only common ground was the movies.”

“And Lieutenant Taylor?”

“No, not even Bret. Our conceptions of him were so different I found I couldn’t talk with her about him. Not without getting angry, at least, and I certainly wasn’t going to do that. To her he was an acquisition, a meal ticket garnished with gold braid. She mentioned twice that he had bought her the house and was sending her an allotment of two hundred dollars a month. In spite of those things I invited her to return my visit, but she never did. I guess I didn’t do a very good job of covering my feelings, and she resented me quite as much as I resented her. I called on her about two months before she was murdered, and I didn’t see her alive after that.”

Wright hammered his pipe on his heel with flagellant intensity. “You didn’t see her alive?” he said with his face averted.

“I saw her dead. I was with Bret when he found her body.”

He glanced up into her face and was embarrassed by the pain he saw there. “Oh, yes. Of course.”

“I told you about it when you took charge of Bret’s case. I hope I don’t have to go through it again.”

“There’s no need to,” he answered quickly. “We have a complete record.”

“As a matter of fact I do have to go through it again,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment with Dr. Klifter tonight.”

“Klifter?”

“The psychoanalyst. I assumed that Captain Kelvie had told you about him. He’s agreed to interview Bret tomorrow. With your permission,” she added coldly.

“Of course the captain talked to me about it. The name slipped my mind for a moment.”

“A Freudian error, Commander?”

“Not at all. I’ve read Klifter’s monographs, and I think they’re fine. But it’s hard to get used to the idea that he’s in California. He’s always been a sort of European myth to me.”

“He’s a very charming and unpretentious man,” Paula said. “He acted as technical adviser on a script I rewrote – that’s how I happen to know him. I’ll be very glad if he consents to take the case. I take it you have no objections to his interviewing Bret?”

“None at all. Since you have the captain’s permission, mine’s only a formality anyway. Actually I’ll be glad of the chance to discuss the case with Klifter. I do want to warn you though not to expect too much.”

“I expect very little.”

“I don’t mean that Taylor won’t recover, and I don’t mean that psychoanalysis mightn’t be useful. Our pentothal interview is a variation of psychoanalytic technique, as a matter of fact.”

“I know that.” She rose to go, holding her purse before her body like a shield. She had worn, for Bret’s eyes, a woolen dress that clung to the outlines of her shoulders and breasts. “I’ll miss my train.”

“Let me take you down in the station wagon.”

“Thank you, I have a cab waiting.”

“All I meant,” he repeated as she offered him her hand, “was that you mustn’t look for a sudden miracle. These things take time. Nothing can take the place of time.”

She heard his final sentence two ways. The meaning that echoed in her mind all the way to the station was the one he had not intended. Time was running away like a river, and she and Bret were lodged on opposite banks. Nothing could take the place of the time that had already run out or the time that was yet to run.

chapter 3

Although she had passed between them uncounted times, Paula was always struck by the contrast between the Santa Fe station and the San Diego gas company building. The latter was an ugly huge cube of a building, surrounded by towering steel chimneys like candles on a birthday cake. Across the streetcar tracks was the archaic and sentimental incongruity of the station tower. It seemed to her that the two buildings were symbols of historic forces. On the one hand was the giant mass of the power and utility companies that actually dominated the life of the state; on the other, the Spanish past that California plutocracy used to stucco its façade.

The shining metal streamliner waiting beside the station added the final touch to her allegory. It was the impossible future superimposed upon the ugly present in the presence of the regretted past. There was no continuity between the tenses, she thought. You passed from one to the other as a ghost passed through a wall, at the risk of your own reality. The spotless interior of this streamlined future was crowded with unreal passengers waiting to be transported, appropriately enough, to Los Angeles.

She moved like a sleepwalker along the platform and found the chair she had reserved in the parlor car. Even the train’s starting, one of her oldest excitements, and the blue glimpses of the sea as they passed outside the city, failed to lift her out of her mood of vague resignation. After her five years in California there was still something false and garish about summer weather in February. She’d have preferred an unsmiling sky and a gray sea to that steady yellow sun and those glittering waves. She wondered if there was anything in the idea she’d heard somewhere that too much fair weather could make people hard-hearted and self-indulgent.

On an afternoon like this, and with a parlor car to observe it from, it was hard to believe in sin and madness and death. That cotton-batting surf didn’t look much like cruel, crawling foam. But of course it was, and people suffered in California just as they did in other places – suffered a little more, perhaps, because they didn’t get much sympathy from the weather.

