The Three Roads

by Ross Macdonald

  When they were in his living-room he offered her a chair and a drink.

  “I’m afraid a drink would make me drunk. Can you possibly give me coffee?”

  “I make rather good Turkish coffee.”

  “Just some plain American coffee. Please.”

  “Certainly.” He disappeared into the kitchen, and she heard the sounds he made filling the coffee maker. “Shall I expect Lieutenant Taylor tomorrow?” he called.

  “I don’t know.” When she raised her voice it sounded dry and harsh. “He’s walked out on me.”

  “Walked out on you?” The bearded face appeared in the doorway, complete in itself, like John the Baptist’s head. She felt no certainty that it was attached to any body.

  “He’s trying to hunt down the murderer,” she said unreally to the disembodied head.

  “Yes?” The little trotting body followed the head into the room.

  “He left me yesterday as soon as we got here. I saw him this afternoon. He’d been wandering around the city looking for the man. I tried to talk him out of it, but he was obsessed with the idea of finding the murderer. He said justice is more important than anything else.” The room itself seemed disembodied now, a cube of soft light adrift in space, menaced by the jagged clamor of the stars.

  “Perhaps justice is as important as that to him,” said the other inmate of the wandering room. “His superego is remarkably strong, I think, even for an American.”

  “Superego!” she cried in the midst of bubbling laughter. “Can’t you forget your jargon for five minutes? We’re talking about a man. What right had you to tell him about his wife? It’s had a terrible effect on him. He thinks he’s found the murderer, and I don’t know what he’ll do.”

  Her uncontrollable laughter was suddenly displaced by tears. She covered her face and cried like a child. Klifter sat down and waited.

  After a while she raised her eyes and looked at him. He was sprawled carelessly in a corner of the chesterfield, one arm over the end, his right ankle resting on his left knee. His trouser leg had crept up above his garterless sock, showing a pale and spindly segment of his right leg.

  “I hear it boiling.” He jumped up and went into the kitchen. “You wish it black?”

  “Black, please.”

  He sat and watched her silently while she gulped the scalding coffee. It helped her to get rid of the end-of-the-world feeling she had had, the terrible immediate sense that the earth was whirling and plunging in open space. Wild dreams always had a whisky taste, but reality was bitter and hot and smelt of breakfast in her mother’s kitchen in Highland Park, Detroit.

  “Thank you,” she said when he poured her a second cup. “If you’ll show me where your bathroom is, I’d better fix my face.”

  Her faith in herself came back with the removal of eroded powder and the application of fresh lipstick, and her faith in the doctor came back along with it. When she returned to the living-room she told him about her visit from Bret’s mother.

  For the first time in their acquaintance she saw Klifter look surprised. “You are absolutely certain that this woman—what is her name?”

  “Mrs. Swanscutt.”

  “You are certain that this Mrs. Swanscutt is really his mother?”

  “No woman could act that part. No woman would want to. Anyway, what reason could she have for deceiving me?”

  “I do not know. There are many things about this case I do not know. There was no apparent reason for deception, yet your Bret has been a victim of deception for many years.”

  “His father must have told him his mother was dead. I can understand a man doing that under the circumstances.”

  “Yes, but he had a memory image, a pseudo memory, of his mother’s death. He described the occasion to me in some detail. He said he went into her room and found her cold body, the hands folded on the breast, the head on a white satin pillow.”

  “I don’t know what that false memory proves about his mind. If there’s something irreparably wrong with his mind there’s good reason for it. The thing he found that night must have been as shocking to him as death could be.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’m afraid I hate that woman,” Paula said. “It isn’t adultery I object to so much. It’s the sloppy kind of adultery that couldn’t be bothered to protect a child from its consequences.”

  “After twenty-five years the consequences have not yet ceased. I should have guessed the truth. I noticed those unreal elements in his story: the crossed hands, the satin pillow. Women do not normally sleep on white satin pillows, even in America. They do not arrange their hands in a funeral attitude when they die in their sleep. No doubt he saw the body of someone in a coffin when he was young—perhaps his aunt—and invented his mother’s death scene from the material to satisfy his mind.”

  “But why should his mind seek that kind of satisfaction?”

  “Evasion is a less clumsy word, and it may be closer to the truth. I cannot tell until I have talked with him at greater length and learned to know him better. He and I together must learn to know him. Still, let us suppose. Let us suppose that his father told him that his mother was dead. What might a small boy think? What might he not? He had blundered into her room in the middle of the night and found her doing something which he did not understand. It is very likely that he felt that in admitting this man to her bed his mother was cheating him of his filial rights. He ran at her in a childish fury and struck her. Then the lover and the cuckold fought in the hall, and the little boy ran back to his own room. In the morning his mother was gone.

  “Perhaps it was then, so soon, that his father told him she was dead. Death is a mystery to a child’s mind, an awesome mystery. To us, too, it is a mystery, an inexplicable accident, but to a child! May he not have imagined deep in his heart that he had killed his mother with his feeble fists? Such a secret, too dreadful to be spoken of to his stern father, may explain the genesis of his guilt. All of us are guilty, plagued by anxiety and self-loathing, but there are some who are more susceptible to this than others. Your Bret has always been oppressed by guilt, and I think we may have found its source. If we can re-establish in his memory that strange night, that queer morning, we should free his mind of its burden.”

