by M. J. Cates
“Indeed he has not. I’ve written to the board asking for a meeting to be arranged, so the three of us can go over everything.”
“Very well. You’ll have my conclusion by tomorrow or the next day.”
“Excellent. Thank you.” Dr. Ganz rose from his seat and showed her to the door. “And once again, congratulations!”
Imogen went to the lab and sat at the big desk. She had been rethinking her introduction on the train and wanted to rewrite it before she forgot. She typed and retyped the pages. It was crucial to word it in a purely objective way, and yet not compromise a clear statement of the findings. These were findings of fact, not bias, but until they read the study, no one else would know that. It was nearly nine-thirty when she got up from the desk and stretched to ease her back.
Outside, the rain hammered down on the streets of Baltimore. It rattled on the roof of the taxi and caused the aged driver to mutter curses at the wipers, overmatched by such a torrent. Two stalled streetcars blocked their way for ten minutes.
“I’m very anxious to get home,” Imogen said. “Do you suppose you could turn around and find another route?”
“I’m not going to do a U-turn. It’s illegal.”
“Surely not, under the circumstances.”
The driver twisted around and glared at her.
“Are you telling me how to drive?”
“I simply want to get home, if that’s all right.”
“No woman tells me how to drive.” He faced front once more. He said nothing further but Imogen could sense him fuming. The streetcars were eventually dislodged, and the driver responded to this release with a burst of speed and much careening. Still, when finally they reached Dukeland Street, he carried her carpet bag right up the front walk.
She tipped him, and as he thanked her, rain spattering off the bill of his tweed cap, she noticed that many of his teeth were missing. He might be a former resident of Trenton, she thought, and realized that for the rest of her life she would wonder this about anyone with missing teeth.
She went inside and set her bag down and shut the door behind her. She stood for a moment contemplating the stillness of her home, its familiar front-hall smells of floor polish and children’s boots. She took off her coat and hung it in the closet. The children’s boots were not there.
She was struck by a sense of déjà vu. The house felt wrong—as wrong as it felt the night of Cynthia. It was overheated, and there was no motion whatsoever in the air. Carl always slept with the window open—she had never known him to close it—and the house being draughty, you could usually feel cool damp fronds of air wafting in from outside.
She went into the kitchen and switched on the light. Carl’s coffee grinder was not on the counter. On the rectangular mat beside the back door there were still no children’s boots, or shoes of any kind. She proceeded slowly, numbly, along the corridor with one hand extended to meet the doorknob of the twins’ bedroom.
She flipped on the light and saw the two beds, neatly made.
Gone.
She crossed the corridor and threw open the bedroom door.
Gone.
A note on the bed.
Imogen stood immobilized in the doorway. A wave of nausea rippling through her. She went to the bed and sat on the edge—carefully, as if it might shatter. She picked up the note and switched on the lamp.
Imogen,
Don’t worry—I have not stolen the children. You and I are not happy together and never will be. Therefore I have moved out and we take up once again our separate lives. Call me at LA 2495 when you get home and you can arrange to pick up the twins.
Carl
She read the note again, and then a third time. She got up and opened the closet. Every shirt, every tie, every hat of his was gone; nothing of him remained.
She began to pace back and forth across the bedroom, to the window, where the rain slid down in rivulets, to the closet, to the doorway, and back to the hated bed. It was nearly midnight; Carl would be asleep. She went to the living room, left hand pressed to her heart until she used it to snatch up the telephone.
Carl answered sleepily. “Hello?”
“Bastard.”
“Imogen. You’re home. I—”
“If you live to be a hundred and five,” Imogen said, “you will never know the depth of my hatred for you.”
She hung up blindly, the bulky handset crashing to the floor.
“I will not cry,” she said as she stumbled once more along the corridor to the bed and collapsed across it, already weeping at the world receding behind her, and howling at the life to come.
19
The snow came late that year to Lake Placid. December usually meant the hills would be blinding white against a startling blue sky, but here it was the end of January and they’d had only a few soggy flakes of snow that dissolved the moment they touched the ground. Although the temperature had dropped to the point where Quentin required his woollen overcoat, the smell of wet leaves and soaking pine was rich and constant, so that the feeling of autumn persisted almost as if the little town had for once been granted a dispensation from winter.
He walked the wet streets, umbrella tapping the sidewalk, up before most of the residents, with the reliable exceptions of the milkman and the baker’s deliveryman. He preferred to rise while it was still dark, liked to be abroad when the first light oozed from the hilltops, and the mist still hovered above the lake. A couple of miles, and then home to a breakfast of eggs and toast and coffee.
His father’s death had left him with a modest inheritance—a place to live and an income that was just short of enough to live on. His books more than made up the difference. Not many men were so fortunate—few soldiers and even fewer writers. But he was often impossibly lonely. He wished for Jack Wisdom’s company—a wish that was always accompanied by a spark of anger and a stab of guilt. He had been too harsh, he had not thought things through. He thought of Stokely and Pratt and Mac, but he knew that, with the possible exception of Mac, it wasn’t the individuals themselves he missed, but his affection for them. Outside the trenches, Jack Wisdom was the only man he’d ever loved; other friends were mere acquaintances by comparison.
