Into That Fire

by M. J. Cates

  “Oh, God.” Imogen lowered herself to a chair, the arm of it anyway, as the real meaning behind Carl’s words sank in.

  “What? You’re being melodramatic again. Honestly, Imogen. Sometimes.”

  “I understand it now. I must be stone blind not to have seen it before. You were happy to see me go—happy! You couldn’t wait, could you. You were already having sex with your student.”

  “Now I’m Satan because I want sex.”

  “Because you want it with someone who is not your wife. With someone who is your student. You are not going to tell me you were deprived of sex—you know you weren’t. Our physical life was excellent right from the start.”

  “Was very good at the start. Look at yourself, Imogen. You must have put on thirty pounds since we got married.”

  “I’ve had children, for God’s sake. Your children. And Cynthia Bee is hardly a model of feminine perfection.”

  “At least her tits don’t sag.” Carl flicked his newspaper back up and rattled the pages.

  Imogen stayed seated for some time, not moving, staring at nothing, while her husband remained barricaded behind his paper. Eventually she made her way to the bedroom where she sat on the edge of the bed. She sat for a long time, staring at the closet door, just as she had done as a child. Now and again the notion came to her that she should get up, she should go for a walk, she should at least move, but there was nowhere to move, nowhere to walk, nowhere to look that did not hurt.

  18

  As Quentin began writing the first chapters of his novel, he found himself stymied in ways he had not previously experienced. He was now aiming for more texture, a greater feeling of actual people in real places, and discovered that he hadn’t taken enough notes to achieve this. He wanted to know what kind of houses doctors lived in, what buses they took—the small details of their everyday lives.

  He arrived in Baltimore on a Wednesday evening, and the following day he was waiting outside the Phipps, seated on a bench with a copy of the Baltimore Sun to screen his features, should the need arise. The day was chilly and damp but he didn’t care. He had brought a book of crossword puzzles to occupy his mind in case the wait should be long, but he found his mind already so occupied with Imogen that his verbal skills abandoned him. It occurred to him that his “need” for novelistic detail could well be just a need to see Imogen. Obsession, if not love, he thought, was probably a form of stupidity. He felt guilty for lurking like this, and his leg, in all the places it had been broken, began to ache.

  Shortly after five o’clock she appeared on the front steps, the only woman he had ever seen who truly merited the adjective “statuesque.” She stopped at the top of the stair, as others emerged from the building and passed her by, and rummaged through her bag, apparently having forgotten something. The clouds parted and a shaft of late afternoon sunlight lit the steps. Her hair seemed darker than he remembered, or perhaps it was only a trick of the light. And she seemed even taller. Her height, her solidity had always given him pleasure—he could not have said why—adding a regal element that contradicted her innate diffidence. It felt wrong to be looking at her and he was afraid of how she might react if she recognized him. This, he knew, was not likely. As far as she was concerned Quentin Goodchild was dead. So even if she discerned a resemblance in this much older man with his hesitant gait, it would be a huge leap to think Quentin was actually alive.

  She passed by him, still rooting through her bag, and walked up the path leading to Wolfe Street. Quentin fell into step about fifteen yards behind her. He wanted to speak to her but could not summon the courage.

  On Wolfe Street, Imogen joined a queue and boarded the number 22 streetcar. Quentin dithered until the last moment, before jumping on. The car was full but a young man offered Imogen his seat, and to see this stranger accord her this courtesy gave Quentin pleasure. He kept his face averted as he passed her. As the streetcar started to move, he gripped the bar and looked at the back of Imogen’s head and at her profile, the curve of her cheek, reflected in the window. She pulled a book out of her bag—he could not see the title—and began to read. It was exciting and unsettling to observe her in her daily routine. He who was dead to her was watching her live her life and, like a benign spectre, he tried to send her waves of affection. Should he speak to her? No, it was too…he did not know what it was too much of, but he knew it was too much.

  Imogen did not look up from her book when the conductor called out the names of stops. A phrase came to Quentin from long ago, something she had said: peace and contentment. Looking up at him from a book, the sunlight shining on her hair, gilding her cheek, and saying, “Peace and contentment. That’s what I get from reading. A good book on a sunny day, a pretty garden—what could be more perfect?” And here she was a decade later finding peace and contentment on a crowded streetcar, oblivious to the clanging bell, the driver calling out stops.

  Gradually the Negroes left the streetcar until there were only white people on board. Even so, none of them sat in the rear third of the car. Quentin took a seat a few rows back from Imogen, on the other side of the aisle. When the conductor called out North Street, she put the book in her bag and stood up. Quentin turned his face to the window as she stepped by him toward the middle doors. When the streetcar stopped and the doors opened, he rose and followed her out. Now, he would speak.

  But the opportunity vanished. A streetcar was just arriving on the far side of North Street, and Imogen hurried across the intersection, unaware of the ghost trailing behind her. Quentin was stopped as he boarded.

  “Transfuh,” the driver said, and repeated it when Quentin did not understand. “Can’t be gettin’ on the thirteen from the twenty-two without you got a transfuh.” Quentin had to pay the full fare again, and felt the stares of impatient passengers. He kept his head down as he took his place a few seats behind Imogen. She was once more engaged with her book.

