The Alexandrite

by Rick Lenz

  My jaw muscles are trembling. I turn to Margaret. “Is that true?”

  “We went to the doctor, and he called two days later,” Margaret says.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to find the right moment.”

  “She shouldn’t have a child. Oh my God, Margaret.”

  “But she’s going to.”

  “I’m here,” says Lily. “You shouldn’t love Margaret, Richard. You mustn’t love Margaret.”

  “When did you find out, Margaret? Was it before the twelfth?”

  “What?”

  “When? When did you know?”

  “Last week.”

  “What day?”

  “Wednesday, I think.”

  “The eleventh?”

  “I think so.”

  The first time back, while I’d gone out and found my acting job, Margaret got the news. Then, that night, she fed dinner to her husband, watched television with him, let him go to bed with her sister again, then—later, downstairs, executed him. This time—

  “What will happen when the baby comes?” says Lily.

  She gives us a moment to respond, but neither of us can come up with a word.

  “I know you’ll take it from me. But you shouldn’t. I can take care of a baby.” She folds her arms together in front of her and pretends to rock a baby. “See?”

  “We see, Lily,” says Margaret hollowly.

  “You don’t. You won’t let me keep him, and then he won’t have a mother. He won’t have his family. Poor little baby.” She looks sadly at the infant in her arms. “Poor little baby.”

  Margaret moves toward her again. “Everything will be fine, Lily. Now, give me the revolver.”

  Lily levels it at her. “You’re the one,” she says, clenching her other hand even tighter, into a white fist.

  “Give me the pistol,” says Margaret.

  “We would be a family without you.”

  “Give it to me, dear.”

  “A happy little family.”

  Margaret takes another step toward her.

  “Be careful,” I whisper.

  Lily continues aiming the revolver at her.

  Margaret reaches out, only inches away from it. “Give it to me, dear.”

  Lily focuses raptly on her. “You’re the one.”

  Margaret’s hand moves closer. “Lily?”

  “Poom. Poom. Poom. You’re dead.”

  Margaret extends her hand toward the gun.

  “Margaret!”

  She stops and looks at me, then pulls her hand back.

  Slowly, Lily turns the gun back toward me, and I have a flash of regret that I haven’t used some of the information I’ve brought back with me about Kentucky Derby and World Series winners. My God, I could have bought some stock in Alcoa or Disney or Sony and guaranteed Jack Cade’s future.

  I think of the old character actor behind me, drinking the ink.

  “Lily has a surprise or two up her sleeve, doesn’t she?” She pauses, looking less hurt, more purposeful.

  “Please, Lily,” I say. “Give me the gun.”

  “I reckon I could drill you right between the eyes, pardner.”

  “Lily …”

  “But I ain’t a-gonna. ’Cause that’s the real sidewinder.”

  She swings the gun back around toward Margaret.

  She presses the trigger.

  Margaret looks at me, no more than mildly startled, and drops.

  The revolver is still gripped tightly in Lily’s hand. She looks at me and raises her other hand, the fist. She reminds me of the woman standing on top of the mountain, raising the bicycle over her head, about to howl at the moon.

  Her eyes examine me.

  She beams, lowers her fist, and holds it out to me.

  “See?” she says, her eyes flashing. “See? Whoever you are?”

  She unclenches the upturned fist.

  It’s the key to my bedroom.

  20

  They tell me many years later, after I’ve remembered the events I’ve described, that Margaret was killed instantly. I don’t believe that because when I looked back down at her, she was returning my stare, saying with her eyes, “If only you had been faithful. If only you had made half an effort, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Margaret had told her neighbor, Amy Jaekel, all her secrets, including the one about her husband’s and her sister’s affair, which accounted for the icy stares I’d gotten from that woman.

  Lily was unprosecutable for Margaret’s death, but Richard wasn’t. I was booked for first-degree murder, or so I was told later.

  What finally saved me was Richard’s inability to cope with the weight of all the events in his life during the period of that April 10th through 15th, 1956.

  I didn’t crack immediately. At first, I defended myself with skill and—pardon my immodesty—finesse. I said that my sister-in-law had come upon Margaret’s revolver through negligence on Margaret’s part and, in a moment of anger and confusion, had shot her. I knew it wasn’t a noble defense, but Lily was going to be put in a home anyway, and her baby would more than likely end up in an orphanage, and there was no reason for me to be sent away too.

  But when they told me that Amy Jaekel had accused me of having an affair with Lily, Richard responded that nothing had been his fault, that a man named Jack Cade had taken him away against his will for the weekend previous to the shooting. When I was pressed for the details, I became, as the court termed it, “uncooperative and incoherent,” then, finally, silent.

  They indicted me for first-degree murder, but my attorney got me off as insane. Later, I would be called a “multiple personality.”

