Miss Jefferson touched the headboard of the first bed. ‘This one here is Katie’s,’ she said. ‘We let her stay up a while after dinner, before bringing her back to tuck her in.’
Barrett surveyed Cassie’s nook, so removed from Montparnasse’s Dome and the Brasserie Lipp. There was a movable tray, perched on rollers, across the foot of the bed, and it held a half-filled glass of orange juice and a paper cup of pink pills. Beside the head of the bed was a metal night table holding a carafe of water, a drinking glass, a transistor radio, and a pair of spectacles.
Barrett turned back to find Miss Jefferson kneeling before a built-inwardrobe from which she had removed a scuffed brown suitcase. She opened the suitcase - her back blocked him from a view of the contents - and then with a gurgle of triumph she held up a rectangular photograph album with navy-blue imitation-leather binding.
‘Here it is, just like I remembered,’ chortled Miss Jefferson, rising to her feet.
A veteran of so many disappointments, Barrett entertained one last doubt. ‘Miss Jefferson, I was wondering, does this Katherine Sullivan who is here, who owns that album, does she in any way resemble the Cassie McGraw in that old photograph taken in front of the Eiffel Tower?’
‘Of course not. Who would, after so much time? Even me. Do I look like I used to look when I was going to school ? No, not a bit.’
‘Then how do we know the photograph in Mrs Sullivan’s album is of her? Maybe it’s a keepsake sent by the real Cassie McGraw, who might have been a friend of Mrs Sullivan’s.’
Avis Jefferson’s buck teeth showed in a broad grin. ‘You are the worryingest man. You don’t need to question this. There’s other pictures in this book of hers and under some she wrote long ago such things as “Me in Paris in ‘35” - and they’re the same, I mean the woman in the other pictures is the same one that’s in the Eiffel Tower picture with the two men. You’ll see.’
Miss Jefferson was flipping the loose pages, and abruptly she stopped and handed the album to Barrett.
There were four snapshots on the facing pages, two of them discolored and brittle, and the one at the extreme left was the one he had discovered in the Sean O’Flanagan Collection. It was the exact photograph: O’Flanagan, Cassie, the headless Jadway. The snapshot next to it showed Cassie in front of a medieval building, and beneath it she had written, ‘At the Musee de Cluny, Oct., 1936.’ The handwriting was as familiar as that on the photostat of the back of the picture, which was in his pocket. The snapshots on the right-hand page showed Cassie alone, one posing on what Barrett guessed to be the Pont-Neuf, with the Seine behind her, and the other showing her saluting into the camera while standing smartly at attention beneath a street plaque that read ‘Boulevard St. Michel.’
Oblivious of the gangling nurse who was peering down over his shoulder, Barrett leafed hastily through the entire album, from the first page to the last. Most of the pages were empty. There were only about a dozen more photographs. Two stiff portraits that Barrett presumed to be of Cassie’s parents. Some mementos of her childhood - Cassie between the ages of six and twelve, in a wagon, on a sled, in a tree. A photograph of the young Sean O’Flanagan in Paris. A few snapshots of Cassie in Zurich, and one of her feeding pigeons in St Mark’s Square in Venice. A long snapshot of a curly-headed, plain-faced, unsmiling girl of perhaps fourteen, with the single name ‘Judith’ printed beneath it. Then there was a shot, streaked with light from overexposure, that appeared to be of a youngish soldier, with crew cut, crooked smile, blocky build, in the uniform of an enlisted man in the United States Army. No doubt this was Sullivan after the marriage and before being shipped out to become a casualty. And one final picture. No human figure in it. Simply a doorway above which was clearly visible the lettering: “The Etoile Press - 18 rue de Berri.’
Barrett stared down at that final photograph, and the album was unsteady in his hands.
That clinched it. He closed the album. Cassie McGraw, at last.
He waited for Avis Jefferson to return the album to the suitcase and lift the suitcase back into the wardrobe.
The nurse shut the wardrobe and came around to face him once more.
‘Where is she?’ Barrett asked nervously.
‘In the recreation room,’ said Miss Jefferson. ‘I always leave her
there, in her wheelchair, after dinner. I like her to have some company before bedtime.’
