(1969) The Seven Minutes

by Irving Wallace

  Once more Barrett was overwhelmed by a feeling of frustration. One of these women, or one woman lying in one of the bedrooms or wards beyond, must be Cassie McGraw.

  But which ?

  Unless she had determined to hide herself from the world, surely she would admit her identity to the manager when he spoke her name and exhibited her autographs. This was a hope. He carried it

  out the exit with him and into the Chicago afternoon.

  He walked and walked - how many blocks he did not know -until he reached a shopping district and saw the time, and then he did an about-face and started to retrace his steps to the Sunnyside Convalescent Sanitarium on the double.

  When he returned, he had been away fifty-five minutes, and Mr Holliday was waiting for him outside his office.

  ‘It’s pretty much as I had expected it would be, Mr Barrett,’ he said. ‘No recognition of the name Cassie McGraw whatsoever. Not even the slightest hint of recognition. Either because none of them is Miss McGraw or because the real Miss McGraw doesn’t want to acknowledge it. I’m afraid that’s it, Mr Barrett. I don’t know what else I can suggest. I guess we’ve got to add her name to the roll call of the vanished. Charlie Ross, Ambrose Bierce, Judge Crater, now Cassie McGraw.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re right, only I hate to admit it,’ said Barrett.

  As he retrieved the postcard and the photostat and began to shove them into his pocket, he felt the other photostats. He extracted them, considered one, then handed it to Mr Holliday. ‘I didn’t show you this, did I? That’s taken from an old photograph, Cassie in Paris in the 1930s. Would there be any point in circulating that among the patients?’

  ‘Hardly. If they wouldn’t admit to the name or identify the autograph, they’d hardly respond to this.’

  ‘What about your personnel here ? Maybe one of the staff might see something in that face that would remind them of one of the patients?’

  ‘Most unlikely, Mr Barrett. This is a picture of a girl in her twenties. I doubt if anyone would, find the remotest resemblance between this girl and a patient who is in her sixties or seventies.’

  There was nothing left to say, except one thing, the forever final act of desperation. ‘I’d like to offer a reward, Mr Holliday.’ He still had the postcard, and he pushed it into the manager’s hand. ‘Would you mind showing the postcard and photograph to your nurses, and telling them that if either exhibit sparks something it’s worth a hundred dollars to anyone if they’ll call me at the Ambassador East by early evening.’

  ‘ We-ll, I don’t know. Most of the nurses on this shift have already seen the postcard, and the old photo won’t mean a thing. I think it’s useless -‘

  ‘Just on the off chance, Mr Holliday.’

  ‘I assure you, I want to be of assistance. It wouldn’t be bad publicity for us if you did find Cassie McGraw here. But I don’t think these two exhibits can produce anything further. Still, if it’ll make you happy - well, we have another shift coming on at four o’clock. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll pin the postcard and the photo up on the bulletin board along with a notice instructing any employee who knows anything about the card, or who recognizes the girl in

  the photo, to get in touch with me, or if I’m not in, with you at the Ambassador East, and I’ll make it clear that you’re offering a hundred-dollar reward. How’s that?’

  ‘It’s all 1 can ask.’

  ‘I won’t be here when the new shift comes on at four. But I’ll be looking in again around eight in the evening. So if I learn anything then that you haven’t already heard, I’ll get in touch with you myself. Though, frankly, Mr Barrett, I think you’d better consider this a lost cause.’

  ‘I know.’ Barrett allowed the manager to accompany him down the ramp to the street door. At the door he paused. ‘I’ll be at the hotel until eight, Mr Holliday. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll go back to where I came from.’

  ‘Can’t you win your case without Cassie McGraw?’

  ‘No,’ said Barrett flatly, and with that he went out the door.

  By five-thirty in the afternoon, he had needed a drink, and he was having one at the darkened plush bar in the elevated alcove of the Pump Room of the Ambassador East.