  I had difficulty talking about all that happened to me during the next four decades because I didn’t remember most of it. I spent the time in four state mental facilities. The final one was the institution near Coolidge, which some of the residents waggishly called Coolidge Storage. It wasn’t until after I’d been stored there for a while that, with the help of their chief psychotherapist, Dr. Harold Henry, I began to put things together. Dr. Henry was the first one who was willing to tell me anything about Lily. Almost from the beginning, according to Dr. Henry, she hadn’t shown any will to live. After her baby was taken away from her, no amount of therapy or drugs was able to bring her out of her depression, and she died a year later.

  I heard about it decades after the fact.

  Jack and Richard each blamed the other for Lily’s death, but they both understood their remorse was pointless, little more than a kind of vanity.

  From the moment I realized that my attempt to implicate Lily had collapsed, I began making it as clear as I possibly could that I was in fact two people and not—as I appeared to be—one. This went on for longer than I can remember.

  My “breakthrough” happened when I went to Dr. Henry for my session one day, reversed my position, and said that Jack Cade had gone away.

  I sat down, facing Dr. Henry, yanked a chunk of hair out of my head and said, “Look. Eight or ten hairs—see? And every one of them comes from the head of Richard Blake. That other one … that other ‘personality’—he’s gone now. He’s gone forever.”

  It was a posture I realized it was time to assume.

  It made me feel good, that I could do that. If I could drop the other persona, it meant I was not schizophrenic—which had been my primary diagnosis.

  It was encouraging to think I wasn’t crazy.

  Even though deep inside me, I was still pretty sure I was.

  21

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1996

  I, now as the old Richard Blake, wake up in my rented room and look at the calendar I bought the day I was released from Coolidge. It is exactly the same day—Friday, October 11, 1996—as it was when Jack Cade woke up in a chair in his home to find Sophie staring at the ring on his finger; the day Jack first met Maggie Partridge in La Vieja. Except now there is no Maggie Partridge …

  I manage to finagle (without prope
r ID) a Dodge Dart from Rent-A-Wreck and drive out to La Vieja.

  There is no car in the driveway now. A shaggy-haired young man is mowing the lawn next door, in front of the house that used to belong to Amy Jaekel.

  I understand that it makes no sense to be here. But what else can I do? I’ve come where I have to be. I’m here on time.

  I have no reason to expect anyone to be home. I ring the front doorbell anyway.

  Through the door, I hear someone come into the foyer. The footsteps stop. The door opens two or three inches.

  Maggie Partridge peers out.

  “Yes?” she says. She doesn’t seem to recognize me, but why would she? Richard Blake is an old man. Maggie Partridge never met him anyway.

  “It’s me. Jack Cade. You’ve been expecting me, right?”

  “Of course.” She continues staring at me. Her expression remains the same. I hear some kind of twittering in the background. Birds? I can’t tell if they’re inside or out.

  “You know who I am?” I say.

  “Of course.”

  Thank God. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  “Thank you.”

  I realize she doesn’t have any makeup on and her formerly shiny auburn hair is dull and uncombed. She wears a faded dress. She doesn’t look well.

  “May I come in?”

  She opens the door and I go inside, into the foyer. I look up toward the second floor. My knees are shaking. I concentrate as hard as I can on keeping my feet beneath me.

  Not appearing to notice, she leads me through the passageway into the living room. I walk slowly, haltingly, behind her.

  The furniture from 1956 is gone. The room is spartan but not neat. There are a couple of ordinary-looking easy chairs, an old imitation leather sofa, and a television set with a VCR. An uneven layer of dust covers all of it, including the bare wood floor.

  “Won’t you sit down?” she says.

  I lower myself into one of the chairs. “Thank you.”

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Tea?” She lifts her eyebrows, nodding insistently.

  “Yes, well … all right. Thank you.” She moves off toward the kitchen.

  I notice a newspaper on the table next to me. It’s this day’s Los Angeles Times. I scan it. It hasn’t been much of a news day. Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo and José Ramos-Horta shared the Nobel Peace Prize “for their work toward a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in East Timor”—wherever that is. Vice presidential candidates Jack Kemp and Al Gore debated last night. Neither of them appeared to be a clear winner, according to the Times pundit. The O.J. Simpson civil trial is soon to begin. Apparently, Mr. Simpson was exonerated in the criminal one; I remember hearing about that.

  My eyes are drawn to the bottom of the page. It’s a fluff piece about the latest Marilyn Monroe products. She’s not only a movie star who’s been gone for over a third of a century; she’s now a brand. The latest items are Marilyn cookie jars, and a winery called Marilyn Wines has just released something called Marilyn Merlot. I’ve spent most of my life with a crush on a brand. That probably says something about … something.

  Maggie Partridge serves me tea and sits on the sofa opposite me. After a lengthy moment of gazing silently at and away from each other, she says, “What are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.” I look around the room and notice for the first time that the portrait of Lily is still over the fireplace. I point to it and say, “Lily.” She doesn’t respond. “Everything has changed so much. I couldn’t find out what happened to Rita—my mother.” I stare at her, trying to measure her response, but she looks past me with no evident thoughts about what I’ve said. “I didn’t die, obviously. I’m trying to think what any of this may have taught me, but I can’t.” I surprise myself with an eruption of old man’s giggles. “There are worse things than being an out-of-work television actor.”

