by Helen McCloy
“Well…” Tony sighed again. “We don’t have skylarks in Manhattan and there’s too much smog for an azure sky even at dawn, but I was still reading when the milk delivery trucks were rattling through the streets and I think I can honestly say that I knew right then and there we had a potential best seller. I agreed with Gus that it was too long and that he needed a better title. I told Phil all about it at breakfast. She was glad, because she had always liked Meg and Gus and she knew they needed a break for the agency. She was pouring coffee when she said, quite casually, ‘If it’s a war book, why not Never Call Retreat? Grapes of Wrath is a pretty good title, but it’s been used.”
“For a moment I didn’t get it. Then I remembered.”
Lepton hummed under his breath: “He hath sounded forth a trumpet that shall never call retreat…”
“I had a sort of shiver down my spine,” resumed Tony. “I said: ‘Phil, that’s it! Never Call Retreat.’ At the office, I phoned Gus and told him to see if he could fix an appointment with the author in my office that afternoon about three.
“Gus called back in fifteen minutes and said he’d run into a little difficulty he’d like to talk to me about if he could come up to the office that morning. I said okay, I could squeeze him in between two other appointments, and he came in looking like the wreck of the Hesperus.”
“And no wonder!” said Gus fervently. “You see the script had come into the agency by mail. The return address was in Westchester and it sounded like somebody’s country estate: The Willows, Stratfield, New York. I got the phone number from Information. A smooth, female voice answered: ‘The Willows, good morning!’ I said I wanted to speak to Mr. Cottle. The smooth voice said, ‘Patients are not allowed to use the telephone. You may see Mr. Cottle if you come here during visiting hours in the afternoon between two and four.’ I said, ‘What is this? A hospital?’ She answered: ‘A clinic. Are you a relative or friend of Mr. Cottle’s?’ I told her I was a literary agent and he had sent me a script. Then she said I had better talk to Dr. Clinton.
“I did. Dr. Clinton had a calm, lofty, controlled voice—God addressing a black beetle. He said that The Willows was a clinic for neurotics—not psychotics. Most of his patients were alcoholics of good family but he had a few charity patients he had taken in because their cases presented features of interest he wanted to study. Writing and painting were both useful occupational therapy. He had encouraged Amos Cottle to write a book, but he did not know that Amos had sent the book to an agent. He must have bribed one of the attendants to mail it for him.”
Tony continued the story.
“It ended with Gus and me going out to Stratfield that afternoon. I knew one publisher who had printed some stuff written by a guy in prison and I saw no reason why we couldn’t print something written by a guy in a psychiatric clinic. After all, I knew plenty of successful authors who should have been in psychiatric clinics—why not one who actually was? But of course I wanted to find out more about Amos Cottle, so we had a long talk with Dr. Clinton first.
“He was quite surprised when he learned that Amos’s book was worth publishing, but he seemed pleased, too. I suppose he felt it was a feather in his cap that Amos was so nearly cured he could now write a coherent book. I asked him what was really wrong with Amos. He hemmed and hawed and I told him I thought I should know the truth if I was going to publish the book. I particularly wanted to know if Amos was capable of writing other books or if this was probably a one-shot.
“Clinton said they didn’t usually discuss patients’ symptoms but Amos’s situation was so unusual he felt justified in doing so this time. He told us that two years previously a State cop had found Amos wandering in the road with blood on his. face and a wound in his head. There were muddy tire marks on the road showing a car had skidded and there was mud on Amos’s clothes. Amos himself was utterly incoherent from concussion or drunkenness, they weren’t sure which. The cop believed he had wandered in front of a speeding car because he was drunk. The driver had tried to swerve and gone into a skid, knocking Amos down. Then the driver lost his nerve and high-tailed it out of there. They never did catch the driver. This was the night of October 14th, 1950.
