For Love of Audrey Rose

by Frank De Felitta

  “What are you thinking?” he asked after watching Jackson mechanically slam his prosthetic arm into his pillow, a robot as lifeless as the aluminum of his artificial limb.

  “I feel as though I know what it’s like to be insane,” she said, looking back down the corridors. “All these rooms, all these terrifying rooms, and nobody can help you.”

  Hoover led her on. Neville was sleeping in the next room. When Janice peered into the scrunched, anxiety-ridden face, she saw something that did not appear human. It looked like a lower order of hominid, something from the Malay jungles, an imperfect human being. In the next room Uncle Earl began his low, piercing howls that had no stop, no pause, as though he never breathed, but had all the patience in the world to slowly pour out his grief and pain to the unseeing void.

  Janice peered into the room. Uncle Earl simply sat like a Hindu priest, lowing like a sick cow. With not the slightest desire to do anything else, ever, until he might die.

  “What pain he must be suffering,” she whispered, “to simply sit there, hour after hour.”

  “It’s almost religious,” he said. “Some primal pain that can be expressed in no other way.”

  Energetic breathing now displaced Earl’s moaning. It was James. The boy flopped among the sheets of his bed in his pajamas, his limbs jerking, rocking mechanically, a pugilist among the bright mobiles, and Janice instantly thought of her own daughter. Ivy had been the identical focus of terror, an unreachable, self-destructive maniac in her nightmares, who saw nothing around her but sheets of psychic pain.

  “What we do here,” he said, as they watched Roy, “is try to reach that primordial disturbance, and try to neutralize it.”

  Janice began to grasp something of the spiritual force that dominated the clinic, an atmosphere of calm intensity that had slowly grown on her.

  “With love,” he said. “We try to cure them through intense, spiritual love.”

  He took her hand.

  “Come with me, Janice,” he whispered.

  And she sensed that he led her, not to another room, a different child, a different variety of torture, but into the labyrinth of his own heart. The children were analogues of his own psychic wounds. The clinic was the exhibition of his most secret motivations, and like a slow whirlpool, the passion of it grew stronger as he approached the center.

  The next room was dark. One single bed. A blue light on at the floor, and then her eyes made out a child’s limp hand. It was Jennie, washed and tucked into the sheets by the staff. Hoover stepped quietly over the carpet.

  “Janice,” he said, half in supplication, half in demand.

  She slowly approached him and looked down at the sleeping child.

  “Who does she look like?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes you do, Janice.”

  “She—she looks like a million children.”

  “Janice, has your heart not been opened? Have I shown you suffering for nothing? Look!”

  Jennie’s small face was cast in a blue shadow. At the nostrils, a black shadow suddenly began, like the eclipse of death over the pale skin.

  “She reminds me…of Ivy…I suppose.”

  “Exactly!”

  “It’s the eyes. No, it’s the expression, really. Trust and fear…a little secretive…”

  He smiled triumphantly.

  “Janice,” he whispered. “She reminded me—so forcefully—of my own daughter.”

  Janice sat down on the edge of the bed. For an instant neither spoke. Jennie’s softened face glowed like the rim of a distant planet, against the annihilating darkness. Life never appeared more fragile than in the face of the sleeping child.

  “Listen to me, Janice. For months, I thought—believe me, I truly thought…”

  “Jennie?”

  “Yes. Amazing that my life should end in such a strange but certain destiny.”

  He knelt down to be with her. His voice trembled, and his eyes glittered in the blue light.

  “Elliot, this can’t be true.”

  “No. Of course it can’t. She was born six months too early.”

  Jennie turned in her sleep. The small hand flopped against Janice’s. Janice placed the hand on the carefully tucked sheet.

  “Then what are you saying? What strange and certain destiny are you talking about?”

  “Jennie is not my child. Nor could Juanita ever be your child. But we wanted them to be!”

