Wall of Eyes

Chapter 1

They moved briskly along the street, the girl carefully indifferent to the stares of the people who passed, the dog unaware of them. He padded along looking neither to the left nor right, his eyes careless and shifty. But when he came to a hole in the sidewalk he guided Alice around it and she felt the firm gentle tug of his harness and followed him.

I wonder if he knows I’m not blind, Alice thought.

He paused at the corner and ran his eye casually over the traffic. Then he stepped off the curb and Alice stepped off too, smiling a little. He’s very conscientious, she thought, he’s doing his duty but he doesn’t have to like it.

When they were across the street she leaned over and put her free hand on his head for an instant.

“Good dog. Good Prince.”

He was bored with the compliment. He turned his head away with a stem there’s-a-place-for-everything movement and continued to walk, picking his way among the fallen leaves.

They were still on St. George Street, but the street itself was changing. They had passed the section of crumbling grandeur, of decayed castles with “Rooms for Rent” signs hammered on sagging pillars and listing porches. This part of the street alternated quaint tea rooms with filling stations and fraternity houses.

She slowed her step and began peering at the numbers of the houses. A young man in a gray topcoat was coming toward her. When he saw the dog he stopped and said, “Could I help?”

The dog didn’t even look at him but sank onto the sidewalk with his head between his paws.

Alice turned and saw that the young man had a wet leaf plastered to his hair. She tried to make her eyes blank, like Kelsey’s, to avoid embarrassing him.

“Yes, thank you,” she said. “I’m looking for Dr. Loring’s house.”

He looked at her curiously, shyly, as one looks at a cripple. Even though he thinks I’m blind, Alice thought, he is too polite to stare.

“Next house up,” he said. “May I help you there?”

“No, thanks,” Alice said. “Prince and I will find it.”

Prince was already on his feet, sensing the call of duty, feeling the subtle movement of her hand on his harness. They walked on. Alice wanted to turn around to see if the young man was looking back but she kept her eyes on Prince, still smiling. The young man had delighted her, he was so earnest and so completely unaware of the wet leaf clinging rakishly to his hair.

But with the elation there was the old feeling of strangeness, loneliness, because it was such a silly, sly thing to find pleasure in.

The house was old but the lawn was freshly raked and the sign, “Dr. T. Loring,” gleamed like a small brass sun. On the veranda there was another sign, “Ring and Walk In.” She rang the bell and opened the door with the brisk precise movements of one who feels she is being watched from behind curtains and wants to impress the watcher.

There was no one else in the office. She had been afraid that there would be someone, but now that there wasn’t she felt no relief. The fear was still there, but it had divided like an amoeba, and the two new parts were full-grown, self-sufficient, able to slide through her veins and divide again and again. Fear of Kelsey, of scandal, of the doctor, of her own security, fear of being wrong.

And perhaps he wasn’t a good doctor — she refused to think of him yet as a psychiatrist, refused to let her mind or mouth form the word — or perhaps most of his patients were too bad to come to his office, like the cretin she had seen years ago, a gibbering, drooling, fat-tongued boy who had stroked her damp hand with his hot, dry one.

Prince was lying on the floor beside her feet, not in the easy relaxed manner of ordinary dogs, but watchfully, his eyes moving in their sockets.

Alice heard the door open. She did not look around immediately but waited until the doctor said, “Miss Heath?”

Then she put down the magazine carefully and picked up her gloves and turned to him.

He wasn’t frightening, he didn’t even wear a white coat to distinguish him from other young men, to mark him out as a man who dealt with things dark and ugly and never to be talked about. But the uneasiness swept over her again and she made a quick little movement which brought Prince to his feet, alert, ready to leave again, to visit strange places and strange houses, bored and despairing of making sense of any of it.

“I’m Dr. Loring.” He looked at Prince, his eyes uncertain. “Is this your dog?”

She stood mute, shaking her head. She wanted to run out, shouting her explanations over her shoulder as she ran, “You’re too young! I can’t talk to you!”

She didn’t run. She merely put on one glove as a symbol of running.

“It is my sister’s dog,” she said. “My sister Kelsey is blind.”

“Ah,” he said, as if that explained everything. “You’ve come about her, your sister?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Come in here, please.” His voice was professional, matter-of-fact. He stood back from the door and nodded his head slightly. “Do you want to bring the dog in with you?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Oh, no.”

He glanced at her and said, “Ah,” again with the same undertone of smugness, as if his mind were saying, “Aha! All is now clear!”

It irritated her and, to cover up her irritation, she laughed softly, nervously. “He reminds me of a governess I had once. She never missed anything and she never got excited.”

