“You sold your car? Where’s the money?” Melusine asks and Hans looks furtive.
“I won’t say. It’s for my joy. My daily joy. I don’t need my daily bread but I need my daily joy.”
A bunch of indigent men come up to Hans.
“We’re going to the Mission for the lunchtime sandwich,” one of them says, and he is missing most of his teeth. “You coming?”
Hans’s face lights up. “Yes, I’m coming. These are my friends,” he says to Melusine and Jonas. “That’s Kristian. This is my home. We are going to get our sandwich. Thank you for the visit. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine as long as I don’t lie down.”
He rushes after the men who have started toward the Mission without him, none of them willing to give up getting their place in line.
Melusine is stunned. “Jonas,” she says, eventually, “are you okay?”
“Not really, Mami,” he replies quietly, picking at a splinter on the wooden bench. AW. Someone carved their initials into the bench and Jonas picks at it. He wonders who AW is. Thinking about that is easier than thinking about his father.
“No. Me neither. I’m going to get Dr. Glott to come and take a look at him.” Glott is their family doctor.
“Good idea. Let’s call him now. You phone him while I call the police and let them know we found Papa.”
They make their calls and wait for the doctor to arrive.
“Uh, I should mention that he has been drinking more than usual,” Melusine starts to explain to the physician when he arrives and then she stops short. Jonas puts his arm around her.
“Tell him everything, Mami, tell him the whole story.”
Melusine starts with the trip to Las Vegas and the deception with the two hotels, and she tells him about the Healing Lives Ministries and Hans’s increased drinking and finally, his assault on the schoolgirl. She leaves out his strange attack on her that night in Las Vegas.
The doctor shakes his head. “Poor man. This might be delayed grief at having lost his sister. Jonas is all grown up and left home — that in itself could have triggered this. There are any number of factors. I hate to use the cliché of mid-life crisis but it could be that, coupled with increased drinking that has led to a nervous breakdown. Certainly aided and abetted by this New Age place. I just wish Hans had come to see me when he started to feel out of control. I could have helped him and stopped things from disintegrating to this degree. Perhaps it’s not as bad as you suspect, perhaps…”
“Look,” Jonas interrupts him, “there he is, there’s Papa.”
Hans and his group are returning to the park, and Hans is animated, waving his hands about.
The doctor looks to where Jonas is pointing and his face pales. “That’s Hans? I wouldn’t have recognized him.”
“Whatever you do, don’t frighten him,” Jonas says. “We don’t want him running off somewhere where we can’t find him. It’s more important that we know where he is.”
Melusine and Jonas join the doctor who is heading towards Hans as carefully as he would an easily startled animal.
Hans eyes the approaching doctor with disinterest. He is drinking from a plastic bottle with a grape juice label.
“Hans?” The doctor holds his hands out in front of him, a placatory gesture. “It’s me, Glott. Come on, man, you know me. What’s going on here?”
Hans backs away and the group of men form a protective circle around him.
The doctor edges closer. “Come on, Hans, we’ve known each other for ages. You can trust me. You know you can trust me. Come on, let me help you.”
As one, the group of men sidle off to the far edge of the park with Hans cocooned in the middle.
“Are the police going to arrest him for what he did to that schoolgirl? Because if they do, I can try to get him into a psych ward for evaluation, get him onto some meds and get him cleaned up. But I can see that he isn’t going to come with us voluntarily.”
“I don’t know what the girl or her family or the school are going to do,” Melusine says. The evening sun is setting and she is suddenly exhausted. She sits down on Hans’s bench. “I don’t know what we should do either.”
“For now, you should go home, both of you. I’m going to the police station to see what they have to say and I know the woman who runs the Mission, I’ll talk to her as well and get all the information I can. All we can do is keep him as safe as possible until we can try to get him some help. Both of you, go home and get some rest. At least we know where he is and what he’s up to. Here’s my cellphone number in case you need me.”
Jonas stands up and offers Melusine his hand.
