Four years?
Four years ago, I’d received word that a woman had tried to commit suicide with her infant off the Golden Gate Bridge. And then she’d disappeared.
I pressed a fist into my lips, closing my eyes in a vain attempt to shut out the pain. Mary hadn’t jumped, but she’d attempted to kill herself all the same, had even faked the death of her child as an added layer of protection after I’d defected just in case the Center ever got wind of what we’d done to hide her baby. And she had been in a psychiatric unit for four years?
I hadn’t been here for her. Not for four goddamned years.
Dr. Johnson continued, oblivious to my turmoil. “Miss Tenney has been with Payne Whitney since her incident. I’m afraid that throughout the entirety of her breakdown, Miss Tenney has maintained some very detrimental hallucinations.”
I had to force myself to release the bedsheets that were twisted in my hands. “What sort of hallucinations?”
“Well, Miss Tenney claims that she is a Russian spy.”
Oh, Mary. Sweet mother of God.
I tried to imagine our roles switched, the FBI laughing at me after I’d become an informer and locking me up simply for the crime of telling the truth. It wasn’t the first time I’d marveled at how closely I’d walked a similar path to the women I’d encountered during my time as a handler, how our lives had diverged in such different ways. How I’d somehow been the lucky one.
“Miss Tenney is one of our long-term patients,” Dr. Johnson continued. “She is mostly mute now, but maintains a violent phobia against everything Russian. A few weeks ago, one of our orderlies mentioned something about a Russian bank, which sent Miss Tenney into hysterics. By the time I got to her, she was screaming over and over again, ‘I never talked. I never talked!’ ” A pause. “Then she said your name. It wasn’t the first time. I assumed she’d simply heard of you from the news, but when I heard you were at the hospital . . . Well, I had to see if you knew her.”
I cradled my head in my hands, couldn’t seem to gather the words to respond. Fortunately, Dr. Johnson didn’t seem to expect an answer.
“My social call today is of a more personal nature,” he said. “You see, in the four years she’s been with us, Miss Tenney has never had a single friend or family member visit her. I believe some time with an old acquaintance might provide the balm she needs to soothe her troubled mind.”
I’d felt guilt before—guilt at spying on my country, guilt that I hadn’t been able to save Yasha or his legacy, guilt at pointing the FBI toward the Rosenbergs. More recently, a crushing sort of guilt when William Remington was convicted and killed in prison.
This was far worse. But also, better in one critical way.
Hidden deep within Dr. Johnson’s offer was a second chance. Perhaps I could set right one damned thing in this entire broken life of mine.
I could help my best friend. The woman I’d once called my sister.
I threaded my hands in my lap. “When are visiting hours?”
“You can come any day, Monday through Friday. Only—”
I didn’t want to hear another word that might dissuade me. “I’ll be there. Tomorrow after I’m discharged. Thank you, Doctor.”
Dr. Johnson recognized the dismissal, nodded his good-bye. I stared at the pale-yellow hospital wall for a long time after he left.
I was going to make this right. If it was the last goddamned thing I did.
* * *
* * *
I had good intentions, I swear I did.
I was going to corroborate Mary’s story. I was going to give up booze and bring her home to live with me in Connecticut. I alone knew her story; I alone could rehabilitate her. And I would, no matter what it took.
No longer would I be lonely Whistler’s Mother with her shades of black and white and gray; no, together Mary and I would be more akin to Klimt’s The Women Friends, with its phoenix rising from the ashes. She and I would sit on my front porch and grow old together, paint our nails while she bested me at chess and we reminisced about the old days.
Not the good old days. For while I’d had some good days—good years—with Yasha, I knew that Mary’s life, especially these past years, had been quite the opposite.
And then there had been that other business with the baby. Which was also my fault. Things might have been fine for Mary had I not defected and forced her to live with the terror that the NKVD—now transformed into the KGB—would hunt her down. Not just her but her child too.
I was going to right those past wrongs.
