The Three Roads

chapter 5

He did his best thinking in the night watches, when darkness and silence swathed his room. Long after midnight he lay awake charging the wilderness of memory that stretched backward from the advancing edge of the present. The motives that explained his life were as difficult to trace as a river that ran underground for more than half its length. But night after night he renewed his groping search. In this dim subterranean place, the hidden life of violence and hatred, tenderness and desire, he might find the self that he had lost, and the key to the door of the room where he lay.

The landmarks of his external life – his boxing championship in college, his graduation summa cum laude, his Washington appointment, the publication of his book on the Age of Reason – these things lost all their significance when he looked at them from below, from the vantage point of darkness. The bald ceremony at which he was sworn in as an officer in the Naval Reserve had moved him deeply at the time, but now it was meaningless except as one remote link in the chain of events that had brought him to this hospital bed. His mental crisis, like a crisis in the economy of a nation, had changed the value of his currency.

But there were scenes in his hidden life that seemed to be lit by a pulsating lightning, a throbbing anguish as secret and intimate as his blood. On his tenth birthday he shot a sparrow with the new air rifle that was his father’s birthday present to him. The sparrow flopped crazily around the garden for a long time and refused to die. He had not been able to shoot it again or to touch it with his hands. He stood paralyzed by guilt and repulsion and pity, and watched it beat away its life among the flowers.

Standing by his father’s coffin ten years later, he had not been able to grieve. The flower-choked funeral parlor in the little Indiana town bored and irritated him. He was anxious to get back to Chicago and his work. And in the heavy atmosphere of the cut roses and carnations he remembered his tenth birthday. His father had found him with the dying sparrow, and they saw it die together, change in a spasm from a frantic bird to a handful of dusty feathers. They had buried the dead sparrow beside the rosebush, and his father had taken away his air rifle, and he had never seen it again.

He looked down into the rouged and sunken face of Professor Emeritus George Taylor who had sired and fed him, taken away his air rifle, and died unloved in his sleep in his sixty-sixth year. But two days after the funeral he awoke in his Pullman berth on his way back to Chicago and wept for the poor old man and the dead bird. Another ten years had passed since then, but he could still remember the fading eyes of the sparrow as its life went out, and the terrible loneliness of the body in the coffin.

A loneliness as deathly as the dead man’s had enclosed him for most of those ten years. He had never been able to take love or give it until he met Paula in La Jolla and she decided to stay with him. Even the day he told her he loved her had been flawed by an impulse of rejection. Though nothing had actually happened and the evil impulse had been rejected in turn, the remembered scene, the moving sky and the gray sea, the dark, sharp cormorants skimming low over the water, were lit by the guilty lightning in his mind.

It was the first cloudy day in their week together, too cold and dark for sun-bathing or swimming in the cove. A rough wind from offshore reinforced the tide, and the waves rolled in like hills of glass that shattered on the deserted beaches. The wind brought color into her cheeks and made her eyes shine. With a brightly figured scarf over her hair she was young, absurd, and lovely, laughing at the white explosions of the waves bursting on the rocks. They linked hands and climbed the sea wall as they had on the first night. Threading their way among the pools and fissures of the water meadows, they scrambled up on a high rock and stood there out of reach of the surf.

While they watched the terrific horseplay of the sea, the seals came in. Usually they stayed a mile or so out, their raised snouts tiny disappearing cones of darkness against the shifting colors of the ocean. But sometimes when their mood was right and the waves were high, they caught them and rode them in to shore. They could swim up and out of the crest of a wave, leap clear, turn in the air, and slide back into their element. Back and forth they swam inside the breaking rollers, the continuous grace of their movements as clear to the watchers as if they were swimming under glass. Just before the waves swept them to destruction on the rocks, they ducked and released themselves, swam out and rode in again. The sleek bodies gliding and twisting in the glass walls were like the bodies of women. He felt exultant, with an undercurrent of fear and shame. He had never possessed the body of a woman.

“How I’d love to be a dancer!” Paula said. “To say things directly with my body, instead of through a typewriter and actors’ faces and camera angles. It must be the most satisfying art there is.”

He didn’t answer until the seals had tired, or thought of another game, and went away. When he turned to her a tender warmth was trembling through him.

She faced him gladly, with soft and shining eyes. Her glowing body was hidden like a beast in ambush under her fur coat. He was painfully aware of the warmth of her hand, the whiteness of her chin and throat, the redness of the mouth that was raised to him. His heartbeat was quickened, and his knees loosened by desire. She opened her coat to let him in, and they embraced on the rock above the sea, in full view of two hotels.

It was then that he told her he loved her. But in the dizzy instant of passion the revulsion had taken hold of him. He moved to free himself, but she misinterpreted his movement and held him closer. He felt trapped. She was a divorcée, her kisses were hot and syrupy, her body was cheaply had. She was a woman like the rest. There was no virtue in any of them, as his father had warned him long ago.

He had mastered the impulse, of course, but it had almost overpowered him for a moment: to fling her backward into the boiling surf, let her appetent body be purified and broken. He might so easily have killed her, with a single violent motion have rejected love and lost her forever. Actually he had done nothing to hurt even her feelings. His love for her had drained back into him by way of his head, and he had kept his secret.

