Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  “Hello,” he called up to her.

  She looked down in his direction, located him.

  “Chester Lord,” she called happily. “Do you like?”

  “Very much.” His eyes rested on her face.

  She laughed raucously like a soldier in a barracks, a surprising sound from her womanly lips.

  “No, Chester, the carriage.”

  “Oh.” He admired the freshly painted black frame and patted the maroon leather, old but well oiled. “It’s quite magnificent.”

  “Good. You paid for it. That was a nice thing. How is Cornelia?”

  “Back from the hospital.” He tried to strike an optimistic tone to match her own. “And getting married.”

  He expected her to gush a bit like everyone else, to offer some congratulatory bit of fluff. Instead, she removed her sunglasses. Her eyes made him wither. They were as coal-black as the lenses she had just taken off, and full of distrust.

  “What do you mean, getting married?”

  “Well, just that. Actually, I came here to ask you to the wedding.”

  “To drive the carriage?”

  “No, I thought as a… guest.”

  She looked so formidable up there, her tangle of hair in the light like a burning bush, judging him. “Mr. Lord, did you honestly come to bring me a wedding invitation?”

  “Uh…” Chester fumbled.

  “You don’t look so right to me.”

  “Listen,” Chester said. “Do you suppose I could hop up there and just talk for a while?”

  She put her sunglass frame between her teeth and nibbled on it, unconsciously, her eyes drilling into him.

  Chester froze in her stare, intimidated. But he did not feel like walking away.

  She spoke crisply. “Do you remember what I told you about Cornelia, when I saw you at the hospital?”

  “You said to help her.”

  “I said that she was only a child.” Roni pointed her glasses at him, shaking them.

  “We did. We found her professional help in a… uh, residential facility.”

  “A mental hospital?”

  “One with a lovely grounds and swimming pool.”

  Suddenly he felt the enormity of his burden come rushing up like something bilious from his stomach.

  “And she had shock treatments,” he blurted. “She’s lost her memory.

  Roni Dubrov’s forehead plunged into angry furrows under the mass of curly hair. “She’s getting married in this condition? Have you gone crazy, Mr. Lord?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  He wondered if he looked as lonely and exposed as he felt.

  Finally, she gave him the look he now realized that he had come seeking, the one he had remembered every day since the horrible night at Manhattan Hill Hospital.

  “I think you’d better tell me about it.”

  Kevin pressed his fingers and nose flat against the glass of the nurses’ station, reading the New York Globe headline upside down. The staff held a daily conference inside, with their backs turned to him. The newspaper lay on a table just inside the booth.

  “Corny: Crazy in Love?” The headline read.

  And Kevin saw Philip Grace’s byline underneath the headline, trying to make out the words while his heart pumped so hard, it almost shook the glass.

  Grace’s story said, “… private afternoon nuptials at the Lord penthouse on February 14…”

  Valentine’s Day.

  He turned around and crumpled into the closest chair. The patient sitting next to him rose up and walked away in quick, robotic steps.

  The nice student nurse, Ms. Babcock, stooped down to look at him, concerned. “What’s the matter with you, Kevin? Your face is all red.”

  “I’m trying to see if I can die if I hold my breath long enough.”

  “Kevin, you stop that.” She helped him up. “You have a visitor.”

  A visitor, good. He would pull himself together. Push Mr. Shit Out of Luck back on the shelf and take out Mr. Last Pitiful Hope. He could beat this. It was only Chester, Tucker, and the New York Establishment again. He had already climbed into the ring once. And he’d snuck into this hospital, sucker-punched them all. For a while, anyway.

  And just when she was really getting better.

  He flashed on an image of Cornelia as one of those tortured explorers he had seen at Bellevue—patients who had shock treatments and lost their memories, looking for their lives in every corner of the ward. Were they married? Were their parents still alive? He felt shattered for her, ached to be with her while she began to pick up those broken shards of her past. It could be months before she would really be Cornelia again.