The only problem was, those intentions become more and more terrifying with each step that led me deeper into the hospital wing that housed the Payne Whitney Clinic. Twice I retreated back the way I’d come, had to force myself to plunge forward. For Mary.
I would not be a coward. Not this time.
The psychiatric hospital that had sheltered my friend these past years was nothing at all what I’d imagined. Perhaps I’d read too many novels, but I’d envisioned walls spattered with week-old oatmeal and numbed-out patients with dirty feet staring at Popsicle stick sculptures. Instead, a hospital wing of gleaming marble and polished oak greeted me, accentuated by arched doorways and smiling nurses in starched uniforms.
“Hello.” I preened at the way I didn’t slur my greeting. (I’d brought a flask of gin to the hospital with me, had drained it dry this morning when the nurses weren’t looking.) “I’m here to see Mary Tenney. She’s expecting me.”
“Of course,” the starched nurse answered. “Please wait here.”
I did, sitting in one of the velvet upholstered settees with curved feet until Dr. Johnson appeared. “I’m so pleased you’re here, Miss Bentley,” he said. “Miss Tenney is waiting in our patients’ lounge. She’s having an exceptional morning.”
An exceptional morning for me to pack her up and move her to Connecticut, you mean.
“Here she is,” Dr. Johnson said as we entered an open room that overlooked the hospital’s small courtyard. Patients—many dressed in soft cotton bathrobes—were gathered around tables, some stacking blocks, others constructing small arts and crafts projects. A thin woman with a perfect bob of blond hair was seated at the nearest table with her back to us, hunched over a half-finished oil painting of what appeared to be a vase of sunflowers. “Mary, you have a visitor.”
The blond woman might have been a papier-mâché statue made by one of the patients for all she moved. Warning bells went off in my head, commanding me to turn tail and run.
But Mary was my oldest friend.
Sinners make the best saints, she’d once said to me. And today I would be less sinner, more saint.
I would make this right. Mary and I would have the happy ending we deserved.
“Mary.” I ignored the doctor’s raised hand of warning as I came around the table. “It’s been so long—”
“Actually, Miss Bentley”—the doctor gestured to a second woman hunched over a stack of maps at the next table—“this is Miss Tenney.”
I stopped, frozen as I stared at the woman who hadn’t so much as lifted her head to acknowledge me. She remained absorbed in a flat image of what appeared to be a map of Manhattan. I sank into the chair across from her, tried to peer into eyes that wouldn’t lift to mine. Reared back when those watered-down blue eyes finally glanced up.
This woman wasn’t Mary.
Her face was slack. Blank. Lifeless.
Yet, somehow, she was still Mary.
She had gained weight in the intervening years—my friend had always possessed just the right curves to snag men’s attention—but now she appeared pale and puffy, as if she never left the chair she’d been planted in. Those dull eyes had once sparkled; waves of blond hair now hung limp around her face. Only one thing was untouched by the ravages of time: the pale bands of puckered scar tissue at her wrists peeked out fr
om the sleeves of her bathrobe, with many more slashes added since I’d seen her last.
“Mary.” This time I reached out to touch her hand. I willed that bit of human touch to be the flint that would light some spark in her. She only stared at me.
Lifeless.
Until she twitched.
Not a twitch so much as a convulsion, followed by another. The involuntary emotion seemed to radiate out from her heart until her entire body shook. Over and over again.
Panic reared its ugly basilisk head; nowhere in my imaginings had Mary been truly ill, merely mistaken for a madwoman. Dr. Johnson merely observed my friend, scratched a note in the journal taken from his pocket before sitting in the empty chair next to her.
“Her convulsions are normal,” he assured me, “following her attempt to take her own life a few years ago. I promise she’s much improved since when she first came to us.”
I stared at Mary’s hollowed-out eyes and her once-beautiful body. It was as if her mind had been scooped out with a melon spoon, leaving behind only a hollow shell that had once laughed and danced, cried and made love.