It occurred to him now for the first time that perhaps she had not been wholly unaware. They were together for nearly two weeks after that, but they had not become lovers. He had blamed his inexperience and desperate shyness, but it may have been Paula after all who had subtly withdrawn herself. When he asked her to marry him she had preferred to wait. She had seen too many hasty wartime marriages, she said. Of course she wanted to be his wife, but it was better to wait and be sure. When his ship got its sailing orders and headed west again, they weren’t even formally engaged.

Still she had been as faithful as a wife, though for nearly a year the only bond between them was the tenuous paper chain of letters. She had written him every day, turning her mind inside out on the pages to show that there was no part of her that didn’t love him. His interior life had fed on her letters like an unborn child drawing nourishment through its cords. A letter a day, thirty letters a month. Sometimes when they were on the high seas for weeks at a time, he would hear nothing for a month and reap a harvest of thirty letters at once. The serial number of her letters had mounted to over three hundred when his ship was ordered back to the West Coast to pick up a load of planes.

Security regulations forbade him to tell her in advance, and he had too strict a sense of duty to try to get around them, so that she didn’t guess he was coming until he phoned her studio from Alameda. She greeted his voice with incredulous laughter, as if it were a miracle that they should be together on the same continent again. He called her shortly before noon. She caught a plane from Burbank at two o’clock, and a little after four he met her at the San Francisco Airport.

When he saw her tall figure descending the ramp and crossing the apron toward him, he felt a glow of possessive pride that was quickly snuffed out by the fear that he couldn’t claim her. From her narrow feet to the tilted hat upon her shining hair she was poised and elegant, moving mysteriously and surely in a female land-world that glittered forever beyond his reach. He saw her through a glaze of time, locked away from him as if in amber.

Then she came through the gate in a little rush, a halting run. Distance and time were annihilated between their bodies. He forgot his doubts and fears, everything but the knowledge of his five senses that he was with her. “It’s good to be home,” was all he could think of to say against her cheek, and all she could answer was “Yes.”

They started out to celebrate in the usual way, drinking at the Top of the Mark, dining at Omar Khayyam’s. They talked about the life of ships, which was strange to her, the life of the studios, which was equally strange to him, the life of separated lovers, which they both knew well. But he gradually lost his ability to respond to her intimacy. He was acutely embarrassed by her obvious pride in the double lieutenant’s braid that he wore now.

As the hours went by, the hours that he had counted over one by one while he lay sleepless on the last five nights from Pearl, his inner tension increased and became unbearable. Paula sensed his trouble and tried hard to play it down. But after they quarreled at supper her good spirits seemed almost defiant in the face of something that was too much for her but that she’d fight to the last ditch. They both drank heavily, and the midnight taxi-ride to Oakland, which she suggested because she had never crossed the bridge, was a drunken flight from an inescapable reality. Before twelve of them had passed, they knew that their golden hours were being lost.

The final wastage, the jackpot of nothingness, came at the bitter end of the evening. She had managed to sublet a suite in one of the apartment hotels on Nob Hill for the three days they would be together, and she invited him up there for a final drink. From the window of her living-room he could look out over the lighted city like an airman, down the slanted neon streets to the dark harbor, where the ferries and water taxis crossed and recrossed, and the bold arch of the bridge slung across it like a chain of light. His vision was slightly blurred by alcohol, and the whole city stirred like a brilliant armada in a light breeze. A fleet laid out like that would be nice to bomb, he thought. Or a city. A little bombing in the right places would do Frisco a lot of good. Jesus, his head felt rotten! Liquor made him melancholy four times out of five, and the fifth time it made him wild. It seemed to affect Paula hardly at all except to heighten her reactions, and that was all she understood about it.

She came up quietly behind him and closed her arms around his waist. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “Greater than Troy or Carthage. There are three cities in this country that give me the feeling of greatness, the feeling I had when I went to London and Paris. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. That sounds like the name of a railway, doesn’t it? A super-railway with no changeover at Chicago.”

“There’s nothing left of Troy,” he answered somberly, “and they sowed salt on the ruins of Carthage.”

She laughed softly in his ear. “You and your tragic sense of history! I wasn’t thinking of anything like that. They have a romantic sound to me, is all. And they were big navy towns in their day.”

He resented her laughter, her easy rejection of his mood. To his whisky-sickened nostrils the perfume in her hair was overpoweringly sweet. He resented her material perfection, the long polished nails of the hands that held him, the fine clothes he could not have bought for her, the lofty rooms he could not have rented. They had quarreled at supper when she had tried to pick up the check. Though she had seen her error and given in immediately, his humiliation still rankled.

“You’re a very independent woman, aren’t you?” he said.

She was silent for a moment, then answered matter-of-factly: “I suppose I am. I’ve been on my own for a good many years.” But her embrace slackened, and she drew back from him a little as if in self-defense. “You wouldn’t want me to be a clinging vine, would you?”

He laughed harshly. “There’s not much danger of that.” He was still facing the window. The lights of the city outside were bright and heartless, like cruel eyes. San Francisco, the city he had dreamed of for a year, meant no more to him now than the empty camouflage cities built to mislead enemy bombers.

“I thought you liked me as I was, Bret. I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing at supper. I’ve simply gotten into the habit of paying my way. It’s a measure of self-protection in Hollywood.”

He stirred angrily, and her hands fell away from him entirely as he turned to face her. “I don’t know much about your Hollywood crowd, but that seems like a funny attitude to take to me. I thought we were going to be married–”

“We are.”

“What sort of place will I have in your life if I’m your husband?”

“What are you trying to do? You’re making a difficulty where none exists.”