  When she got out a few stops later he followed her on the opposite side of the street. She turned down a smaller street. The houses were modest here, some of them rundown. The one she went to was larger than some of the others, but there were three mailboxes by the front door, indicating other tenants. As she was collecting her mail the front door opened and a little boy and girl came out, calling, “Mumma! Mumma!” and clutching at her. She reached down to tousle their hair, and a coloured woman appeared in the doorway. Something Imogen said made her laugh and she shooed the children inside. Imogen followed them in and shut the door behind her.

  Quentin walked on for a couple of blocks, then turned back the way he had come. He intended to catch the streetcar but when he got to the stop decided to keep walking—treading the pavement, smelling the grass, seeing the streets, the sky, the ground of Imogen’s world.

  By the time he reached his hotel it was night, and he treated himself to an expensive meal in the hotel restaurant. He was in a celebratory mood and yet a thread of shame ran through his excitement. No matter how affectionate it might be, there was something a little unsavoury about the way he had followed her.

  By way of redemption he spent all of Friday in the Baltimore public library outlining his novel.

  * * *

  —

  On Saturday, he followed Imogen and her family to the market. If a good opportunity presented itself, he would speak to them—this was his resolution when he started out, but he rapidly abandoned it. There were four of them, as together as four petals on a flower, and he knew there was no place for him in their world.

  He took a seat up front where he could steal glances at them in the driver’s wide mirror. The little boy sat on Imogen’s lap, the little girl on her father’s. Twins. He remembered something he had forgotten: that Imogen herself had been born a twin, that her twin had died of a fever. He remembered the sorrow in Imogen’s face when she had told him about it. Now she straightened the cap on her little boy’s head and kissed his brow, causing him to squirm. Imogen laughed and looked up, her eyes making contact, via the mirro
r, with Quentin’s. Quentin blinked and looked away, and when he glanced back up at the mirror she was saying something to her husband.

  He had done a little more detective work and now knew her husband’s name and that he also worked at the Phipps and was the author of many papers on innate behaviour. Quentin recalled Imogen’s admiration—hero worship, really—of the great figures in medicine. This man would have her respect; the two of them would enjoy the pleasure of shared experience. They would have common friends and colleagues, know each other’s days to the hour and minute, understand each other’s ambitions and frustrations. Love would be easy.

  Imogen’s daughter, contented and secure on her papa’s lap, pointed at something outside the streetcar and both parents smiled. He didn’t see the physical charms of Kromer. His features were bland, and he had something of a know-all look about him. Like so many men, you only noticed him because of the woman he was with.

  The two of them had lapsed into a shared quiet now. Imogen’s features took on the slightly sorrowful cast he remembered so well—her lovely melancholy, he’d always considered it. Lovely because eloquent. Lovely because temporary. Lovely because curable by him, or at least the young him. But she had others to cure it now.

  The streetcar rumbled into the market area and the Kromer family roused themselves. They would be getting off here for their Saturday shopping. Quentin turned in his seat to watch—little girl aloft in father’s arms, little boy guided down the streetcar step by Imogen who, somewhere along the road, had become her own guardian angel. And so he remained seated in the streetcar and watched them wade into the colourful crowds of shoppers and sellers, another happy family forming a tribe unto itself, needing no other.

  * * *

  —

  When Christmas came, Imogen and Carl agreed not to exchange presents—to save money, they told each other. The only thing that made it bearable was that Carl elected to leave them and spend the holiday with his parents in Pennsylvania. The twins’ disappointment quickly turned to crankiness and despite the toys, the tree, and Imogen’s attempts to be cheerful, they had more than the usual number of spats.

  In January Imogen continued to shuttle back and forth between Baltimore and Trenton. Although there were times when the pen and paper in her hand seemed to belong to someone else, or when the words she was typing would go in and out of focus, she kept working. How was it possible that her increasingly damaged heart was not visible for all to see? How could it not be as vivid as fire? Her husband hated her. The man with whom she had thought to share her life could now not bear to be in the same room with her. And by a bitter alchemy this disdain was transmuted into self-loathing. She was an ugly, unwanted woman with sagging breasts and a depressive personality. Who could blame a vigorous young man for his contempt?

  Her self-respect could only be salvaged by her career; she would finish the Trenton report and she would publish. Sometimes, on board the train, she forgot which direction she was heading. In a way it didn’t matter; her emotional arrival point was the same. If travelling away from Carl, she was bound for the tortures of jealousy and suspicion. Cynthia Bee had moved away, but jealousy was like an allergic response in that, once triggered, it is all too easily triggered again with less and less provocation. Her days in Trenton were soured by the near certainty that Carl was engaged in wild sexual encounters with every female who came his way. Knowing that this was irrational, that he was far too busy for such liaisons, made no difference.