  If ever.

  Anyway, she couldn’t save herself now. It was on him to patch together his thin armor and go after her.

  Thinking about the “nuptials,” that almost obscene-sounding word, he felt suddenly drained of all energy and hope.

  Who was he kidding?

  If she stepped into her world again, they could flick a finger and be rid of him forever.

  An aide approached him, warily. “You’ve still got a visitor.”

  He slumped to the visitors room in his bedroom slippers.

  “Jesus, Kevin,” Marne greeted him. “You look like you’ve been chewing the rug. What happened to you?”

  “They gave Cornelia shock treatments and released her.”

  “Shock?” She blinked. “What kind of shock?”

  “Right out of the Middle Ages. They use them to zap somebody’s brain if they’re really disturbed or suicidal. I can’t believe her father could do that to her.”

  Marne involuntarily flexed her biceps under her jacket. “So what are you gonna to do about it?”

  “Do about it?” He looked at the wall, as if the secret hung on a light fixture. “Marne, they’re holding me until my health plan runs out. If I act crazy, they’re happy. If I act normal, they say I’m manipulating them and they drive me crazy all over again. It’s a beautiful system.

  She scowled. “Can they do that? I mean, they got laws in New York State. Look at all the nuts on the street. Maybe I should call the ACLU for you.”

  “The ACLU?” His eyes stung with a hopeless fury. “I need the 101st Airborne. She’s getting married on Valentine’s Day. Oh, Jesus. What’s the date today?”

  “February 7.”

  He tried to get control but felt his eyes rolling like pinwheels. “A week. I have to break out of here, get past building security at 840 Fifth, sneak into the Lords’ apartment, and convince her she ought to take a chance with me. Marne, you’ve known me since I was two. You really think I’m up to that?”

  “What I think,” Marne said after a hard look at him, “is that you rescued that girl once, all on your own. You earned her, Kevin.”

  Vlad’s stupid story about the Doorman Prince had lodged in his brain. Now it crept forward to mock him. He felt that life had just swallowed him up.

  Doorman Prince, my ass.

  Hope had driven him into the hospital. Hope gave you that dumb ambition that spits in the face of reason. But sometimes hope failed. You get outsmarted, outspent, life comes at you thundering like a bullherd, and you get trampled.

  Maybe real wisdom came when you realized it was smarter to give up.

  His voice was only a whisper. “Maybe you were right all along. It’s not the end of the world just being a doorman, is it?”

  His sister flashed him the defiant glare of the Feeneys, the fighters.

  “Being a doorman may be okay for some people,” she told him. “But not for Kevin Doyle.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  To the father of the groom!”

  “To Sloopy, hear, hear!”

  She obediently stood and hoisted her champagne glass. Forty-eight relatives and close friends selected for this intimate dinner at Binky’s, a jewelbox of a private club, bobbed up like a line of dominoes jerked on a string.

  The man from the New York Times, the only society repo
rter permitted into their dinner, ticked off photos of Cornelia as she smiled at Tucker. She widened her jaw until it showed all her teeth and gums. She lifted her own glass to clink onto his.

  Now the whole table stared at Tucker’s father. Sloopy Fisk flapped his fluffy eyebrows in Cornelia’s direction. Amazing that his friends still called him Sloopy, his nickname from Yale. But not quite as amazing as his marriage to Tucker’s mother.

  Perhaps they found each other in a marriage of convenience. Sloopy’s family had the name, but was shabby genteel. Tucker’s mother, Elise, wore the pants and made the money. She stood as far apart from Sloopy as seating permitted, clutching the stem of her glass too tightly.

  Her new in-laws. Harmless Sloopy and intense Elise. Her future mother-in-law’s heart pumped so much adrenaline, her fingers almost broke the stemware. But she wasn’t marrying Elise, was she?

  Now it was time for sweet Sloopy’s toast, and she stifled a giggle at his stuffy formality.