She forced blankness on her mind, smiled as an act of faith, and watched the belt of orange trees that had appeared between the railroad and the sea. A sailor passing in the aisle, willing and eager to accept her blind smile as a personal tribute, paused beside her chair.

“Good afternoon,” he said with the assurance of extreme youth and a double row of ribbons. “A lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

As if he were appraising an object on which he intended to enter a bid, he stood and frankly examined her polished-copper hair, her smooth skin, the promise of the figure revealed by her blue wool dress. She couldn’t bring herself to feel angry. She was on the brink of thirty, and she’d never been quite beautiful enough to be smug about her looks. On the other hand she wasn’t going to listen to wolfish chatter all the way to Los Angeles.

“Blow, swabbie,” she whispered hoarsely. “My husband’s an officer.”

“Certainly, certainly.” He tipped his white hat forward onto the bridge of his nose, and said before he strolled away: “No hard feelings.”

She turned back to the orange groves rushing by like a dark green river on which thousands of tiny oranges floated dizzily away. She was worried about the lie she had told, not because it was a lie, but because she had claimed Bret Taylor as her husband. He wasn’t, and she was afraid he never would be. He’d turned her down in San Francisco in no uncertain terms, and if she’d had any pride she’d have given up when he married the other girl. Yet here she was, nearly two years later, still camping on his trail and beginning to tell strangers on trains that she was his wife. She’d have to watch herself or she’d be going around making all sorts of extravagant claims, like the old woman in Monterey who said she was Mary the Mother of God.

Her real embarrassment came from a deeper source. In the two and a half years since she had met Bret Taylor there had been stirrings in the heart of her body as heavy and ultimate as seismic movements. She had to admit that she was beginning to feel as female as hell, as female and irrational as any D. H. Lawrence Fraülein. She wanted a man and she wanted a child. Yet she felt that it was faintly ridiculous to be an old-maid Rachel weeping over her unborn children. After all, she had been married and knew the answers, most of which were discouraging. But perhaps a marriage like that one didn’t count. She hadn’t really begun to feel like a woman until years after Pangborn floated out of her life, paddling blithely with a swizzle stick down a golden river of highballs. Jack Pangborn, the King of the Golden River, had never been for her. No, that marriage didn’t count.

You certainly are a tremendous shrewd picker, she told herself derisively. Your first choice, way back in high school, was a youthful Adonis with an I.Q. of 85 and a dazzling future as a clerk in a chain grocery store. Then there were all those crushes on older men, the men you were going to reform. Finally you followed the dictates of common sense and got yourself romantically involved with an amiable dipsomaniac who half the time couldn’t remember your name, and called you Mabel, Gertie, or Flo, as the spirit moved him. When the spirit moved Pangborn beyond your reach and you couldn’t go on supporting him for the rest of your life, much as you would have liked to, you nursed a broken heart for years and years. Or was that only a mother complex that got fractured? Whatever it was, you laid off men for a good long time, on account of you had a great sorrow in your life. And meanwhile your salary went up from a hundred to seven fifty a week, because there’s nothing like a fractured mother complex, or heart, to fit a girl for making money.

One day you, the shrewd picker, shut both your eyes tight, mumbled a brief invocation to Aphrodite and reached into the grab-bag again. What came out was Lieutenant Taylor. He looked pretty good for while, so good that you began to doubt the faultless ineptitude of your own judgment. But all came right in the end when he stood you up in San Francisco and broke your heart, or whatever it was, for good and all. But that wasn’t enough. You needed something more to maintain you in the condition of unhappiness to which you had become accustomed. So he married another girl, just to make it permanent. Then he went away into the Pacific and had his ship bombed out from under him and came back and lost his mind. Even that wasn’t enough. But the additional things were a little too terrible to think about just now when she was still depressed by the encounter in the hospital. There would be time enough to think about those additional things when she went to see Dr. Klifter.

How on earth did a girl get that way? She’d made a couple of bum choices, but she was no spiritual masochist, in love with a system of diminishing returns kissing the fists that gave her the old one-two. It was true she’d been tossed out on her ear and had come back asking for more, but that was because he needed her. He needed someone at least, and she had nominated herself. But it wasn’t true that she loved him because he needed her. When she’d fallen in love with him for the first and last time, he hadn’t needed her at all. She had never met a man more self-contained and independent, and she’d gone ahead and fallen for him just the same. That was back in the fall of ’43, when the tide of war was beginning to turn and the only thing that people worried about was winning it. It was really rather pathetic how simple the big things like love and war seemed until you started to go into detail.