She walked to the door, peeling off her glove again. Her voice had faded into a whisper. Loring closed the door loudly behind them and began to bang things around, a chair for her, his own chair, a lamp that was in his way. When she sat down he continued to make noises; he walked up and down the length of the room; he thrust some papers into the filing cabinet and slammed the door shut again.

She stared at him, her nervousness falling under this barrage of noise and movement. When he saw that she had stopped twisting her gloves he sat down abruptly behind the desk.

She said, “That was very good.”

“What was?” He sounded on guard, suspicious.

“Trying to make me feel at ease. You can’t, of course. Perhaps if you were older...”

“No. You’d have the same difficulty,” he said crisply. “It’s because you’ve come on behalf of someone else. If you yourself were the patient you’d be eager to blurt things out.”

He began to write rapidly on the pad in front of him, hardly bothering to keep his eye on the pen, looking up swiftly at Alice now and then.

“Kelsey. How old?”

“Twenty-six,” Alice said. “Two years younger than I am.”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“One brother, John. He’s thirty.”

“Parents?”

“My mother is dead. She died a year and a half ago of cancer, soon after Kelsey was blinded.”

“Accident?”

“Yes.” She saw his frown of impatience. “Do I tell you about the accident?”

“Is your father living?”

“Yes.”

“All right. The accident.”

“She was driving Johnny’s car that night. They were on their way to a party and...”

“They?”

“Johnny and his girl and Kelsey and Philip James. The girl was killed.”

“Oh.” He looked up, interested. “The girl was killed and your sister blinded. And your sister was driving at the time. The girl was a friend of hers?”

“No. She was with Johnny. She was one of Johnny’s girls. Kelsey had never seen her before.”

“And Mr. James?”

She turned her head and looked out of the window. “Mr. James was — is — engaged to Kelsey.”

“Was, is,” Loring repeated. “Why the change in tense?”

“I made a mistake,” Alice said hoarsely. “He is engaged to her. It was a slip of the tongue.”

“All right.” He stopped speaking, laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes, waiting.

“All right,” Alice said finally. “He intends to marry her but she doesn’t intend to marry him. She’s kept him waiting now for two years. He lives with us right at the house, waiting to marry her. They were engaged at the time of the accident.”

She spoke slowly as if she had projected herself into the past and was feeling her way along among the ghosts.

“When Kelsey came home from the hospital she knew that she could never be cured, that she was going to be blind for the rest of her life. She didn’t keep Philip waiting until she knew — she knew already. She never planned on or hoped for seeing again. There is none of that in Kelsey, no self-deception, no softening of blows for herself.” She paused again, feeling her way back to the present. “So Philip is waiting. They never even talk about the marriage any more, she gives no reason, nothing is brought into the open. A few months ago she stopped wearing his ring. She said she lost it. Later on I had to hire a new maid. Her name is Ida. About two weeks after Ida came she was wearing the ring, on her little finger. Kelsey had given it to her.”

“Strange,” Loring said.

“No one else has noticed it and I haven’t talked to Kelsey about it, but she’s waiting for me to bring the subject up. I can tell it in the way she looks at me, half-sly, half-challenging.” She drew in her breath. “She’s through with Philip. She hates him, I think, but she won’t let him go.”

He was writing rapidly again, and the sight of him, the realization that he was writing down what she said shocked her.

She said stiffly, “I wish you wouldn’t write this down.”

“Why not?” He smiled dryly. “Isn’t it true?”

“Of course it’s true,” she said harshly. “Why did you say that? Did you think I’d go to all this trouble, suffer this indignity, to tell you a pack of lies?”

He was young and inexperienced enough to resent her tone and the word “indignity,” but he hung on to his smile. He recognized the natural antagonism between this girl and himself.

It’s because, Loring thought, we’re close in age and she’s the kind of girl who girds herself for the battle of the sexes, automatically, instinctively, smelling the battle from miles away. He knew by just looking at her that she bathed and changed all her clothes once or twice a day, that she applied her lipstick carefully and lightly so it wouldn’t be noticed, that she would wrinkle her nose or even faint if she had to ride on a Harbord Street trolley on a rainy day. The smell and touch of human beings would be too much for her. He began to wonder about her parents and the kind of life they had lived.

He said abruptly, “How old is your father?”

“Fifty-three,” she said. “Do you intend to keep on asking me questions or shall I just talk?”

“Go on and talk.”

“It wasn’t fair to tell you about Kelsey first, giving her to you without her context. We are... we are all of us queer, I suppose, except Johnny. You’ve known families where the unspoken word is stronger than the spoken word, where everything that happens is drawn out into tenuous wisps, half-thoughts, shadow feelings... You know?”

“Inverted,” Loring said. “Turned in.”