  The last words hissed out between clenched teeth. It startled her. The silence abruptly descended. He became afraid that he had frightened her. With a great will he resumed control of his voice, and he lowered it and tried to speak reasonably.

  “It was the wanting that we perceived,” he said with an almost infinite sorrow. “Not the reality.”

  Janice felt a pang of regret shoot into her heart. She knew all too well that he was right.

  “Once life was filled with pretty things,” she said softly. “Now it’s all gone so dark. Was it really so much to hope for?”

  Janice’s head slowly lowered onto his shoulder. He was surprised, then simply cradled her face in his hand. He felt the hot tears coming into his palm, and he blinked rapidly.

  “I’m so alone,” she whispered.

  He stroked her hair, but found himself unable to speak.

  “So alone,” she repeated in a tone so desperate that it frightened him. “Alone… alone…”

  “Each of us… equally alone,” he whispered.

  She stirred. Something in Jennie’s sleep changed. The child’s eyes were open, looking at them, through them, the green irises now dark in the blue lamplight.

  “She does seem like Ivy,” Janice said, smiling faintly. “So mischievous, all-knowing. Why do I feel this kinship? Even when I know better?”

  “I told you. It’s the wanting that you perceive.”

  “No. It’s something else. Something that makes me feel strange.”

  “Haven’t you guessed what it is?”

  She turned. He was smiling at her, the pupils of his eyes catching glints of the night lamp. His face had softened.

  “Because we both wish it to be so. Don’t you see why?”

  “Because…”

  “Because we share the wish to be together. And she makes it possible. Without guilt. Without sin.”

  Janice acknowledged what he meant by “sin” and turned away. The silence remained. The darkness remained. And Janice remained, confused, uncertain.

  “She is the medium through which Bill could be cured, and through which our relationship can be made whole,” he said in a dark, hypnotic voice.

  She looked at him. He was more silhouette than man. He came closer but she felt only the darkness of his form, and the subtle rim of blue around his shape. Her own body seemed to have dissolved, leaving a residue of purest darkness, afraid of him, afraid of herself, as they edged together in a compact that knew neither reason nor patience.

  “H-how can she do that, Elliot?” she stammered.

  “If Bill were to believe that Jennie is his child, he would have reason to live again—become whole again.”

  “But—”

  “I said believe, not she is. But that he believe it.”

  She was silent. Hoover reached for her and took her hand. “If he only thought it. And he could be made to think so.”

  “Elliot, I can’t be a party to this. What if he found out?”

  “The whole point is to establish a bridge into his fortress,” he said softly. “That’s what I’ve learned here. You must learn how to include yourself in the interior panic, in the terror, where the fantasy begins.”

  She shivered in the cold. He drew her against him.

  “It can’t work, Elliot.”

  “It can’t fail! We’ll simply produce a suitable birth certificate….”

  He ignored her glance, the surprise she showed at how well his plan was worked out, even down to forgery.

  “Introduce him to the chi
ld. Time will take care of the rest.”

  “It’s you who live in fantasy, Elliot. He believes that Juanita is his child.”

  “Then I’ll convince him otherwise.”

  She laughed bitterly.

  “He’s in no condition to be spoken to.”

  For a long time Hoover said nothing.

  “I know that kind of deafness,” he said. “These children have it. But they do hear. Unconsciously.”

  But she only shook her head in despair. And they both understood that behind the struggle for Bill’s sanity was the secondary struggle, the most complicated of their lives: if, through Jennie, they could be together while curing Bill. But it was Janice who suddenly broke it off.

  She got up and began walking slowly from the room.

  “Wait!” he insisted. “You could put a doll in the room and Bill would think it was his!”

  Janice was startled by his remark. “They tried dolls in the hospital.”

  “But how much better a real girl. And Jennie has that quality, hasn’t she? Of awakening love?”

  “Elliot, how can it possibly succeed?”

  “Because I know it will.”

