The Guardian

by Konvitz, Jeffrey;

  “Faye,” he said.

  “Yes, honey,” she replied without removing her eyes form the book.

  He leaned forward. “Could you stop reading for a minute? I’d like to ask you something.”

  She laid the book on the quilt. “Sure.”

  “Don’t you think it’s peculiar that you knew the nun’s name?”

  She looked at him and nodded. “Someone must have told me. What other explanation is there?”

  “But you don’t remember anyone telling you, right?”

  She pouted impatiently. “I told you that already.”

  “Okay. One other thing.”

  She nodded.

  “Did you ever try to commit suicide?”

  The expression that crossed her face was the strangest he’d ever seen.

  “Did you?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Let’s just say I do. It concerns me.”

  “Ben. We’ve been married for seven years. We’ve know each other for twelve. Of all things to ask. And of all times.”

  He shuffled uncomfortably on the bed. “I’m just curious.”

  She looked at him squarely, her eyelids blinking in rapid confusion.

  He raised himself up on the pillows. “Faye, it’s simple. If you’ve never tried, just say so.”

  She tossed the book angrily, pulled up the blanket to the nape of her throat, and looked off into space. “And what if I did try to kill myself?” she said, her voice so distant that she sounded as if she were somewhere else. “Would it make a difference?”

  “No. I just want to know.”

  “All right.” Her eyes pierced him. “I did try. When I was much younger.”

  He said nothing for a long time. Then he asked, “Why?”

  “Let’s just say I did. I swore that I’d never talk about it. In fact, for many years I repressed the entire incident.”

  “Faye…I…”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it. Please. I never want it mentioned again. I want you to promise.”

  He waited, then said, “All right. I promise.” He had the, the final bit of information he needed to reinforce his resolve to take action. What action? He didn’t know. But something. “Why don’t we go to sleep?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He reached up, turned off the reading lamp, and rolled on his side, facing away from Faye. He knew she was staring at his back. He could feel it. But he wouldn’t turn back to say anything else. He’d said enough. Now he wanted to think, sleep, then get up early and get to work.

  10

  When Ben left the apartment at eight o’clock, it was already raining heavily, and there wasn’t a free cab in sight. He took the bus downtown on Central Park West, transferred at Fifty-seventh Street, rode to Third, and got off in the face of a driving wind. Crossing the street, he ducked into a corner delicatessen, sat down at the counter, ordered a cup of coffee, then pulled the Madison Avenue Handbook from his raincoat pocket and studied the list of New York’s model agencies. Some were nearby, a few farther downtown; if traffic permitted, he could conceivably cover all of them in one day. He hoped, though, that that wouldn’t be necessary, that he’d hit a lead to Jennifer Learson early. But he doubted it would be easy; it had been over ten years. In a transient business like modeling, built on beauty and youth, there were probably few models and few employees of any kind who’d remained in the business for that long a period of time.

  After a second cup, he left the delicatessen and covered the midtown agencies on foot. No one had ever heard of Jennifer Learson, and though there were two or three bookers, who could remember a model named Allison Parker, no one could recall what had happened to her.

  By the time he reached the lower-midtown agencies, he was almost convinced he’d been wasting his time. However, one booker at a small firm remembered something about a model, who’d been involved in a series of murders and who’d disappeared. She recalled that a woman named Rusty had worked for the girl’s agency. The company was long since defunct, but Rusty was still in the business, booking at Blanchard Models.

  He thanked the woman, checked the directory for the address of Blanchard, then grabbed one of the few available cabs he’d seen all day and taxied several blocks to a converted brownstone office building.

  Blanchard Models was on the second floor. The owner was an attractive, pleasant woman in her early forties. There were eight employees. Rusty was one of them. Miss Blanchard was kind enough to take her off the booking board.

  “My name is Ben Burdett,” Ben said, shaking Rusty’s thin, freckled hand.

