Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  She thought it over. She had been asked and answered that same question more than once, she believed.

  “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “Who invented electricity?”

  “Nikola Tesla,” she told him.

  “Prepare her,” the doctor instructed the nurses. “Run a monitor strip.”

  A nurse checked the goo and wires on both sides of her head.

  The chin-nurse told her. “Open.” She opened her mouth and the nurse stuck in a piece of very hard rubber.

  “Mmmrumph?”

  “This is so you don’t bite your tongue.” The nurse pulled the bedside rails on either side of her into the upright position.

  “Give her thirty seconds,” the black-haired doctor said curtly.

  A clear mask came over her nose.

  “This is just oxygen.” The woman doctor’s voice.

  She closed her eyes, and felt the shock. A wavy one, oscillating, lifting her up, then dropping her as her muscles contracted.

  Black. And a terrible dryness.

  When she awoke, a clammy sweat enveloped her and saliva trickled out of her mouth. Her head ached horribly. Her thoughts were jumbled. When she tried to organize a question, her thoughts flew hopelessly out of her control. She made a waterfall sound in her head to protect herself. Through that rumble, she heard snippets of hushed disagreement.

  “Again? But Doctor…”

  “Just do it.”

  “It’s awfully high, Doctor.”

  “Airway… suction…”

  Blackness again.

  The waves ended, crashing. She believed someone spoke to her. But she couldn’t talk. She labored just to breathe. A heavy, prickly heat fell over her as someone wrapped her in blankets and removed the flat, stiff object from her mouth.

  Several minutes passed before she heard a man speak.

  “Cornelia, who invented electricity?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Such an odd time for a quiz. She thought she was lying in the school nurse’s office, with a god-awful headache.

  Her mouth felt woolly and full of a funny odor, like animals lived inside. “Alexander Graham Bell?”

  “Electricity. Who invented electricity?”

  “Oh. Thomas Alva Edison, wasn’t it?”

  “Good, Cornelia. I’d say we just achieved a major breakthrough.”

  “Break through what?” She slurred her words. She felt ashamed, afraid that she must be drooling.

  “Let us worry about that.” The voice sounded so arrogant and smug. It came from the male doctor with curly hair who scribbled notes on a chart. “You just concentrate on getting better.”

  She felt so weary and hopeless. As though her whole being collapsed into herself and she was left alone in a black void.

  When she opened her eyes, she was sitting on a couch, dressed in a robe. She was in a room surrounded by strange women. A few of them greeted her by her name, Cornelia. How did they know her?

  So tired. She slouched down into the folds of the green sofa, studying the terry cloth bathrobe she wore with a T-shirt underneath. Three girls sat around her, dressed just as oddly. She would really like to leave. Immediately.

  “Creamcheese,” one of the girls whispered to another so she could just hear her. “Give it to her.”

  A porcelain-pale girl with inky black hair leaned over.

  “Corny, I have a note for you.” She pressed a folded pink napkin into her hand.

  She tried to smile. At least she could be polite in her disarray, until she sorted this out. Slowly, she unwrapped the napkin. Someone had written on it with a pen in black letters. She moved her lips over the words, four times, before folding it and handing it back to the pale girl.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know anyone named Kevin.”

  He waited in the therapy room of Astor I for Dr. Lester.

  Now his notes to Cornelia went one way and vanished. Since he had been transferred to this maximum-security wing, the only information about her came from hospital gossip. That shaky grapevine told him that Corny’s doctor gave her shock treatments regularly, and she wasn’t remembering a lot.

  The door opened. A young doctor with a half-bored, clinical look and curly black hair plopped down in the chair across from him.

  “Where’s Dr. Lester?” Kevin asked him.

  “Dr. Burns took her off your case because she wasn’t tough enough with you. It’s time for a new regime, Sebastian. I’m Dr. Loblitz. I’ll be your therapist from now on.”

  Now Kevin recognized him from Cornelia’s description. He crossed his leg in a sprawling way so that his ankle rested on his knee. He had a nervous tic. His heavy brown shoe shook up and down.

  “I have good news for you, Kevin. I’ve cured your friend Ms. Lord. She’s made a complete recovery.”