“On the contrary. The difficulty may be insuperable.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “I don’t even know what we’re quarreling about. Those weeks in La Jolla I thought I learned to understand you. Whether I did or not, you took reality with you when you went away. All the time you were out my life here seemed unreal. Before I met you it was the war that was unreal, but since then it’s all I’ve cared about.”

He had hurt her once, and the resulting pain made him strike out blindly again. “No doubt I’ve given you some very authentic touches for your next war picture.”

She threw away her vanity and took hold of his unbending body. “Don’t be a bastard, darling. You can’t be jealous of my work.”

“That’s a laughable thought.”

“Then what’s the matter? I was crazy with happiness when you phoned this morning. I thought everything would be wonderful, and it hasn’t been. Don’t you love me?”

He answered with an effort: “I don’t know.”

“All your letters said you loved me. Have I done something to spoil it? Turn around and face me.”

He turned in the circle of her arms and looked down into her face. There was a spillage of tears from the corners of her eyes, which she tried to blink away. She closed her eyes and leaned toward him.

“I know you love me,” said her red and swollen mouth. “Forget whatever it is, Bret. Just love me.”

He lacked the power to accept her love. His mind went whimpering backward down the past to stand transfixed by a dead face on a pillow. He was as cold as the face of his dead mother; his heart perished in her mortmain grip. He took Paula by the shoulders and pushed her away from him.

Her face was torn by grief and anger, but she kept her voice steady. “I don’t know what the matter is, Bret, but you’d better go now.”

“I suppose I’d better.”

“You’ll call me tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. Good night. I’m sorry.”

He heard her crying softly while he waited in the funereal hallway for the elevator. The dead hand of the past held him by the arm, and the image of the dead woman descended with him in the automatic elevator and followed him out into the slanting street.

Lying in his hospital bed a year and a half later, he could see his mother’s face as clearly as he had then: the marble face of the long dead, closed to the sight, unresponsive to the touch, with hair like wings of darkness folded on the brow. She had died when he was four, more than twenty-five years ago, but the image of her face hung on the wall of every room he entered, and the cold memory of her death still chilled him to the bone. Yet so far as he could remember, she had died naturally in bed. The trouble was that he didn’t remember very well. His brain was a whispering gallery thronged with uncertain images.

His memory of what he had done after he left Paula was doubly confused because he had gone on drinking the next day. He knew nothing else about it, but he could taste the whisky in the passages between his nose and throat and recall the buzzing alcoholic emptiness of his head. He had gone down in the automatic elevator, crossed the steep street to a taxi stand, and disappeared from his own consciousness.

A few months before, he had been willing enough to forget, but now he was fiercely impatient with his lagging mind. His memory was perfectly good for the unimportant things. He knew the names of Napoleon’s marshals, the call signs of the ships they had operated with off Leyte, his telephone number in Arlington, his street address in Los Angeles. No, not Los Angeles. He had never lived in Los Angeles. That was a queer sort of slip to make, and he was always making them. Parapraxis, the doctors called it, and said it was perfectly normal, but he was not consoled. It was terrifying not to be able to trust your memory.

Still, he was getting better. Nine months ago he had been utterly lost in time and space. Now he knew who he was, where he was, why he was here. He repeated the facts like a consoling liturgy. Bret Taylor, Lieutenant, USNR, Naval Hospital, Eleventh Naval District, San Diego. Forgetfulness. The day was Saturday. Sunday, rather, since it was past midnight. Sunday, February 24, 1946. Not 1945, but 1946, and the war was over. It had taken him a long time to catch on to that, but once he got hold of a thing he never let go of it. The problem was to get hold of those lost days in Frisco. All he had was the whisky taste, the buzzing emptiness, and the sense of disaster. Something disastrous had happened, but he did not know what it was. Paula might have told him, but he had been ashamed to ask her.

Whatever had happened, she had stuck by him. A year and a half later she was still coming to see him every week. She wasn’t married to him as he had imagined, but she was standing by. The thought of her was an island of security among the uncertainties of his mind. He went to sleep with the thought of her standing by his bed. But it was not Paula he dreamed of.

chapter 6

He awoke at his usual time, with the taste of the dream in his mouth and a name on his lips waiting to be spoken. The dream faded quickly when he opened his eyes, but he remembered a multitude of bars telescoping into a dreary penny arcade flavored with whisky. In one of the games of chance he had won a kewpie doll with bright blue eyes. It sat on his shoulders like an old man of the sea. He didn’t want the doll on his shoulders, but he had won her in the arcade and she was his responsibility. A policeman with a face like Matthew Arnold proclaimed the fateful words: “Be ye married to disaster until death do us part.” The Matthew Arnold face withered away to a skull, and the kewpie doll danced on his grave in Alsace-Lorraine.

“Lorraine,” his dry lips repeated. He was married to a girl named Lorraine. But only yesterday Paula had told him that he had no wife.

He put on his bathrobe and slippers, and ran down the hall to Wright’s sleeping quarters. There was no answer to his knock. He tried the door and found that it was locked. He knocked again.

A hospital corpsman came round the corner from the duty desk. “The commander isn’t here, Mr. Taylor. Is there something you want?”

“Where is he?”

“He went up to L.A. last night. Lieutenant Weising’s on duty.”

Weising wouldn’t do. He was too young, and he couldn’t talk freely to Weising. “I want to talk to Commander Wright.”

“He said he’d be back sometime this morning. Can it wait?”

“I suppose it’ll have to.”