  Rusty was tall, slim, about forty, with an encouraging smile, a reddish complexion, and a mild, enthusiastic voice.

  “And I’m Rusty.”

  Ben nodded. “Rusty, you may be able to be of great help to me.”

  “I’ll try, if I can.” She could see the urgency in his expression.

  He sat down on the lounge next to her.

  “I’m looking for a girl named Jennifer Learson.”

  Rusty was surprised. “Jennifer Learson? God, I haven’t heard her name in ages. Sure, I knew her. She was one beautiful woman.”

  “So I’m told,” Ben said. He looked at Rusty, coaxing with his eyes.

  “She was the best friend of a model named Allison Parker. I booked for them both. What happened to those girls is a tragedy.”

  Ben moved in closer, so close that he could feel the drift of her breath as she spoke.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I really don’t know the specifics. You’d have to ask the police. They were good models. In fact, when the roof fell in, they were both doing very well. Especially Allison. Oh, they weren’t stars yet, but there is no doubt in my mind that they’d have made it. No doubt at all. They were like sisters, always together, laughing. If I remember correctly, Allison was from Indiana, and Jennifer was from Macon, Georgia. They’d been in town for a couple of years. In fact, when they first got here, they roomed together in the Village, at least until Allison moved in with her boyfriend, a lawyer named Michael Farmer.”

  Ben lit a cigar and watched her closely; once she started talking, he could see that she had a lot to say and no hesitation about saying it.

  “It was terrible. Poor Allison disappeared off the face of the earth after her boyfriend was murdered. Oh…it was in the papers…all over them. There was an investigation, but I don’t think the police solved anything.”

  Ben drew his tongue across his lips, coating them with a thin film of saliva; then he nodded again, somewhat more resolutely, to urge her to continue.

  Rusty sighed and clasped her hands in her lap. “The one I really feel sorry for is Jennifer.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, she went through some bad times. Of course, so might have Allison. But no one ever saw Allison again, so no one could possible relate to her experience. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Of course.”

  “Jennifer didn’t come in for a long time after the murder. When she finally did, she looked like a different human being. She’d completely changed. As I said before, Mr. Burdett, she was a beautiful woman. She had dark hair, a dark complexion, a magnificent figure, and a smile that could melt granite. But what a sight she’d become. She was as pale as a ghost, and she had lost twenty pounds – she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five. You’d have thought she’d just gotten out of a concentration camp. There were terrible wrinkles under her eyes, and she was racked with the shakes. We had lunch the day she returned. She told me she had been questioned by the police. Then she rattled off a lot of gibberish about Allison and Michael. I was sure she wasn’t all there. Her thoughts were all jumbled and nothing she said made any sense. You know what I mean? It was like listening to a lunatic. And was she paranoid! She kept telling me about a plot by relig
ious fanatics; she said they were after her. She was even carrying a gun to protect herself. I tried to calm her down, but she wouldn’t listen. Or couldn’t. She said she hadn’t had a date in months. Hadn’t even left her apartment. She was afraid they would grab her. Now, what was I supposed to say or do? I was in shock. Well, she tried to get back to modeling, but got nowhere. Who was going to book a girl who looked like she’d just risen from the grave? I told her to get away. Take a year off. She said she had to work. She was seeing a psychiatrist four times a week, and the bills were running very high. Then she disappeared, reappearing again months later. She seemed to be getting worse. Worse looking. More paranoid. Kind of manic-depressive. In fact, one of the girls thought she was schizo. And I wouldn’t have bet against it. About a year after she first came back, I tried to call her. She had a bunch of residual checks that had built up. No one answered her phone. I went to her apartment and buzzed. She let me in. She said she wasn’t answering the phone, because they were after her and she didn’t want them to know that she was home. You should have seen her place. It hadn’t been cleaned in months. There were TV dinners all over. Garbage on the floors. Tons of dirty dishes in the sink. There was a terrible odor of human feces and urine. God, it was awful. I tried to convince her to leave the apartment, but couldn’t. I gave her the money. She told me she was through with modeling; she’d found a better way to make a living. And I was quick to see that she needed a lot of cash. She had scars on her arms. She was shooting something. Cocaine. Heroin. Who knows?