  His voice had an odd ring to it. It reminded her of his voice when he first came to New York. A disembodied, yet passionate voice, nervous because of fear of his own strength.

  “How? How do you know it?”

  “Because I’ve had proof.”

  “Proof?” she asked vaguely.

  The dreamlike quality of the moment dominated again. The seesaw of reality to unreality switched for the thousandth time. Once again there was a different system of rules, the kind of rules that one believes in India or in ashrams, places where the material world grows transparent and vaporous.

  “I had a visitor,” he said strangely. “Let me show him to you.”

  Hoover creaked open a door a door and they went inside. He flicked on a light. It was his bedroom. Long red curtains ran down to the floor across the windows. A disarray of books, stationery, a radio, and crumpled clothes lay over the floor. Artifacts from India: sculptured goddesses, the elephant deity painted crimson, incense holders, gold-spangled saddlebags, and teakwood carvings of Krishna lined the room. It was a voluptuous, softly lit environment, completely different from the analytical, cold corridors. Even the unmade bed, the sheets clean but rumpled in the amber light, seemed to glow softly like a hazy sunrise.

  Hoover went to his desk. Behind a framed painting of the blue-skinned Krishna relaxing in the courtyards of pleasure in the moonlight of the Himalayas, Hoover gently removed a faded photograph. Shyly, he brought it forward. It was a small photograph, a passport photograph of an old man with surprisingly black eyebrows under white hair, with an unkempt white beard.

  “I keep the picture protected,” he said softly. “It’s my only real treasure here.”

  She stared at the unfamiliar countenance. She guessed the man was about seventy years old, stern, yet with soft eyes that showed pale, almost white in the photograph.

  “My first teacher,” he whispered.

  “In India?”

  “In Benares. I don’t even remember how I got there. Somehow I ended up in an ashram speaking not a word of Hindi, very confused, and he knew some English. He saved my life.”

  She looked at him, surprised at the trembling tenderness in his voice. His face had grown suffused in the amber light of the lamp.

  “He began the process toward my enlightenment, many years ago.”

  He took back the photograph as though it were a holy relic. Carefully he returned the photograph to its hiding place behind the painting. Hoover seemed oblivious of the disorder in the room, or its sensuous reds and ambers, the soft madras fabric crumpled on the bed, the long red curtains that illumined the walls like exotic pillars.

  “He came to me, Janice. Five days ago.”

  “From Benares?”

  He laughed. “Benares? Who knows? Maybe I went to see him. Maybe I was the visitor.”

  She waited, but he seemed almost too happy to continue. The flush of joy did not leave his face. Nor did he approach her, but instead remained near the wall where he had hidden the photograph.

  “It was in a trance,” he said gently. “I… ascended… I suppose that is the best word for it. I ascended far beyond any place I had ever been, because… because…”

  “Because what, Elliot?”

  His face darkened.

  “Precisely because of this …plan… with Jennie… with Bill. I was in despair, since it involved the element of deception.”

  In the next room Jennie made a soft sound in her sleep.

  “I suppose I disappeared in some way,” he explained. “Or should I say I reappeared in some way. In any case, I saw him again.”

  “He’s still alive.”

  “No. He died six years ago. But there he was, in the Benares garden, just as I always remembered him; the same sunlight, the same smell of the flowers and the incense, and his voice…”

  Janice waited. She felt herself caught up in the passion of his remembrance. He seemed to use it to cast a wide net over her, as though she were one of the migrant butterflies that had startled them in South India, and she nervously watched him pace the floor.

  “His voice was heard beyond the walls of oblivion,” he said ecstatically, “and it told me that there shall be no deception.”

  He turned, happy that she did not disbelieve him, or at least made no sign of it.

  “The deception shall not be a deception! That was what I heard! Don’t you see? To Bill, Jennie can be, will be, his child again! She will be the link, the bridge on which he can emerge again into the light of day.”

