by Len Wein
They had called him “Battling Murdock” in his prime. “Yeah,” his father would say, over and over, “in my prime.” He would sit in the threadbare stuffed chair his mother had bought at a rummage sale somewhere on Tremont Avenue—the week before she died, it might have been. Matt would watch the spreading of the dark stains under the old man’s arms and wonder how long he would sit there without taking off his warm-up jacket. “In my prime,” he would repeat until in Matt’s mind it became another way of saying “a hundred years ago.”
Battling Murdock. Perhaps the same lack of imagination that had given Matt’s father such a name was responsible for the indifferent way the old man had been brought along. He was just another pug who never had a shot at a big-money bout, and he was never allowed to become anything more. Somewhere along the line he got it into his head that Matt could become the fighter he never was, and somewhere along the line Matt bought into the dream. It would not occur to Matt until years later that he had only wanted to put back into the old man’s life something that his mother’s death had taken from it. He was just too young to understand that he could have done it on his own terms. He was spared having to find out the hard way that the ring was never what he really wanted—spared by a set of bad brakes on a lead-lined truck.
He had been in the city for some reason—it was funny how after all these years he could remember every detail of that day except how it began—and was crossing Eighty-Seventh Street at the corner of Third Avenue. The truck had been barreling down the street when a taxi pulled out in front of it. The truck had swerved to avoid the taxi and was bearing down on an arthritic old man who had just slowly made his way across the street to the opposite curb.
Matt had lunged forward without a moment’s hesitation and pushed the old man up onto the sidewalk. He had been on his knees on the edge of the curb when he heard the squeal of the brakes and had looked up into the driver’s face as the driver’s hands flew from the steering wheel to cover his eyes.
Matt hadn’t noticed until an instant later that there was a signpost between the truck and where he crouched. He had felt only a cold, prickling sensation at the base of his skull, then his limbs refused to move as the truck kept on coming. He had seen the post bend a little as the armored van struck it broadside and cracked open. Then he had felt a shadow fall across his face and had caught a fleeting glimpse of something coming at him, something that smacked him across the bridge of his nose and took away his picture forever.
He would remember too much of the weeks that followed. He would remember lying in a bed with his head feeling as if someone had locked it in a vise, and lying there until the rest of him ached almost as much as his head. He would remember feeling like a drowning man who kept coming up for air long past the point at which his lungs should have filled with water, each time breaking through the surface to find the other side tightly enclosed by a low ceiling of gauze.
He would remember hearing voices on the other side of that close black barrier. One voice spoke of cosmetic surgery being a luxury, and another voice understood how a certain member of the family may have had his nose broken three times, but that was not quite the same thing as having had it broken in three places.
He would remember hearing voices that spoke of concussions, of how lucky the boy was to be alive, of how the impact had been enough to crack open the lid of a lead canister, and of how it was a miracle that the radioactive waste inside it had not burned the boy or poisoned him.
He would remember his father sensing his gratitude for the plastic surgery that eventually restored his upper face—without his having to articulate it. And he would remember, too, wondering if his father knew the other feeling that colored the gratitude. Matt had had an inkling of the things the old man must have done to get the money for the surgery. He had refused to contemplate them.
He would remember having to be told how long it took the swelling to go down because he himself did not know how many weeks had passed. And he would remember his father having to tell him that his eyes were still blackened because a mirror could tell him nothing.
He would remember a morning not long before he finally left the hospital, when a nurse with a steel-edged voice swept into his room at a mercilessly early hour to open the blinds. He had asked her what the point was since he wouldn’t know the difference. She had replied with ill-concealed scorn that the room was not a private one, and besides, all those flowers on his bedside table needed the sun.
But most of all what he would remember, and would continue to remember on those nights when he was unfortunate enough to dream, was the morning he awoke in darkness but buoyant with anticipation, for this was the day the bandages were to come off—only to remember a moment later that they had been off for quite some time.
He would not be able to remember a time in all those weeks when he had heard the word “blind.”
They had a reception area, two small but comfortably furnished offices, a conference room whose walls were lined with books, and the largest room on the floor, which had become a combination file room and steno pool for the secretaries, paralegals, and 3-L’s clerking on their summer vacations. The room could echo all day with the sound of tireless typewriters and efficient voices without disturbing the mill of justice which presumably ground on, slow but exceeding fair, in the other rooms.
This was Nelson and Murdock, the bare essentials, furnished by the junior partner in good taste and on a modest budget, because the junior partner had felt that the bulk of the overhead should go into paying for legwork and research. The reputation of the firm, if one asked Mr. Murdock, would rest with the quality of its services, not the luxury of its surroundings. The trick had been to avoid making the offices look as if they had been furnished by a blind man, the humor of which fact was not entirely lost on Mr. Nelson.
“Hey! You with the shades!”