But his mind wouldn’t wait. After a breakfast that he was unable to eat, he went back to his room to continue his reconstruction of the past. The dream of the kewpie doll, and the single name it had deposited in his mind, filled him with acute anxiety. But it was the clue he needed, the Ariadne thread in the San Francisco labyrinth.

It took him to a room he remembered very clearly: every detail of the peeling walls, the cracked blind, the clouded mirror hanging precariously over the bureau. He had found this room in a cheap hotel after he left Paula, and had spent a bad night on the thin edge of sleep. He managed to sleep for a couple of hours in the morning, but that was all. Some time before noon he went out and bought a bottle of whisky. He drank a few shots by himself in his room, but the alcohol only depressed him, and he was gripped by loneliness. Company was what he needed, any sort of company. He hid the bottle on the top shelf of the closet and went out to look for a bar.

There was a bar where the singing waiters wore handlebar mustaches and served beer in foaming mugs. There was a bar whose walls and ceiling were mirrors reflecting a sickly fluorescent light and women’s waiting faces. There was a bar with naked pink ladies painted on the walls, their nipples as large and red as maraschino cherries. There was a bar with a roughly finished interior like a log cabin, and a basement where submarine men could play at being under water. He felt out of things there and went to other bars. There was the place in Chinatown where a girl in a kimono served him fried prawns and he was sick in his booth. He had never before drunk past the first onset of drowsiness and sickness, but that day he did. There was a long series of bars, indistinguishable from each other, with a jukebox at one end and a pinball machine at the other. In each of them a white-jacketed bartender with a bored and knowing face served drinks in a semidarkness to shadowy couples and single men and women hunched on leather stools. In one of these, behind the smoke screen of noise that the jukebox laid, the nightmare of Lorraine had begun.

The scene he remembered had the earmarks of a dream. There were a number of people in the long room, but none of them made a sound. His own voice, competing effortlessly with the brawling of the jukebox, issued from his throat without moving his lips. His legs and feet, the hand with which he paid for their drinks and raised his glass to his mouth, seemed as remote as Pacific islands. But he felt carefree and powerful, borne up and thrust forward like a plane by the buzzing in his head.

Of course it hadn’t been a dream. Lorraine had been a real girl sitting not in some cavern of the unconscious, but in an actual bar drinking genuine whisky. For a girl of her age she seemed to have a remarkable capacity. If the truth were known she probably had no right to be drinking in a bar at all. They were strict with minors in California, and she didn’t look twenty-one. Her face was extraordinarily innocent, he thought, and extraordinarily sweet. The whiteness of her low, broad forehead was marbled with delicate blue veins and framed in black hair. Her long brows, which had not been plucked artificially thin like Paula’s, gave her blue eyes a pure and steadfast look. Yet there was nothing heavy about her face. Her short upper lip, repeating the upward tilt of her nose, gave it an impish gaiety accentuated by her full, impulsive mouth. She looked like an innocent kid from out of town who had blundered into a dive by mistake and was quite untouched by her surroundings.

He felt a certain responsibility for her, as he felt responsible for all weak or innocent or helpless people. It was only natural that he offered to buy her a drink.

“I don’t mind if I do,” she said. “Two stripes mean a full lieutenant, don’t they?”

“Yes,” he said. “I like your face. You have a lovely, pure face.”

She wriggled and giggled. “You Navy boys are fast workers. Been out a long time?”

“Nearly a year this last time.” He leaned toward the fragrance of her hair, which was sleek and heavy on her shoulders. When he inclined his head, his mind descended in a dizzy spiral round and round her body like a wreath. He said in a choked whisper: “I like the way your hair smells.”

She laughed with pleasure and turned her head quickly back and forth so that her hair flew out against his face. “You ought to. That’s expensive scent. What’s your name, sailor?”

“Bret.”

“That’s a nice name, so unusual. Mine’s Lorraine.”

“I think Lorraine is a beautiful name,” he said.

“You flatter me.”

He seized her hand and kissed its moist palm. The bartender gave him a brief, cynical glance.

“Be careful, Bret. You’ll spill our drinks.”

“To hell with them! I’ve got a quart of Harwood’s in my room. This stuff makes my throat dry anyway.”

“I like Harwood’s,” she said with girlish candor.

“Let’s go then.”

“If you want to, Bret dear.”

She slid off the stool and buttoned her coat. She was surprisingly small, but her figure had the dignity of perfection. As she moved ahead of him to the door he saw how the hips under the tight coat bloomed out from the narrow waist, swaying with every tap of her quick heels. His mind swayed with her body, and his eyes undressed her.

Twenty minutes later he undressed her with his hands. The taxi ride to his hotel had been a continuous kiss, and he was breathless and dizzy. She let out her breath to help him with a last difficult hook and eye and lay back smiling. He was amazed by her body’s economy and richness. Beneath the luxury of her breasts he could feel the fragile ribs. He could span her waist with his hands. But the sweep of her hips was terrifying, and the blandness of her belly and thighs, and the panther blackness of her hair.

When he turned out the light the whole night became panther-black and terrifying and sweet. Her kisses were the fulfillment of a promise too sweet to be believed, like a springtime in midwinter. Somewhere inside him the ice went out with a rush. The black night flowed like a river toward the delectable mountains, through a narrow, desperate gorge, into a warm valley where eventually he went to sleep.

This time Commander Wright was in his office and called to him through the open door to come in.