She had driven down to La Jolla for the week end – San Diego County seemed to have become the Ithaca of their affair – and had met him at a party there. It wasn’t much of a party. Bill and Bella Levy were too careless and informal, and too much in love with each other, to run a really good one. They were content to corral a heterogeneous mob of human beings and turn them loose in the big studio with a radio-phonograph and a case of liquor. Sam Slovell was there that night, and drunk enough to play boogie-woogie on the electric organ.

At one moment she was moving about the room by herself, with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, looking at Bill’s abstractionist paintings and Bella’s primitives. Male and female created they them, she thought, not much caring which was which. The next moment a young man in Navy blues was moving beside her. He was the only serviceman present, and she’d noticed him earlier in the evening. Without feeling called upon to do anything about it, she’d registered the observation that he looked lonely and out of place. Now he was asking her to dance, and she raised her arms to let him take hold of her. He danced quite well, though he had the look of a man who wouldn’t, and she felt pleased with herself because after several hours of moderate drinking she could still dance with a glass in her hand and not spill a drop of her drink.

“You’ve got a steady hand,” he said when the music paused.

She drained her glass and set it down on a table. “Confidentially, I’m controlled by invisible wires.”

He laughed dutifully and somewhat unnecessarily. “Let me get you another drink.”

“No, thank you. Like half the souses in the world I’m merely a social drinker. But go and get one for yourself.”

“I don’t drink.”

She thought she detected in his tone a trace of provincial self-righteousness which made her want to embarrass him. “But how unusual! I thought all naval personnel simply poured it down.”

Instead of blushing he smiled, and she saw with some surprise that he wasn’t a dull man at all. “Drinking brings out my paranoiac streak, so I gave it up. My name’s Taylor, by the way.”

“West is mine.” She removed a dried old palette from a bench, and they sat down together. “I take it that when you’re inducted into the Navy they take away your first name and give you a number instead?”

“My first name’s Bret.”

“Mine’s Paula.”

“I know.”

“Really? I thought movie writers were practically anonymous.” Damn it, she said immediately to herself, I had to get that in, didn’t I? I never can resist a chance to brag.

“I didn’t know you were a writer. I asked Bill what your name was an hour ago – as soon as I saw you.”

“Why?” From any other woman it would have been a request for flattery, but from her it wasn’t. She simply wanted to know.

He took her at her word. “You look honest. I won’t deny you’ve got the trimmings.…”

“Did you say your name was Diogenes? Lieutenant (j.g.) Diogenes?” She was flattered after all, but a little irritated too.

“You asked me,” he said uncomfortably. “I thought I’d like to talk to an honest woman for a change. I haven’t really talked to a woman for over a year.”

He was sitting in an awkward and embarrassed attitude with his hands on his knees. His hands were brown and thin, ridged by taut tendons and veins that branched into small blue tributaries, like a contour map of a country she didn’t know.

“Does it feel so strange?”

“The whole country seems strange. It strikes you when you come back to civilian society after some sea duty. People seem to be thinking exclusively about themselves.”

She thought about the number of bonds she had bought and the number of pints of blood she had given, and wished her record had been better. “Is it different at sea?” she said defensively.

“Maybe not so very different. We have our in-groups and our out-groups. There’s a good bit of anti-Semitism, especially among the officers, and of course the Negroes on board get a separate deal. But there’s something else besides, an over-all feeling for the ship that comes before everything else. Am I boring the living daylights out of you?”

“No. But I’ll bet you’re a sociologist in real life.”

“Not me. I studied history and law.”

“You’ve been to Washington then.”

“I was an underling in the State Department for a while. Does it stick out like a sore thumb?”

“Everybody that goes to Washington comes back so serious-minded.”

He answered a little peevishly: “You overestimate me. I always have been serious-minded. I suppose I’ve gotten worse since we came into the war.”

“Were you out long, this last time?”

“Long enough. Just over a year. Nothing to gripe about really. But it makes you feel kind of wooden.”

She had noticed that there was something wooden about his face. It was a lean brown mask, as if the pressures of war had forced it into a rigid mold and the Pacific sun had dried and baked it. Each bone and muscle was distinctly anatomized under the tight skin, but the sense of life was to be found only in his eyes.

They were hard and deep, dyed dark blue by the uniform he was wearing.