  Janice had no doubt of Hoover’s vision. It seemed too potent to be confined to the small rooms and corridors of the clinic. It belonged in a vast landscape, like India’s, which could contain such dreams. Here, it threatened to burst the bounds of normalcy and sweep everything before it.

  “Can you doubt it, Janice?” Hoover pleaded. “Can there be any doubt at all?”

  “If it should misfire? What would happen to Bill?”

  “There’s very little that can happen to him,” he said in a low voice, “that hasn’t already.”

  In dismay she closed her eyes.

  “Let me think about it. It seems too dangerous.”

  Frustrated, he only clenched his jaw. His eyes looked lost, as though he had failed miserably, and having exposed the message of his trance, having shown her the sanctity of the room where his deities found their worship, he was even more vulnerable.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you have to give me time.”

  “That’s all right, Janice. Perhaps I’ve rushed things.”

  In the next room there was a small thump. Janice instantly remembered the nights when Ivy had fallen from bed, only to be driven half mad by the dream from which she could not awaken, the dream of her own coming death.

  “Did you just think of Ivy?” he asked suddenly.

  “Yes,” she said, startled. “I did.”

  “You see? The child calls out to you. In your own heart, you can’t deny her. Go to her, Janice. Tend to her.”

  Janice opened the door and fumbled into the darkness. Behind her Hoover followed, and they groped toward the lamp. Jennie lay on the floor, her pajamas rumpled, and a tiny trickle of red lay over her nostril.

  “Elliot, she’s hurt herself!”

  “It isn’t like her to fall out of bed. James does that with a vengeance, but not Jennie.”

  Janice took a tissue from the night table and quickly dabbed at the tiny nose. Strangely, the child seemed only now to awaken to the touch of Janice’s hand. There was the fragrance that a mother instantly recognizes, the soft smell of a sleeping infant, and the warm cotton of the pajamas.

  “F-five—T-two—” Jennie mumbled.

  “She’s awake,” Janice said.

  Hoover bent down.

  “So she is. I wonder if she knows whether or not she’s dre
aming?”

  The green eyes of the child gazed through them. Though she took notice of their presence by virtue of being alert, even aware of everything in the room around her, she refused to look at their faces. Janice sensed the protective hostility of the child, the fear that wrapped around her like a robe.

  “Jennie,” she whispered. “It’s me. Do you know who I am?”

  “F-five—T-two—”

  Janice looked at Hoover. He shrugged.

  “Three-three means bathroom. Maybe this is a further refinement. Would you like to do the honors?”

  Janice laughed. “I’d love to. I haven’t done it in a long time.”

  Hoover stood in the center of the room, without moving. The light went on in the adjoining bathroom. He watched as Janice gently removed the bottom pajamas, sat Jennie on the small toilet seat. Then Janice washed Jennie’s hands, then her own. Hoover watched Janice comb down the girl’s hair. Time seemed to slow down and die as Jennie gazed into the mirror, held in Janice’s arm.

  Slowly the small hand slid down Janice’s neck, down the throat, toward the curve of her breast. Jennie relaxed, and the other arm wrapped itself slowly around Janice’s neck. The light went off. Janice carried the sleeping girl back into the bedroom.

  “What’s wrong?” Janice whispered. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “She’s never returned an embrace before,” he said slowly.

  As Janice lowered the child to the bed, the small arm had to be pulled from Janice’s neck. Jennie turned to Janice, the sleeping body curled, the arms stretched lengthwise across the sheets. From Hoover’s room the amber light mixed with the blue, and a curious glow appeared on the girl’s forehead.

  “She seems warm,” Janice said.

  Hoover went to the bathroom and in the darkness wetted a towel. He brought it back, gave it to Janice, and she daubed it lightly over Jennie’s forehead. Then Janice rose, took the towel back to the sink, rinsed it, and hung it on the bar to dry. She turned and was startled to find that he had followed her, looking just as tired as she.