One

by David Karp

  “I wish I had her picture here,” Hughes said, trying achingly to remember his wife.

  “I have it at my place. I’ll bring it the next time. It was stupid of me to forget it. Of course you’d want it.”

  The photograph Cumbers brought on his very next visit (he was a man of his word who never forgot what he promised) was of an alert-looking, pretty woman with heavy, black hair, gracefully combed and pinned at the back. There was a sweetness and delicacy of brow and a gentleness of mouth and chin that Hughes found greatly appealing. When he was alone with the photograph he studied it carefully. It was an old picture and although it was only a head and shoulders likeness Hughes could see by the jewelry and the style of dress that it was nearly thirty years old. It caused Hughes to stop and consider. He did not know how old he was. It had never occurred to him to think of it, but now that it had, he realized that he did not know. He studied his face in the mirror and puzzled. He was not in his thirties. He appeared to be in his middle or late forties. But perhaps he was older. Or younger? The photograph was probably between twenty and thirty years old, and here was a woman in her early or middle twenties. Which meant he was past forty-five or even fifty. It seemed incredible to him that he should remember so little of all those years except as shadows. It was true that Cumbers was always bringing up things that struck responsive chords in his mind. There were names, dates, places, events which, once Cumbers referred to them, he seemed to be able to grasp in rough outline. And Cumbers was always eager to help him to remember. Hughes shook his head. He had never been given an official explanation for his breakdown or any sort of analysis of its debilitating aftereffects. Well, he thought, if they felt it was necessary for him to know such things they would probably tell him. He waited patiently to hear from the doctors.

  Meanwhile his physical strength returned and now he was fully dressed most of the day and free of the room. He wandered the corridors and sat in the sunlit reading room. Not for the books or for the magazines, but for the feeling of peace and companionship. Patience was a good card game when one was alone but Hughes did not want to be alone any longer. He looked forward eagerly to Cumbers’ visits. Not so much for the pleasure of seeing his friend but to hear about the world in which Cumbers moved. There was excitement about the work Cumbers did at the office. Things people said and did, problems he faced, decisions he made. And from Cumbers’ stories of the boardinghouse Hughes began to know all of the people, the landlady who suffered from bad headaches, her nephew who was forever “skylarking and chasing after women,” the couple on the first floor who were waiting for an aged uncle to die so that they might claim their inheritance and build a home in the country, the woman who was married to a sea captain who was forever sending her exotic treasures from all his ports of call, the family who had pinned their great hopes on a son who was a gifted flute player. To Hughes they all came alive when Cumbers spoke of the house, of what was said at the meals and during the evenings.

  “They must be extraordinary people,” Hughes had said once.

  “I hope you won’t be disappointed when you meet them,” Cumbers said guardedly.

  “No, no, not at all,” Hughes replied, patting his friend’s hand reassuringly. “I look forward to meeting them. It will be such an enormous change from this place.”

  “Yes,” Cumbers looked about him. “There’s something unhappy about a room where a person’s been sick. I mean, they fix it up neatly enough and it’s clean and bright and it has all you might want. But it’s a sickroom and you can’t be yourself in a room like that.”

  “Yes, yes,” Hughes agreed, “that’s it exactly.”

  “I’ve told them at the house about you,” Cumbers said, “and they’re all anxious to meet you.”

  “Ah, that’s wonderful. But wait a minute. Haven’t I met them before?”

  “Why, no,” Cumbers said, “don’t you remember?”

  “No,” Hughes said in a small voice. It ached inside of him. He would get excited and caught up in something and then the darkened past would swirl up and chill him to the bone.

  “You always insisted that I go to your place. You never came to mine. You’ve never seen my room. I’ll confess that lots of times I felt it was inconvenient and selfish of you but—well, that’s the way you were and I had to put up with it.”

  “Poor Cumbers,” Hughes said feelingly, “I’ve treated you so badly.”

  “It’s forgotten,” Cumbers said sturdily, “believe me. I see now that all this illness was responsible for the way you’ve acted. The illness must have begun long, long ago—long before either of us suspected it.”