His eyes were watching the couples still caught and gyrating in the currents of the music. “It’s coming back to the States that really gets you down. When you’ve been out for a while you’d willingly barter your soul for a couple of weeks Stateside. You catch yourself secretly wishing that the engines will break down and you’ll have to come back for repairs. As a matter of fact that’s what happened.”

“You have two weeks?”

“Three weeks. Nineteen days left. But now that I’m here I don’t like it.”

That had the earmarks of a direct insult, and she could not keep the sharpness out of her voice. “What don’t you like?”

“Civilians, I guess. It wasn’t so long ago that I was one myself. But now they seem so damn frivolous. There’s method in their frivolity of course. They don’t forget to look out for number one.”

“I take it I strike you as frivolous?”

“Sure you’re frivolous. You said you wrote screenplays, didn’t you?”

“I try to write as good ones as I can.”

“Did you ever write one that wasn’t about a couple of nitwits fighting for a permanent possession of a pair of false breasts? Did you ever see one that wasn’t?”

“You haven’t seen many movies, have you?” She was trying hard to be superior, but she couldn’t suppress the anger in her voice. “You probably never heard of Grand Illusion, for example?”

“Never did,” he admitted cheerfully. “But I’ve seen enough movies – too many. We have one every night on the ship. Even in the Pacific you can’t get away from Hollywood. It covers the globe like a thin coat of paint.”

Her reason was beginning to recover and to reflect on the novelty of her position. Like nearly everyone below the rank of producer, she had become hypercritical of Hollywood. Griping on the job was the occupational disease in the writers’ building (in the producers’ building it was stomach ulcers). But it was a little late to tell him that he had taken the words out of her mouth.

“I suppose you’ve got to have your daily crack at Hollywood,” she said more coolly. “All intellectuals do, don’t they, like the Boy Scouts and their daily deed?”

“You don’t have to be an intellectual to get fed up with general lousiness.”

“Of which lousiness I seem to be an integral part?”

“Why reduce everything to the personal?”

“But it’s all I can see,” she chirped ironically. “General ideas are terribly bewildering to a frivolous addlepate like me.”

“That griped you, didn’t it?” He stood up unexpectedly and reached for her hand. “Let’s get out of here. It takes about an hour for boogie-woogie to explore its limitations.”

“You’re as opinionative as hell,” she said. But she rose obediently and followed him out of the room.

The concrete steps that led down from the studio to the shore were steep, and there were a hundred and fifty of them. Paula was silent as they descended, concentrating on her three-inch heels. When they were part way down she stumbled and took hold of his arm. She stumbled again before they reached the bottom, and his muscles tightened in her hand and became as hard as wood. It gave her a queer feeling, and a rather frightening one, which her fancy translated into an image of the body beneath the blue uniform, a body carved by exertion, pared lean by the wind, polished by the sun, with blankness like a fig leaf guarding her mind from the bronze loins.

She was glad when the sea spread out before them, and she let her mind spread with it under the pure stars. They walked along the dark path toward her hotel. The tide was high and bringing in a heavy surf that roared lonesomely in the deep coves and struck upon the rocks with white polar paws of foam. It was wild and terrifying to her, like the mating of horses. She shivered a little, though her coat was warm, as if the sea might be able to reach her where she stood.

She couldn’t bear to be passively frightened. Deep in her heart she was an animist who believed that the sea was conscious of her and threatening her personally. She stepped over the low wall beside the path, ventured out on a slippery rock just above the reach of the spray, and stood there laughing at the ineffectual waves.

He came up behind her shouting: “You must be crazy! In those heels!”

She turned and laughed at him too. A gust of spray came up and drenched her legs, but she went on laughing.

He put both arms around her and dragged her away from the edge.

“Don’t count too much on those invisible wires. You’re not drunk, are you?”

“I’m just feeling good. I showed him I wasn’t afraid.”

“Him?”

“ ‘He,’ then, if you must be technical. I showed he!” She laughed in his face.

His embrace was rough and awkward, as if he was performing an unwilling duty, but after years in Hollywood she didn’t care for men who were smoothly expert in such matters. She held her face turned up to his to let him kiss her if he wished. When he disregarded the opportunity she felt like a hussy, and her exultation changed to anger.

“You’d better get home and take a hot bath,” he said.

“I suppose I’d better.”

She hated him warmly all the way back to the hotel. But when, at the last possible minute before they said good night, he asked to see her again next day, she felt unreasonably grateful.