“Amos was taken to the clinic because it was the nearest hospital. The doctors there said he had every symptom of concussion aggravated by the fact that he was obviously a confirmed alcoholic. They dressed his wound and made the police wait until he had slept off his concussion before they tried to question him. Neither the police nor the doctors had ever seen him in that neighborhood before. There were no personal papers in his wallet and no identifying marks on his clothing. When he came to after about thirty-six hours, he seemed normal except for one thing—he was in a state of complete amnesia as far as his identity and personal history were concerned. He didn’t even know his own name.”
“And the name Amos Cottle?” asked Basil.
“That was the name Amos picked for himself a few weeks later when he began writing his book. Why he chose that particular name, no one knows. We let him keep it even though it wasn’t a particularly good name for an author, because Dr. Clinton thought it would have a disturbing effect on his mental balance if he had to change his name again.
“Dr. Clinton insisted that, aside from amnesia of personal memories, Amos was perfectly normal. He was obviously an educated man and he remembered all the skills he had ever learned. His wasn’t at all like those extreme cases of amnesia where the patient forgets how to read and write or even how to walk and talk and has to begin life all over again as if he were an infant. Amos had shown considerable strength of character in conquering his alcoholism with the help of Antabuse. Clinton said. ‘I cannot keep him here indefinitely. The only reason I’ve been hesitating to release him is that I don’t see how a man without a past can make a decent living in these days when everyone has to have some sort of employment status before getting a job—a union card, educational credentials or at least some previous experience. So far as I can discover, Amos has no special skills or talents. He even shows distaste for anything that has to do with science or medicine or psychiatry. In the last few months he’s been helping the janitor in our main building because he wanted to earn his keep here. He is docile and industrious, but obviously too well educated for that sort of work. The one sign of initiative he has shown is the writing of this book. If he can earn a living by writing, there is no reason why he shouldn’t leave the clinic. Indeed I’d be glad to get rid of him. He doesn’t need me any longer. There’s nothing more I can do for him.’
“Of course I asked if there was a chance that Amos might recover his memory eventually. Clinton said: ‘I don’t believe he will recover his memory any more than Caspar Hauser did. Short periods of amnesia are often associated with alcoholism, but this prolonged amnesia must come from the head wound he sustained. The concussion must have been more serious than we realized at the time. Or perhaps it was the alcoholism and concussion together that wiped out his memory so completely. The most likely theory is that he was trying to escape from the memory of something in his past when he took to alcoholism and the concussion finished the job for him. Even normal people develop spots of amnesia about unpleasant things they don’t want to remember. That’s why war always seems so romantic to veterans ten years later when it wasn’t at all romantic at the time. But Amos Cottle’s kind of amnesia is what we call fugue—a man’s flight from his own past because it has become unbearable to him.’
“At that point I began to wonder if there were anything criminal in Amos’s past. Clinton pooh-poohed the idea when I mentioned it, but now Amos has been murdered, I’m not so sure. Maybe he was running away from something pretty horrible and maybe it caught up with him last night.”
“He didn’t look like a criminal type,” said Gus. “That was my first thought when Clinton took us up to Amos’s room that afternoon. Amos didn’t have the beard then. You could see the frailty of his chin and the sick look around his mouth. He was slender, almost emaciated, with d
azed, wondering eyes. There was something quite childlike about him in those days, only he was more quiet and self-effacing than most children.”
“In short,” resumed Tony, “Amos looked exactly what he was—an incomplete man. a mind that was only half there, a personality without the rich, rounded volume that is added to a man’s presence by his long personal memory of die past, his extension in the dimension called time.”
“Two-thirds of a ghost,” said Gus. “That’s what Amos was.”
“Or one-third,” suggested Tony. “He must have been at least thirty, perhaps thirty-five, when we first met him four years ago, and he’d been in the clinic two years then. The greater part of his life was lost. Intellectually and physically a man, emotionally he must have been about six years old.”
