by M. J. Cates
It was clear by the third or fourth chapter that the author had not embarked on a realistic depiction of mental illness. Hansen, whose madness takes the form of strange, lyrical monologues, is also subject to lucid periods that occur far more frequently, and conveniently, than would be observed in a real-world psychosis. Imogen was not so literal-minded as to allow this to impinge on her enjoyment. And she took great pleasure in the dialogue as Gwen tried to uncover what lay behind those poetic flights of speech.
The young psychiatrist is in no hurry to diagnose her patient, having been trained by her stern director that finding a category was the least interesting chore in psychiatric care. That’ll be Donna again, Imogen thought; West must have taken good notes.
Sometimes Hansen exhibits a kind of reverse Capgras syndrome, “recognizing” all the other patients on the ward from previous admissions to other hospitals (hospitals to which he has never been admitted, in cities the other patients have never seen). He greets them warmly as if they are old friends, leaving them bewildered, bemused, and in several cases shaken. Other times he is euphoric, exhibiting signs that would be noted on his chart as ideas of reference and pressure of speech. At still other times, Hansen seems to believe that he is a ghost, that he in fact died some years ago in a train accident on the Canadian border.
“But you’re breathing,” Gwen points out. “You’re able to talk.”
This provokes from Hansen an elegant monologue on “all the dead can teach us,” and the passage was so lovely that Imogen read it three times.
“Would you agree with me,” Gwen says, “that dead men do not bleed?”
Oh no, Imogen thought. Don’t try logic on him. Hansen thinks a moment before nodding an affirmative. “Yes. That is true.”
“Here, then. Let me prick your finger and we’ll see if you bleed.” Hansen offers his hand, and she pricks his little finger, a scarlet bead welling at the tip.
“Obviously they do bleed,” Hansen remarks, and refuses to speak for the rest of that day.
During one of Hansen’s lucid periods, Gwen takes him for a walk in the Phelps’s cloistered courtyard. As they are sitting on a bench by the fountain, a monarch butterfly alights on Gwen’s sleeve, multicoloured wings flexing open and closed, open and closed. They watch it in silence for a moment, then Gwen observes, “He’s probably tired. You know, they travel thousands of miles.”
“Astounding,” Hansen says. “So fragile a thing—hardly more than a bit of leaf—and yet such power.”
Imogen smiled at the image, remembering a day long ago when she and Quentin saw a butterfly in—where was it?—Lincoln Park. The next passage made her catch her breath.
Gwen lifted her arm, so that the sunlight lit the beautiful wings like stained glass.
“Hinge,” Hansen said, opening and closing his pale hand, four fingers flapping open and shut against his thumb. “Hinge,” he said again. “Excellent word.”
He held a forefinger up before her face, curling and uncurling it in an upright beckoning gesture.
“Hinge,” he said gravely, as if about to read a monograph on the subject.
* * *
—
It was Imogen’s own memory laid upon the page. She read the passage again. Any novel reader will occasionally come across a plot development or narrative situation that is remarkably similar to a moment in his or her own life. But Imogen was experiencing something quite different. This was the moment itself clipped from her life and pasted onto the page.
She leaned back against the pillows, her breathing rapid and shallow, trying to think what it could mean. She had never described this memory to anyone; it was the sort of fleeting thing that only has meaning to the rememberer. It was conceivable that Quentin had related it to someone, but Quentin had been dead for ten years. What sort of person would retain such a tiny, second-hand memory for so long a time—and vividly enough to reproduce it in a book? A novelist?
No, Imogen decided. I’m being silly. Far more likely it would just be a remarkable coincidence, in which an author had exactly described a moment from her own life. The only detail in which it differed was that Gwen, unlike Imogen on that day long ago, in a park in Chicago, does not burst into a fit of giggles. Remarkable, yes. But impossible?