Matt heard the voice from inside the larger office as he came in the front door and nodded in Miss Meyerson’s direction. The sound was a whispery croak that ran up and down the scale like a child playing on an escalator. The heartbeat that accompanied it was arrhythmic, with a trace of flutter. It suited the voice perfectly.
Matt had known coming off the elevator that it was already 9:16. Miss Meyerson’s coffee was working up a full head of steam in the reception area and he could smell it at the far end of the corridor. Beneath the clatter of her busy work had come the familiar sounds of springs and gears groaning as Foggy Nelson wound the old-fashioned clock on the wall of his office.
If Matt’s life was ordered by routine, Foggy’s life was enslaved by it. The freak effect of the radioactivity from that canister had sharpened Matt’s senses and had given him the strange waves that spread from his brain and brought back data, like radar. With them had come some magical ability to pinpoint time without the use of instruments. But even if the accident had never conferred its mixed blessings on him, Matt knew he would be able to tell time by Foggy’s rituals.
The senior partner stepped through the front door each morning at 9:15, not a minute earlier or later, and from there followed a pattern that had never been broken in Matt’s memory: coat on the hanger, newspaper on the desk, and key out of the desk drawer and into the keyhole on the face of the clock. Only then would Miss Meyerson enter the sanctum sanctorum with the day’s first cup of coffee.
There was a second heartbeat in the reception area, a steady, determined rhythm that never quickened or slowed as the voice that matched it rose or fell. Carole.
They had met one month ago, when she first became one of Foggy’s clients. They began seeing each other outside the office one week later.
He knew from the music in her voice and the softness of her hair in those rare moments he had been lucky enough to touch it that she was beautiful—or so he chose to believe. They could not meet frequently, so they fit a lot into the little time they had. But for all the intimacy of their few hours together, she had never allowed—and probably never would allow—the touch
of his hand where it could give him the truth of her face.
“Good morning, Matt.”
He hung his cane on the corner coatrack. “Carole.”
“I tried calling you last night.” Her voice was tight, coming up from the back of her throat. “No answer.”
“I was working late.” Not altogether a lie.
“Then why didn’t I get through to you here? You said there was a link between your office and the apartment,” she said. “You told me your calls were automatically routed here if you weren’t home.”
“I was in a meeting,” he said, “with a client.” Now, a lie. For a moment, he resented her for it.
He sensed Foggy behind him in the doorway.
“Why don’t you come in now, Mrs. Lehrman? And you, with the shades, get to work.” There was an attempt at lightness in his voice that didn’t succeed.
“Yes, massa,” Matt replied, instead of the genial obscenity that formed itself in his mind. Carole would not have minded but Miss Meyerson might have knocked over the percolator. After five years in their employ, she was still that way. Excitable old woman.
He settled himself at his desk and started in on the amicus curiae, his mind wandering with annoying regularity in the direction of the wall between his office and his partner’s. The voice that had reminded him of Andy Devine when he had first heard it droned on, reciting for the God-knew-how-many times the intricacies of getting a will out of probate.
Matt reflected that Carole was a bright woman. He felt a pang of guilt at his condescension the moment he thought it. But why, then, so many meetings at which Foggy, ever the patient dutiful attorney, repeatedly explained the nature of his client’s position, a concept which was surely within her grasp?
Carole Lehrman’s recent widowhood did not seem to have dimmed her intelligence or blunted her perceptiveness any more than it had dulled her appetites. Matt had come to appreciate the former the first night he had had occasion to appreciate the latter. She had refused to patronize him. She had made a teasing remark about expecting him to excel at what was customarily done in the dark anyway. She had seemed totally unselfconscious as she had said it, and he had begun to love her a little for it then and there.
Carole seemed to understand instinctively the way things always had to be between Matt Murdock and his friends. It wasn’t enough to abstain from pity because they respected him. They had to forget he was blind and treat him accordingly. The funny thing was that sometimes he would do things they believed only a sighted man could do and they really did forget, and that brought them up short and made the funny thing an irony, because then they were reminded of his blindness.
They knew they had to forget his handicap, but they thought it was because he was just so damned stubborn, so fiercely proud. They didn’t know he merely demanded what he deserved without telling them why he deserved it. Of course, he couldn’t tell them, because the cane, the glasses, the window dressing would be there to put the lie to whatever he might say. In any case, the concessions to their notions of what he was were made to preserve his other self.
He had met Franklin P. Nelson in law school. They were both first-year students. Matt had started out calling him Frank in their study group for Professor Hardesty’s course in matrimonial until he had said that his friends called him “Foggy.” Matt had thought he had said “Froggy,” promptly placing himself outside that circle of friends. Another student’s explanation that the nickname had started out earlier that year as “Foghorn” and had been shortened to simply “Foggy” cleared up the misunderstanding but did little to clear the air.