Barrett picked up the bouquet of roses from the bed. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
They were in the corridor again, on their way to the recreation room. Miss Jefferson looked at him approvingly. ‘That’s nice of you, bringing those roses. When I first saw the notice on the board, I thought you were a distant relative or something. I sured hoped so. Because no one ever comes to see her.’
Barrett shook his head. ‘She has no one left, except a daughter in a convent.’
‘But then that postcard that you had posted on the bulletin board puzzled me, and I asked about you, and our R.N. reminded me you were a lawyer mixed up with that sexy book and the trial out in California, and that our Katie Sullivan had something to do with that book.’
‘She was the mistress of the man who wrote that book.’
‘You’re kidding! Our Katie ? That nice little old lady ? Lordy, the things you don’t know about people. It’s hard to believe that, when you see her sitting like anybody’s grandma in that wheelchair.’
Something new niggled at him. The wheelchair. He would uphold his reputation as the worryingest man. ‘Why is she in a wheelchair, Miss Jefferson ? She’s ambulatory, isn’t she ?’
‘Not no more. When I first came here a few years back, she was recovering from a broken hip, and getting therapy and using a walker. Then, right after that, she had another fall, shattered the same hip, nearly died of pneumonia after the surgery. But she’s a sturdy one. She came through. But no more walking for her. Too bad, you know, because sitting like that all the time makes you get sort of frail and wasting away.’
‘Yes, it’s pitiful’ he agreed. Even as he spoke, Barrett was considering the difficulties of transporting Cassie McGraw to Los Angeles and delivering her into the courtroom, but it could be done. Perhaps, if the price was right, Mr Holliday would loan him the services of Avis Jefferson to look after their star witness. With every step he took, every word he heard, Cassie McGraw was closer to being a real person for him. He thought about her sentenced to that wheelchair. ‘What does she do with herself all day?’ he inqured. ‘What’s she doing now - watching television ?’
‘No, she hardly ever watches for long. She just likes to sit and dream and think, the way most of them do. I sometimes wonder what she’s thinking. I asked her one time, but she just smiled at me sweetly like she always does and said nothing. I sure wish I knew.’
‘Oh, she’s probably thinking of her youth and the past. That’s the only game for old folks.’
‘Maybe, but probably not,’ said Miss Jefferson. ‘Thinking much about the past would be pretty hard for her.’ They had reached the swinging doors that led into the recreation room. ‘So sad, the way
it has to happen, but Katie or Cassie or whatever you call her, she’s lost most of her memory by now.’
‘Lost her memory?’ Barrett stood stock-still, aghast. This had never occurred to him. This was the only obstacle that he had not anticipated, and it was a shock. ‘You mean - do you mean she can’t remember anything any more?’
‘She’s senile,’ Miss Jefferson said. Then, seeing the expression on Barrett’s face, she let go of the door she had pushed half open. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘It was her memory that I was counting on for the trial.’
‘Aw, that’s too bad. You mean finding her won’t help you now?’
‘Not if she can’t recall the past.’
‘That’s real bad luck. Well, I shouldn’t take any reward from you, then.’
‘No, you found her. You deserve the money. But senile ? Nobody mentioned it earlier. Yet I should have suspected
it when Mr Holliday took that postcard and photograph around to every female patient today and none of them recognized either item. Cassie must have looked right at the postcard and the photograph without remembering them. Still -‘ Another related thought had come to him. ‘Miss Jefferson, tell me one thing. The postcard signed by her and sent to Los Angeles. In it she recalls and defends Jadway and The Seven Minutes, and speaks of herself as Jadway’s friend. That memory goes back almost forty years. So she did remember when she dictated her message on the card. How can you explain that ?’
