“Bill Brewer wants me back.”
“That badly?”
Tash nodded.
“And you feel your obligation to him is more important than your obligation to Jeremy?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
Hilary took a moment to light a cigarette, then looked up without smiling and said: “I think you’re a fool.”
“What did you come to say to me?”
“Vivian is leaving early tomorrow morning for the nursing home. She would like to say good-bye to you before she goes.”
“Now?”
“As soon as you’re ready.”
“Does she know I’m leaving?”
“No, and there’s no need to tell her. It might upset her.”
“I don’t see why my going should upset her.”
“Everybody thinks your going is peculiar because no one believes the reason you give for doing so.”
“Does she know the canary is dead?”
“No one has told her. We’ve been told to shield her from anything that might disturb her. Jeremy hasn’t even questioned her about that letter she asked you to mail.”
They climbed the stairs together, Tash thinking: I shall never go upstairs in this house again.
“We ought to have elevators,” said Hilary.
“Oh, no, the stairway is so beautiful!”
“That’s what Jeremy says, but if he had to go up and down as often as the rest of us—”
“Don’t tell me you’re criticizing Jeremy!”
That brought a spark to Hilary’s eyes. “I do frequently. Didn’t you know?”
At the door Hilary tapped gently and a voice said: “Come in!”
Juana opened the door and stood aside to let them enter.
The curtains were drawn back now, and Tash saw the room clearly for the first time. Thin, after-rain sunlight flooded the boiserie, painted lavender-gray, and the tall, taffeta curtains of a harmonious mauve. Rugs and furniture were old and faded and French. The only dark note in the pale room was a Chinese screen that protected the bed from draughts, black lacquer inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
Vivian’s eyes followed Tash’s glance around the room. “That paneling hasn’t been repainted since the eighteenth century. You only get housekeeping like that in official residences.”
This room doesn’t express her, thought Tash. She has let her role as governor’s wife smother her real self.
For all its grace, the room was obviously a sickroom now. The astringence of lavender smelling salts hovered in the air. A glass of fruit juice stood on the bedside table; beside it, a small bottle with a typewritten label: Mrs. J. Playfair Two at bedtime as directed. Dr. Clemens. # 104623.
Yet Vivian did not look sick. There was no longer a dressing on her temple. The bruise had faded and the cut had healed. Her pallor was no more than the pallor of anyone who has been kept indoors.
“Smoke?” She held out a cigarette case. “Oh, I forgot! You don’t.” She lit a cigarette for herself, dropping the burnt match into a Sevres ashtray almost hidden in a fold of frilly counterpane.
“You’re still doing it,” said Tash.
“What? Oh, the ashtray on the bed.”
“Please don’t. It is dangerous.”
“It really bothers you, doesn’t it?” Vivian smiled. “All right. Since it worries you that much, I promise to keep the ashtray on the table.”
“Starting now.” Tash put the ashtray on the bedside table.
Juana stared at this performance in astonishment.
Tash tried to explain to her in lame, phrasebook Spanish: “El cenicero siempre en la mesa, por favor; no en la cama. Es peligroso. Fuego.”
Juana smiled shyly and nodded her head as if she understood. That smile on that mutilated face was the most pathetic thing Tash had ever seen. Never again would she think of Juana as grotesque.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Vivian. “I have my faults, but I keep my promises. Now do sit down.”
Tash pulled up a small chair to the bedside. “I’m sorry you’re going away. Everyone here is going to miss you.”
“Thanks, but I don’t expect to be missed.”
Hilary started to protest.
Vivian stilled her with a look. “For one thing, I won’t be gone that long. It’s just a check-up. I may even be back in time to go on this campaign trip with Jerry. I’d like that. The west is the most fascinating part of this state. Impenetrable dialect, archaic schools, fundamentalist churches, but fascinating folklore, the best hunting and fishing we have, and the fieriest white mule, distilled illegally, of course. There’s a kind of lazy, lawless, fey charm about those people you don’t find anywhere else. If only Jerry and I could go there alone, just the two of us.”
“You know that’s not possible in an election year,” said Hilary.
“I know only too well.” Vivian reached for the ashtray, stubbed out her cigarette, and put the ashtray back on the table. “See?” She smiled at Tash. “I won’t forget. What I really wanted to say to you is that I’m sorry I’ve seen so little of you since you came here. I hope we can make up for that when I come back.”
On the stairs once more, Tash looked at Hilary. “She didn’t say anything about her loss of memory.”
“She never mentions it. She behaves as if it had never happened.”
“Do you think she really has no memory of anything that happened while she was away?”
“I think she’s forgotten because she wants to forget. Can you think of any better reason for letting sleeping dogs lie? I’ve always thanked God that memory is selective. Life couldn’t go on if we had to remember everything.”
“That’s heresy to the modern psychiatrist.”
“And look at the mess he’s made of the human mind in less than a hundred years. Nature is wiser than we are. Blotting out an intolerable memory is a survival trait, like growing scar tissue. I just hope this new doctor knows what he’s doing.”