  “Yes,” Hughes said thoughtfully, “that must be the answer to all I have forgotten. There is one thing, though, I’ve got to know. How old am I?”

  Cumbers’ face grew very small and unhappy. “Forty-three,” he said softly, “it’s in some of the papers I have for you.”

  “Then the picture of Edna was taken—when?”

  “Oh, twenty years ago, I imagine.”

  “Then Edna must have been just twenty herself.”

  Cumbers nodded as one nods when reminiscing of the dead. Hughes sighed. “It’s an awful thing to forget, Cumbers,” he said quietly. Cumbers watched him with distressed eyes until it was time for him to leave. When he was at the door he took Hughes’ elbow and said gently, “Listen to me. Don’t brood. I could see you brooding this afternoon and it makes me unhappy. God knows all of us have had our share of misery in our life. Yours came before your breakdown. Perhaps it had all accumulated during those days and nights when you were alone and pushed you into it. Well, Nature has been kind and helped you to forget it. Don’t disturb her plan, Hughes.”

  “Yes, maybe you’re right, Cumbers,” he said, “maybe if I didn’t remember I’d be better off.”

  “I know a great deal about your life. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. But there’s a lot you’ve never mentioned and perhaps that’s the dark part and you ought to forget the dark part of it. That makes sense now, doesn’t it?”

  “The best sort of sense,” Hughes smiled, agreeing. Then Cumbers smiled, the two friends shook hands, and Cumbers hurried­ off.

  Cumbers was right. It was best to forget the dark part of his life and not try to revive it. He had a new life ahead of him and as the days went on he grew more and more eager to enter it.

  One frosty, clear December morning the doctor made his first appearance in Hughes’ room and subjected him to a thorough physical examination. At its conclusion, Hughes waited with a thrumming sense of excitement. The examination could only mean that now he would be free of the hospital.

  “Well, it looks as though you’re ready to leave us, Mr. Hughes,” the doctor said with a smile.

  “That’s wonderful,” Hughes said, barely able to conceal his delight.

  “In fact, I don’t see why you couldn’t leave any time you wished tomorrow morning. I’ll speak to the supervising nurse about it.”

  “Thank you very much, Doctor,” Hughes said, and hesitated for a moment before he spoke again. “I wanted to ask you about my illness. My memory isn’t all it should be. Will it come back to normal in time?”

  “Oh, yes,” the doctor nodded his head. “You shouldn’t have any trouble with that after awhile. I don’t really know how to explain to you simply, nonmedically, about your failure of memory. Let’s put it this way. There are things in your past which weighed so heavily upon your mind that a time came when you could no longer cope with them. What happened then is somewhat the same sort of thing that happens when a machine has been overloaded. It breaks down. In the same way, your mind broke down. You lost all consciousness of the present as well as the past. So, during the period of your breakdown a wall was built up between your conscious self and your unconscious, or memory, self. The wall will move back now, allowing more innocent memories through and that process will continue—the wall steadily retreating—until it comes to those memories or memory factors which caused the break
down in the first place. Then the wall will stop and your memory will stop at that point. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I do,” Hughes said. “It means that I won’t ever remember the unhappy things in my past.”

  “I won’t say never. You may remember them. The only real cure is to remove the wall, to bring those memories, those thoughts, those fears into the open and discuss them, to understand them for what they are and in understanding them, reduce their power to harm you.”

  “I see. Then must I stay here until the wall has been removed?”

  “That’s up to you,” the doctor said thoughtfully. “Sometimes an adjustment can be made without a thorough analysis. If the wall operates, then I would not advise disturbing it. However, the wall is not nearly as secure as its name implies. Those things behind the wall do sometimes leak out and you’ll find yourself suffering for inexplicable reasons, perhaps moods of depression, or feelings of guilt, or moments of terrible inadequacy. When those things happen you can be sure that you’re being affected by something behind the wall which has been exerting an effect on your behavior. Something like a magnetic field.”