  Sloopy began luffing at length. “It’s good to finally be in the ‘family way’ with my old college roommate, Chester Lord. We’ve always been close, but as Chester’s dad used to say, ‘Nothing wrong with inbreeding… works for racehorses, doesn’t it?’”

  She heard echoes of polite laughter.

  A flickering candle caught her attention inside the glass of the candelabra in front of her. Like a firefly, casting little stars and shadows, shapes like… that face in uniform.

  A uniformed officer of some kind, with his ear bleeding.

  Her father had just explained that face the day before. It was a man who used to work at her building. He had done something and been fired. When did he work there? she wondered. Surely when she was a child. She couldn’t recall his name, but he saved her from a terrible accident. It was a trauma, Chester told her, like her mother dying.

  Oops. All the guests stood up around the table, looking at her.

  She shifted her attention back to her well-wishers. Sloopy had finished his part. Now they all waited for her.

  She smiled apologetically. “Thank you,” she said, lifting her glass. “I have a toast, too. To my fiancé, who I’m sure you’ve all read about in New York magazine as the city’s number one bachelor. What more could I add, except that we’ll be putting an end to that foolishness soon enough.”

  Relieved laughter bubbled from the table.

  Kevin whaled against the old Beautyrest put up against the wall of the Seclusion Room.

  Dust particles flew as he skinned his knuckles red. He raged, screeching and muttering, yowling and cursing. He no longer cared how he sounded. It didn’t matter, anyway.

  Loblitz had downgraded him even further, a unit so hellish they didn’t even call it a wing—South One, an apt name for this lowest level of pit, for patients with random bursts of aggression and bad table manners. There were so many problem patients, the South One Seclusion Room often became as overbooked as an HMO’s waiting room. Kevin often had to share it with other patients.

  He tensed for trouble from one of the real psychos when the door clicked and slammed open with a squish against the rubber. Then he relaxed.

  “Hey, Richard,” he said.

  The aides wrestled his pudgy old pal in, pink-wrapped in a cold sheet, and dropped him onto the floor mattress. The aeronautical engineer rolled his eyes up so high Kevin could only see the whites like two cueballs.

  He felt sorry for Richard, but at least it wasn’t his turn in the freezing sheets.

  Then the door opened again and Loblitz’s curly head popped in.

  “Cold-pack Doyle, too,” he ordered.

  They sat shivering together.

  Kevin tried concentrating on a plan. He had heard about prisoners of war who survived by building houses in their heads, down to the last nail. He was constructing his plan. But now Richard was interrupting, blowing big holes in his plan so it kept collapsing. Richard was whining in one of his high-pitched monologues that lasted hours, sometimes days. He recited aircraft specs in a voice so incredibly high-pitched and singsong there was no way to keep it from intruding on his thoughts.

  “Richard,” he finally asked him, “what are they punishing you for?”

  “My doctor had me taken upstairs,” Richard told him, teeth chattering. “I went for it.”

  Richard had a rare but very real mental disorder Kevin had heard about at Bellevue. Richard was an obsessive personality who, if he went above the first floor, would look at a window and feel the compulsion to fly. Now Richard had been cruelly denied both the thrill of flight and his plastic green bottle to throw up in the air. He needed more than ever to recite the specs of every aircraft ever built, to bring order back to his world.

  “If you had a plane in the Wright Brothers’ day, Kevin,” he babbled in the high-pitched whine, “it was probably a Curtiss…”

  Kevin sighed and gave up on constructing his plan. Instead he tried to imagine puffy clouds and Richard’s old planes. The tiny germ of an idea started, but Richard’s voice chased it away.

  He fell fitfully asleep. He dreamed of a cobalt sky and a flock of white doves soaring into the sun. He woke sharply and saw only the white room.

  Richard lay next to him, snoring.

  Cornelia waited for Tucker in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel.

