He bicycled over to Henrietta Boulevard and turned west, past the Meadows Mall, over to the first motel that had been built at the Center. Now it was the least expensive. It was a three-story rectangle without elevators, with the cheapest accommodations on the third floor, and in front, near the boulevard traffic. He stopped at the desk and learned that she was in While he climbed the stairs to the third floor he tried to plan some way of handling it. But he knew it could not be planned.
He would have to adjust to her reaction to him, playing his tunes by ear.
The voice on the phone had sounded so frail, uncertain and so young that he had thought it might be one of Patsy Knox's friends playing a wicked trick on him.
"I'm Doreen's mother," she said.
"I came on the bus. I've got to talk to you."
"Where are you now?"
"I'm at the Econo Way Motor House. I want to come to your office. I asked and they told me you have an office in the Communications Building, but they wouldn't let me come in without permission from you. The policeman said you could arrange it."
"You wait there, Mrs. Purves, and I'll take care of it."
And now, he thought, as he raised his hand to tap at her door, I must face some overweight, red-faced countrywoman with murder in her little gimlet eyes, and a small mustache on her upper lip.
He heard the rattle of the safety chain and then the door swung open and the woman looked at him expectantly. He suffered a moment or two of disorientation, as though some warp in time had sent him to Doreen's world twenty years in the future: her waist thickened, eyes faded, thighs and upper arms heavier, blonde hair going gray, a pouch under the chin, lines across the throat and forehead and around the mouth. A pretty woman with a faded look.
"You brought the paper so I can go see Reverend Deets?"
"I'm Joe Deets, Mrs. Purves."
Surprise immobilized her for a moment, and then she tried to slam the door on him, but it hit his shoe and bounded back, slipping away from her fingertips. As he moved into the room, she backed away, her eyes wide. He turned and closed the door behind him.
"I don't want to talk to you here!"
"I don't have a private office. People are in and out all the time. It wouldn't be a good place, really. You sounded as if it's important and private. So I decided to come over and see you.
What do you want to talk to me about?"
She started to speak, then turned and hurried over to her purse, opened it, took out a sheet from a yellow legal pad, folded twice, and started to hand it to him, then seemed to try to throw it at him. It fell at his feet. She rubbed her hand on the thigh of her skirt as though something had come off on it from that piece of paper. She wore a beige skirt, nylons, brown sandals with high heels, a white blouse with long sleeves and ruffles at the throat and wrists. He could see the beige jacket to the suit hanging in the closet alcove, wrinkled across the rump from the bus ride. Her suitcase was on a luggage rack by the closet alcove. It was a small room with a single window, a single bed, two chairs, a desk, rosebud wallpaper, and a Panasonic portable television set chained to a massive steel ring screwed to the wall.
He opened the letter and read it, seeing out of the corner of his eye that she had turned away from him. In profile she had the same high round little rump and slightly swaybacked stance as her daughter.
"I know who wrote this, of course," he said.
"How would you know that?" she asked sharply.
"It's not difficult to figure out. She worked for me for a time.
I'm the computer specialist here. She had such an obvious crush on me it became embarrassing and I had her transferred over to clerical work at the University. Her name is Patsy Knox. If you confront her, I'm sure she'll admit it. She's not a very good liar."
"Why would she do that?"
He shrugged.
"Anger, jealousy, impulsiveness."
"Have you been doing... what that letter says?"
"Who else have you showed it to?"
"I thought I'd go right to Sister Mary Margaret, because she helped us get Doreen accepted here and she and Doctor John Tinker Meadows told us how Doreen would be treated here.
But... I just couldn't give it to her and stand there and watch her read it. I couldn't."
"I know what you mean. How did Mr. Purves react?"
"Nobody has seen it except me and the person who wrote it.
And you. Unless, of course, they showed it to somebody before they mailed it. I don't know what to do. I never come up against anything like this before. I mean we had that trouble with Doreen ' "I know about that," he said. He moved over and sat in the chair near the window and waved her toward the bed. She moved back and sat on the edge of the bed, ankles together, knees clamped together, her clenched hands resting on her thighs. He noticed that her hands looked chapped, the knuckles swollen.
"Well, have you been doing... what it says?"
"Annalee, we're here to think about Doreen's welfare, isn't that right?"
"Of course, but..."
"What was she like when she was little?"