Imogen shook her head and read on. Whereas before she had been absorbed in the entwined fates of Gwen and Hansen, she now noticed herself slipping out of the story and even skimming ahead for more similarities. I’m having ideas of reference, she thought, but the self-diagnosis did not stop her from plunging on.
Hansen writes obsessively, furiously, in a journal he refuses to show anyone, but one day a nurse finds a page he has thrown away and brings it to Gwen. It was a list of rhymes: Gwen, then, amen, again, wren, fen, pen, and so on, ending with Imogen. Her name in black and white. Imogen’s earlier shock of recognition returned, though as a less happy shock this time, carrying with it a low-level sense of dread, as if someone had laid a cold hand on her shoulder. Hansen writes on graph paper, just as Quentin used to.
That question of probability again. The use of graph paper was not limited to Quentin, after all. Even if you allowed that he was a dead poet who wrote on graph paper and Hansen was a fictional poet who thought he was dead and used the same stationery. Nor was the name Imogen unique to Imogen Lang. Another coincidence, less striking than the first.
In the next chapter, however, Gwen is rooting through a cabinet looking for something, when she comes across an old photograph. On the back, in her mother’s hand: Gwen, aged 7. The image itself shows a little girl in a long dark dress, and around her neck, hanging from a white ribbon, is a tiny notebook and pencil in which “she printed the words she feared to speak.” Like Imogen, the child Gwen is tongue-tied.
“This is too strange,” Imogen said aloud. “Far too strange.”
In her entire life, she had told only three people of her childhood affliction: Quentin, Jonas Ganz, and Donna Artemis. Donna had actually met Jeremy West, but Imogen could conceive of no reason why her friend would have told him such a personal confidence. She would not; she knew it was a tender spot in Imogen’s childhood, and she had received the confidence with warmth and sympathy. So too had Quentin, along with writerly curiosity.
“You poor girl,” he had said. “You must’ve felt completely bottled up, like a little grasshopper.”
Dr. Ganz had seen it as an asset in her dealing with depressed patients.
None of them would have told anyone.
Obviously she had no copyright on being tongue-tied any more than on any other physical trait. But a coincidence on this level—a female psychiatrist at the “Phelps,” who was tongue-tied until the age of seven?
There was nothing further for several chapters. Gwen finds it increasingly difficult to maintain her medical objectivity, and her relations with Hansen become more intense—more Jeremy West–like. It is on one of Hansen’s lucid days, when Gwen has just commented gently on a painful memory her patient has related (and probably invented), that Hansen blurts out, “I wish you were my sister! How I wish you were!” Gwen lets that hang in the air a full minute before saying softly, “I wonder why you said sister?”
Hansen gave her a puzzled look.
“As opposed to what?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“As opposed to fiancée? Daughter? Wife? Concubine? Queen?”
“Sometimes we choose one word when we fear—often unconsciously—we can’t say another. Perhaps because it is too frightening.”
“I said sister because I don’t have a sister.”
It was too much. Five pages later Hansen is saying “certain is my middle name,” and a chapter after that he describes breaking up with the great love of his life “on a tiny island, in a tiny park, across a tiny bridge. No doubt it was a tiny event in the grand scheme of things, but that bridge, when we crossed it, felt to me like the Bridge of Sighs.” Quentin had kept a journal. That must be it. Quentin had kept a diary of some sort and
somehow it had fallen into someone else’s hands. Imogen got out of bed and threw on her dressing gown and went into the kitchen and dialed Donna’s number.
“Donna? Donna, wake up, it’s Imogen.”
“Imogen. Darling, it’s—it’s three-fifteen in the—”
“I know. Sorry, but I need you to remember something.”
“Remember something. Jesus. Give me a minute.”
“What does Jeremy West look like?”
“What?”
“Jeremy West.”
“Why could you possibly want to know what—”
“Just tell me, please. Whatever you remember.”
“Imogen, this is so unlike you. Why are you so—”
“Donna, please.”