“Do you mind waiting a minute, Taylor? I should have got this stuff out yesterday.” He was working at his desk on a typewritten report, emending it with a red pencil that threatened to snap under the pressure of his thick fingers.

Bret sat down in a hard chair to wait. His body was tense with anxiety. Unless he was having delusions again he had done the one thing that fouled up his life completely. He remembered waking up in the morning with the girl in bed beside him. His head rang like a cracked bell, but a drink from the dwindling bottle of Harwood’s softened its tone. He went back to the sleeping girl and was fascinated again by her half-covered body shining in the dingy room. He had wakened her with his hands, and she turned toward him as soft and sensuous as a kitten. All this had been bad enough for a man of his moral pretensions (and the day after Paula had flown five hundred miles to be with him), but it wasn’t the chief thing that was worrying him now. He seemed to recall that when they ran out of whisky and went out to buy more, he also bought a marriage license.

“Bloody Navy red-tape,” Wright grumbled. He looked up from his papers and retrieved his dead pipe from the ashtray. “I suppose you came to get the word on Dr. Klifter? Well, he’s here. He drove down with me this morning.”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“Didn’t Miss West tell you he was coming?”

“No, sir.”

“He’s a friend of hers, a well-known psychoanalyst. He was one of the original members of the Viennese Society until he broke with Freud. Then he ran his own clinic in Prague before the war. He’s been practicing in L.A. the last few years.”

“Very interesting,” Bret said. “But how do I come into all this?”

“He came here to interview you, I thought you knew. He’s going over the files with Weising now. If he thinks your case is susceptible to psychoanalytic treatment, we’ll arrange for it–”

“Who’s going to pay for it? I can’t afford the luxury of a psychoanalyst from Middle Europe.”

“Miss West is handling that.”

“I see.”

“You don’t seem very pleased. If he takes the case you’ll get a leave out of it. Don’t count on it, but that’s what’s in the book.”

“I’ve given up counting on anything.” Under different circumstances the prospect of a leave would have delighted him. But all he could think of right now was the stranger he had slept with, or married. If he had married her it meant the end of the one thing he cared about. When Paula found out, if she didn’t already know.… But she must know. Why hadn’t she told him?

Wright gave him a narrow look. “Is there something bothering you, Taylor?”

“Yes. Am I married? I know how irresponsible that sounds.”

Wright’s nostrils emitted twin streams of smoke like a benevolent dragon’s. “Close the door, will you? Thanks. Now sit down.”

“Do you have a record of a girl called Lorraine? It’s important to me to know–”

“Yes. You plan to marry Miss West, don’t you?”

“Answer my question,” Bret said sharply. “I don’t see any reason for making a mystery of it.”

“I’m not making a mystery out of it, Taylor. Your own mind did that.”

“All right, all right. Am I married?”

Wright knocked out his pipe as if extinguishing an impulse to ease his patient’s tension. “You can’t go on using my memory indefinitely. You’re getting to be quite a big boy now.”

“Yes, sir,” Bret said in flat hostility.

“Let’s see, you met this Lorraine Berker in San Francisco in the fall of ’44. Can you tell me about her? What she looked like?”

“She was a blue-eyed brunette, a very pretty girl.” He adopted the doctor’s past tense with a half-unconscious recognition of its aptness. “She had a remarkably white skin for a brunette.”

“Is that the way she looked the last time you saw her?”

“I don’t know. I’m trying to think.” He caught a glimpse of Lorraine’s face stained with sleep and tears as it had been the morning he left her. The ship was due to weigh anchor at eight, and he had to leave the hotel at five to allow time for the long ride to Alameda. He had kissed her for the last time, on mouth and eyes and breast, and left her in what must have been their marriage bed. “I married her, didn’t I? Before I sailed? Is it in the record?”

Wright permitted himself to say yes.

“Where is she now?”

“Remember for yourself, man.”

Another face in another bed (the old spool bed his father had bought in Boston?) came over the horizon of his conscious mind and into memory’s middle distance. It wasn’t Lorraine. Yet he couldn’t be sure. Death did strange things to people’s faces.

“Is she dead?” he whispered.

“You tell me.” Wright’s predatory eyes were stalking him from the underbrush of his eyebrows.

“I remember a dead woman. She had on a black silk dress.”

“Your mother,” Wright said irritably. “That all came out in narcosynthesis, remember? She died when you were very young.”

“My sense of chronology seems to be a little scrambled.” And this fat-faced doctor, arrogant and smug like every man with too much gold braid on his sleeve, wasn’t giving him any help. He sat behind his desk as bland as a Buddha, with all the important secrets locked in his thick skull.

Instead of the truth he had asked for, Wright was making him listen to a talk on elementary metapsychology: “Time is a relative concept,” he was saying. “The mind is like a clock with several faces, each keeping its own time. One for the minutes and hours, one for the seasons and the years, one for the individual biological development, one for the mental life, and so on. On the level of motivation and emotional reaction the mind is practically timeless. Freudians like Klifter say that the clock is set once in early childhood and never changes unless you go back and give the hands a push. I think that’s an oversimplification, but there’s a good deal of truth in it. Klifter said on the way down that you’re probably identifying your wife and your mother, though they died over twenty years apart.”

“Then Lorraine is dead?”

“You know she is, don’t you?”

“How did she die?”