"What? Oh, she was a wonderful child. She was a wonderful baby. She smiled all the time. She hardly ever cried. And she was a wonderful loving child. She was a happy child. Dave, he's a year older, he was cranky. He nearly drove us crazy crying. Why should I be telling you what she was like?"
"So that together, between us, we can find some answers."
"To what? You're doing it to her or you're not."
"I know what she was like when you brought her here.
Sullen, silent, depressed. She moved and looked like a person with some sort of terminal illness, like a cancer."
"We were both scared, Hub and me. Both of us were scared about that. The doctor who took care of her after she lost the baby, after her boyfriend was killed, said she ought to have professional help. He meant some kind of psychiatrist, I guess.
But I told him that it was against our faith. When she just seemed to get worse, we decided to turn to the Church. We've been members a long, long time."
"I know. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't relax our standards a little bit when it comes to emergency situations.
People who go into depression after a tragic accident should have some access inappropriate care. We may be changing that stance in the future. There are plans to build a big hospital and medical center here, with emphasis on geriatric care, and probably a medical school. Then perhaps the Church will be willing to accept the use of special medicines in the case of emotional shock and depression. Psychic energizers they are called. And then of course there are drugs such as Valium which, used in moderation, can take the sharp edge off grief and loss. Yes, I would predict that there is going to be some liberalization of the past rules. Soon, but not yet."
"Well... we thought she would do just fine here."
"And she has! Let me tell you about last Saturday. I go everywhere by bicycle. I came here on my bike. I don't own a car. If I have to have one, I guess I could get one from the car pool, but come to think of it, I guess my license has expired.
Anyway, there is a road that starts up beyond the Settlements, a narrow, winding little asphalt road. I told Doreen about my early-morning rides and she begged to come with me, and so she borrowed a bike and she was there waiting for me at six-thirty at this end of the little road. We rode for about an hour and then we leaned the bikes against an old tree, and while I rested in the shade, she went walking ahead to see what was over the brow of the next little hill. She disappeared from view and suddenly there she was again, running downhill toward me, running like the wind. It startled me. I thought something horrible the other side of the hill had frightened her.
But she was running and laughing all the way down the hill, and she collapsed breathless on the grass there in the shade, still laughing. I asked her what had struck her so funny and she had no answer to it. She said she had just felt like it, that's all.
She wanted to run and she wanted to laugh b
ecause she felt like it."
In silence Annalee stared down at her hands. Then she looked over at him without raising her head.
"That's what she used to do when she was little. Then when she got in with those bike people and started staying out all night, and coming home acting funny from the stuff she was using, it like to broke my heart right in two. She was like a different person, so quiet and sullen-like, and never smiling, and even using bad language on me and her daddy. I prayed to God night after night to get Doreen back to like she used to be before she got mixed up with that gang. What I was afraid of most, God would kill her on one of those machines going a hundred and ten miles an hour, squashed like a bug against a tree or a truck or a bridge. I prayed to him to give her a chance to repent before she died, so she wouldn't spend all eternity in hellfire. She'd lost her faith.
And my own faith was beginning to feel a little bit shaky. I'm glad you told me about her running. That's the way she used to be." She stared beyond him, out the window, into space, her eyes narrowed.
"I used to wonder if it was something passed down to her."
"From whom?"
She looked startled.
"I didn't mean to say that."
"From you?"
Her voice trembled.
"It is something I am never going to talk about to a living soul the rest of my life."
"But it was something a little bit like her running around with the motorcycle people?"
"Maybe. I don't know. Let me alone. Could be it was all Hub's fault, the trouble with Doreen."
"In what way?"
"I guess I don't want to talk about it."
"I thought we were here to work out what's best for Doreen."
She sighed and shrugged, spreading her hands in a gesture of helplessness.
"It's probably nothing. When she was seven, eight, nine. Around that age, Hub used to tease her to come give him a movie kiss. And she'd hug him tight around the neck and kiss him on the mouth for a long, long time. It was innocent fun with Hub. It was a game they played. She was his daughter. But it worried me that she began to get big up here when she was so young. And she became a woman when she was a month past her twelfth birthday. I couldn't blame that on Hub because I was that way too. And that's part of the reason I got into... never mind."
She stopped talking and stared at him with an exasperated expression and a little snort of frustration.
"I didn't come here to the Center to have you talk and talk and talk and not say nothing at all. You probably think I'm some kind of dumb farmer-woman. Maybe I am but I'm not that dumb. You're not going to talk me out of anything. Are you sleeping with my daughter or aren't you?"