  He had spent a mean and wasted afternoon in his single room upstairs, the Chicago telephone directory in his lap, calling every major sanitarium and rest home in Cook County, monotonously inquiring over and over whether there was a patient on the premises named Cassie McGraw.

  There was not, any place, anywhere.

  It had been an illogical effort, based on no reason, and it had provided him with what he had expected - no information at all.

  After that he had telephoned Donna in Los Angeles, so that she might report his failure to Abe Zelkin later, and to ask how Zelkin was faring with the day’s defense witnesses. Zelkin had checked in once, briefly, during the noon recess, to inquire whether there had been any word from Barrett and to bemoan the fact that the defense witnesses were continuing to prove unimpressive and inept and were sitting ducks for Duncan’s cannonading in the cross-and re-crossexaminations.

  Hanging up, Barrett had felt so low that he was tempted to telephone his apartment, just to hear Maggie’s voice, just for some kind of lift. But then the time was already well after four o’clock, and if he was going to bother to wait on here he should keep his phone open for any possible calls.

  He had smoked a half pouch of tobacco, and throughout, the telephone remained mute.

  And so, after leaving notice of his whereabouts with the switchboard, he had come down to the lobby to make reservations for the flight back to Los Angeles and then had moved on to the Pump Room bar to see whether it worked and whether there would be no pain.

  He was drinking, and it wasn’t working, and he was wondering

  whether a defeated and impoverished and unpromising middle-aged attorney had the right to ask a girl like Maggie Russell to spend her life with him. She was magnificent, he remembered, and he revived the pleasure of her company in his head, and the sweetness of her in his heart, and the heat of her in his loins, and he realized that last night had been the first time in all his years that he had ever experienced a complete and honest relationship with a woman who was totally female.

  The period with Faye had not been a relationship. It had been one-sided. He had not been a man with a woman, but a stud who filled her with intimations of normality. The others before Faye had been little better, like two people dancing to no music.

  For years he had felt a misfit, as if there wasn’t anyone on earth with whom to connect. Constantly he had read of fantastically satisfying relationships in novels, and these had depressed him, because they had told him that he could not measure up to any woman, could not find a relationship that would be comparable to the love scenes he read about in books. Most of the novels had led him to believe that any relationship with a woman was largely dependent upon sex.

  But now he knew those books were fakes and he had been deceived.

  He had divined the truth of what was a genuine and what was a counterfeit man-woman relationship during his studies before the trial. Last night, in fact, he had experienced what was truth and what was real.

  This trial had taught him exactly what was lying, deceptive, delusive about most written pornographic fiction, even the best of it. Silently he sipped his drink and thanked his mentors.

  Thank you, Professor Ernest van den Haag, mentor one, for exposing the fiction of pornography: ‘Sex rages in an empty world as people use each other as its anonymous bearers or vessels, bereaved of love and hate, thought and feeling, reduced to bare sensations of pain and pleasure, existing only in (and for) incessant copulations without apprehension, conflict, or relationship.’

  Thank you, Jacques Barzun, mentor two: ‘The standardized sexual act for literary use’ starts with a brief conversation, moves to a couch or bed, has a man undress a woman or the woman disrobe herself, gives attention to some physical detail of her
body, and then devotes itself to copulation at military speed. ‘In most cases, the enterprise is successful, despite the lack of preliminaries, such as the works of theory deem imperative; in most cases no thought is given to consequences,’ and ‘in most cases there is no repetition of the act, or indeed any sort of artistic conclusion, unless the orgasm itself and a sketchy resumption of clothes are to

  be taken as such___The modern sex act in print is only a fable, a

  device to correct this or that deficiency of our upbringing and culture.’

  Thank you, Professor Steven Marcus, mentor three: in ‘Pornotopia,’ which describes the pornographic Utopia of books, the landscape world consists of ‘two immense snowy white hillocks … Farther down, the scene narrows and changes in perspective. Off to the right and left jut two smooth snowy ridges. Between them, at their point of juncture, is a dark wood… This dark wood - sometimes it is called a thicket - is triangular in shape. It is also like a cedarn cover, and in its midst is a dark romantic chasm. In this chasm the wonders of nature abound… This is the center of the earth and the home of man.’ The nature of pornotopia ‘is this immense, supine, female form… As for the man in this setting, he is reaily not part of nature. In the first place, he is actually not man. He is an enormous erect penis, to which there happens to be attached a human figure.’