“When will her treatment be finished?” My voice came out tinny, bile rising in my throat as the room tilted dangerously beneath me. “When can Mary leave and go home?”
The sad shake of the doctor’s head confirmed my panicked suspicions. “With her history of suicide attempts, I’m afraid Miss Tenney will remain a resident here at Payne Whitney for perpetuity. However, as you can see, she’s safe and well cared for, spending her free time between treatments with flower arranging and map reading, just as is recommended by preeminent psychiatrists in the field of schizophrenia.”
Mary had always been fragile, but now, according to the doctor, she was beyond repair. And I couldn’t handle this terrible new reality.
(Catherine, I’ve lingered on the stoops of hell more than once in my life and tried to be brave—the moment when I protected Yasha and his contacts while his body lay on my sofa, the day I defied the NKVD to turn myself in to the FBI, even when I stared down Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon at the HUAC trials—but in my heart of hearts, I am a coward. And cowards run. So, that’s what I did. I ran.)
Clutching my handbag tight to my chest, I ignored Dr. Johnson’s startled shouts and fled from that hospital as fast as my utilitarian black heels would take me. I didn’t stop running until I reached Central Park, my hair whipped into a Medusa-worthy frenzy and the armpits of my blouse stained with foul-smelling sweat.
I wandered blindly past the fountain where Yasha and I had once thrown sticks for Vlad, somehow found myself at the bar of the Hotel Abbey.
I tried to drink myself into oblivion that night. Maybe into the next world.
As you know, I failed even in that.
* * *
NOVEMBER 26, 1963
Elizabeth rubbed her temples. “I’ve already told you what happened after that, Catherine. I took the train home, failed to hang myself, and got myself into yet another car accident.”
Cat struggled to remain objective, to simply gather the facts. Difficult to do when there were a thousand questions stinging the tip of her tongue. “When did you next see her?”
“After the last car crash. It was Dr. Johnson’s letter that did it. I certainly wasn’t going to send my best friend to the notorious hellhole of Willowbrook.”
Cat lifted her chin, sifting through the questions that tumbled through her mind for just the right one.
“Had her condition changed?” Cat forced herself to keep breathing, her heart to keep beating. “Or was it still the same?”
Some of the light winked out of Elizabeth’s eyes. “She was the same. I cleaned myself up before that next visit—stopped drinking and, with Hoover’s affidavit, convinced Long Lane School for Girls to hire me. I went to Payne Whitney still hoping I could take Mary home with me. But she wasn’t lucid—far from it, in fact—and I realized the clinic was the best place for her. The only place, really.” She lifted her gaze to Cat. “That’s when I realized I couldn’t do right by Mary—except keep her safe at Payne Whitney—but I could do right by her daughter. By you.”
Which explained all the payments to Cat’s student account at Trinity. But she wasn’t ready to let Elizabeth off the hook, not even if she had been playing a guardian angel with dirty wings all this time.
“Why didn’t you tell me you have cancer?”
“Simple: I don’t need you feeling sorry for me.”
Or apparently, even liking her. Cat suspected this was Elizabeth’s way of protecting herself. After all, it was easier to lose someone if you never became attached to them in the first place. Or let them get attached to you.
Still, Cat was weary of Elizabeth’s games. It was time to get everything on the table.
“You sent money to Trinity. For me. Why?”
Elizabeth’s gaze dropped. Silence.
This woman across from me is a human Enigma machine. Cat couldn’t for the life of her understand why she would rather own up to being a spy and Communist, a drunk and a liar, than admit to the kindness discovered when she left her accounts in that box. Cat still wasn’t sure if she’d even really wanted them to be found.
Finally: “It was the least I could do,” Elizabeth ground out. “I called Trinity once back in 1961 and pretended to be your mother—to be Joan Gray, that is—claiming I wanted to deposit money into your account. They told me I was just in time since your account was overdue. I did a little digging, had the FBI confirm that your mother had reverse mortgaged her house to cover your tuition. That the money had run out.”