  Hughes nodded solemnly. “How long would it take for me to be fully cured?”

  “Months, years, perhaps. Depending upon your resistance, your willingness, many factors.”

  “Can I live happily without knowing about them?”

  “You may live a completely happy life from this moment on. Or you may be happy for a year or so. Or there may be alternate periods of happiness and misery. If you don’t wish to undergo analysis which, as I said, may take a long time—then live a full and complete life. Have friends, be interested in things outside of yourself, join a church if you are not already a member, make a conscious effort to be interested in others—in what they do, what they say. All that helps.”

  “Yes,” Hughes nodded soberly, seeing the good sense of what the doctor said.

  “Above all, don’t worry too much about your memory. Things that are better forgotten are forgotten. You can only make yourself unhappy by trying to recall them without the aid of medical guidance.”

  “I have a friend who said virtually the same thing,” Hughes said.

  “Your friend sounds as if he has a good head on his shoulders. I’d listen to him.”

  “Yes, I will, Doctor. Thank you.”

  Hughes stayed in his room the rest of the morning pondering what the doctor had said. He felt that he would make the adjustment with Cumbers’ help and the thought so increased his warmth and affection for Cumbers that he even surprised himself with the cheerfulness and excitement he displayed when Cumbers arrived.

  “They’re letting me leave tomorrow,” Hughes said.

  “Wonderful!” Cumbers exclaimed. “And you’re getting out just in time for the holidays, too.”

  “Why? What’s the date?”

  “The seventeenth of December. Tomorrow’s Friday and a week from tomorrow the holidays begin.”

  “It’s almost as though it were a Christmas present,” Hughes said, glowing at the prospect of being away from the hospital for Christmas and New Year’s.

  “Well, I’ll call my landlady from work and tell her to get your room ready, and I’ll bring all your stuff from my place to yours. The landlady says we might even have a special dinner for you when you have your first evening home. That is, if you don’t feel the excitement would be too much for you?”

  “Of course not. I’m fine, Cumbers. Absolutely fine. I’ve been fit for weeks now. And I’ve been most anxious to meet everyone at the house. I think the dinner’s an inspired idea. Thank her for me, Cumbers, will you? And tell her I’m looking forward to it?”

  Cumbers nodded, smiling. He confessed to Hughes that he had been contemplating his usual lonely Christmas and New Year’s holidays without much relish. It always struck him most sharply at that time of the year—the fact of his true loneliness. While the people at the boardinghouse were friendly enough, and Mrs. Doughton, the landlady, brightened the halls and dining and sitting rooms with decorations, the house did not have all the charm the holidays needed. When the captain was away for the holidays, as he would be this year, Mrs. Greevy grew almost inconsolably sad and was more than tiresome until the New Year came in, when she seemed to perk up and look forward to the spring, when the captain would surely touch port near home and come to see her.

  “She’s a good sort most of the time,” Cumbers said of Mrs. Greevy, “and she bears up with his absence remarkably well. But the holidays are rather special to her, even if she is Church of State, and it sort of hits her hard when the captain’s not with her. Just looking at her sitting at the dinner table is enough to make a man lose his appetite for Christmas dinner.”

  “Well,” Hughes said, “perhaps we can help her to cheer up this Christmas.”

  “It’d take some doing,” Cumbers said.

  “Well, why not? After all, I have so much to share with others. It seems a shame if we don’t help Mrs. Greevy.”

  When Cumbers left, Hughes felt that he had to bustle about and do things. But there was nothing to do and he began to fret over his idleness. Because he wanted the time to pass quickly he took a nap during the afternoon, lingered over his evening meal, and played patience until it was time for lights out. When he finally eased his body between the sheets and watched the cold moonlight on the floor he was aware of a deep contentment overlying a slight sense of thrill. It was his last night in the hospital. In the morning he would be up early, tidy his own room to surprise and please his nurse, and be ready the instant Cumbers called for him.