  “Are you all right?” She’s looking at me with concern—or it could be alarm.

  “Yes, I’m fine. Look, I just want to go back and get out of this. I want to undo some wrong things. I met someone the last time back and ended up letting her down. I want to go back and not meet her this trip. I don’t want to cause her any more trouble than she already has. And I want to stay out of Margaret’s and Lily’s lives as much as I can. I don’t want to do anything more than make it possible for them to create their own fates. I want to work my way back to my original path. I realized when I found there is no record of my mother ever having lived in California that we’d opened too many doors. Can you explain why I could never locate her?”

  “No.”

  “You should be able to. You should be able to account for something like that.”

  Again, she doesn’t say anything and now it seems to me her eyes are unreflective, opaque. She reminds me of most of the inmates at Coolidge.

  “What would you like to do now?” she says.

  “Didn’t you understand? I want to go back. You should have known more about this before you sent me off. I hoped I would only be gone a few seconds—like I was the first time, but look at this place. Look at you. It took me all this time to work my way back here, and now something’s gone wrong. I dreamed of you being here, and here you are, but this is … all wrong.”

  The smile remains on her face, but it’s clearly strained.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” My tone is blunt; I can see she’s afraid. “You don’t really know about me, do you? As it is now, Jack Cade never did any testing through the Screen Actors Guild for the Southern California Psychology Group. As it is now, Jack Cade doesn’t even exist. You should not be here.”

  “Then why did you come? If you didn’t come to see me, what are you doing here?”

  “I’m lost,” I say. “You aren’t listed in any of the Los Angeles phone directories. There was an M. Partridge in Orange County, but it wasn’t you. I tried every Partridge in Los Angeles, and I couldn’t find you. And now I’m scared to death you don’t exist any more than Jack Cade does.”

  She gets up from the sofa and moves with studied control to the television set. She puts a tape into the VCR and turns back to me. Her eyebrows are twisted in anger. “You tell me what this is.” She turns on the set and steps back to watch it.

  Maggie Partridge appears on the screen. She addresses the camera: “My name is Dr. L.M. Partridge. The experiment I hope to videotape is a result of what I think is a perfect confluence of circumstances: of time, place, and subject.”

  Partridge turns off the VCR. “Who’s that?”

  “Pardon?”

  She makes a long, low hissing noise and turns the machine on again. “That.”

  The Maggie Partridge on the screen continues: “Time has now passed. My subject, Jack Cade, has traveled successfully to 1956, and I have now sent him back for the second time. Now it’s in the laps of—I hesitate to evoke—the gods. A footnote about this house: I am the private party who leases it to the county.”

  The woman on the television pauses and seems to decide whether she should go on recording or not. “I must add a personal postscript,” she says. “While I believe my particular project here is unique, I am firmly convinced that the government has been doing this work for years. I have tried to make my way into their program, but so far, I’ve been rejected.

  “So now I proceed with my own work. It’s unlikely that Jack Cade will return, or that I will ever see him again, at least as the person he is now. As for Richard Blake, if he is not killed by Margaret—if he survives—I don’t have any idea how that will affect me. But how could I be the same person? The alteration of the lives of three insignificant people in the San Fernando Valley shouldn’t have any effect on most of the world, but it’s sure as hell likely to have one on me.”

  My arms feel as if they’re rising into the air without my permission—like my body is going to fly away, just drift up into the ether.

  Partridge snaps off the
machine. “Who is that?”

  I’m trembling. “It’s you.”

  “It isn’t.”

  She’s standing between me and the fireplace. Over her shoulder is the portrait of Lily.

  “Is that the end of the tape?”

  “No.”

  “Show me the rest of it, Maggie.”

  A short shrill burst. “That’s not my name.”

  “What is your name?”

  “You know what it is. You’re not from the hospital. Who are you?”

  “The hospital?”

  “Of course. You’re from the government or something.”

  “When did they let you out … of the hospital?”

  “You know when. Ten years ago. And you know my name. It’s Lily. Lily Margaret Partridge.” She tries to calm herself. “I was named after my mother and my aunt. Partridge was the name of the people who adopted me.”

  I try to stand up but can’t. “Who was your father?”

  It’s as if she’s taken off a mask, revealing something contorted, an undernourished soul. “My father is an evil spirit; my father is a murderer. He was insane, and they sent him away. I asked about him, but nobody would tell me. They wouldn’t tell me about my blood family because my blood family were all insane—except my aunt.” She forces a smile. “And me. I’m not insane. I take after Margaret … You see how well I do with your test? You try to scare me and make me give the wrong answer, but you can’t because I’m perfectly all right. I watch myself all day long. Every day! And there’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “How did you come to have this house?”

  “It was left to me. I remember one of my doctors said, ‘Fair is fair. They may have put bats in your belfry, your parents, but at least they left you a house.’” Her look darkens again. “And you’re not going to take it away from me now.”

  “I … don’t want … to take your home away from … you.” My voice is quivering. “What happened to Mrs. Partridge? Or Mr. Partridge? Or whoever adopted you?”