It was a warm day, cloudless and bright, and they went down to the cove in their bathing suits. In any other company Paula would have been the first into the water, but today she didn’t need to go in at all. She had a man to take up the challenge for her, a man who put her competitive instinct to sleep. She lay down in the hot sand like any soft little woman, and watched him catch the waves and ride them in. He swam well, and that pleased her. Brains in a man were all very well, indispensable in fact, but you liked a few other things to be added. Broad shoulders, for example, and the ability to swim under water.

The brown man in the waves looked much younger today, younger and freer in the water, as if that other element were his own. He played like a young animal until he was tired and a wave brought him up and stranded him on the beach. He staggered up the slope toward her, breathing hard.

“I bet it’s cold.”

“Not so cold if you keep moving.” He stood on one foot and kicked sideways with the other, shaking the water out of his ears.

“Don’t you ever get tired of the sea – after being on it for so long?”

“It depends what sea you’re talking about.” He sat down in the sand and stretched out beside her. “There are two kinds of sea, and they’re as different as day and night. The sea that meets the land, and the sea that’s all by itself. Where they come together they sort of kindle each other and make something better than either land or sea. I never get tired of seacoast.” He paused and took a long breath. “But when you’re in the middle of the ocean and haven’t seen anything else for weeks, it’s as dull as anything you can think of – a prairie farm, or a boys’ prep school in the middle of a desert.”

“ ‘ ’Twas midnight on the ocean,’ ” she quoted, “ ‘Not a streetcar was in sight.’ ”

“Exactly. I get a kick out of looking at the ocean and not being on it. Not that I see too much of it when I’m at sea.”

“I thought naval officers stood on the bridge in all weathers, scanning the darkened horizon for enemy craft.”

“The O.D.’s stand on the bridge all right, but we’ve never even seen an enemy craft. Our planes do the scanning for us.”

“I didn’t know you were on a carrier.”

“A jeep carrier. I’m an Air Intelligence Officer. My job is to keep track of the planes.”

“Is it hard?”

“It’s fairly easy most of the time. But in combat it’s not hard, it’s impossible. The instruments aren’t perfect yet, and training never is, so every now and then communications break down. The whole system gets locomotor ataxia just when we need it most. I won’t try to describe it.”

“You sort of have. It must be nice to get home for a change–” Then she remembered what he had told her about his disappointment, and quickly added: “Did you say you had three weeks?”

“Eighteen days now.”

“Are you going to stay here?”

“I guess so. I can’t think of a better place.”

“No folks to go home to?”

“No. Both my parents have been dead for a long time. Most of my friends are in Washington, but I don’t feel much like going to Washington just now.”

She had already, quite shamelessly, begun to plan. There was no important reason why she shouldn’t take her holiday now. Even if she went ahead and finished the revision she was working on, her producer was tied up with other things and wouldn’t be ready to go into production for months. She had been half intending to spend her holiday in La Jolla anyway. Here, more than anywhere she knew, land and sea kindled each other, as he said, and made a new element under the sun.

He had raised himself on his elbows to look down into her face. “Do you live here?”

“No, but I’m staying here this month.”

“I suppose you live in Hollywood?”

“For the last few years I have.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you were a Hollywood type.”

“Hollywood is full of outlandish characters.”

“That’s not what I mean. You’re not outlandish at all.”

She smiled up at him. “I’m doing all right.”

“I know. I can tell by your clothes. But there are other ways of doing all right.”

“What other ways? Kitchen and Kinder?”

“Perhaps.”

“I tried them.”

“Kinder?”

“No, no Kinder. But I was married for a while. That was a considerable time ago. It didn’t work out.”

“Oh,” he said.

She pressed her advantage. “I did my stint of plain living and high thinking too. I worked for the Detroit Free Press for my bread and butter, and wrote for the little magazines for art’s sake. Then I met an agent who offered to sell me down the river to Hollywood, and I let him sell me. I was sick of living in a one-room apartment and mending stockings after midnight. Now I just throw them away. Or did before the war.”

“Stockings, or dollar bills?”

“Five-dollar bills.”

That silenced him for a while. “I guess you resent my high moral tone,” he said finally.

“I guess I do. I can’t help wondering where you got it. You didn’t study for the ministry, did you?”

“No.” But he added surprisingly: “My father did. He never finished his seminary course though. He lost his faith and turned into a philosophy professor instead of a minister. His religious emotions were transformed into a passion for morality. Morality was an obsession with him, at least after my mother died.”

“How old were you when she died?” Already she was becoming infected with a lover’s typical symptom and most impossible desire, the desire to share all of his memories, to have known him from the beginning. “Very young?”

“I think I was four. Four or five.”