“Come on, Mami, let’s get out of here. I tell you one thing, the school can’t sue him. He’s gone crazy. And Dr. Glott’s right, we’ll find a way to get him checked into a hospital. We’ll get this all sorted out. We’ll have Papa back to normal in no time.”
They walk back to the car. Jonas looks at his watch. “I have to meet up with Nika in an hour. Let me drive you home. Are you all right, Mami?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” Melusine says distantly. She is still trying to process what has happened. “Dr. Glott is right. We’ll get him into a hospital. I’d better call work too, they think I’ve got the flu.” She feels as if she is rambling, her thoughts are scrambled, fluttering.
They drive home in silence.
Jonas pulls into the driveway and they sit there for a while then he hands her the keys. “I’ll call you later,” he says. He reaches over and gives her a hug.
“Will you be alright tonight? Do you want Nika and me to come back and stay here with you? We can.”
Melusine appreciates the offer but she would prefer to be alone and have some time to think about things. She pats his knee. “I’m fine my sweet boy, fine. You go home to Nika. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll figure all this out, okay? Try not to worry.”
She waves goodbye to Jonas and unlocks the front door. As soon as she is inside, the enormity of what has happened hits her. Her husband has gone mad. Her intelligent, handsome, funny husband has gone mad. He sucked the toes of a hapless schoolgirl and turned into a homeless drunk and all in an inexcusably short period of time. It seems improbable and yet, there it is.
Melusine sinks down into a chair beside the big wooden table. She catches sight of one of her copies of Herzzeit Briefwechsel and she makes a ragged sound — a mocking laugh. How romantic madness seemed when it was contained to the artistic worlds of Ingeborg and Paul. Death by suicide, preceded by years of breakdowns; how intriguing the fragile mind had been. Not so intriguing or lovely when it happened to a member of your family.
“I imagined you suffering a movie star madness,” she says out loud to Ingeborg. “And I apologize. I imagined teenaged drama but acted out in an adult fashion, in other words with a solid substrate of rational control. But there’s no control, I see that now.”
She does not feel foolish, conversing with a dead poet; she feels reassured, comforted. “And Paul, I’m sorry I romanticized your suffering too. What pain you must have endured, pain that finally defeated you. Madness is not a vacation from the boring self, it’s a descent into hell and the boring self seems like an idyllic heaven from which one is barred. I thought madness was heroic but really, it’s just tragic.”
The darkness of the night seems menacing and Melusine wants to get up and close the curtains but she feels too tired to move.
“And now my husband has gone mad. I know I betrayed him by falling in love with Gunther but Hans had already left me and perhaps I sensed that. Not that I’m trying to excuse myself, I’m not.”
She crosses her arms and stares out into space. “We’ll sort all this out. We will.” She gets up and closes the curtains and pours a drink of water. She dials the doctor’s telephone number; she cannot wait until the morning.
“According to the police, the girl is not going to press charges.” Glott is blunt and to the point. “This is not a good thing even though it might appear that way. Becau
se without her statement, the police cannot arrest Hans and unless they arrest him, we can’t get him into a hospital. It’s clear he won’t be coming voluntarily.”
“Why won’t the girl press charges? I would have thought her family would insist?”
“They don’t want to put the girl under any kind of stress. Further stress, should I say. Melusine, you should be warned, the tabloid newspapers are all over this. That woman from Hans’s office, the receptionist…”
“Gretchen.”
“Yes, her. She told them everything she knows. Someone at the school, one of the teachers said something to alert the media’s interest and the newspaper called Gretchen and she told them the whole story.”
Melusine is cold, her legs feel rubbery and she shrinks against the wall. “How do you know this?”
“The police told me because the paper called them to ask if the girl’s going to press charges since no one from the family would talk to them. Not easy to keep a thing like this under wraps in a town our size.”
“That’s just great. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse. But you’re right, the main thing is how can we help Hans now?”