  This was the fairy tale about man and woman, the fairy tale exposed. It must necessarily be defended. But it must never be believed in.

  Reality, in life, in literature, honest literature, was something else. It was, as Professor Marcus pointed out, how people lived with one another, what their changing feelings and emotions were, what their complex motives, and what their conflicts were with one another and within themselves. Reality was, as Barzun saw it, all the tenderness and hesitancies, the sensations and fantasies of love. Reality was precisely as Jadway’s Cathleen remembered it.

  Last night, with Maggie Russell, Barrett had enjoyed and suffered reality in a reciprocal relationship with a woman for the first time.

  It had been more than her pointed hillocks and wide chasm, and more than his erect penis, and more than the wonders inside the chasm. It had been the hours of talk before, the discovering things held in common, the laughter, sorrow, indignation, and a secret knowledge that they were united and special and above the world and appreciative of their secret uniqueness. It had been their desire to be closer, touching, loving, merging into one. It had been their simultaneous decision, and their wordless going into the bedroom, and her use of a contraceptive before, and their intial embarrassment at their nakedness, and her appendix scar, and his wishing he had lost weight before he’d ever met her, and their awkwardness, and his difficulty entering, and her initial outcry not of ecstasy but of discomfort, and their victory in joining, and the sound of a gas burble in her stomach, and the fleeting thought of Cassie McGraw and Chicago in his mind before his early orgasm, and his apologies, and her kisses, and their whisperings afterward, and their tea and crackers together, and more sleepy talk, and her rhythmic breathing in her sleep, and his catching himself snoring.

  It was this, and so very much more.

  Still, even though he was sure of his feelings for her, positive about the rightness of the two of them, he was uncertain and

  worried about her feelings for him, feelings that must wear for a lifetime. She had endured too much insecurity, he suspected, to invest the rest of her love, her vitality, her childbearing, her chances for safety, her years on earth, in a man who would be a failure. In this society, a failure was only half a man, and Maggie needed an entire man. If he failed to win this case, he knew that he would never be able to ask her to join him in partnership, and even if he did ask her it was unlikely that she would be imprudent enough to say yes.

  He turned on his bar stool to order a third drink.

  ‘Mr Michael Barrett!’

  He spun the rest of the way around to face the maitre d’ approaching him. He raised an arm to acknowledge his name.

  ‘Mr Barrett, there is a telephone call for you.’

  He paid his bar bill quickly, and chased after the maitre d’, asking, ‘Is it long distance or local?’

  ‘I do not know, sir. Please accept it in the booth in the lobby.’

  He hastened into the booth, took up the receiver, and identified himself.

  The call was local.

  It was a femine voice that he heard. ‘Oh, Mr Barrett -I am phoning about the reward -‘

  He was instantly alert. ‘Yes? Who is this?’

  ‘My name is Avis Jefferson. I am one of the practical nurses on the late shift at the Sunnyside Sanitarium. I was busy earlier, so I just now saw what was on the bulletin board. Mr Holliday is out, so I thought I’d call you direct. It says there you’ll pay anyone a hundred dollars who can help you about the postal card or picture on the board.’

  ‘The - that’s right,’ he stammered.

  ‘I can help you. About the picture, I mean.’

  ‘You recognize the woman in the photograph, Miss Jefferson? That photograph was taken almost forty years ago.’

  ‘I’ve seen the picture before, Mr Barrett.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the sanitarium here. I can even show it to you. If that’s what you want.’

  He was sky high, beyond gravity now. ‘Honey, that’s exactly what I want! I’ll be over immediately. Don’t go away. I’ll be there in twenty minutes flat. Meet me at the reception desk.’