“That’s dreadful. What did she die of?”

His face went blank. After a silence he answered: “I don’t know.”

“But didn’t your father tell you?”

“No,” he said curtly. “He was a strange man, terribly shy and secretive. I think he should have been a monk.”

“What did he look like?” Paula said. “I don’t think I would have liked him.”

“No. He wouldn’t have liked you either. Did you ever see a picture of Matthew Arnold? He looked like him. A long solemn face, intelligent-looking but too heavy, and sort of miserable. He wasn’t a happy man.”

“You must have been glad to get away from him.”

“It wasn’t easy. Even after he died I still felt under his thumb. I was at the University of Chicago then, and I tried kicking over the traces, but my heart wasn’t in it. That was when I found out I couldn’t drink.”

“What happened?” She made her question as perfunctory as she could, but she was breathlessly eager to know.

“I got drunk a few times, but I invariably wanted to fight. I had been storing up aggressiveness for fifteen years, and it all came out in the bars. I suppose that’s as good a place for aggressiveness as any.”

“Aggressiveness against him, you mean? Did you hate your father?”

“I never admitted it to myself, but I suppose I did. For a long time I was afraid even to think anything that he would disapprove of. He never laid a finger on me, but he put the fear of God into me. Of course I loved him, too. Does that sound complicated?”

“Yes, but no more complicated than the way things happen.” She thought of her own father, who had been the antithesis of Bret’s, an easy-living hard-drinking salesman whose visits home became less and less frequent and finally ceased altogether. She had started out by despising him, but all she felt for his memory now was affectionate tolerance. Tolerance was the most she had felt for anyone for a long time, until now.

A sudden four-o’clock chill drew off the strength of the sun and chased them back to the hotel. But after dinner they came back to the sea again, as if they both secretly recognized that it was the catalyst of their meeting. In the darkness under a palm tree by the public walk he kissed her for the first time, moving toward her with such violent suddenness that she felt waylaid. There was something pathetically arid about his kiss, as if the tropical sun had evaporated his vital juices, and he held her so briefly that she had no time to respond.

The physical inadequacy of his kiss didn’t really matter. Already a new element had precipitated from her contact with him in the presence of the sea. The sound of the surf was full of echoes, and the night was larger than it had ever been.

Because he had come from a great distance, from an unimaginable place where planes flew up from carrier decks and combat communications got locomotor ataxia, she had a vivid sense that the ocean stretched far beyond the limit of her vision, curving downward in darkness below the uncertain horizon to military islands and contested waters where the war was being fought. She was invaded by a consciousness that never withdrew again – that she was standing on the edge of a dim infinity from which anything might emerge to meet her: grief, or ecstasy, or death. And she had experienced the three of them.

chapter 4

Theodore Klifter watched her as she talked, occasionally stroking his reassuring beard. He had grown this beard involuntarily during a period when he had had no access to shaving materials – it hurt his S.S. guards in their professional feelings when their prospective victims cut their own throats – and he had retained it as a protection for the lower half of his face. The upper half of his face was shielded by thick spectacles that enlarged her image and blurred it slightly, as if there were a wall of glass between them.

The admiration he felt for Paula was not wholly uncritical, though he knew that he made special allowances for tall women who had long brown hair, like the hair his mother had allowed him to brush for her in the evenings when he was a child. Paula was not extraordinarily intelligent, as he preferred women to be, and there was a harsh and irritating contrast between the hard surface of her conversation and the strong vein of emotional femininity in her nature. But she was honest and self-aware. She knew what she wanted and had the stability to wait for it. She was capable of sustaining a grand passion without lapses into moral triviality, and without romantic solemnity. Though other people’s lovers were his life’s most hackneyed theme, he couldn’t help being interested in the man who had won such a love from such a woman.

Her quiet face showed traces of the hard day she had had, but she had plunged into her story as soon as she was seated in his living-room with a drink. He let her talk, for he understood that she had wound up her courage to this point, and was unwilling to give it time to run down.

“You already know, don’t you, that he had a severe shock last April when his ship was bombed? It was one of the suicide planes that the Japanese used so much in the last months of the war. A great many of Bret’s shipmates were killed, and he himself was rather badly burned and thrown into the water. He was picked up by a crash boat and flown to Guam. He recuperated in the naval hospital there. I didn’t know anything about this at the time, but his wife did.