A deep sigh on the line. Then: “He was tall. Over six feet, anyway. Lots of curly brown hair. Very pale. And he walked…carefully, as if he’d been injured. Like a war injury.”
“And his face. What about his face?”
“Bony, I suppose you could say. Bony, pale, wide brow—and a cute little mouth. A girl’s mouth, really.”
“Dear God.”
“Dear God what?”
“I thought you were going to describe a person I used to know—a man named Jack Wisdom. He was a friend of Quentin’s.”
“Quentin, your old suitor? The one who joined up?”
“They were very close.”
“But you said I didn’t describe him. This Jack person.”
“No. You didn’t. You described someone else entirely.”
23
Quentin moved to New York City shortly after finishing his first draft of If True and took a lease on an apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street. It was small, with only one bedroom and a galley kitchen, but it did offer a partial view of the Hudson. He had feared New York’s noise and crowds would be inhibiting, but in fact his block between Columbus and Amsterdam was quite tranquil, and Central Park was practically next door.
Far from inhibiting, he found the streets of Manhattan with their stupendous variety of characters inspiring. He enjoyed the proximity to his publisher, and worked closely with Griffin Burke on a second, third, and even a fourth exhausting draft. Griffin invited him to lunches and dinners where he could talk endlessly about books with congenial colleagues. If True was published to good reviews and brisk, if not spectacular, sales. It was time to think of another story.
He spent many hours in the park, just thinking, and even more in the New York Public Library, flipping through the endless supply of periodicals and letting ideas drift in and out of his mind. He was much happier than he had been in Lake Placid. There was such a thing, he had come to realize, as too much solitude. New York with its busyness and plenitude offered more distractions than one could ever hope to indulge in. He developed an appreciation for Broadway and considered writing a play.
His happiness was shaken, however, when he found, quite by accident, that Imogen, too, was now living in New York. He was flipping through an issue of Collier’s, and came across an article about the growing profession of psychoanalysis, which included a sidebar about the inroads women were making into the profession. “New York psychiatrist Imogen Lang” was quoted on the New York Psychoanalytic Society’s training process (calling it “rigorous, thorough, and very rewarding”).
To his dismay, it started him thinking once more about possibly seeing her. This was upsetting. After his brief haunting of her world in Baltimore he had managed to go home, write his novel, and clear his mind of her again. He didn’t want to be thinking of her, he wanted his own life, thank you, and the peace of mind to write his books. But the knowledge that she was so close nagged at him. He looked her up in the city directory and found she was living on Tenth Street, but could find no entry for her husband. He thought about this for a moment, and considered that the most likely explanation was that Kromer’s position at the Phipps required that he remain there until some later date.
In an effort to clarify matters, he wrote out his thoughts and feelings on a sheet of graph paper. Looking at these notes, he decided that the main reason she could still destabilize him like this was the knowledge that she thought he was dead. Donna Artemis, after all, had told him Imogen blamed herself. He wanted her to know he was alive, that he had not killed himself, that he had not only survived but was thriving.
That much was true, he decided. But he also knew himself well enough to know that this might simply be an attempt to insert himself into her life, which was going along perfectly well without him. Based on this assessment, he came up with a plan. He would indeed let her know he was alive, but he would also go away. A grand tour would be just the thing to clear his head once more and with any luck generate fresh ideas for his next novel. He began consulting guidebooks, and it was not many days before he found himself on Tenth Street, not twenty yards from Imogen’s front door.
It was Saturday. She might be home, she might not. Of course it would be a shock for her to see him again, but nothing she wouldn’t get over in the space of an hour or two.
He mounted the steps of her building. It was a typical New York brownstone, indistinguishable from the others on the block and divided into several apartments. He stepped into the vestibule with its six brass mailboxes. I. Lang was typed onto a tiny paper rectangle, the a out of alignment with the other letters. If her husband was travelling back and forth from Baltimore, surely they would put both names on the door. In any case, it was no proper concern of his.