He yearned far too much for human contact. And for women. He thought of Margaret Morley’s black hair and pale Irish features; he thought of Imogen. Often enough he found himself rapt at the images in the Sears catalogues his father had left behind. It baffled him that a mere drawing, a mere line, the merest oblique C of a nippleless breast could excite him so.
His plan was to finish this novel and then move to Manhattan, just as he’d said he would. Since his return from Baltimore he had been working on his Phipps story, his female psychiatrist. Despite the surface debt to Imogen, he found that writing the story took him away from thoughts of her. His character did things the real Imogen had never done, said things she would never say, and so the two—in his mind, as the pages piled up—bore less and less resemblance to each other.
One of the simplest tasks—selecting a name for his heroine—proved to be one of the most difficult. Eventually he settled on Grace, and even wrote several chapters calling her Grace, but found his Jesuit-moulded mind could not get past the religious overtones. He changed it to Gwen. It felt truncated and insufficient after Imogen, but he liked the Arthurian overtones.
Gwen, unlike Imogen, was in love with Bannock, an extremely manly man—a man with a taste for danger. Bannock enlists in the United States Army roughly thirty seconds after Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war—not out of any fantasy of suicide but for the pleasure of shooting barbarians. Gwen, although terrified for his life, accepts that he must go, knowing that he would be miserable on the sidelines.
Soon after she joins the Phipps, a young soldier is admitted—a possible schizophrenic, possible transient psychotic, and, according to the army medical officer who transferred him, likely malingerer. There is no question of shell shock because he has not yet left Fort Meade. Quentin chose not to des
cribe the young man, whose name is Hansen, but Gwen perceives him as extraordinarily beautiful. The question—the only question as far as the army is concerned: is he faking?
At first Gwen has no doubt that he is suffering from mental illness. No one could fake the Byzantine flights of speech he comes up with, the dizzying illogic, the sudden paranoid “insights” followed by weeks of immobility, and not actually be mad. And yet Hansen enjoys lucid periods, all too brief, during which the charming and useful young man he might have been comes vividly alive. He is a big reader, can remember the plots and characters of Charles Dickens and quote passages of Shakespeare, not to mention Imogen’s favourites, Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift. But then it is as if a trap door opens and this smiling literary man drops from view, to be replaced by the drearily insane individual who occupies the same bed on West One.
The story had reached the point now where Hansen’s delusions and hallucinations begin to seem suspiciously poetic. Gwen starts to perceive a coherence and beauty in them that goes far beyond the ironclad solipsism of the psychotic, but just as she starts to think he is faking she also begins to suspect she is in love with him. This at a time when men are returning from the front horribly mutilated—missing eyes, jaws, limbs—and disfigured beyond all understanding. Those who aren’t physically burned and broken are mentally so, quivering wraiths barely able to clutch a cigarette without dropping it.
Quentin was mulling whether to kill Gwen’s boyfriend off or have him come back hideously wounded. What he wanted above all was for Gwen to protect Hansen by finding him insane. What would happen beyond that he did not know, and he sensed an impasse just up the road. Unless you counted the elements of war, which were peripheral to the main story, it was very much a Jeremy West book.
The great advantage of being Jeremy West was that Jeremy West was not in love with Imogen Lang. A state devoutly to be wished because Quentin could lose an hour, even two, imagining life not just with Imogen but with her children. He saw himself—wickedly, he knew—in her husband’s place, amusing them, teaching them, comforting them when they were ill or hurt or sad. He imagined reading to them in bed—he in the middle with an enormous illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland propped on his chest, a twin cuddled on either side, doing funny voices for the March Hare and the Red Queen and the Mock Turtle. And in the other bed—for there must be two little beds in the twins’ room—lies his wife, Imogen, who looks on smiling, or listens with eyes closed, savouring Carroll’s gorgeous nonsense, her children’s rapt attention, her own colossal good fortune in being at the centre of this blessed, loving family.
He had been immobilized over his typewriter by these thoughts for a good ninety minutes one day when he shook his head, gave his face a dry wash, and stood up. He stretched, looking out the window—hill, town, lake—and gave a yell for no reason but to clear his head.
A copy of the Lake Placid News lay on the table. He picked it up and scanned the articles. Al Jolson had come to town to perform a benefit for the Girls’ Industrial School. The University of New Hampshire winter sports team had arrived, apparently confident that snow would surely follow. One headline concerned the appearance of a black bear in Ausable Forks. Bruin Pays Early Call on Village, the subhead ran, Routed by Four-Pawed Dog Without Argument. Most days, Quentin enjoyed the local news, right down to the notices to creditors, but since his return from Baltimore he found it trivial, precious, priggish, and a great many other things that irritated him.
He sat down again and rolled a fresh piece of paper into the Royal and wrote the following to his editor: Dear Griffin, I’m definitely moving to New York. Where’s a good place to live?