“Why did she change doctors?”
“The other one, Dr. Grant, didn’t seem to be doing her any good, so Jeremy called in his own doctor, Henry Clemens. Now if she could just get rid of that gargoyle of a maid—”
“Is that how you think of Juana?”
“Don’t you?”
“Not now that I’ve talked to her and seen her smile.”
They had come to the door of Tash’s office.
“Hilary, when Vivian comes back and finds I’m gone, please tell her I’m sorry I had to go without saying goodbye. In other circumstances, she and I could have been friends.”
“When are you going?”
“Tomorrow morning early.”
“Then I’ll say good-bye now.” Hilary held out her hand. “We must have luncheon together in town once you’re settled back in your old job.”
She was the only person who had spoken of wanting to see Tash again.
It took only a few moments to pack personal possessions in a brief case. She took it and her portable typewriter with her when she went into the mess hall for something to eat.
It was early for supper. Two women from the secretariat were at the far end of the room drinking tea, but there was no one else in sight.
Tash played with a salad for a while, then went upstairs to her own rooms, stopping at the guard room on her way to surrender her office key to the man on duty.
Her two suitcases were in the closet. She packed swiftly, took a cold shower, and put on the thinnest nightgown that came to hand. It happened to be filmy white with a matching robe, the sort of thing our grandmothers called a negligee.
She pulled a long chair over to a French window that was standing open on the balcony. Half-sitting, half- reclining she could see the last daylight draining from the pale, rain-washed sky.
She tried to read. By the time the first star came out, she had put the book down. She didn’t feel hungry. She felt empty. How was she ever going to get to sleep tonight?
At last she remembered a bottle of rum Carlos h
ad given her to keep in her rooms when she first moved into Leafy Way. “For dire emergency,” he had said. “Such as the bar being closed.”
It was still standing, unopened, on the hat shelf in her clothes closet.
She opened it now. There was always fresh ice-water in the Thermos jug beside her bed. She filled a glass and took it back to the long chair in the sitting room.
The stars came out one by one to watch and keep her company while she sipped her drink. The empty feeling began to melt away. Physically she felt looser, mentally she felt enlarged. Now she could say with true faith: This, too, will pass.
She looked at the clock. Nearly eleven. One more drink, a smaller one, and she would sleep, and leave early tomorrow morning and put the whole thing behind her forever.
She was only twenty-five. The greater part of life was still ahead of her.
She heard the light knock, but didn’t pay attention to it until it came a second time.
Hilary? So late?
She went to the door and threw it open.
On the threshold stood Jeremy Playfair.
11
“I HAD TO talk to you. I knew you were awake because I saw your light.”
His voice was almost inaudible. Never before had she seen him so subdued.
“Come in,” she said, and shut the door as he stepped inside. “I was just having a drink. Would you like one?”
“Thanks, I need one.”
He must have been playing tennis earlier that evening, for he was wearing sneakers, slacks, and a tennis shirt.
“Has something happened?”
He hesitated over his answer. “A lot of things have happened, including your resignation. Why did you resign?”
“But I told you, the newspaper—”
“Please. Let’s have the truth.”
Had she been telling the truth all along, she would have protested indignantly. But she had been suppressing the true and suggesting the false, which is lying, no matter what the Supreme Court says, so she hesitated.
That moment’s hesitation gave him an advantage. He seized it quickly. “You don’t defend yourself because you know you can’t. Now tell me the real reason you resigned.”
“Is there any rule that says one has to give a reason?”
“No rule, but it is customary.”
“I gave you enough reason to satisfy custom.”
He moved his glass, swirling the drink in a miniature whirlpool. “You gave no reason. Just a transparently false excuse. Mr. Brewer and his newspaper can get along without you perfectly well and you know it.”
“You’ve been making inquiries?”
“Of course. I questioned that reporter of his who covers the State House. You are not needed on the paper now any more than you were when you gave up the job to come here. So what is your real reason?”
“I’m not going to tell you. Let’s just leave it at that.” Tash expected him to finish his drink and walk out of the room, but he didn’t. He sat quietly looking through the open window at the arch of stars above the dark treetops. At last he spoke.
“Is it because of something you found out?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I am asking you if you found out the truth about Vivian.”
Until now it had all seemed a simple matter of an employer irritated because he was losing an employee at an inconvenient moment. Even this unconventional visit to her rooms late at night was just the informal Playfair charm being used to paper over a crack in staff organization.
Now she saw that it must be more than that.
“All I know about Vivian is what you and others have told me.”
He looked at her steadily. “I’m not sure I believe you.”
“There’s only one thing I know about her that you may not know.”
“And that is?”
“The first time I saw her here she asked me to mail a letter for her, and the letter was stolen before I could mail it, but that has nothing to do with my resignation.”
“Tell me all about the letter.”
He listened without any sign of surprise.
“And even then it didn’t occur to you what was wrong?”