‘You just don’t know about senility cases, Mr Barrett. They’re most of them like your Cassie. She’s got hardening of the arteries to the brain. It’s gradual-like, but it keeps getting more and more so. At first it makes the patient confused and she loses her sense of time. Little by little her memory fades away, until one day it’s gone and maybe she won’t even know who I am. Of course, it’s not to that point with Katie yet, but it’s getting close. There’s just one crazy thing about those senile cases when they’re in the stage she’s in. Sometimes, on certain days, they can remember what happened to them maybe forty or fifty years ago, yet not remember what they ate or who they met five minutes ago. Other times they can remember what’s just happened, but not another fact about where they were years ago or the people in their lives or anything. But most of the time their brains are like a horse’s, I heard one doctor say, meaning if a horse does something wrong and you punish him ten minutes later, he won’t know why you’re punishing him, won’t remember at all what it was he done wrong. No memory except for what’s happened this second. That’s it usually for our Katie.’
‘But the postcard, Miss Jefferson?’
‘Well, like I said, that must’ve been one of her sharp days. She has maybe an hour or two when she makes sense a couple days a month. I can pretty nearly tell you what probably happened with that postal card. When me or one of the other nurses sees she’s suddenly having one of her good alert spells, no confusion, alert and understanding everything, we take advantage of it by maybe reading to her from some newspaper or magazine that’s handy, just so she sort of should know there’s a world out there and know what’s been going on. So that postal card - When was it written?’
‘About two and a half weeks ago.’
‘So she was probably pretty alert on that day, the fogginess gone, real sharp for a short time, so then me or one of the others read to her from the front page of the newspaper, this and that, maybe a little politics, a murder, or something lively like that sexy trial. One of us probably read to her from the trial story, and it stuck in her head for an hour or two and she remembered Jadway and that book. And when whoever was reading to her stopped to go on with their other work, just then some of those volunteer helpers must have come around asking each patient if they could do anything, and one probably asked Katie. And since she had this trial on her mind until it slipped away again, she said, Yes, get me one of the picture postal cards and write down something I’ll tell you and send it for me, and address it to the home of that man with the son who was involved in that censorship case that was in the paper - and the volunteer did it and sent it off, and that’s how it happened.’
That was the way it had happened, and now Barrett understood. His hopes, like Cassie’s mind, had faded. Still, there was a mind that had a few good hours one or two days a month, and if there was that, then there was also hope.
‘How is she today?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know. Haven’t had a chance to talk to her since I came on. Let’s find out right now. I can see her from here, over there by herself in the wheelchair at the far table next to the patio door. Come on in and let me introduce you.’
Avis Jefferson wended her way through the recreation room, and Barrett stayed at her heels. Once they had passed the group around the droning color-television set and arrived at the center of the room, Barrett had his first full view of the legendary Cassie McGraw
He had been prepared, yet he knew one could never be entirely prepared. He understood that the pert and lovely gamin of the Left Bank and the 1930s was no more, just as Zelda Fitzgerald was no more, yet he had expected some recognizable relic of the heyday past. Perhaps a lovely old lady with traces still of a lost beauty and her bohemian heritage.
What he saw now was the concave shaving of what had once been a woman. An old lady, aged beyond her years, with flour-white mussed hair, dull eyes, sunken cheeks, a few sprouts of stiff gray hair on her chin, wrinkled thin neck and wrinkled blue-veined hands and swollen feet, draped all around with an oversized pale-blue bathrobe. She sat at the circular wooden table, staring not at the wax fruit centerpiece, not at the patio beyond, not at anyone or
anything, not even inward.
Jadway’s mistress, the lusty, love-giving heroine of the most suppressed novel ever written.
This was Cassie McGraw.
Barrett dropped his senseless red roses on a nearby chair as Miss Jefferson brought him past the table and into Cassie McGraw’s line of vision.
‘Hi, Katie, how are you?’ Miss Jefferson asked. She tugged at Barrett. ‘Katie, look at the nice man I’ve brought to see you. This is Mr Barrett, all the way from Los Angeles, California, come here all this way to Chicago just to see you. Isn’t that nice?’
Barrett took a hesitant step forward. ‘I’m please to meet you, Miss McGraw.’
Cassie’s head came up slowly, ever so slowly, and her dim eyes gradually seemed to fix her visitor in their focus. She held her eyes on him a number of seconds, and then as her head nodded slightly, ever so slightly, her chapped lips formed into a sweet smile. The effort of the smile had been her acknowledgment of a presence, and her welcome, and then her attention was given back to an object that lay in her lap. It was a shredded ball of Kleenex. Her weak bony fingers began to play with it, shredding it further.