She can almost feel the doctor’s shrug down the line. “Not much really unless Hans does something that’ll land him in jail. I also spoke to Ellen, she runs the Mission and she said she’ll keep an eye on him. I gave her both your and Jonas’s telephone numbers.”
“Thank you Dr. Glott.” Melusine is exhausted. “I’ll go and see her tomorrow. Thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“Haven’t done anything.” The doctor is gruff. “Wish I’d had the chance to treat him sooner. Let’s keep in touch, alright?”
Melusine agrees and replaces the receiver.
“Oh, Hans,” she says, looking through the kitchen to the living room at his empty chair. “I really don’t know what to think. Or feel. I guess I should have known something was wrong after that night in Vegas but I just couldn’t deal with it. You’ve always been so dependable. Why? Why, after all these years, did you come undone now? I don’t understand.”
She knows she should call Bill and her boss and Ana but she cannot bear to talk about it yet. They’ll know soon enough anyway and she can deal with it then. The silence in the house feels ominous and Melusine has no idea what to do with herself.
She feels as if the house is alive, as if it is breathing and watching her to see if she will break too. And if she does break, it will have won and she too will be driven out into the night.
She shakes herself. These are stupid thoughts. She is a rational woman, Hans is the crazy one.
She forces herself to enter what was their bedroom and she tries to make herself lie down on the bed, to exorcise the tormented energy of Hans and his demons but she can’t bring herself to do it.
She tells herself that it is just a bed, that she slept there for over twenty years but the bed — unmade, rumpled, sweatstained — is the pit of Hans’s hell and she can feel the horror of his pain. She leaves the room and closes the door. She feels as if the room is the devil’s lair and again, she feels the living pulse of the house and she reminds herself that it’s only her poor startled heart that’s beating too fast.
She walks through to the living room and she sees the ghost of Hans as he lay on his chair only days before, guzzling cheap red wine to stop the evil spirit from approaching.
She looks at the wine stain on the wall. She never cleaned it; she wanted it to be a stain of reproach; a visible symbol that would bring Hans to his knees and restore his sanity. It mocks her now, that hurled splash of anger.
Melusine turns on her heel, grabs her handbag and leaves the house. She gets into her car and drives to a hotel at the edge of town. She sits on her bed and phones the police who do not tell her anything she has not already heard from Glott. Then she phones Bill.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am that Gretchen ran her mouth off to the newspaper. She’s been reprimanded, let’s put it that way. I don’t know what she was thinking.”
Melusine shakes her head. “She made things a lot worse. So, the girl’s family are not pressing charges?”
“No, and I’m glad to say that there will be no charges, not to Hans or to our little business. I’m relieved about that, Melu, I can’t say I’m not. And the school says that they’ll continue the contract, so that’s good too.”
“Bill … didn’t you see anything? About Hans’s deteriorating. Didn’t you notice anything? I know I’m the one who really should have seen it coming, but didn’t you notice anything?”
Bill hesitates. “There were odd things but nothing I could confront him about. He locked himself in his office regularly, said he had a conference call and he didn’t tell us anything more and we didn’t ask. Gretchen was the most observant; the rest of us guys didn’t pay it much mind. We all have stuff to deal with, wives, kids, money. If Hans seemed distracted, we just figured it was the usual.”
“I should have noticed. I’m the one. Oh, Bill, I’m sorry about all of this.”
“Melusine! It’s not your fault! If there’s anything I can do, you let me know, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks Bill.”
Next on the list is Ana. Melusine sighs. While she loves her friend, she is too tired for drama. She picks up the receiver and then changes her mind and calls her boss instead. She figures it is better if Ana reads about it in the newspaper first and lets off some steam before she talks to her.
“Take as much time as you need,” her boss says when Melusine explains the situation as sparsely as she can.
“Uh, there’s one more thing…” Melusine hesitates. “The newspapers have picked up the story so it’s going to be everywhere.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” the woman says, “and don’t worry. You have our full support. This is a tragedy, Hans was, is, a very fine man.”