“You’ve got to remember for yourself. Klifter may have different ideas, but so long as I’m handling the case it’s going to be that way. It’s our only guarantee against a relapse. I could tell your conscious mind, but it wasn’t your conscious mind that wiped out the memory. The unconscious levels have to accept the fact. The only way you can demonstrate that they have is by recovering the memory yourself.”

“I can’t see any purpose in this mystification.”

Wright shrugged heavily, like a man shifting a weight on his shoulders. “It would be nice and easy to overhelp you, but I’m not going to do it. You’re going to stand on your own feet, understand?” He got to his feet as if to emphasize the metaphor.

Bret rose at the same time, but Wright waved him back into his chair. The gesture, in combination with his dark blue uniform, accentuated his resemblance to a burly policeman. “You might as well wait here. I’ll go and see if Klifter’s ready for you.”

Bret sat down to wait again. His resentment died down suddenly as soon as Wright had closed the door behind him, and depression took its place. In the space of a few hours he had been married to an unknown girl and widowed in an unknown way. It seemed to him that time was the meaning of his life, and he had lost it. His future was still in the inescapable past, and he was caught in a closed circle as meaningless as the treadmill in a rat cage and as timeless as hell.

chapter 7

Externally Bret seemed to be a typical young American, big, smooth-faced, and brown, with a strongly constructed nose and chin, and candid blue eyes. The only sign of inner disturbance that Klifter noticed in the first few minutes came when the young man’s eyes roved to the window. Then the heavy muscles of his shoulders bunched and strained under his gray fatigue uniform, as if the narrow office hemmed him in and he was held in his low steel chair by an invisible belt. When he withdrew his eyes from the green vista of the hospital grounds, his face had taken on a complexity that had not been apparent at first.

The eyes were not blue after all, but blue flecked with gray. The combination of color gave them depth and modified their transparency. They seemed to contain more than one surface, like a series of lenses that filtered and selected their perceptions before they reached the brain. The mouth was equally complex, the generous softness of its natural molding held in a firm line by an aggressive will. The conflicts in the young man’s nature, of which he seemed intelligently aware, gave him a kind of tense, self-conscious beauty. But Klifter was disturbed by the ironic bitterness that when he smiled cast a shadow in his eyes and deformed his mouth.

The newspaper clippings Paula had given him the night before were in the inside pocket of his coat. If Taylor’s mind was moving toward reality and health, a full knowledge of the event that had alienated him from these things would help him on his way. But if his mind was seriously ill, caught in the grip of a psychotic perversity, the knowledge of the murder might strengthen his disease. Truth was a potent drug that could kill or cure, depending on the patient’s stomach for it. His problem, as always, was to understand the individual man.

He turned to Bret, who was silent in his chair, emptily gazing at the floor.

“Please go on. I should like to learn more of your childhood life.”

Bret stirred uneasily. “From the beginning?”

“Not necessarily. I do not attach the importance which Adler does to the earliest memories. I am more interested in what you consciously think important.”

“My attitude, you mean?”

“Give me the facts. Your attitude has been speaking for itself.”

After some embarrassed hesitation Bret resumed his interrupted narrative.

“You must have gathered that my home life when I was a kid was pretty queer. I don’t think it was before my mother died, but she died when I was four so I don’t remember much about that. My father’s older sister came to keep house for him, and for a couple of years I was under her thumb. Aunt Alice, or perhaps it was my father, set up some rather peculiar rules for a five-year-old to live by. I remember she spanked me on at least one occasion for asking questions about my mother. She wouldn’t even tell me what had happened to her. Aunt Alice died herself when I was six, and I can’t say I was sorry.” He smiled his disturbing smile again, tightening his mouth as if these memories had a bitter taste.

“That’s natural enough,” Klifter said. “The stern old aunt would make a poor substitute for your dead mother. Who looked after you when the aunt died?”

“My father took care of me himself. He was a full professor at that time, and vice chairman of his department, and he could have afforded a nursemaid. But for some reason he wouldn’t have a woman in the house. He went to an inordinate lot of trouble with me, and probably slowed up his own work considerably, simply in order to avoid living with a woman. He hired male students of his, off and on, to help with the cooking and the cleaning, but he and I did most of the housework ourselves. I could cook quite well when I was eight, but I didn’t learn to play baseball until I went to prep school. He only let me stay in prep school for one term, by the way. All of which probably accounts for my inability to fit into a group, my feeling that I have no definite place in society.”

“Yes, probably.”

“When I look back on it I can see that I’ve been a good deal of a lone wolf all my life. Even my profession – I don’t believe I told you I write history, or used to – was a one-man sort of thing. I never did much in team games, but I was good at boxing and swimming. The only thing I ever got into where I felt carried away by something greater than myself was the Navy. After I was given my commission, and especially when I was assigned to my ship, I felt for the first time in my life that I belonged to something. I was a member of a team fighting for a good cause, and it gave me a satisfaction I’d never had. I turned out to be a pretty good officer, curiously enough. I got along well with my men and did my job. When the ship went down I had a sense of irreplaceable loss.”

“You were – invalided out, I believe, before the war ended?”

“Yes. I think I know what you’re driving at. I’ve gone into it rather thoroughly with Commander Wright. It’s true I felt guilty about dropping out of the fight before it was finished. It’s also true that I didn’t want to go back after my ship was bombed. I was completely tired out after more than two years at sea, and I guess I was frightened too. I didn’t admit it then, even to myself, but I do now.”

“What exactly do you admit?”