“No.”
“Then I think I shall have to tell you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t. I might let it slip to someone else without meaning to.”
“No. You wouldn’t.”
“But why tell me at all?”
“I have to protect Vivian. The mystery about her must be the reason for your resignation. What else could there be? Since you already know enough to suspect her, you might as well know the whole truth. Then you may feel less like resigning.
“Suppose I let you go without another word, what happens? I have to get someone else, someone who is sure to suspect something is wrong with Vivian just as you did, but who may be so much less understanding than you that I could never confide in him or her as I am confiding in you now. Don’t you see how much more difficult everything would be for me then?”
“I don’t want to make things difficult for you. What is it you want to tell me?”
“Like everything else that seems complex when you don’t know what it’s about, this is really simple when you do. It can be expressed in five or six words.”
He lifted his eyes and looked her full in the face. “Vivian takes drugs. Hard drugs.”
Everything fell into place.
The sudden change in Vivian’s spirits and appearance? A common symptom of cocaine addiction. Her loss of memory? Partial amnesia was another symptom associated with several drugs. The nursing home where she was going tomorrow? A clinic for the cure of addicts where Jeremy was sending her now he knew the truth. The absence of children in her marriage? Some drugs were said to affect fertility, especially when more than one was taken at a time.
The letter smuggled out of Leafy Way through Tash herself? An attempt to communicate secretly with a drug supplier. She couldn’t send or receive many letters on her own without drawing attention to what she was doing. All her personal mail, incoming and outgoing, was filtered through the office of her social secretary, Hilary. If she bypassed that office more than once or twice, Hilary would want to know why.
She couldn’t use the telephone at Leafy Way for such purposes. There were a dozen lines, but they all went through the switchboard manned by operators from the state police guard.
Her periodic disappearances without her own car? Times when she had to make contact with a drug supplier in person. She couldn’t go just anywhere in her own car. Its license number was known to every policeman in the state, and her face was known to every reader of news magazines. She couldn’t take a taxi. A driver who recognized her might talk. A driver who suspected her might blackmail her.
Any contacts with a drug supplier she had to make in person would have to be made alone and after dark, slipping out a French window, walking down the neglected right of way to the nearest public transportation.
If she wanted to stay away for several days, there would be no search for her as long as she telephoned Jeremy or Hilary that she was staying with friends. If any reporters asked Jeremy about her mysterious disappearances, he would in all good faith, deny there was any mystery about her absences.
All these things were commonplaces of drug addiction. Only one thing made Vivian’s case uncommon: She was the wife of the governor of the state.
“She must have felt Hilary was more like a jailer than a social secretary,” said Tash.
“Guards can become jailers overnight,” responded Jeremy. “It all depends on your point of view.”
“How long have you known?”
“Only since that night she came home alone in her car, almost unconscious. I sent for my own doctor and he told me what was wrong. Do you think I would have announced my candidacy at the dinner that very night if I had known what was going on? Until then I thought she was going through some kind of mental illness. I kept trying to get her to see a psyc
hiatrist, but she wouldn’t. How could she? He would have seen what was wrong immediately.”
Tash remembered his concern for her. Viv, are you sure you are not overdoing things? . . . Take care of yourself Viv. Promise. . . .
“Now I understand why my resignation made you angry. It must have seemed like desertion.”
“Not angry.” He smiled with rue. “Just scared. I was afraid you had discovered the truth, and I didn’t know what you might do about it after you left. So tonight I decided to tell you everything. I’m asking you to keep her secret until she can be cured.”
“You don’t have to ask. Of course I’ll do everything I can. Did you think of going to the police for help?”
“You’ve heard Wilkes on addicts. Would you turn an addict you cared about over to him? This is a matter for doctors, not police.”
“Is this one reason your new anti-drug law is more merciful to addicts than pushers?”
“I signed that bill before I knew about Vivian, but how can I make anyone believe that I didn’t know? Can you imagine how the press would crucify me if they discovered now that my own wife was an addict?”
“It’s a perfect set up for blackmail.”
“Yes, isn’t it? I thought of that. So far there have been no attempts.”
“How many people know now, besides you and the doctor?”
“Only Hilary and Carlos. I told them because I needed their help, and they were likely to find out anyway, living in such close relations with Vivian and me. Luckily, Hilary is an old friend of my mother’s family and Carlos has been my closest friend since Princeton. They won’t talk.”
“What about Vivian’s maid, Juana?”
“I doubt if such a thing would occur to her. She’s good at manual jobs, but she’s not intelligent. Even in her own language she’s illiterate, and she doesn’t understand English.”
“When did it begin?”
“I don’t know when or how or why. But I do know that if Vivian does not come back from the nursing home cured, I’ll have to get out of politics altogether.”
“So you meant it when you told Job that you really didn’t care whether you ran for a second term or not?”
“I meant it all right, but I doubt if Job believed me. How could he when he doesn’t know about Vivian?”
Helen McCloy Page 10