  “You can’t,” Paula said. She sat upright in her chair with her cup held steadily on her knee.

  He stared myopically at her uncovered face. His white hands fluttered limply and returned to their perch on his knee. “You seem very certain,” he said mildly.

  “It seems to me that you’re the one who’s overcertain. You’re explaining a man’s life on the basis of very few facts, and even those facts are doubtful.”

  “All facts are doubtful. But consider my advantage. I have an actual witness, other than the patient, of the traumatic event, and that is rare in my work. I admit that my conclusions are hypothetical, subject to verification. But the immediate test of a hypothetical explanation is its power to explain, its impact on the imagination. I will state my hypothesis in more detail. The violence in the house, followed by his mother’s disappearance and his father’s silence, would be enough to convince the little boy that a great wrong had been done. It is easy for a child to suppose that he has committed a wrong. The line between wish and responsibility, between intention and guilt, is very thinly drawn in a child’s mind. I do not insist that he believed he killed his mother. The possibility would be enough.

  “No child could face such a horrible imagining for long. The mind protects itself in any way it can. A memory, or an imagined memory, which is too terrible to face must be pressed back into forgetfulness, covered up, and smoothed over. The boy’s mind took refuge in the illusion that his mother had been dead when he entered her room. The violence was denied and forgotten. It was a harmless illusion, harmless except to him. While it enabled him to live and grow, free of conscience guilt, it planted the seed of guilt deep in his unconscious. It set the pattern also for his adult reaction to shock. Evasion at any pric
e, at the price of memory itself. Does such an explanation explain nothing? Has it no impact of reality?”

  “Yes, it does. It’s dreadfully convincing. But does it mean, this pattern of evasion, that there is no hope for his memory?”

  “On the contrary. It means that he must be told the truth. A man’s life cannot be sustained on illusion doubly compounded.”

  “He must be told the truth?” she echoed. The question went on echoing in her mind until it embraced her whole life and threatened its foundations.

  “I have thought so from the beginning. Now I am certain of it.”

  The lines of the conversation, spoken and unspoken, converged in a bright point of fear before her eyes. The point expanded into a vision of Bret, senseless and lost forever, slain by an arrow of truth. And where was he now? Wandering somewhere in the city, utterly vulnerable to evil. Entering a dark alley where a gunman was waiting?

  She rose so quickly and awkwardly that her cup and saucer fell to the floor and shattered.

  “It doesn’t matter in the least,” the doctor said before she could apologize. But he didn’t rise to take the hand she extended. “Do not go just yet. Sit down again, please.”

  “I don’t know where he is. I have to find him.”

  “Don’t be afraid. There is no reason to be afraid. Circumstances struck at his Achilles heel, but he will recover.”

  “You don’t understand. I’m afraid something may happen tonight. I’m afraid he’ll get into trouble.”

  “I doubt it. I doubt that he will do anything wrong.” His eyes seemed to have become brighter and smaller behind his spectacles. “It is true that the guilt-ridden are often predisposed to violence. Guilt is normally thought of as the result of sin, but it may also be its cause. A man who feels guilty may with unconscious deliberation commit an act which is sinful in his own eyes. Such an act may serve to rationalize his guilt, to justify it, one might say. Many criminals have performed senseless crimes, which could not fail to be discovered, in order to receive punishment for their guilt.”

  “It’s ridiculous to talk about him as if he were a criminal.” She was still standing in the middle of the floor. Tension and indecision had drawn her body off center and made her seem ungainly.

  “Do please sit down, Miss West. Conversation is a sedentary art.”

  “I haven’t time for conversation.”

  “But you must listen to what I have to say. And you must listen more carefully. I was speaking analogically and made no moral judgment on your Bret. I do not approach a case with moral preconceptions. I have argued with Stekel on occasions that an analyst should enter the patient’s mind with no preconceptions at all. This case of Taylor tends to prove my point.”

  “How?” She sat on the edge of the chair, her feet among the shards of broken china.

  “My preconceptions led me into error. I supposed almost from the beginning that Taylor was a clear case of infantile regression to the Oedipus pattern fixated by the mother’s death. Now you tell me that the mother’s death never occurred. That does not mean, of course, that the Oedipus element is not present. Taylor’s relations with women will always be influenced, I had almost said determined, by his early relations with his mother. His sexual life will always be difficult because his mother betrayed him, so to speak.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “No. You are perceptive about these things. You must be aware also that in spite of his revolt against his father, he will always tend to see himself through his father’s eyes. He cannot escape from the moral judgments which his father bequeathed to him. And with a part of his mind, the part which sits in judgment, he does not wish to escape.”

  “But wasn’t his loss of memory an escape? You called it an evasion—”

  “I know it. Perhaps there is a deeper explanation, however. The loss of memory may have been a punishment inflicted on him by his own mind. A kind of death, a capital punishment.”