‘You saw her smile,’ said Miss Jefferson with the overenthusiasm of a USO hostess. “That means she’s pleased to have you here. Do sit down, Mr Barrett. You go right on and talk to her. Ask her anything you like.’
Barrett accepted the chair, drew it up closer to Cassie McGraw, and sat down. Avis Jefferson took the remaining chair across the table for herself.
‘Miss McGraw,’ said Barrett earnestly, ‘do you remember a man who was a very close friend of yours years ago, a man named J J Jadway, or Jad, as you may have called him?’
Her eyes seemed to watch his lips as he spoke, but there was no recognition or understanding in them, and her fingers continued to pick at the Kleenex tissues.
She said nothing.
‘Perhaps, Miss McGraw, you remember a book that Jadway wrote. You helped get it published in Paris. It as called The Seven Minutes. Do you remember?’
She was attentive to his voice, and her brow contracted. She appeared interested but mildly confused.
‘Miss McGraw, do the names Christian Leroux and Sean O’Flanagan mean anything to you?’
She did not answer, but she seemed to be chewing something in her mouth.
‘She’s got a loose denture,’ Miss Jefferson explained, ‘and now she’s rocking it.’ The nurse wagged a finger at Cassie McGraw. ‘Now, Katie, don’t be stubborn and play possum like that. I know you can do better. This man, he’s here to ask you to help him with
his trial over that book in Los Angeles. I seen with my own eyes that postal card you dictated a few weeks ago and signed. You were sensible enough to sign it by your own hand then, and now I think you should tell this fine man why you wrote that postal card.’
The old lady offered a sweet smile to her nurse, as if commending a singer for a virtuoso performance. But still she said nothing.
‘Katie, you remember your daughter, don’t you ?’ Miss Jefferson asked.
Cassie’s eyes flickered, and the same smile remained, but so did the silence.
Avis Jefferson looked mournfully at Barrett and shrugged. T guess you’re out of luck, Mr Barrett. Like I warned you, this is most usually the way
she is, this is normal for such patients. It’s no use.’
Barrett sighed. Tm afraid you’re right, Miss Jefferson. What disappoints me so is to have finally got to her and to know how much is locked up inside her about J J Jadway - oh, well, I’m sorry not only for myself but for her. Dammit, that’s life, I guess.’
He pushed back his chair to rise, and then he heard an odd sound, almost a croak, and then a thick voice said, ‘How is Mr Jadway?’
He came down hard in his chair, facing Cassie McGraw, murmuring the Lord’s name in vain, watching as her lips continued to try to form words.
‘How is Mr Jadway?’ Cassie McGraw repeated.
‘Well, he was fine, he was fine, the last I heard,’ said Barrett quickly. He glanced over his shoulder at Miss Jefferson, who was excitedly waving her hand at him as if imploring him to continue. He turned back to the old lady. ‘Mr Jadway was fine. How was he when you last saw him?’
‘He was unhappy to leave Paris,’ said Cassie McGraw thickly. ‘We were both unhappy, but he had to go home.’
‘He went home? You mean he left Paris and went home to the United States?’
‘To his family in Conn… Conn.,.’
‘Connecticut?’
‘He went back because of his father. I was with Judy in New York. I thought maybe …’ Her voice trailed off. She chewed silently, trying to remember. She shook her head slowly. ‘No. I couldn’t stay. I had to leave him. I had to.’ Her eyes blinked, and her fingers found the tissues in her lap again, and she picked at them.
Trying to contain herself, Barrett reached out and touched her thin hand, which had the texture of old parchment, as he sought to regain her attention. ‘Miss McGraw -‘
Cassie McGraw lifted her head, but the eyes had dulled.
‘What were you telling me ?’ Barrett urged. ‘Were you telling me that you and Jadway left Paris together and returned to the United States for good? That he didn’t kill himself? That he came back
(1969) The Seven Minutes Page 65