“When he’d been on Guam about four weeks the hospital authorities decided that he was fit to fly home for survivor’s leave. His burns were healed, and he showed no signs of a mental condition, at least none appeared in his medical record. He landed at San Francisco after an overnight hop from Hawaii, and after some red tape and delay he caught a train for Los Angeles. He got home about nine thirty at night, but his wife wasn’t there.”

“Where was she?”

“She was downtown in a bar. The bartender knew her slightly and told the police next day that she had been there. She didn’t know when Bret was coming, you see. He couldn’t be sure what day he’d catch a plane from Guam, and even if he had, he couldn’t have written her on account of the censorship. He should have wired her from San Francisco, but I guess he wanted to surprise her by dropping in out of the blue. Or perhaps he was suspicious of her. Anyway, she wasn’t home when he arrived. He was upset and lonely, so he phoned me. I was never so glad to hear from anyone in my life. I didn’t care, that night, whether he was married to another woman or not. I picked him up at his house, and we went for a drive.”

“How did he behave?”

“Correctly. Too damn correctly.”

“That’s not exactly what I mean–”

“I know it isn’t,” she said with a faint smile. “He seemed pretty much as he’d always been except that he was more silent. His manner to me was distant, so much so that I wondered why he’d bothered to call me. He wouldn’t talk about his experiences or about the bombing. All I could get out of him was a sort of communiqué. He couldn’t conceal his worry about his wife. I drove out Sunset and out the highway toward Malibu, but it wasn’t more than an hour before he asked me to take him home again.”

“He was eager to see her, then?”

“Yes. I noticed his nervousness, and that may account for it. Of course you’d expect him to be nervous after what he’d gone through. He was thinner than he’d ever been, and he’d never had any excess flesh. He was quite jumpy by the time we got back to his house, and for some reason he asked me to come in with him. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of witnessing his meeting with his wife, but he insisted for some reason. I think he wanted to be honest with her, not to deceive her even about a little thing like a car ride. So in I went.” She took a long swallow of whisky and soda. The doctor observed that her hand was clenched white around the glass.

“The light was on in the front bedroom – it hadn’t been when I called for him – and he opened the door and walked in. I heard him say her name, Lorraine, and then a thud as he collapsed on the floor. I followed him in and saw her lying on the bed naked on top of the bedclothes. She had an enviable figure even in death, but her face was ugly because she had been strangled. I went to the phone and called the police. Then I went back to the bedroom and found that Bret was still unconscious on the floor. I tried to revive him but it didn’t do any good. He remained unconscious all night and most of the next day. When the police arrived they found a rolled prophylactic tube on the table beside Lorraine’s bed, and other evidence that a man had been with her. The man who murdered her has never been caught.”

She was breathing quickly, and the blood had withdrawn from her face, leaving fever spots of rouge on each cheekbone. She raised her glass and finished its contents. “May I have another drink, Dr. Klifter? I didn’t realize it would take so much out of me to tell you that.” She handed him her empty glass.

When he came back from the kitchen with a strong drink for her and a weaker one for himself, she was standing by the window looking out. Her tailored back was tense and straight in the attitude of listening. Even when she disregarded him she disturbed him, not entirely because she was tall and brown-haired and well made. She was one of the women who without relinquishing their female quality had entered into man’s estate. Her body was as streamlined as a projectile, potent as a weapon, but she did not use it to advance her interests or excuse her errors. Europe had had its share of women who lived their own lives and asked for no quarter, but they were the exception rather than the rule. In Los Angeles there were scores of thousands of such women living boldly by their wits, self-contained and energetic atoms in a chaotic society.

He set down the glasses and approached her from behind, looking out through the casement over her broad padded shoulder. She was watching the darkness intently. The walled grounds of the hotel were as quiet and dark as a countryside. The only sound came from a distant bungalow where a radio faintly chided the silence.

With her high heels she was an inch or two taller than he. When they were standing it was hard for him to preserve the patriarchal attitude of his profession. Since he had left his clinic and his professorship and migrated to a strange country, he had found himself dangerously willing at times to slip into a relationship of dependence on such women. He gripped his thick, dark beard with his right hand and thought earnestly of himself as a somewhat priestlike figure, superior to human weaknesses, even his own – a man with weaned affections, as the American Pilgrims said.

Then she turned to him, and he saw the terror in her face.

“What is troubling you, Miss West?”

Her voice was shallow and quick, but her whole body labored to produce it. “I thought I saw somebody outside looking in the window.”

“But who?”

“I don’t know. Nobody I knew. I only saw two eyes, or thought I saw them.”