He knew then that she was a more formidable opponent than he had anticipated. There was a good toughness there, a directness that was going to require every bit of persuasion he could muster. And he had the feeling that it was not going to work, that nothing he said to her was going to change anything.
"I'm waiting," she said.
"Annalee, I'm a foolish man and I'm a weak man. Please believe me when I say that I am going to give you all the answers, but I want you to let me go at it in my own way, because it may be the only way I will ever get you to understand."
"You will never make me understand a man like you sleeping with my daughter."
"Do you know what a hypothetical question is?"
"I don't think so."
"Lawyers ask hypothetical questions when they crossexamine somebody in court, some criminal.
"What if," they say.
"What if the prosecution can prove you were at the scene of the crime that night?" ' "You want me to change my question so it's hyp... hyp..."
"Hypothetical. No. I want to change the question around and ask you what will happen if what's in that letter is true?"
"You will burn in hell forever!"
"Aside from that."
"Don't you care about that?"
"When I am finally judged, Annalee, I hope that I will be judged on the basis of my entire life experience."
"You are confusing me."
"If that letter is true, nobody here at Meadows Center knows about it. If that letter is true, and if it were made public, they would have to send Doreen home. And if that letter were true and they sent Doreen home, she would probably kill herself.
She tells me that she would, and I don't think she's bluffing.
First she would sink back into depression, and then she would kill herself."
She leaned toward him and she hit her thigh with her clenched fist, a thud of bone against muscle.
"You are telling me it's true, aren't you? Damn you! Why? She's just a kid.
She's so innocent. You're older than me. Older than Hub.
You're not handsome and you're not tall. You're kind of an ugly wrinkly bowlegged man, like some kind of farmhand.
Those little pale eyes and that scratchy voice. What in the name of Jesus Christ could a sweet pretty girl see in you? How in God's name did it ever happen the first time?"
"If it happened."
"Play your dumb game. It doesn't work anymore. Just tell me why it happened."
"This is not a game. Don't think of it as a game. This is the real world, and foolish acts in the real world can make horrid things happen. What will happen if you, out of anger and pain and righteousness, take your daughter Doreen home with you, after telling Mary Margaret why you are doing it? What will happen if you tell Hub and her brother what happened to her up here?"
She looked startled and awed.
"It would really kill Hub. It really would. He would have to come up here and kill you.
Like he tried to kill her boyfriend the week before he died, after he found out Doreen was pregnant."
"Can't you talk quietly to your husband? Can't you explain things to him?"
She thought for a moment.
"I think we used to talk a lot, when we were going together and after we were married, before the kids came along. The way I remember it, we used to talk about... well, things that are important, like time and God and love. But I can't remember what either of us said. I just remember sitting in the hammock and talking. Now we don't talk like that. We haven't for a long time. I wouldn't know how to begin with him. And I don't think he wants to talk about anything anymore. He is on edge. There's too many men been fired where he works and still not enough work, and in the night he'll get up and walk around the house and sit in the dark. It's like he's getting ready for some kind of explosion.
I don't know. I'm not explaining it right. All I know is that if I tried to tell him about Doreen, I would get it half said and he would be gone. He wouldn't hear another word and he wouldn't talk about it. He would just drive up here ninety miles an hour and do what he would think he had to do. Please tell me what happened. I can't understand how it could happen."
"We haven't looked at all the probable results yet, Annalee."
"I guess not, and they would throw you right out of the Church and I guess that's what's bothering you, isn't it ? I don't know what you're trying to talk me into, but that's what's so important to you."
He hoped his laugh was convincing. At least it startled her.
"Mrs. Purves, I am a computer expert. As such, I am very well paid. I am a programmer of the very first order. They don't want to lose me because I am as near to being essential as any person in Administration can get. They ordained me as a device to make me less likely to leave. It puts me under a very generous retirement and pension program. It adds to the plausibility of the Church, I guess, to have the top people called the Reverend this and the Reverend that. But if you blow this whole situation wide open, they will have to ask me to leave, regardless of how badly they need my services. In a certain sense, I will be sorry to leave. It's a pleasant environment, an interesting challenge. But the major problems are solved. It may very well be time for me to move along. I would say that, on the average, I get three good offers a year from industry. I would have no tro
uble. I would have some regrets. But I would be doing interesting and important work within a month."
She stared at him.
"Don't you believe in the Church?"
John D MacDonald - One More Sunday Page 20