Bret withdrew his eyes from Klifter’s and looked away out of the window again. His hands strained against the arms of his chair as if it were a trap. “I admitted to Commander Wright, and to myself, that I was secretly glad when my ship went down. It meant survivor’s leave for me.” His voice cracked on the final word.

“I see. You are still suffering from a sense of guilt?”

“Maybe I am,” Taylor said impatiently. “But it has nothing to do with that.”

“I think it has. You cannot yet live comfortably with the knowledge of your own weakness. Remember that it is a normal human weakness to value self above all others. I have harbored a similar wish, Mr. Taylor. When the candidates were selected for the crematorium each day, I silently prayed that I would not be one of them, though there were many others less fit to die. We all must learn to live with the dreadful fact of our own selfishness. There is no virtue in futile guilt.”

“That’s what Wright said, and I believe it. Some of these dreadful facts take a lot of getting used to, that’s all. But it isn’t that that’s bothering me now.”

“What is bothering you now?”

“The things I can’t remember,” he said in a dry, wretched voice. Suddenly he blurted: “Doctor, what happened to my mother?”

“Your mother?”

His smile was equally wretched. “Did I say ‘mother’? I meant to say ‘wife.’ I meant to ask you what happened to my wife. I didn’t even know I had a wife until today.”

“She is dead. I am sorry.” Klifter spread his hands in a gesture of embarrassment and sympathy.

“But how did she die?”

Klifter had not yet made his decision, and he took refuge in a Jesuitical half-truth: “I do not know exactly. Tell me about your mother, Mr. Taylor. Do you remember her?”

“Yes.” After a long pause he added: “She was quite a pretty woman. I remember that much, but she’s rather vague. I told you she died when I was four. She was good to me. I had fun with her. She used to stand on her head on the bed for me, things like that. We had pillow fights. And we had a game at meals, about my eating. One bite for each of her ten fingers, or something. She had lovely hands.”

“Do you remember her death?”

The dreaming blue eyes hardened in rejection. “No. Wait a minute – I remember something.” His eyes glazed and lost their focus. His brown face became smooth and blank, a wooden image of a young boy set out to decoy the past. “I went into her room, and she was dead. Some nights when I was afraid, she would let me come into her bed and stay until I was asleep. I had a bad dream that night and went into her room, and she was stiff and cold. I could see her dead face in the light from the head of the bed. Her hands were folded on her breast. I touched her face, and it was as cold as a wet cloth.”

“Was she wearing her nightgown?” Klifter recalled that Lorraine had been naked when Taylor found her.

“No.” The answer was very definite. “She was wearing a black silk dress with a white ruffle at the throat. Her eyes were closed, and her head was resting on a white satin pillow. I didn’t know that she was dead until my father told me. I had never seen a dead person before.”

“Did your mother usually sleep on a white satin pillow?”

“What do you mean? How do you expect me to remember a thing like that? My mother died when I was four.”

Klifter refrained from pointing out that Taylor had recalled the detail himself. Because this line of inquiry seemed to be disturbing to the young man, he abandoned it for the moment.

“Tell me, was your mother’s death a frequent memory, or a painful one?”

“In my childhood, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t often think of my mother at all. One reason must have been that my father never mentioned her. I think he may have grieved for her in private. Certainly he wasn’t a happy man and he never remarried, but so far as I remember he didn’t talk about her. He wouldn’t even answer my questions about her, and he discouraged my asking them. He let me understand that the subject was taboo. Naturally I got the impression that there was something wrong there, but I never dared to ask him what it was.”

“Perhaps he did not love your mother?”

“Perhaps he didn’t. The thought wouldn’t have occurred to me when I was a kid, but it has since. I told you how he felt about women in general. He brought me up to regard them as whited sepulchers, lovely receptacles of the world’s filth – that sounds like exaggeration, but it isn’t. So long as I was at home, and I was with him up to the age of seventeen except for my term at prep school, I wasn’t allowed to have anything to do with girls. He wouldn’t let me buy a girl a soda or go to a mixed party. I didn’t go out with a girl until after his death – I was in my senior year at Chicago – and then nothing came of it. I was a virgin until my marriage.” He corrected himself hastily. “The night before my marriage.”

Paula West? the doctor wondered. Surely she would have told me. But perhaps not. Every woman has her reticences, like every man.

Bret understood the silence and answered the unspoken question. “I slept with my wife the night before I married her. It’s a curious thing,” he added hesitantly. “I dreamt about it this morning.” He told Klifter what he could recall of the kewpie-doll dream. “I suppose it means I married Lorraine under the influence of my father’s morality?”

“Or slept with her as a gesture of revolt against him? A dream may have multiple meanings. We will talk about your dream at another time.”

Klifter rose from his chair and moved impatiently about the small office. While great areas of the biography were blurred or missing altogether, the patterns of Bret’s mental life had begun to configure in his mind. There was clearly a fixation on the death of the mother for which the father’s foolish treatment of his son seemed partly responsible. But the evidence of it had come too easily, almost without resistance. The very readiness and clarity of the infantile memory made it suspect, especially in view of the similarity between the death of the mother and the death of the wife. It was clearly possible that the mother’s death scene was a substitute, elaborately staged by the analysand’s imagination, for the inadmissable memory of the murdered wife. This possibility was strengthened by the evident identification of the mother and the wife, whom Bret had confused verbally. The pattern was Oedipean, complicated by a melancholia arising from what Bret described as his sense of loss. He had lost his mother at a vulnerable age, lost his ship and the comradeship it symbolized, lost his wife. He was one of those who had formed the habit of loss and acquired a need for it, especially where his affections were concerned. He had done his best to lose Paula West. Finally he had lost his memory and for a while reality itself.