  Kevin felt the hairs rise. “A recovery?”

  “Yes,” the young doctor worked his unpleasant, wet lips. “I helped her forget all her disturbances. Her delusions about Tesla. Her irrational reluctance to marry Mr. Fisk. And her flirtation with you.”

  The doctor sat back. Maybe he wasn’t exactly enjoying this, but he sure wasn’t hating it either. “I’m discharging Cornelia Lord tomorrow. But I’m afraid your prognosis isn’t so clear.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You’re still manifestly disturbed, suffering from—”

  “Code Green,” Kevin guessed. “I’m covered by my health plan, as long as you want to keep me.”

  The doctor looked surprised. “Very good, Kevin, but even the best medical plans come to an end sometime. We have about a year left to work together. Let’s make it count.”

  He actually smiled now, a mean little “gotcha” smile that made him look more like a prosecutor than a psychiatrist. No, more like a torturer warming up. Kevin scorched his brain searching for what could work to change the doctor’s mind.

  “Look, aren’t you supposed to ‘first do no harm’?”

  “Kevin, am I harming you? I’m here to help.”

  “I faked my way in here. You can kick me out for malingering, do whatever you want. But you can’t keep me in here when you know I’m okay.”

  He was very nervous about this doctor’s smile now, the way his blubbery lips curled.

  “It’s not just me you’re up against, Kevin. We have your referring doctor’s diagnosis. We have test batteries. You can’t fake those.”

  “I was only acting crazy for Cornelia.”

  Dr. Loblitz chuckled. “And you did a fine job, Kevin. Why don’t you just settle back and enjoy it. Working people like you never get to stay at the Sanctuary.”

  A growl began deep in Kevin’s stomach and worked up through his throat. He leapt up from his seat, lunging at the doctor’s stringy neck.

  “Aides!” Dr. Loblitz yelled.

  Then he could recall only a noisy red fury. He almost lost consciousness with one beefy aide’s arm around his neck, the other twisting his own arm behind his back. They wrestled him into the most feared room in the entire hospital. The one with no plaque on the door.

  The staff called it “Seclusion.”

  The patients knew it as “The Rubber Room” or “The Wet Room,” depending on their doctor’s orders.

  The floor and walls were padded with foam rubber. They had been smeared with something unsavory by the last patient. It smelled like a monkey cage treated with disinfectant. One foam mattress was placed against the wall. It was there to be walloped like a punching bag to work off anger. Another mattress lay on the rubber-padded floor for resting. There was no other furniture.

  “Cold-pack him,” Dr. Loblitz snarled, straightening his tie. Kevin’s wild efforts to strangle this doctor hadn’t even mussed his curly hair.

  The aides stripped Kevin’s clothes off. They wrapped him in pink bedsheets soaked in ice-cold water, and secured them tightly around his body with fabric belts. Kevin pressed his face against the mattress on the floor. He began to shiver, his teeth clattering
together.

  He lay there for what seemed like hours yelling into the mattress. He couldn’t stop thinking of Cornelia standing politely at the big oak front doors of the Sanctuary, ready to go home.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chester swung the door open.

  “Where are my bridesmaids, Monsieur? Bring them to me.” The woman’s voice cut though the elliptical foyer of Penthouse A like a haughty foghorn.

  “Good afternoon, Madame.”

  “Eh, bien. “Madame honked, then sneezed in Chester’s face without apologizing.

  Chester swallowed his dislike. He greeted the frail woman heartily and took her by her brittle arm. Carefully, he escorted Madame Marie-Claude, Manhattan’s oldest wedding planner, across the foyer under his glittering chandelier. She shook off Chester’s arm and hobbled away, stabbing her walking cane with a top ornament like a Fabergé egg into his floor.

  This was the woman who would reign over Cornelia’s wedding. In his heart he suspected that Madame had peaked about half a century ago. Then she had served as one of the royal wedding retinue for the movie star Grace Kelly, soon to become Princess Grace of Monaco. “Happily ever after” had seemed quite attainable to Elizabeth’s generation of debutantes, with the right selection of husband and wedding planner.

