by M. J. Cates
She went to the front room and slid the window closed. Outside, she saw the mailman coming up the street with his enormous shoulder bag. Perhaps he was bringing her cheque from the court. She picked up her keys and went down to the first floor to meet him, but when she stepped out onto the stoop it was not the mailman coming up the walk, but Quentin. He came towards her with gangly, careful steps and his bright, wide smile.
“Quentin,” she said, and took hold of the rail. A quiver ran through her voice, though whether with laughter or with tears she could not have said. “Quentin, you really must stop doing this. I can’t take any more.”
“Me either,” he said. “I’d sooner go back to Vimy.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Imogen said. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
He was standing in front of her now, tall, smiling down at her. The mailman came up the stairs and Quentin stepped back to let him pass.
“Afternoon,” the mailman said, and they returned his greeting as he vanished into the vestibule.
“I’m going to wait until he’s done,” Quentin said.
“And then what?”
“Then I’m going to light the blue paper.”
“Blue paper?”
“It’s an army expression. Light blue paper and retire to a safe distance.”
The mailman emerged. They watched him hurry down the path and continue along the street. Quentin stepped closer.
“Miss Lang?” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Goodchild?”
“I’m sorry. Doctor Lang?”
“Yes, Mr. West?”
“I’m lighting the blue paper, and one of two things will happen. Either you will allow me to kiss you, or you will not. If you will not, then I shall immediately go mad and you’ll have to make arrangements for the asylum. If you do allow me to kiss you—”
Imogen, who had been watching his lovely mouth form these words, leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. He took her in his arms and they held each other until Quentin asked if they could eat at the Automat again.
* * *
—
Three weeks later they were standing in the shadow of a brontosaurus at the Museum of Natural History when Quentin asked Imogen to marry him. She said yes, and they kissed again. Charlotte and Aubrey, who had been misbehaving by running circles around a dyspeptic-looking platypus, came to a stop and stared, silent and open-mouthed.
On a blustery afternoon in the last week of November Imogen made a solitary pilgrimage to Central Park, walking up the winding path from the zoo to the boat pond. The pond was lazily circled by a gyre of mothers and nannies bundled in scarves, pushing prams. A low sun sent honeyed light and long shadows across the pavement and the benches where old men in caps read newspapers or barked at each other about sports and politics. Imogen walked past the pavilion to the statue of Alice and the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse, but it was being loudly conquered and claimed by red-faced children. She needed quiet.
She walked back down the other side of the pond and sat on a bench near the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, his bronze book open on his bronze knee. It wasn’t long before Laura appeared beside her.
“I must say, you’ve done very well for yourself,” she said brightly. “With Quentin at your side that’s one less ghost to deal with.”
“Actually two less,” Imogen said. “Father has definitely loosened his grip on me. I felt it the moment we left the cemetery. Funny that dying should make someone less of a ghost.”
“Maybe it’s your grip that has loosened on him.”
They sat for a while in peaceful silence. Nothing but bird sounds and a slight wind that rustled the fallen leaves, and somewhere in the distance an angry motorist honking a horn. Imogen felt a twinge of sadness, but Laura saved her from having to dwell on it.
“We have to talk about something, Imogen.”
“I know.”
“We have to talk about me.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you’ll be seeing me anymore.”
Imogen nodded. “It’s making me a little sad.”
“Come now, goose. You’ve every reason to be happy.”
“I know. And that’s the reason we must part. I don’t want to hold anything back from Quentin and, somehow, having a ghostly confidante doesn’t seem right.”
“You’re absolutely making the right choice, Imogen.”
“As long as you don’t hate me.” Imogen turned to her.
Laura was looking less substantial, more ethereal, but the great brown eyes shone with affection. “My darling sister, I could never hate you. Furthermore, I don’t think we should use the word part. I can’t actually go anywhere, can I? I’m already gone.”
“Long gone.”
“And you haven’t forgotten me.”
“And I won’t.”
“So perhaps, if you’ll just look away a moment—maybe at those children over there in the matching red coats—I’ll just…”
Imogen watched the two children—twins like her and Laura, and like her own, a boy and a girl, wearing tiny red car coats with matching caps fastened under their chins. They were taking stealthy steps toward a starling who seemed unconcerned. One of the children—the boy, naturally—made a little jump and the starling flapped off with a rude remark. Imogen turned once more, and felt rather than saw the last of Laura fade to the echoes of their laughter.
Later, as she walked across the park toward the sheep meadow, the fallen leaves thick beneath her feet and a deep blue calm above the palisade of hotels, she thought how strange it was, and yet how fitting, that once again her life was beginning with goodbye.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I had reason to consult the works of many authors in the course of writing this book. As is usual with the magpie nature of the novelist’s curiosity, I plucked a fact here, an anecdote there, and a single character might have had his or her beginnings from three or four different sources. Acknowledgement in such cases would only serve to bewilder, but there are three sources that I have relied on quite heavily.
For a broad view of psychiatry in general, Edward Shorter’s highly readable and informative History of Psychiatry (John Wiley & Sons, 1997) proved indispensable. More specifically, Madhouse, by Andrew Scull, paints a harrowing portrait of psychiatric treatment at the Trenton State Hospital from 1908 to 1933. And Susan D. Lamb’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer, Psychobiology and the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic” (Johns Hopkins, 2010), offers a fascinating description and analysis of daily life and treatment at the real institution behind my fictional one. Ms. Lamb kindly provided various clarifications via e-mail for which I’m enormously grateful.
Despite my plundering of these three authors’ historical accounts, they are in no way responsible for any errors of fact in Into That Fire.
MJC
TORONTO, 2018
MJ Cates was born in Canada, studied psychology and literature at the University of Toronto, and has lived at various times in South Kensington, North London, and Ottawa, writing many novels and winning several awards under another name.