“Was there no way of tracing him through his military record?” suggested Basil. “After all, his first book was a war book.”
“Kipling wrote a lot about the British Army but he never served in it,” retorted Tony. “Clinton was of the opinion that, if Amos had been in the Pacific at all, it was in some civilian capacity, USO or YMCA or something. He could not have passed a physical examination to get into the Army even in war time. X-rays showed a weakness of the spine that must have been a defect of long duration. Something about the cartilage, or whatever it is that connects the vertebrae and cushions one against another, being almost entirely worn away. That was why he tired so easily. Even a draft board doctor would know that Amos couldn’t survive an Army training course. But Amos could have had some canteen job that gave him a chance to overhear the casual talk of soldiers.”
Tony smiled a little cynically. “Damn few authors have experienced personally the things they write about. That’s one difference between a pro and an amateur. An amateur can’t write about something that isn’t direct experience. A real writer can write about anything—that’s his job. No one really cares if he’s technically accurate in every petty detail. The only thing that matters is making it real to the average reader who doesn’t know any more about technicalities than the average author. Emotions are what concern a fiction writer. Not facts, but the way people respond to facts inside themselves. That takes imagination—something a lot more rare than factual knowledge.”
“Writing about things he hasn’t experienced directly probably gives the writer perspective,” put in Lepton. “Like those East Indian painters who would paint only from memory, never from direct visual experience.”
“So…” Tony picked up his story again. “I bought a pig in a poke. I told Amos and Clinton that Daniel Sutton would publish Amos’s book, but we couldn’t possibly predict whether it would be a real success or not. What publisher can? I gave Amos a decent advance against royalties and he turned part of it over to Clinton to pay for his maintenance at the clinic until we saw how the book went. He also agreed to start another book now he no longer had to earn his keep as a janitor.”
“The rest is history,” said Gus. “Amos’s first book was what we in the trade call the hat trick—best seller, first serial sale, Book-of-the-Week Club and movie. By six months after publication day the money was really rolling in.”
“We had a last consultation with Clinton,” added Tony. “He said Amos was quite ready to leave the clinic and advised us to forget all about Amos’s past. The chances were it would never be recovered. The one thing to watch was the alcoholism, but Amos seemed as nearly cured as any alcoholic could be. Clinton said that Amos would be better off in the country than in the city—fewer temptations—and it was his suggestion that I should live near Amos where I could keep a fatherly eye on him. I’d been wanting to move to Connecticut and this seemed the time to do it. I gave up my New York apartment and bought this house for a song. It was only a rundown farm house then and we’ve been remodeling it ever since. I arranged for Amos to buy another house nearby and he seemed perfectly happy about the whole deal.”
“He wasn’t!” Vera’s voice was bitter. “Who would be? He was—what did you call him? A valuable piece of property. He was like a zombie working for his masters. He had no life of his own at all.”
“Did he ever tell you he couldn’t remember his past?” asked Basil.
“No,” admitted Vera. “But now I do know it explains so many things about Amos I never understood before. When I urged him to leave ‘Tony and get another publisher he wouldn’t. He said Tony had done so much for him, no one else could do as much. He was emotionally, as well as economically, dependent on Tony. How could any man be happy that way? He was just a thing Tony used—a sort of sleepwalker. As Tony says, ‘Two-thirds of a ghost.’” She looked at Tony resentfully. “You didn’t like his marrying me, did you? You got me that job in Hollywood to get me away from him. You knew I was just fool enough to take it, even though we’d only been married three months.”
“You would have driven him back to drinking, Vera,” said Tony levelly. “You would have killed him.”
“He would have had fun being killed that way, wouldn’t he?” snapped Vera. “He didn’t have much fun with you, living alone and working like hell and drinking iced tea when everybody else was drinking Scotch. I don’t believe you even liked Amos. You just used him for your own purposes.”