  Ben was fascinated. “And this all happened within the space of a year?”

  “Yes, over ten years ago.” Rusty paused, then continued. “A couple of months later, I found out how Jennifer was earning a living from a model named Victoria, who’d known both Jennifer and Allison. Victoria and her boyfriend were walking near Broadway, after coming out of a theater, and saw a drugged-up girl standing on a corner, soliciting. It was Jennifer. Victoria tried to talk to her, but Jennifer didn’t respond. Just then a pimp came out of a building and introduced Jennifer to a Puerto Rican john, who led her into his car and drove off. Victoria was shocked. She tried to speak to the pimp. The pimp refused to answer her questions and disappeared into an alley.”

  Rusty stopped talking; she was tense, perspiring heavily. Ben offered her a handkerchief; she took it and wiped her face.

  “That was the last I heard of her for at least two years. Until one night and I remember it distinctly. It was Christmas Eve. I was home. The phone rang, and it was Jennifer on the other end. I could barely hear her. She said she’d taken an overdose. I called the police. They went to Jennifer’s apartment and rushed her to Bellevue. I found her parents’ phone number and called her father. He said he didn’t care what happened to her. If she died, she died. He hung up. It was incredible. Anyway, I spoke to Jennifer a month or two later; she was being treated as an outpatient at the Bellevue psychiatric clinic. She was more paranoid than ever. Then she disappeared again. When she next called, about a year and a half later, she said she’d been confined to an institution, but was completely normal and cured. She said she wanted to return to modeling. I told her to come in, but I knew that no matter how much progress she’d made, too much time had passed. She showed up just prior to closing, thank god. She was still under thirty. But she looked ninety. And she had wild eyes, like a rabid animal’s. I was scared. I asked one of the other bookers to stay. I told Jennifer there was no way she could return to modeling. I was afraid she’d get violent. But she didn’t. She just stood, as if she’d expected to hear what I’d said, and then calmly left the building. And that’s the last time I saw her.”

  Ben bit into the end of his cigar; he felt a tremor run up his spine. My God, he thought. My God. He could hardly moisten his mouth. It had dried like the caked floor of a desert lake.

  “You’re sure that you never saw her again?”

  Rusty looked off into space, searching her memory. “Yes, I’m sure. Absolutely sure of it”

  “And you have no idea where she is?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Ben’s body stiffened. “Where is she?”

  “She was confined to a mental institution.”

  “Which one?”

  “Providence State Hospital. In Riverhead, Long Island. But whether she’s there now, I don’t know. All I can tell you is that I want nothing to do with her.”

  “Of course.”

  Rusty stood; she was shaken.

  They shook hands.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” Ben said.

  “Forget it. I hope I was of some help.”

  “Yes. You certainly were.”

  He thanked Miss Blanchard for her consideration and walked to the door with Rusty at his side.

  “Mr. Burdett,” Rusty said, as Ben was about to leave, “I forgot to ask you why you wanted to know about Jennifer. Why you seem to be so interested in her whereabouts.”

  Ben smiled and stared at her feline eyes. “Why?” he asked rhetorically. “Because I think I’ve found Allison Parker.”

  “Over the last six or seven years,” Dr. Taguichi said softly, “she’s been admitted several times. From the very beginning there was not the slightest doubt about the diagnosis. But what truly amazed us…beyond the depth of her psychosis… was the extent of the symptoms and the crossover into other syndrome subtypes.”

  “What do you mean?” Ben asked.

  They began to cross the neatly pruned exercise yard of Providence State Hospital.