  She read her daily checklist for the third time. She had forgotten to do a bridal registry at Bendel’s, Tina’s suggestion. But she did remember that she and her parents had always brunched in this lovely, archaic room when she was a child.

  This would be her last chance to really talk with Tucker before the wedding. And she did have some questions.

  Now Tucker threaded through the room toward her, beaming, clearly the star of his world. His presence excited one tableful of businesspeople who smiled and nodded as he passed. With his shiny blond hair combed back and his crisp white shirt and wine-colored tie, he seemed practically anointed for power.

  She tried to organize her thoughts. They were so hollowed out somehow, like craters of the moon.

  “Hi,” he greeted her. “Rough morning. Am I late?”

  “Only an hour.”

  Over these past few weeks, she had definitely learned Tucker’s sense of priorities. Her handsome young man smoothed out his tie, a silky Armani, and swept his hair back with his hand to strike a leonine pose.

  Tucker Fisk, King of Beasts.

  But much of his story needed to be repeated to her. She could recall so little of their time together. She remembered the feeling of high pressure, being jostled around in a small plane. Then some incident by a fountain where he appeared to look after her. They seemed to have shared some rough moments, which of course could glue a couple together. What seemed to elude her in her recollections were the giddy, carefree times that they must also have shared to be so in love that they were now heading for the altar.

  “Tucker, what exactly did we do when we dated? I hate having to ask, but I can’t help it.”

  He shrugged and patted her hand once. Whether it was from tenderness or a hint of impatience, she couldn’t tell.

  “We saw friends, went to parties.”

  The nice waiter appeared. He had already brought her five cups of coffee while she waited, and joked with her so she wouldn’t feel so alone.

  “We’ll both have kippers and eggs with coffee,” Tucker told him.

  “Tucker, don’t I hate kippers?”

  “Oh. What do you want?”

  “Just the coffee. And maybe a mimosa would be nice.”

  The waiter started to move away.

  “Waiter,” Tucker called loudly. The man returned without flinching. “No champagne in her mimosa.”

  She glanced out the window toward Central Park. The morning had been bright and cloudless. Now a thundercloud drooped north of the park. She watched it darken and saw light flash through it.

  A lightning storm—rare for February. It made her tense. No, severely troubled. She sensed a vague memory through her body, stirring her
nerve endings.

  In the distance, a white bolt crackled out of the thick cloud. She jumped in her seat.

  “What’s the matter?” Tucker asked her.

  “I don’t know.”

  The lightning had startled her with what she recognized as traces of forgotten feelings, important ones. They slid across her face like fingernails on a blackboard, sharp, intrusive.

  “Then what’s bothering you?” Tucker asked.

  “An electrical storm.”

  A single line of worry appeared on his forehead.

  “No,” he told her firmly. “It’s just a storm.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Cornelia lay in the half-world between sleep and waking.

  She slept for so long, a crust of sandpaper had formed between her eyelids. She opened one eye and looked around her.

  The pillows and bedsheets sandwiched her among layers of lavender silk and pink chenille.

  She opened the other eye. The room looked almost exactly as it had when she was a child. She was sure she recognized the hand-painted bed table. It was a pastoral scene of maidens in togas frolicking in a yellow field, their faces like peaches over ample arms and legs. All that exquisite brushwork, just to decorate a drawer that contained her hairbrush and Excedrin.

  A piece of Lalique crystal on the table had also been shaped into a maiden—maybe the White Rock girl bending over and pushing her hair back. Simple maidens cavorted everywhere in this girl’s room, dewy virgins, milkmaids. Like the young girl in the poem “Maud Muller.”

  What was the phrase about Maud?

  For of all sad words of tongue or pen

  The saddest are these: It might have been!

  Why did she remember this room as having been simpler once?

  She had the nagging sense that it had been quite stark. Yes. And she was certain that a fish tank once occupied the space where a huffy Louis XVI armoire now stood.