“It must have been imaginary. The gates of the pueblo are locked at eight, and anyone who comes in must pass the desk. I have never been troubled by window peepers.”

She laughed uncertainly. “Neither have I until lately. But the last few months I’ve thought there’s been someone following me. Even in my own house I don’t feel safe.”

“It’s an unsettling experience even if it is not actual.”

“Have you had that feeling, Doctor? The sense of being followed, being watched by malignant eyes?”

She noticed the full highball glass standing on the coffee table, crossed to it, and drank greedily.

Dr. Klifter looked around the heavily furnished, anonymous room. For two years he had occupied the same bungalow in the walled grounds of this pueblo hotel, but he still considered himself a transient. He had hung no pictures, bought no furniture, planted no seeds in the flower beds. The scented stock and early daffodils bloomed around his house, but they did not seem to bloom for him. He felt that his only rights were squatter’s rights. His trunk was in the closet waiting to be packed. At worst – at very worst – he had traveler’s checks and a volume of Rilke’s poems always in his pockets, and was ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

“Whenever I leave a doorway,” he said, “I look both ways. When I turn a corner I look up and down the street. I know that there is no Gestapo in America, but I have my own Gestapo in my mind. Eventually I hope it may be disbanded. Still my neck is stiff from looking over my shoulder.”

“You seem pretty sure that my fears are imaginary.” The drink had restored some of the color to her cheeks.

“The things you see, the eyes, and the people that follow you, are almost certainly imaginary. The fears themselves are real. We are all pursued by fears from birth to death, from the fear of being born to the fear of dying. There is no one who has not seen those eyes in the night. I mentioned my own peculiarly Jewish fear as an example.”

“You’re very kind,” she said.

“On the contrary, I am very cruel.” He motioned her into a chair and sat down facing her. “But I like to think that mine is the cruelty of a surgeon who amputates in order to save a life. You have been courageous to tell me so much about this murder, and without evasion. Will you tell me one thing more?”

“I will if I can.”

“It has occurred to me – I shall be quite as frank with you as you have been with me – that Mr. Taylor’s amnesia was, and is, the evasive action of a depleted ego in the face of a guilt that it could not bear. You were with him on that night, and you should be able to clear up that possibility for me.”

“Are you asking me whether Bret killed his wife?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t. I know he didn’t, but you don’t have to take my word for it. The police surgeon established that she was killed at about ten thirty, and at that time Bret and I were halfway to Malibu. There was other evidence corroborating the medical testimony. The woman next door heard a scream from the house at that time.”

“Was anyone seen to leave?”

“The woman didn’t look. She thought the scream was a radio sound effect at the time. Nobody else heard or saw anything till Bret and I found her body.”

“The thing is still very vivid to you after nine months.”

“Could it help being? I kept the newspaper clippings on the case too. I have them here if you want them.”

She rummaged in her bag and produced a wad of clippings held together with paper clips. Unfolding the top layer, she spread it out on the coffee table in front of him. “These are the worst in a way, but the Examiner had the most complete coverage.”

The doctor glanced rapidly down the columns of print:

Dr. Klifter laid down the clipping and drew a long breath. “It is rather hideous, is it not?”

“That’s one of the things that reconciles me to Bret’s loss of memory. He doesn’t have to remember these things. He doesn’t even know that his name was in the headlines.”

“You’ve told him nothing?”

“Not I. And fortunately Commander Wright agrees with me. I couldn’t bring myself to show him these.” She made a gesture of repugnance toward the clippings on the table. “You keep them if you wish. I don’t know why I’ve held on to them so long.”

“Thank you. I may have a use for them.”

“What use?”

He answered her indirectly: “I’m not sure that the Commander is right–”

“In keeping back these facts? I realize Bret will have to know eventually. But not now. His hold on reality is still so precarious. I don’t know what the shock would do to him.”

“Nor do I. I hope to understand him better when I have talked to him tomorrow. It may be that the truth of these things, the ugly and naked truth, is exactly what his mind requires. You see, the fact that he is innocent of his wife’s death does not exclude the possibility of subjective guilt. It merely removes the most obvious objective reason for his guilt.”

“You’ll have to take it slower. My brain isn’t functioning tonight.”

“I shall illustrate my meaning. Suppose that he desired his wife’s death. Though he was innocent in all but wish, her death, satisfying as it did his unconscious or partially unconscious desires, might very well leave him with an overpowering sense of guilt. Do you understand me now?”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice. “I felt guilty of her death, for that reason.”

Her eyes, black with fear, were fixedly watching the dark window again.