Melusine thanks her and says she will take the following day and then she calls Jonas to see how he is doing and tell him where she is.
“Good thinking, Mami, going to a hotel. So there’s no way of getting Papa to a hospital? What are we supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know. I’ll talk to the woman at the Mission tomorrow and tell you what she says.”
“I tell you, Mami, what makes me so angry is this Healing Lives place. I’m going to find them if it’s the last thing I do. They’re to blame, they should be held accountable.”
“I’ve tried to find them, Jonas, believe me, I’ve tried. The number is unlisted and they cashed the cheques your father sent so there’s no trail to follow and there’s nothing about them online either.” Melusine takes a deep breath. “Jonas, I want you to listen to me, really listen. The police know about the Healing Lives Ministries now, let’s leave it with them, please. I want you to enjoy your life with Nika and not go off chasing lost causes. Your father never got over the loss of his sister. It stunted his emotional growth, it stunted his whole life, and now look what’s happened.”
“But…”
“No buts. Please. Promise me you won’t let this thing with your father do the same thing to you. Promise me you will do all the things we were talking about the other day — law school and marriage and babies.” Her chest is tight and she finds it hard to breathe. Her jaw hurts and there’s a ringing in her ears. “Promise me, Jonas, promise me.”
“Okay, Mami,” he says, with obvious reluctance, “but only if you promise to do the same. Papa’s a good man but he never let you spread your wings and fly, so you promise me that in return that you’ll do some of the things in this life that you really want to, okay?”
“We’ve got a deal,” Melusine says, exhaling loudly.
“Mami,” Jonas says, “it’s not that I don’t love Papa. I really do love him. But I just can’t cry. I feel like I should cry but I can’t. Why is that?”
“I don’t know, Jonas. Me too. Maybe we’re still in shock. I want you to get some rest now. I’m going to have a long hot bath and then go to bed. It’s bee
n an exhausting few days. We’ll talk later, my sweet boy.”
“One more thing, Mami. Nika asked me to tell you something, wait, what was it? Nika?”
Nika comes to the phone. “I step, a bundle of goodness and godliness that must make good this devilry that has happened. And we will, Melu, we will make good of this, all of us together.”
“Ah, my dear, I was thinking it was more a case of war is no longer declared but continued. The outrageous has become the everyday. But I’m more than willing to accede to your quote instead.”
She hands the phone back to Jonas who manages a laugh. “Whoever thought I’d have two of you quoting Ingeborg at me?”
“There’s no escape!” Melusine summons a wan smile. “Goodnight then, we’ll talk tomorrow.” Melusine orders a hamburger from room service and sits down on the bed, waiting.
She wonders if she should sell the house. She tells herself that it is Jonas’s childhood home with many good memories but still, she cannot imagine going back. The tall red-shingled, gabled house with yellow climbing roses in the summertime was her home too, but now it is a mocking place, dark and cold.
Her food arrives and she wolfs down half of it then suddenly feels sick and rushes to the washroom to throw up. She splashes her face with cold water and looks at herself in the mirror. She is haggard and grey, with lines etched deeply in her face. She turns away and runs a bath, the water so hot it stings her skin and she wants to scrub herself but lacks the energy.
Steaming and lobster red, she wraps herself in a towel and climbs into bed, the humid heat a comfort. She thinks about Hans, out in the freezing night, without his gloves, hat or scarf.
She balances the hotel stationery on her lap and begins to write to Gunther.
I feel as if this is my fault. I should have seen this coming. In all fairness, I couldn’t have known the fallout would be this bad, how could I know? But still … I should have stopped this from happening.
She wishes she could tell Gunther that she longs to see him again and that it would be wonderful for him to be by her side during this terrible time. Then she reminds herself that this is her lover she is talking about; it would hardly be appropriate. She shakes her head. Never mind Hans, it’s not like she is keeping her own house in order either.
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