She repeated the word. “Turned in, toward ourselves and toward each other.” She smiled self-consciously. “There is always a great deal of atmosphere around us. If we have something for lunch that Kelsey doesn’t like the dining room is charged with electricity. Sounds uncomfortable, doesn’t it?”

He smiled at her. “It does.”

“Only Johnny isn’t like that. He feels the atmosphere but it merely puzzles him. He is very simple-minded.”

“Simple-minded might mean anything.”

“He’s not a moron,” she said sharply. “I meant, it’s easy to figure out his reactions.”

“Simple, then.”

“Yes. I imagine my father was, too, a long time ago. He and my mother didn’t like — hated each other.”

He nodded, as if an idea of his had been confirmed. “The children of mismated marriages are often over-perceptive. They become accustomed to interpreting small signs of tension. Because they dread quarrels they are quick to see the signs.”

“There were no quarrels.”

Loring was interested in her quick denial. She didn’t mind his knowing her family was queer, neurotic. Neuroses occurred in the best of families, quarrels were merely common.

The implication of anything as common as quarrels changed her voice and her words. Her voice throbbed with culture and she chose her language more carefully, pausing to find the striking word, the telling phrase.

“No quarrels,” she said, “simply atmosphere, black, fat clouds of it. They were in love with each other in the beginning. He did actually marry her for love, but she was rich, you see, she was never quite sure. Father rarely talks about it, but he told me years ago, before she died, that it was all right to marry a wealthy woman for her wealth but not for love. It gave her too much power over you, he said, you became doubly sensitive. Then, too, she was ill most of her life. She had a soft, sick voice, and her bones were small and brittle but threaded with iron. She hated living, but I think she hated dying even more. She couldn’t bear to die leaving him alive. I am telling you about her so you will understand about Kelsey.”

Her speech had a queer rhythm which Loring found disturbing. It was almost, he thought, as though the rhythm was a deliberate method of emphasizing and explaining her words, like an invisible footnote: We are all queer, we even talk queerly, op. cit., ibid.

“When she died we were sick with relief, sorry, too, but mostly relieved, thinking we were free of her. But we weren’t because she’s back again, in Kelsey. Nothing has changed, not even the money. She left it all for Kelsey, every cent of it. We live in Kelsey’s house and eat Kelsey’s food.”

“Is that why you stay?”

“For free board and room?” she said. “No, it’s not as simple as that. We’re all capable of supporting ourselves. Johnny has a job, Philip is a pianist, and I... I could at least be a housekeeper. It’s what I am now. No, we don’t stay for economic reasons, we stay because we can’t leave. She’s blind, we can’t walk out on her.”

“Conscience?”

“If you must have a label,” she said shortly, “call it conscience.”

“Yet none of you had anything to do with the accident?”

“No. She was driving herself. It was her fault. She can’t blame any of us.”

“Does she?”

“No, not in words, but in attitude. She’s bitter and hostile. She seems to like nobody but Ida.”

“The maid who wears the ring?”

“Yes. She makes us feel that we are responsible for her blindness — guilty and ashamed. But none of us has done anything to be ashamed of.”

She paused, waiting for his reassurance, “Of course not. Of course you haven’t.”

He said nothing and she lowered her eyes. “I have done nothing I’m ashamed of — until now, until I came here. I shouldn’t have come. She’s not insane, she’s twisted. I thought you could help her and us too. I shouldn’t have come here. Could I just pay you and walk out?”

“You could,” Loring said. “Waste of money, though. Her money. I suppose you did come here about your sister and not about yourself?”

“Myself?”

“It occurred to me,” he said dryly. “I get people — girls like you especially — who simply come here to talk to me. Ingrown, lonely women who don’t need a psychiatrist, who only need someone who’ll listen to them. Sometimes they come twice a year and tell me about their jobs and their lives and their families. Sometimes they’re in love and are radiant or weepy, depending on the lover. But most of the time nothing at all has happened to them between visits and they go back into the past and repeat what they’ve told me before, how at the age of four Uncle Charley came for a visit from Montana and how many valentines they received in the fourth grade... The lonely ladies. I can’t do anything about them. That will be five dollars, please. I hope your sister got her money’s worth.”

She made no move to open her purse. She said, “I have no Uncle Charley and I didn’t go to grade school.”

“No? Well, other things.”

“Nor did I talk about myself,” she said quietly, “except to give you an idea of Kelsey.”

“That’s true,” he said with a faint smile. “Sorry. My profession is one that breeds suspicions.”

“Since you intend to be reasonable, I’ll be just as reasonable and admit that I didn’t come here strictly for Kelsey’s sake, nor for my own. Whatever the others do I shall have to stay with Kelsey. I don’t expect much from life and that is all right. But I want you to save Johnny and Philip.”