  The train was taking her home, but it was to a home in ruins. Carl only spoke to her when it was something to do with the children. He resolutely kept up the façade of normalcy, and even happiness, when the twins were around. Also in public. And she found herself responding in kind. Her acting talent sickened her. If Carl had made the slightest effort to repair things between them it wouldn’t have hurt so much, but he made none—no kind words, no affectionate glances, not so much as a raised eyebrow of inquiry—so that these public displays of false intimacy were all the more excruciating. See? he seemed to say, I know how it is done, I know how loving husbands treat their wives but I am not one. I can do this forever, he seemed to be saying, how long can you stand it?

  At home she had the children to remind her she was needed, she was loved. Sometimes she hugged them so tightly they would cry, “Mumma, I can’t breathe!” At Trenton she had her report to remind her that she had a career, a possible future. She struggled on with the inadequate help of Mrs. Boxer. She worked the phone and the typewriter and watched the snow build up on her office windowsill—New Jersey had a different idea of winter than Maryland—and at last her work was done.

  Over the past few weeks, slush and ice had made driving more harrowing, but even so, Imogen hated to part with the Ford. She sold it to one of the Trenton residents and lugged her carpet bag for the last time out of her little closet in the criminal wing, hearing for the last time those wails and curses and cries. Fifty-three pages of charts and figures and statistics, page after page of analysis, supplemented with four bound volumes of case reports, all of it amounting to a thorough indictment of Rupert Bingham’s “detoxication” treatments. She had not yet written the conclusion, but it was inescapable. His claims were empty boasts, his cures were fictions. She said goodbye to Mrs. Boxer, who, having slowly come to realize the damage Imogen was going to inflict on her “saviour,” gave her a curt nod in return.

  It was heartening to know that her work would improve the lives of hundreds of patients, that it would even save some of those lives. But as she made her way to the asylum gate, she glanced over at Bingham’s house and felt a surge of pity. Of all afflictions, self-delusion had to be one of the worst. Bingham had committed the crime of believing himself to be a great man, of being blind to his own blindness. Had this failing been confined to his own fortunes that would be one thing, but it affected all the patients who came under his care.

  As she stopped to switch her bag from one hand to the other, Imogen felt she should say goodbye to Dr. Bingham and his wife. It was the correct thing to do, and it was nearly noon; he would be home for lunch. On the other hand, Bingham had been avoiding her these past couple of weeks, the armour of his denial having, apparently, finally been pierced by the power of the evidence she had amassed. She would be leaving no friends in this place. She trudged on toward the gatehouse, where the taxi duly arrived a few minutes later. As they drove away she turned for a last look at the grand gate of stone and iron—for so many a dread portal—to the Trenton State Hospital for the Insane.

  A dreary winter rain was pouring over Baltimore when Imogen’s train pulled in. Even though it was late afternoon, she went straight from the station to the Phipps. Dr. Ganz was delighted to see her, urging her to sit down and summoning Mr. Penn to bring them coffee.

  He examined the latest pages of the typescript, shaking his head as he did so. He tapped the last chart and said, “This is devastating. You’re absolutely sure your numbers are correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So much for his 85 percent cure rate.”

  “It’s 12 percent,” Imogen said. “And only 8 percent are even improved—less than a third of what most state asylums are reporting.”

  Dr. Ganz bent his head to the papers once more, absently stroking his beard. “And he can’t even say it’s because they refused treatment, or their families took them out before he was finished.”

  “Far from it. The patients who received all the treatment he recommended have in fact fared the worst. Forty-three percent of them are dead.”

  “Yes, I’m looking at it right here.”

  “Only 13 percent can be considered recovered, and 40 percent of them are still in hospital.”

  “Devastating,” Ganz said again. “The more treatment they received, the worse the outcomes.”

  “It’s all the abdominal procedures. He seems to have no idea of the difference between the mere presence of bacteria and an actual infection of the tissues. But he operates on them and they di
e of postoperative shock, pulmonary edema, cardiac dilation—not to mention severe diarrhea. The colon I saw him resect showed no obvious sign of infection, and the patient had not been complaining of abdominal pain. She died too. Peritonitis.”

  They sipped their coffee in silence for a few moments. Dr. Ganz put the papers aside with a sigh.

  “Well, on the bright side—if there is a bright side—you’ve completed a first-class piece of research. You must be very pleased.”

  “I’m certainly relieved it’s over.”

  “But more than that! It’s a sterling piece of work—a milestone in your career.”

  “How soon do you think we can publish?”

  “How long will it take you to write your conclusion?”

  “No time at all. I could have it to you within a day or two. And then you’ll allow me to seek a publisher?”

  “Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.”

  “I don’t understand—what else could there be?”

  “Just a formality or two. My agreement with Trenton’s medical board is that the report cannot be considered complete until Dr. Bingham has had a chance to read it and make any comments or corrections he feels necessary.”

  “But he’s been reading it from the start. He knows very well what’s in it, and so far he’s made minimal comments.”

  Ganz dipped his head and stared thoughtfully at his desk. “Yes, he has been rather silent in response to my letters.”

  “Chief, I don’t understand why we need Dr. Bingham’s signature on the report. In fact, any involvement by him would seem to undercut its value as independent research.”

  “He does not have to agree with its conclusions—that goes without saying—but there must be reasonable agreement concerning the cases we’ve studied and the statistical methods used.”

  “I can’t see him rushing to agree to that.”