  22

  The morning Hughes was to be released was cold and clear, with the cruel purity that only December mornings can have. Hughes, who had arisen early, found the morning endlessly long. His impatience mounted with the minutes and he was in and out of his room a dozen times to find out what the time was. The supervising nurse finally grew tired of seeing him and told him to stay in his room or in the reading room until it should be time to leave. Hughes, with all the excitement and impatience of a small boy, could not stay in either, and hurried back and forth between the two rooms so often that finally he gave up all pretenses and lingered in the hall, watching the elevators.

  His release papers came through before Cumbers arrived and the supervising nurse said he could leave at any time. The moment Hughes actually had the papers in his hand his impatience disappeared and he returned to his room to comb his hair, to brush his shoes, and to fix his necktie. He tried on the overcoat the social welfare office had sent up for him, since he had entered the hospital without one. It was well-made, of some heavy, coarse fiber, but Hughes felt that it did not fit too well and lacked style and distinction. Even Cumbers, who was not an overfussy dresser, seemed to have a smarter-looking coat. Well, he decided, it was quite sufficient for his purposes and there was a lot of wear in it. When he had money of his own he would buy a different coat but now this coat was perfectly fine. It represented the surest evidence that he was allowed to leave. He put the coat on with the idea that he would be ready on the instant to leave with Cumbers, but it soon developed that the coat was too heavy to be worn indoors so he took it off.

  “What? Not ready yet?”

  Hughes whirled at the voice and saw Cumbers’ grinning face staring through the partially opened door.

  “I’ve been ready for hours!” Hughes cried, struggling to get into the coat. “Where have you been?”

  “I was a little late, I know,” Cumbers said with a smile as he came in, “but there was a reason for it. I explained to Mr. Hampshire that you were coming home today and guess what he did?”

  “Gave you the rest of the day off,” Hughes cried, delighted with the good news.

  “Right,” Cumbers said, grinning from ear to ear. He came forward and clapped Hughes on the back but the coat was so thick that Hughes hardly felt it. “Now, that’s a coat!” Cumbers said admiringly.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” Hughes said with a shy
grin, “but it ought to be warm enough.”

  “No, no,” Cumbers insisted, “there’s nothing wrong with the coat at all. It’s fine, fine.”

  “Well, let’s try it out on the weather,” Hughes said, throwing open the door.

  Once outdoors, Hughes drank in great draughts of cold, thin air that burned his nostrils and bit into his lungs. He was grateful for the coat’s warmth, but he felt so fine, so glowing that he felt that he could have walked coatless and hatless through the streets and not been chilled at all. Cumbers, who had been watching his friend out of the corners of his eyes, smiled.

  “It makes that much of a difference, does it?”

  “It’s—it’s marvelous,” Hughes said with a terrible sense of happiness and inadequacy to communicate that happiness. They fell into silence then during their long tramp through the winding streets to the station. Hughes looked everywhere—at the trees, the brown winter grass, the naked ugliness of privet hedges stripped of their leaves, the houses snuggled close to the earth showing chilled windowpanes reflecting the afternoon winter sun, at the thin streams of smoke that curled uncertainly from the chimneys, to drift over the roofs and then be sucked into the path of a sharp wind. The walk proved to be an exhilarating tonic for Hughes so that when they came up to the small, busy restaurant near the station he felt ravenously hungry.

  There was a cheerful clatter in the restaurant of dishes, voices, and silverware. The long, curving oak dining bar was crowded while many of the tables were empty. It was only after Hughes and Cumbers had taken one of the tables with the prettier view of the herb garden behind the restaurant that they saw why the tables were neglected. Almost all of the help in the restaurant was concentrated behind the dining bar to take care of the luncheon crowds that had no time to dawdle over its meals.

  “Well, we’re in no hurry,” Hughes said, enjoying the surroundings immensely, drinking in the sounds of voices, the sights of people eating, talking, gesturing. He sighed a deep, ecstatic sigh that brought a responsive smile of pleased sympathy from Cumbers. “I know I’m acting like a fool,” Hughes apologized, “but to be out of that room, out of that building. The feeling can’t be described.”