  Avis Jefferson was waiting at the reception desk of the Sunnyside Convalescent Sanitarium when he arrived. She towered over him by three or four inches when they shook hands. The inky blackness of her skin was broken by the whiteness of her buck teeth and accented by the clean white nurse’s uniform. She was friendly, effervescent, and Mike Barrett liked and trusted her at once.

  ‘Follow me,’ she said to Barrett, and she led him up the corridor. Feeling as clumsy as a schoolboy going to his first prom, he carried

  the bouquet of long-stemmed roses with which he hoped to woo Cassie McGraw, if there was finally and actually a Cassie McGraw.

  As they turned the corner, Miss Jefferson said, The minute I saw that photograph on the bulletin board, I said to myself, I’ve seen that before. And I remembered right off when and where. It was a year ago when we were doing some spring housecleaning in the patients’ rooms, and it was in 34A. I was going through her suitcases, inventorying and straightening her personal effects, and seeing if there was anything wearable that wasn’t being used, when I came across one of those old paste-in photo albums. So just out of natural curiosity - because you always think of the patients as old people only, forgetting they were once young like yourself - I looked to see what she was like when she was young. There were pages of snapshots inside, and some were taken in Paris - she’d told me she’d traveled and lived abroad, but I was never sure if it was true - and there was this one of her between the two young gentlemen in front of that Eiffel Tower, and it stuck in my mind because she had the devil in her eyes and looked so full of nature, if you know what I mean. So when I saw that photo again, on the bulletin board, where you had Mr Holliday put it, I remembered the same one in her album, and another thing made me remember it especially. The one in her album had a corner torn off just like yours. That made me positive.’

  ‘Jadway’s face was torn off?’

  ‘I don’t know whose face.’

  ‘You never heard her mention Jadway?’

  “Not so’s I can recall. For that matter. I never heard Katie mention the name Cassie McGraw either.’

  ‘What is her name here?’

  ‘Katie’s? Well, formally I’ve always known her to be Mrs Katherine Sullivan.’

  ‘Sullivan.’ Barrett savored the sound of the family name that had so long eluded him. “That must have been the name of the man she married after Jadway died, her husband who was killed in the Second World War. Did she ever speak of him?’

  ‘Not by using the name Sullivan. Only a co
uple times saying as to how she’d been widowed and that’s what made her girl turn to the Lord.’

  ‘I see. So it is Katherine Sullivan. Okay, the Sullivan part is solved. But I wonder where she got that given name of Katherine.’ No sooner had he asked himself the question than he had the answer. Early in the case, when he had been browsing about Ben Fremont’s Book Emporium, he had come across a book called Naming the New Arrival, which gave the derivation of female and male Christian names, and he had looked up his first name and Zelkin’s. He had learned that the name Michael was not Irish, as he had always thought, but of Hebrew origin, meaning Vho is like God,’ and one diminutive was Mike, and that Abraham was also

  from the Hebrew, meaning ‘father of the multitude,’ and one diminutive was Abe. Then, fascinated, he had looked up other names that had become familiar to him in the pretrial preparation, and one of these had been Cassie, and he had read that Cassie was derived from the Greek and meant ‘pure’ and was one of the diminutives of Katherine. And just now he realized that one variant of Katherine was Cathleen, the name of the fictional heroine of The Seven Minutes.

  He had forgotten this archeological dig into appellations until this very moment. Now it was clear. With her marriage Cassie had shed the past and eyen taken on a new given name, yet she had paid homage to her immortality in Jadway’s book and to her fictionalized self in its pages, and from Cathleen she had also held on to a single strand of a more wondrous time by calling herself Katherine.

  Miss Jefferson had halted before an open doorway. On the wall next to it was painted ‘34A-34B.’ The nurse crooked her finger. ‘Right in here.’

  He followed her inside. There were two single beds, neatly made up with maroon covers, and separated by a hospital curtain. Beyond the beds there were sliding glass doors and screens that opened into the inner patio.