Commander Wright believed that the truth Bret had lost should be withheld until Bret found it himself. Like many American doctors, even some who had learned from Freud, Wright was basically a moralist. He believed that mental disease was an evasion of responsibility by the patient, and that it was therefore a doctor’s duty to his patients to let them cure themselves so far as possible. Heaven helped those who helped themselves.

But it was possible that the motives behind Wright’s muscular attitude were not entirely moral. Klifter had noticed during their conversation on the road that Wright was deeply interested in Paula West. This sexual interest in his patient’s lover might have influenced him to take the longest way in his treatment of the case, avoiding the drastic shortcut on which Klifter had decided. There was also the fact that Paula was opposed to Bret’s being told the truth, and Wright took her opinions very seriously.

Wearily he dismissed the elaborate train of conjecture. The case must be judged on its merits rather than on the basis of hypothetical motives of the other people involved. The only question to be decided was Taylor’s relation to the blurred and wavering line that separated the sheep from the goats, and his mind was already made up.

His hand was in his pocket palpating the wad of clippings when he was overcome by caution. What if he made his potent gift of truth and Taylor then refused to become his patient? The results could be embarrassing, not to say disastrous. He must be certain before he prescribed this medicine that the case was his.

“Do you wish to see me again?” he said. “Do you think I can help you?”

“I’d like to think so. I’d grab at anything that promised to pull me out of this backwater. If I don’t get back to work soon I’ll lose the habit permanently.”

“What work are you planning? It is good for you to be thinking of going back to work.”

“It’s a book I’ve had in mind for a long time. I call it The Political Fallacy. It’s nothing startlingly original, the idea goes back away before Thoreau, but I want to make some modern applications of it. The leading fallacy of our times, underlying fascism and communism and even most of the liberalisms, is the belief that political man is man in his highest function, that political forms are the salvation of the individual soul – but don’t let me bore you,” he concluded miserably.

“On the contrary. Please go on. I take it you are no anarchist?”

“Call me a political protestant. Your true anarchist is the enemy of political forms of any kind. I simply want government to know its place. A state, or a political party, is a means to an end. The end has got to be determined by non-political values, or politics becomes a snake gagging on its own tail. You have an analogous problem in psychiatry, don’t you? Whether to prepare your patients for the absolutely good life or for the life of society. That’s a crude antithesis, but you know what I mean.”

“I do indeed. That is one of our basic problems. Especially in a period when the good life and the life of society may be at opposite poles. In an insane society it is the sane man who seems insane.”

“I can’t take that comfort to myself,” Taylor said with his bitter smile.

“You have no reason to despair. The final test is ability to work, and your mind displays great energy.”

“And produces nothing. You can hardly imagine how unsettling it is not to remember certain things. It’s as if my own back yard were full of hidden land mines. I know I planted them myself, but I can’t remember where.”

“You know as well as I that every man has within him, in his back yard as you say, the total range of good and evil. But nothing there is less than human. You will find that nothing there can blow you to pieces.”

“Then what happened to my wife?” Taylor’s voice had suddenly become violent and high. “Why has nobody told me?”

“Consider that you did not know you had a wife until today. Commander Wright has allowed your process of recall to follow a natural course.”

Taylor twisted in his chair in order to look up into Klifter’s face. “I can’t live in a cage for the rest of my life. I feel as if they’ve shut me away in a drawer in a mausoleum.”

“I understand your feeling,” Klifter said quietly. “Shall we meet again then?”

“If you think it will do any good. Commander Wright said something about a leave.”

“Yes. If you come to stay with Miss West in Los Angeles you will be accessible to me. She has already taken it up with Commander Wright’s superiors. You will come to see me this week in Los Angeles then?”

“I have no choice, have I?”

“Your choices are voluntary. You are legally a free man–”

“I didn’t mean to be ungrateful,” Taylor said. “If I had a choice, or since I have, I’ll come.”

“Good. In the meantime it will be well for you to read these.” He brought the wad of clippings out of his pocket and handed them to Taylor. “We will talk of them at our next meeting.”

The young man stared at them. “What are they?”

“The newspaper accounts of your wife’s death. She was murdered nine months ago. Your illness had its inception at that time.”

Bret had sprung to his feet and was standing over the doctor, his irises shining grayly like small spinning wheels. “Who killed her?”

“The murderer is unidentified and still at large. When you have read those articles you will know all that I know.”

“I see now what the mystery was,” Taylor said slowly. “The bloody fools!”

“You must excuse me now,” Klifter said. “Good-bye. I should say au revoir.” The German phrase had risen to his lips, but he suppressed it, as he tried to suppress all German things to himself.

Bret was so absorbed in the newsprint in his hands that he failed to answer. With a last look at his tormented face Klifter went to the door. Superficially, he reflected as he closed it behind him, these Americans were an optimistic and secular brood. Incessant radios routed their loneliness, five-color advertisements and chromium bathrooms exorcised their diseases, mortuaries like the mansions of heaven disguised their funerals. But the tragic inner life went on, strong in proportion to its denial and violent in proportion to its stealth. The handsome barbered heads and sun-tanned faces were shadowed by death. Even more than the others, it seemed to him, Taylor had been engaged in a lifelong struggle with death. Let him meet his adversary face to face.