  “He said that,” Paula whispered. “He said it was like death.”

  “Really?” He leaned toward her, his body a bundle of sharp angles loosely clothed in tweed. “Then the possibility is decidedly worth exploring. It raises a further question. What guilt, real or imagined, would require the self-infliction of such a punishment?”

  Leaving the question hanging unanswered in the air, he leaned back against the arm of the chesterfield. Paula watched him intently, unable to relax. Without a cup to hold on to, her hands were playful in her lap.

  He went on in his gentle, slightly thickened voice. “I have sometimes thought that we of the Viennese school have paid too little attention to problems of moral guilt. Freud himself was a child of his century. He never quite outgrew the physiological laboratory and its atmosphere of materialistic determinism. It is curious, is it not, that the subtlest introspectionist since Augustine should have under-valued the moral and religious life and seen the human mind in terms of blind forces working in Newtonian space?”

  “You’re talking like a Jungian,” she said. “I can’t listen to a lecture now.”

  He ignored her protest. “I am far from being a Jungian. I am an analyst first and always. Jung has reverted to type and abandoned analysis for theology. I think that explains his popularity in the United States, which has its own Calvinistic tradition. Nevertheless I must admit that the products of this moralistic tradition, men like your Bret, cannot be studied in a moral vacuum. They must be interpreted, partly at least, in their own moralistic terms. The guilt of such men cannot be taken for granted or explained away on general grounds. It must be traced to its source.”

  “But you explained Bret’s guilt. You said that childhood experience was the crucial one.” She rummaged in her bag for a cigarette, which broke in her fingers when she tried to light it.

  He brought her an ash tray and remained standing over her. “The strains and shocks of the adult life are equally crucial in a case like this. You questioned my wisdom in telling him of the murder, but I maintain I was right. He must be told everything. To a mind which has been starved of truth, you cannot dole out truth in fragments. I do not know what you know. I do not need to. But he does. He is groping in the darkness of the external world for a truth his own mind has refused him. You tell me that he thinks he has found the murderer of his wife. Do you believe that he has?”

  Two deep lines formed on either side of her scarlet mouth and twisted it like a pair of pincers. “I don’t know. I—”

  “Are you sure that you don’t know? If you are suppressing the truth you are perpetuating the darkness of his mind.”

  “No!” she cried. “I’ve been protecting him.”

  “From reality? From justice? In ignorance he will find no justice. There is justice in the truth because they are the same thing. Would you deny him justice?”

  “I have no faith in justice.”

  “But he has. Perhaps you do not need the faith. He does. When a mind has broken through the surface of appearances, a strong rope is needed to pull it out.”

  “I don’t trust any rope.” She felt the symbolic horror of the word and suppressed a shiver. “Do you, Dr. Klifter?”

  “Have I faith in universal justice, do you mean? No. But I trust the faith of men who have it.”

  She sensed his weakness and thrust her wedge further into the opening. “Is that scientific? I came to you as a doctor, but you’re talking like a priest—a priest who has lost his own faith.”

  “Very well, I accept the role.”

  “Though you yourself believe in nothing?”

  “I believe in one thing: the individual man. I am not so mad as to try to remake men in my image. I remake them in their own.”

  “Even then you assume a great responsibility.”

  “No greater than the one you have assumed. I believe your responsibility is too heavy for you.”

  After a while she said: “I know it is.”

  “Then give him back to himself. Tell him the truth. I think he knows i
t already but will not recognize it. Eventually he will recover all his memories. When he does he will cease to trust you.”

  “I don’t care about myself. I’ve lost him no matter what I do.” She rose with a movement of disconsolate finality, gathering herself to face the outer loneliness and darkness.

  He followed her to the door and gave her his hand. “Perhaps you have lost him. If that is so, his loss is the greater one. But I wish you both good fortune. You need not be afraid that I will tell anyone what I have guessed—not even him, if you do not wish it.”

  “Thank you.” Her face was troubled but bold.

  She went out, and he heard her heels click rapidly across the paved terrace into silence.

  chapter 21

  Bret knocked on the door of 106. After a heavy pause Miles called out: “Who’s that?”

  Bret knocked again.

  “Who’s there?”

  Bedsprings creaked, and quiet footsteps crossed the floor of the room. The blind on the window beside the door twitched slightly. Bret flattened himself against the door. He couldn’t see the window from there, but he could see the pencil of light that was thrown across the balcony when the edge of the blind was lifted. After a moment the light was erased.

  The footsteps came to the door. They were hardly footsteps at all, but the muffled whisper of stockinged feet. Miles spoke softly through the door. “Is there anybody there?” A slight nasal wheeze added an overtone of uneasiness to the question.

  Bret stayed where he was and said nothing. The door between them was so thin that he believed he could hear the other man’s breathing. Very softly a hand touched the door and moved against it. A bolt screeched faintly as it was withdrawn from its socket. The knob on which Bret’s hand was lightly resting turned against his palm. It was like a movement of repellent life in an unexpected place, a worm in the apple, a snake under the pillow. He removed his hand and stood back a few inches from the door.