Cat gaped. Since her mother’s death, she’d thought the house had been reverse mortgaged to pay for her mother’s medical bills and that it hadn’t been enough, hadn’t realized their home had been sacrificed even before the cancer. For her. Of course, Joan Gray likely hadn’t planned on coming down with cancer when she’d mortgaged everything. Which had meant she’d had to sell the house to pay her own medical bills.
Elizabeth sniffed. “I certainly couldn’t have you being thrown out of college.”
Cat shook herself, would deal with this new shock later. “And I assume you just wired more money to Trinity to cover my final semester? And my housing?”
Elizabeth shifted again, winced. “I did what I could. I should have done more.”
“Why, Elizabeth? Why?” Cat demanded. She thought she was done being mad, but her anger was a slumbering giant that was beginning to wake again. “Why not just invite me for coffee after you had the FBI track me down instead of making me come to you? I wanted to kill you, for God’s sake. Why all the grandstanding and all the goddamned lies? For crying out loud, you even told me Mary Tenney had a boy.”
“That was survival, said for the same reason Scheherazade made up stories: to buy myself—and you—more time, to convince you to keep listening. I lied when things got hard because that’s what I’ve always done.” She lifted her shoulders—fragile as a bird’s wings—in a pitiful shrug. “You’re my priest, Catherine, and I’m dying—I needed you to hear my full confession. And now you have.” Her hand fluttered alongside her leg on the hospital blanket, and Cat caught the flash of gold that she knew was a cigarette lighter inscribed with a double-headed eagle. How she got that past the nurses and doctors is beyond me.
Cat was so exhausted, so wrung out from all of this, that she rose, ready to leave. Except Elizabeth stopped her.
“There’s one more thing I must confess to.” Elizabeth’s tone was tortured, stripped of the armor of her usual bluster and bravado. She closed her eyes, as if that somehow made it easier to speak. “Mary Tenney isn’t dead. Your mother is still very much alive.”
“What?”
“She’s not the Mary I once knew—it’s an incontrovertible truth that Mary Tenney is dead and gone—but the woman who carried you for nine months and nearly broke my hand g
iving birth to you still lives and breathes. I thought I was protecting you—it will be damn hard for you to meet her, but you deserve to know. Deserve the choice.”
“Is she at the Payne Whitney Clinic?”
At Elizabeth’s nod, something unfurled deep in Cat’s chest. Hope.
That Cat might not be totally alone.
But she’d gotten everything she needed from Elizabeth. That much was certain.
“I know I don’t deserve any favors from you, but will you do one last thing?” Elizabeth asked as Cat rubbed the tension from her temples, turned off the recorder, and started packing it into her bag. Cat almost pointed out the utter audacity of her question until she saw the golden cigarette lighter cradled in Elizabeth’s hand. “Get rid of this for me?”
Cat’s fingers closed around the cold metal, and she flicked it once. Click. Somehow, the sound was comforting. “Why did you keep it all these years?”
“As a reminder to stand up to my monsters.” Elizabeth’s broken voice made Cat wonder which monsters she was thinking of: Al and the Russians, Elizabeth and her own vices, or perhaps the mountain of lies she’d told? Cat tucked the lighter into her pocket and slung the heavy recorder bag over her shoulder, resolving not to care. “I have exploratory surgery scheduled sometime after Thanksgiving,” Elizabeth announced. “Will you visit me again, Catherine? After the surgery?”
Cat thought of offering her some platitude or perhaps even a lie, but her own world had spun off its axis and she needed to catch her breath. There was only one thing she could say as she left the tomb-like quiet of that sterile hospital room.
“I’ll take care of your cat until you’re back on your feet.”
* * *
* * *
Part of Cat wanted to wait to visit the Payne Whitney Clinic, to make a plan.
I’ve always made plans—graduating high school early, the ideal White House internship, the perfect journalism degree—and look where it’s left me. To hell with plans.
A Most Clever Girl Page 37