  So Elizabeth had chosen Madame Marie-Claude to spin their own fairy-tale wedding—had it really been twenty-five years earlier? Chester had found the old tyrant insufferable even then. But when Cornelia went through the photographs of her parents’ wedding and asked about the old crone, Chester encouraged his daughter to hire her. Even this fragile connection to Elizabeth proved irresistible.

  Chester followed Madame into the living room. He tuned out Madame’s hectoring of Cornelia’s bridesmaids, Tina French and other childhood friends huddling around his daughter.

  “Hey, Madame,” Tina greeted her, deadpan. “Torquemada called you. He wants his personality back.”

  Chester regarded smirky, quirky Tina of the cylindrical body wearing a “Models Suck” T-shirt under a man’s dress shirt.

  “Venez vite ici!” Madame barked.

  Chester marveled that each of the bridesmaids who slouched around his living room in a fairly unappealing collection of sloppy, street-chic get-ups understood Madame’s command and dutifully jumped up to gather around the old fascist. Respect for wedding planners must be burned in these girls’ genes, Chester mused, the way they leapt to her authority.

  Except for Cornelia.

  Cornelia sat before the hearth, frowning at the flames.

  “C’mon, Corny,” Tina screeched at her.

  His daughter finally smiled and stood up to join Madame. Though she seemed warm on the surface, undeniably calmer, Chester keenly felt the dullness in her eyes as though it were his own emptiness.

  How her sparkle had gone.

  She no longer ran away. She never bothered to argue. Sometimes she hovered near her father in a tentative, almost fearful way, as though he were the only person in a precarious land. And that had been his wish.

  Be careful what you wish for, Elizabeth would have told him.

  Most of Cornelia’s memories would return in time, Loblitz promised. He felt a simmering of anger at the doctor. Loblitz neither realized nor seemed to care about the passion that seemed lost, perhaps irretrievably.

  Dr. Loblitz had brushed aside his concerns. He had immediately begun with the jargon. Something about anterograde memory loss. Once Chester had cut through the hokum, Loblitz had admitted that Cornelia would be confused and possibly suffer some minor loss of memory. But Chester felt ill-prepared for the depth of her funk. When she tried to remember her past, even some of her fondest recollections of her childhood remained pockmarked.

  The great positive, he supposed, was that Cornelia seemed to view Tucker as a new person in her life. At least she didn’t reject him, or bring up her conspiracy theories. It was good that she could start with a “clean slate,” as both Dr. Loblitz and Tucker had taken to calling her evacuated memory banks. Fortunately, she recalled nothing at all about the Tesla business or the doorman.

  Chester had sat her down several times and talked to her. He had omitted some thorny topics such as Kevin Doyle, shaded others. He told her that she needed help dealing with painful memories of her mother’s death and had received it at the Sanctuary. He belabored the loyalty Tucker had shown her. With a hazy and rather tragic gratitude, she had accepted Chester’s abridged version of events. Sometimes she even seemed to fake recalling things to make him happy. Her genuine recollections, notable by the glint in her otherwise full eyes, came infrequently. Each recaptured true memory seemed a small treasure.

  Yet in the coldest and most practical terms, their plan—or he should say Tucker’s plan—had worked. In her halting way, Cornelia seemed to enjoy occupying center stage as the bride-to-be in Manhattan’s Wedding of the Year.

  He had defeated Corny’s rebellion, but at a terrible cost. And now his heart punished him.

  Chester left Madame with Cornelia and slumped off to his study. At the door, he was taken aback to see Tucker working at his English desk, a trophy plucked from the Rothschild banking house. The boy was treating Chester’s private sanctum sanctorum as his own.

  “Should I look into getting a partners desk?” Chester asked dryly.

  Tucker looked up, startled. He pulled some papers together and tapped them on the desktop to smooth out the pile.

  “Cornelia and I signed these yesterday in Edgar’s office. We’re going to beat the Kois, Dad.”

  Dad.

  “Don’t look so depressed.” Tucker slapped his arm. “Loblitz told me an interesting mind thing. The closer you get to a goal, the more you see the negatives.”

  Tucker rolled his eyes playfully at the mysteries of the mind.

  Chester’s heart skipped for some reason. “I didn’t realize that you and Dr. Loblitz were so close.”