No. He couldn’t do it; he hadn’t the right.
He shook his head and trotted back down the front steps and headed toward the hubbub of Sixth Avenue and when he got to the corner he turned downtown and ordered his feet to keep marching, carrying him away from Imogen. It felt right. It felt intrepid and robust, the decision of a competent, intelligent male, obviously the healthy course to take.
Two hours later, the Cunard ticket agent slid his papers under the grille of the wicket. He was British, with a wide moustache and perfectly round wire-frame spectacles that made him look more than a little like Rudyard Kipling.
“Progress, sir, we have made progress. My apologies for the wait.”
“That’s all right,” Quentin said. “I’ve been reading your brochures.”
“Yes. Make one want to survey the world from China to Peru, don’t they?”
“I think for now I’ll just stick with England and the Lake District.”
The agent tapped the top sheet with a neatly manicured finger, pointing out the crucial items. “Second-class passage for one. Open-ended return. You’re quite sure you wouldn’t rather specify a date for your return journey?”
“Quite sure, thanks.”
“Very good, sir. You’re booked in a second-class cabin on the RMS Sylvania, departing from Pier 44, at 9:45 a.m. on 27 October, arriving Southampton, U.K., on 2 November. The Sylvania is a beautiful ship, recently refurbished. I’ve been on her myself. Splendid vessel.”
“As long as she gets me there.”
“Oh, a good deal more than that, I assure you.”
The clerk shuffled the papers, pointing again. “I’ve also reserved a seat for you on the express train to London Waterloo, arriving just after lunch. You are booked for three nights at the Lombard Hotel and after that I understand you’ll be fending for yourself.”
“That’s right.”
As the agent worked his way through the remaining data, Quentin allowed his mind to drift—now to his British editor, whom he had actually met, now to his French publisher, whom he had not met but with whom he had exchanged several warm letters. Jeremy West’s novels were more popular in France than in any other foreign-language territory—a prime reason for considering it as a later destination.
The clerk folded up the itinerary and Quentin wrote out a sizable cheque. The ticket was duly issued and enclosed in a handsome Cunard packet along with the other papers.
* * *
—
When he got back to Sixty-Seventh Street h
e took a small wooden box from the closet. It was a well-crafted thing of polished walnut with brass corners. He opened it and lifted out a slim bundle of letters and postcards. Several—the last ones Imogen had written to him—were painful. But he had also preserved playful notes written during holidays. They fanned out on the bed like a canasta hand, the loops and curls of Imogen’s writing as evocative to him as the curls at the nape of her neck. He picked up a postcard, a picture of Chicago’s Navy Pier, and ripped it in half, then into quarters. The next was a pale-blue envelope with her parents’ address printed on the flap. Without opening it, he tore it once, twice, and dropped it on the bed.
“I could use a fireplace,” he said aloud, as if the landlord were right beside him taking complaints. But the apartment, being steam-heated, offered no fireplace to feed with his scraps of memory, and so the pile of folds and corners, loops and curls, grew until he had destroyed every letter and every card.
All that remained was a single photograph of Imogen, much creased with handling, and missing one corner. She was sitting in a deck chair at some outdoor event, perhaps a concert. Whoever had held the camera must have said her name, because Imogen has turned around to face him over the back of the chair, a look of inquiry on her face. Although seventeen or eighteen at the time, her features had the openness, the guilelessness, of someone much younger. On the back of the deck chair were stencilled the words NOT TO BE TAKEN AWAY.
Quentin tore it in half and then quickly tore it again and again until the pieces could be reduced no further. Even as he engaged in this destruction he was aware that its very thoroughness contradicted its purpose—only a man still emotionally entangled would care enough to do it. He found a paper bag in a kitchen cupboard and brought it to the bed. Using both hands he scooped up the tattered pieces of his life and dropped them into the bag.