There was enough truth in this to abash Tony, but Philippa was not so easily cowed. “You didn’t like him either, did you?” she murmured sweetly. “You just used him for jour own purposes, too. Or tried to.”
Vera was ashen with anger. “How dare you speak to me like that! Of course I loved Amos. I was his wife, wasn’t I?”
“So you say.” Philippa was still the smiler with the knife.
Vera started speak, then closed her mouth.
“I see you’re getting the idea,” said Philippa. “If Amos was married before he lost his memory and if that wife is still alive, you were never his wife at all.” Gus turned to Basil defensively. “I don’t think we did Amos any harm. I think we even did him some good. It wasn’t our fault he was in deep amnesia. We certainly gave him a better life than he would have had mopping floors in Clinton’s main building. I don’t pretend I had any warm personal friendship for Amos. It’s hard to feel quite normally toward a man who doesn’t know his own past.”
“I liked him,” said Meg. “I didn’t know about the amnesia of course. Perhaps that was why. I always thought of him as a perfectly normal human being-just a little more subdued and reticent “than most people. He always looked so-so lost. I felt sorry for him. It seemed too bad for him to have so much vitality in his writing and so little in his own personality. He lived vicariously, didn’t-he? Perhaps that was one secret of his success. Everything went into his books because he had no life of his own, and he wrote with a detachment impossible to a man with personal memories of the immediate past.”
“You all took a mean advantage of his weakness,” said Vera. “You couldn’t have taken such a big slice of his picture and TV rights if he’d been a normal man.”
“There were reasons for that,” said Tony quickly. “Take the TV program. I set it up with the advertising agency and the network. I got the sponsor for the agency. Actually I planned the format of the whole show. I even roughed out treatments for each broadcast which the script writers followed. I earned my share of that TV money.”
“But not the movie money!” retorted Vera. “Or did you rough out treatments for Catamount?”
“No, but we both did a lot more for Amos than we would have done for a writer in a more normal situation,” insisted Gus. “We were always afraid he’d relapse into alcoholism. If anything, we deserved a larger cut of his profits for the amount of time we had to take from other work in order to keep an eye on him. And he didn’t seem to mind anything we did.”
“Well, I do!” said Vera. “What you did for him was your own choice. He didn’t ask you to do it. Either way he should have been paid at exactly the same rates as every other author. Why, Sam Karp says Amos’s royalty rate was ridiculous. You skinned him all along the line, Tony Kane!
”
“Did he ever relapse into alcoholism before last night?” asked Basil.
“Once,” answered Tony. “During the three months he was married to Vera. She’s right. I did get her the job in Hollywood. That was why.”
“There was another time he wanted to and didn’t,” said Meg.
Tony looked at her in surprise. “I never knew that.”
“It was nearly two years ago,” said Meg. “One spring evening when Amos was in town and we were walking down 57th Street together, we stopped at Madison to wait for a traffic light. The light changed to green but Amos didn’t move. He stood perfectly still for three or four seconds and then he said, ‘I’m thirsty,’ and headed for Schrafft’s. I thought he wanted a soft drink, iced tea or lemonade, because it was a warm evening. But when we sat down at table, he asked the waitress for Scotch on the rocks. While she was getting the drink, I talked fast. He carried Antabuse in his pocket in those days. I got him to take a pill before the drink came and he was saved. So far as I know he never tried to break training again until last night.”
“What was he looking at when he stood so perfectly still?” asked Basil.
“I don’t believe he was looking at anything,” answered Meg. “He was sort of lost in thought.”
“But the direction of his gaze?”
“Well, he was looking, in that sense, directly across the street to the opposite corner. There was a drug store there then.”
“Was he looking toward the drug store window?”
“No. He was looking up, higher than that.”
“At the sky?”
“Not so high as that. He was looking toward the upper floors of the building on the corner opposite us. But I don’t believe he was seeing them. His eyes were sort of unfocused like—well, like a man trying to remember something.”
“Or like a man who had remembered something?”