“Save them?” he said ironically. “From what?”

“From Kelsey, from this feeling of guilt that keeps them there when they should both go away and live their own lives. She’s only keeping Philip to make him suffer. She tells him to get out and when he tries to leave she won’t let him.”

“She’s not a witch,” Loring said. “And he’s not a cripple.”

“You’re wrong. She’s part witch, and I think he’s part cripple. Philip isn’t strong enough to stand up to her. And now it’s worse than ever because about three months ago she began to imagine that there were eyes watching her, a wall of eyes.”

He leaned forward across the desk. “Whose eyes?”

She didn’t see him or hear him. “She has built a wall of eyes around her, the good eyes of the rest of us, the eyes of the people who hate her and watch her and wait for her to die. That’s what she says, that the eyes are watching and waiting. Yesterday she was clawing the wall, the ordinary wall of her room, trying to...”

She stopped, sucking in her breath. “Letty found her on the floor, crying.”

“Letty?”

“She was my mother’s nurse. It is a terrible thing to see a blind person cry, eyes that can’t see shouldn’t cry, blind eyes should be tearless and unseen. But there she was, crying, on the floor. Her eyes look real, they haven’t faded, they look as good as new.”

“Don’t you cry!”

She stared at him. “I’m not one of your lonely ladies — in love.”

“They’re not my ladies,” he said irritably. “Don’t get personal. I haven’t done anything to you.”

“You’re cold, without sympathy, and you’re too young. I don’t trust you. I think I want to go home.”

“Five bucks,” Loring said wearily.

She half rose from her chair. He reached his hand across the desk and made a violent pushing motion toward her. The hand didn’t touch her but the gesture was so savage she fell back in her chair, cold with fright.

“There,” he said. “I’ve lost my temper. Every time I lose my temper I double my price. You’d better get out of here while you’re still solvent. Try Graham at the Medical Arts. He’s twice as old as I am and twice as sympathetic and consequently twice as expensive and twice as rich. He’ll suit you on all counts.”

“You can’t order me out of here. I don’t want to go. I’m all mixed up...”

“You’re mixed up because you talk too much. You’re even dragging me into the conversation.” He saw that she was going to cry and his voice coaxed her. “Tell me about your sister. Good Lord!”

Her crying was as quietly intense as her voice. She cried for some time, holding the sleeve of her suit over her eyes to hide her face from him. When she had finished she put her arm down again and he saw with a shock the two dry deep lines from her nose to her mouth. She looked forty. Tears were not a balm to her as they were to the lonely ladies.

She probably never cries, Loring thought, so why in hell is she crying now?

“Please,” he said. “Tell me about your sister. What do you want me to do about her?”

“See her,” Alice said. “Talk to her. Make her realize her own motives for some of her actions, let her see that she’s only ruining her own life.”

“A tall order.”

“Yes, but she’s reasonable, she’s more coldly reasonable really than any of the rest of us. And some of it — I’m sure that some of it is only pretense. Not the eyes, but some other things. She pretends that she’s forgotten she used to smoke and she refuses to let us smoke in the house.”

“Was she smoking when the accident occurred?”

“No. She had asked Philip to light her cigarette. The windows of the car were open and Philip bent down, cupping the match in his hands, when the car crashed. He tried to twist the wheel at the last minute.”

“Will she see me voluntarily?”

“No! She doesn’t even know I’ve come here. Could you... couldn’t you come to the house? We could pretend that you were a friend of mine. You could come for tea. I know this is imposing on you.”

“No.” he said dryly. “I like tea. When?”

“Tomorrow?”

“All right,” Loring said. “What about the dog?”

She stared at him. “What about him?”

“Why did you bring him along?”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “I know what you’re thinking, that perhaps I like to pretend I’m blind, identify myself with...”

“You’re at it again.”

“I brought him because he has to be kept in practice. Is that good enough?”

“Fine. Tomorrow at what time?”

“Four. You have my address. What... what is your first name?”

“Tom.”

“Mine is Alice. I think you had better not be a doctor tomorrow. What will you be?”

“I have sold insurance,” Loring said. “I could sell it again.”

“I hope... I’m sure you’ll be able to help.”

“Don’t hope anything,” he said curtly. “The girl is blind and she’s young and she was in love. What good can I do? I can’t make her see again.” He opened the door and saw Prince. “How would you like to be led around by a dog?”

She went past him. Without turning around she said, “Well, you can try, can’t you?”

“Sure,” he said cynically.

“Good day.”

“Good day.”

He watched her from the window, liking the way she walked, with smooth arrogance, as if she had paid for every inch of the sidewalk and her own personal engineers had constructed it, guaranteed without holes.