20
Three weeks into February, winter seemed barely to have grazed the city of Baltimore. People strolled about in summer-weight suits, and in many places—Johns Hopkins among them—the grass was still deep green. But Imogen had never been so cold. Never, growing up through all those Chicago winters, had she found it so difficult to get warm. At night, after the twins had gone to sleep, she would curl up on the couch fully clothed and under an eiderdown, and still her fingers, her toes, the tip of her nose were frigid, as if she had just staggered in from a sleigh ride. She recognized this as a transformation wrought by the chemistry of high emotion. It made her think of all the ice queens and frozen caves of myth and fairy tale, literary material she had come to re-explore through the works of Freud and Jung.
This same dark magic had transformed her beloved Phipps, her former castle, into an icy keep. The inviting red brick of its exterior was now the colour of rust and blood, the gleaming marble that had promised stability and protection was now comfortless. The hundred feet of hallway between her lab and Carl’s might as well have been miles, and the marble itself seemed despair transformed into matter.
Her colleagues—to a man, to a woman (except Lila Quinn)—were kind. None of them said anything directly, but she registered the unlikely notes of cheer or warmth they added to the most routine exchanges with her. She had become that pitiable thing, the abandoned woman. She thought about picking up and moving away, anywhere but here, but she had always thought she would stay at the Phipps, and had never put out a single query about work elsewhere. She had recently been surprised by a job offer that arrived, thanks to a friend of Donna’s, from the state courthouse (juvenile division) in New York City. It paid reasonably well, but the work—assessing the psychological states of children and parents for court purposes—did not excite her. She would have no connection to an educational institute, no connection to the famous Phipps. But she kept bumping into Carl at work and it was agony.
She met with Dr. Ganz in his office and asked him outright why Carl had not been fired.
“Oh, dear,” Ganz said. “You are under enormous strain, aren’t you.”
“I’m in an impossible position. The entire staff know that he slept with his graduate student. I had almost reconciled myself to living with that. But now that he’s abandoned me the looks of pity have become unbearable.”
“Oh, not pity, I think. Empathy. Concern. You must know that you are very well liked—and very highly regarded—in this place. I think it only natural people should sympathize with you and wish for you happier circumstances, don’t you?”
“When Robert Taunton left his wife you got him out of here quick enough. You and the board were adamant that his behaviour was grounds for dismissal—as were all the other institutions that refused to hire him.”
“That’s true. You know what I personally think of Mr. Kromer’s behaviour.”
“And what about the man Taunton replaced?”
“Donald Lyme.”
“The minute it came to light he’d been in a brothel he was out that door.”
“Yes, but—”
“And that didn’t even involve a student!”
“Lyme broke the law. That’s why he was banished. He wasn’t right for the job anyway—far too theoretical, too meditative.”
“But that’s not why he was fired.”
“Look, Dr. Lang, it grieves me to see you in such pain, but there are other considerations.”
“What considerations? What are these considerations?”
“Mr. Kromer has become very valuable to this institution.”
“Robert Taunton was the most famous psychologist in the world. You couldn’t wait to let him go.”
“Mr. Taunton’s work, his writing, were very much out of harmony with our aims here at the Phipps. His behaviour—unlike Mr. Kromer’s—was reported in all the papers. He damaged our reputation. There was never any question of his remaining on staff.”
“But this is different?”
“Well, yes. Perhaps you have forgotten, but when your husband’s indiscretion—”
“That’s a nice word for it.”
Dr. Ganz cocked his head to one side, eyebrows raised.
“When your difficulties came to light,” he said, “I did my utmost to deal with them in a way that would cause the least turmo
il for you. I arranged for the transfer of Miss Bee, and spoke sharply to Mr. Kromer about my disappointment in him. I certainly considered dismissing him but I had no indication that it was what you wanted nor any reason to suppose it would serve you best. If he were unemployed your circumstances would be all the harder, would they not?”
“Well, by moving out he has created two households where there was one.”
“Just so.”
“It’s perhaps not professional of me to mention it, but you must see, sir—this is agony for me.”
“I do. And it pains me. Truly. But it is now several months since the affair with—”
“Two months.”
“I believe it is closer to three. In either case, enough time has elapsed that dismissal would now be seen as being at your say-so, rather than on the wishes of the officers of this institution.”
“Do you want me to go, is that it?”
“Not at all. You mustn’t think that.”
“Because I can’t bear this.”
“You underestimate yourself. You’re a resilient person. A strong character.”
“Am I?”
“And look. I do have some good news.” He held up a typewritten letter.
Imogen took the letter and scanned it. It was from the Trenton Hospital medical board.
“At long last,” Ganz said. “Dr. Bingham will be here within the week. We’ll thrash out our differences and the way will be cleared for publication. It’s not all darkness.”
* * *
—
The agony Imogen experienced at work was all but matched by the agony of being at home with two young children. She had underestimated how much their happiness depended on Carl’s being at hand. With her father gone, and with her mother so upset, Charlotte became whiny and even reverted occasionally to sucking her thumb. Aubrey was sullen, listless, and, in contrast to his former sunny disposition, tearful.