  “Well, there are certain symptoms, general ones, that are common to most schizophrenics, which allow us to make a diagnosis. In Jennifer Learson’s case, as I said before, she displayed firm paranoid tendencies. She was tense, suspicious, guarded, even hostile at times. And she had a fixed sequence of delusions of a persecutory nature.”

  “What kind of delusions?’

  Taguichi told him; it sounded like a repetition of Gatz’s epic. Ben told Taguichi that he had reason to believe that Jennifer Learson’s story had some basis in fact. Taguichi admitted that that might be so, then continued to evolve a picture of a very disturbed girl.

  “Even granted that the persecutory delusions…a religious plot carried out by the Catholic Church…might have had some foundation in fact, I can assure you that the further manifestations did not. She was convinced that clerics were following her, trying to kill her. Alternately, she was convinced that she was to be the next living victim, the next guardian, the successor to her friend Allison Parker, whose personality and fate were clearly developed in her mind. These, of course, suggest coexisting delusions of grandeur. She experienced delusions in which she claimed to be the Virgin Mary. She heard voices. She saw visions. One time she thought she was on fire, burning at the stake like Joan of Arc. Another time, she perceived that her heart was growing. Mr. Burdett, this is classic paranoid schizophrenia. But, as I said before, she also elicited a gamut of general schizophrenic manifestations. She had severe disorders of verbal behavior. At times she was totally incoherent. At other times she spoke in wholly indecipherable symbolic terms. She was subject to mutism, echolalia, and verbigeration, all forms of verbal and expressive dementia. With each successive visit, she showed an ever-increasing and serious deterioration of appearance and manner. One day, we found her eating her own stool.”

  Ben grimaced; a surge of stomach acid sickened him.

  “In addition, she was particularly subject to affective disorders, reduced emotional responses, and emotional blunting.”

  “Doctor, this sounds like a very sick girl. Why was she ever let out?”

  Taguichi nodded thoughtfully, as they reached the end of the exercise yard and entered the building to their right.

  “In the beginning, Miss Learson was a voluntary internee. We were able to keep her schizophrenia under control and release her periodically. She initially responded well to daily d
oses of chlorpromazine, but the ultimate results were mixed. We also utilized several forms of psychotherapy, but with generally negative results there, too.”

  “Did she return voluntarily?”

  “No. She was committed by her family after several self-mutilations, one homicidal episode involving a man, who was supposedly paying her for sexual services, and an alarming increase in the frequency and the nature of her delusions and hallucinations.”

  They climbed a staircase to the second floor and started to walk down a white corridor.

  Ben shook his head. “Perhaps I’ll be able to make some headway with her. Perhaps something I say will get through.”

  “I’m afraid not, Mr. Burdett. She is one of the few truly hopeless cases in the institution. Of course, that’s an opinion. But a good one. Even if she were still in the paranoid state, she’d be difficult to reach. But during the last four years, since her involuntary confinement, her clinical course has taken an alarming turn, a possibly terminal psychiatric turn.”

  Ben looked at the doctor with weary eyes.

  “She’s become a catatonic.”

  “A what?”

  “She’s lost contact with the outside world, Mr. Burdett. Her trauma is very rare today, although many years ago it was common. Modern treatment has all but eliminated such conditions. However, these treatments have failed with Miss Learson. She’s not responded to drugs. She hasn’t responded to insulin coma. She’s not responded to electroconvulsive shock. Nothing has helped. For the last two years she’s lain immobile on her cot, salivating, at times eliciting a cataleptic response, frozen body positions, what-have-you.” Dr. Taguichi could see the horror in Ben’s eyes, the look of frustration. “I’m sorry.”

  They arrived in front of a door, which Dr. Taguichi opened; they stepped inside.

  Ben could hardly keep from screaming; he felt even sicker than he’d felt outside. The girl, who lay on the cot, could conceivably have been a beautiful woman at one time. But now she was a dirty old crone, a shriveled, frozen body without any expression, even a hint of life.