  Tucker cocked his head. “Close? Why would you say that, Chester?”

  Suddenly he felt too queasy to stay in his own study. “I think I’ll step outside for some air.”

  In the lobby, Andrew, the doorman, tipped his hat. “Congratulations, sir.”

  “Thank you.” His own voice sounded high and tight.

  Chester couldn’t walk through the lobby and see his own doorman now without the apparition of Kevin Doyle flitting through his mind.

  Doyle had been a hero at first. No question about that. Then, in the way of young people today, he had taken advantage of the situation, forcing himself on his daughter. No better than a surly, overpaid professional quarterback who makes one good play and—

  Quarterback. No. It wasn’t Kevin Doyle whose image leapt in front of him, but Tucker’s. Why had his grim doubts all turned in Tucker’s direction lately? Perhaps Chester had overreacted to the boy’s sitting at his desk. But he had physically recoiled when his future son-in-law had called him “Dad” and touched him.

  Was it possible that, although Chester had always known the awful fire of shame that burned the tips of his ears bright red, he had never really felt guilt before? On his daughter’s wedding day, when he would get to keep Lord & Company, all of his troubles would be over. So why did his world seem ready to collapse like a… what did they call those stars that imploded into themselves, becoming dead, cold little raisins in the universe?

  White dwarfs.

  Why did he feel like he would turn into a white dwarf?

  Walking south on Fifth Avenue, he looked back at 840. For the first time, Chester found a hint of the Bastille in the limestone tower. It had always been just “home,” familiar and unremarkable. Now it looked old and ugly. His daughter’s prison. He turned abruptly into Central Park. The cold should bite his skin, but didn’t. He felt suddenly inured to sensation, as though his body had turned to salt, like Lot’s wife, and could blow away in the wind.

  Chester followed the path toward the entrance to the Central Park Zoo, looking up at the big stone gate. He sa
w the bronze animals at the top, the bear ringing the bell. He had loved that bear as a small boy. Now it looked as grotesque as a gargoyle.

  His bench-made English shoes kept moving toward Grand Army Plaza. The Plaza Hotel sparkled, fresh from its latest sandblasting renovation. If only one’s spirit could be sandblasted, he mused, to rise up so tidy and renewed. The fountain in front had been shut off for winter, perhaps just after Cornelia’s incident. Limousines huddled together under the hotel awnings in loud colors that could only be commissioned by sultans and rock stars.

  He felt so cold and alone that one of his worst childhood memories came back to him.

  During his fifteenth summer, his dad arranged for him to crew on a competition sailing boat. Shivering below in the dark, swinging in a net hammock under a skimpy blanket made of silver foil, he dreaded his first shift as night’s watch. The boat pitched and brine swept over decks with only a six-inch-high railing, with nobody else to notice if he should go overboard and drown. His crewmates laughed and shoved him on deck, then locked the door behind him. He slid across the bow as if it were slicked with oil, and clung in terror to a cleat with his eyes closed until he was finally relieved…

  “Oh, sorry.” He was clinging to the back of a park bench, a woman bustling her children away in fright.

  He moved on, gathering speed. His feet found a groove, did his thinking for him. Everyone who he had trusted with Cornelia… Tucker… the psychiatrists… had given him queasy waves of uncertainty lately, cold pockets of dread. With one exception. Only one person in his recent memory had unburdened him with an act of goodness so pure and comforting, it still glowed inside him, pulling him forward.

  Chester found what he had come for across the street from the Plaza. There were already sparkling lights on in the trees at the rim of the park, and the hotels along Central Park South shone full of comfort and celebration. He could see the couples bundled up under lap robes in the backs of the horse-drawn carriages, black coaches with gold fittings and red tassels, driven by men and women in stiff white shirts and top hats.

  The carriage stood out from the others, spanking white. What ambition it must take to sit up there. He walked toward Roni Dubrov, towering over her black-leather driver’s seat, the black curls spilling around her shoulders. She wore round wire-rimmed sunglasses with glossy black lenses today, a bit intimidating on her sharp cheekbones. As he approached, he noticed that her skin kept its bronze warmth even in this thin winter sunlight. He breathed in the comforting horsy scent.