One evening the group got into a heated debate on the existence of precedents for awarding husband’s alimony. Nelson took the floor and addressed himself to the points Matt had just finished making. He tore Matt’s arguments to shreds in an eloquent and biting oration, filling Matt with a grudging respect that made Matt’s ears burn. Nelson concluded by saying that Matt would have to be blind not to see the truth of Nelson’s argument. After a moment of uneasy silence, both men began to laugh at the same time. The following year they shared an apartment off campus, and four years later they went into practice together.
That was the way it was between Matt Murdock and his friends. They had to forget he was blind. And sometimes they actually pulled it off. All except Karen. The two of them had finished without his ever understanding what his sightlessness had meant to her. All these years later, he was still wondering what his insistence upon being treated as a “normal” man had done to destroy the foundation on which she had built her love for him. He was certain that if he could just figure out how he could have driven her three thousand miles away, he would be all right; he would be able to let go of her memory for good. But he knew just as certainly that he never would, and it would be up to Carole to take Karen’s face from his dreams.
As he stacked the sheaf of papers neatly atop his desk blotter, it occurred to him that Carole was especially adept at the things one had to do to be close to Matt Murdock. Paradoxically, that entailed maintaining a distance—something Carole was very good at indeed. Probably because she had her own secrets. She kept her distance as much for her own sake as for his. A perfect illustration of the golden rule.
Her heartbeat grew louder in the open doorway.
“Lunch?” he said as he fastened the papers into a binder.
“Sorry. Too much to do today.” It was flat, expressionless.
“Don’t be that way, huh? Okay, so I probably should have called. I got hung up.”
He remembered hanging onto the side of the Tishman Building and wondered when he was going to stop playing these verbal mind games with himself.
“I’m not mad or anything,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“You are mad, and I am sorry. So let’s forget it.” He rose to put on his jacket. “If I didn’t think you were a little touchy this morning, I might suggest that we’re even. I mean, there have been some nights when I’ve listened for a phone ring a few times, too.”
“Touché.” He could tell she didn’t smile.
“I bet you think you’re lucky I’m not representing you,” he said.
“It would be the first time you wouldn’t have to defend yourself in order to have a fool for a client.” She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that . . . maybe this wasn’t such a good idea—us, I mean.” She sat in the chair opposite his desk—heavily, from the sound of the leather. He was forced to sit again. “It wasn’t very fair of me.”
“You talk as if we were something you dreamed up all by yourself.”
She lit a cigarette. The cellophane on the pack crinkled in a way that told him her hands trembled.
“Franklin and I finished up this morning,” she said. “The estate should be settled by the end of the month.” She exhaled. “He’ll probably have to send his bill to St. Croix.”
“I’ll see you again?”
“I really don’t know.” She sounded apprehensive. Her pulse rate quickened slightly. He couldn’t help thinking that in scenes like this it was the one in his position who was supposed to be scared. He had a penchant for melodrama that made its presence felt at the worst times.
“I just wanted to tell you—” She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette abruptly and stood. “I don’t know what I came here to tell you. Let’s just leave it like this, okay?”
He started to say something to her and she asked him not to before she gently closed the door in his face.
He expected Foggy to be lousy company at lunch and he wasn’t disappointed. One of the advantages of his unique hearing was that he could tune out specific sounds as easily as he could pick them out from the welter of noise around them. He was tempted to let Foggy’s depressing summation of the previous night’s events be drowned out by an argument between the waitress and a rowdy customer. Their shouting was audible even here in the restaurant’s rear dining room. This
morning he had let the sound of running water in the bathroom drown out the bad news on the radio without meaning to.
His hypersensitive fingertips—another gift of radiation—could discern the microscopic thickness of ink on a printed page. This and the ability to sense color in terms of heat—he assumed it had something to do with the absorption of light—allowed him to read from well outside the meager braille bibliography to which the conventionally blind were limited. Still, he had to read by touch, and from across the room, the headline of Foggy’s newspaper could not tell him what he would have had to know to anticipate the full weight of his partner’s mood.
The headline would have confirmed his worst fears of the night before. Peter Markesson had died in the fire, his wife Helen was in critical condition at Lenox Hill Hospital with third-degree burns over much of her body, and the bodyguard who could have gotten them out in time had not been in the connecting room. As of eight this morning, the fire department had still been picking through what was left of the suite, but it was clear that the men would not find a second body.
And while Foggy, with three martinis in him, could make black jokes about losing a fee and being out one advance to the bodyguard, Matt knew that this time Foggy had allowed himself to care too much. He had been genuinely fond of the Markessons. And both he and Matt knew there was little chance they would come across the bodyguard in any place that wasn’t a morgue.
Helen Markesson had worked as a high-level secretary for an investment counseling firm in Chicago. She had been working nights toward a management degree at U.C. Circle, and had picked up enough about finance—far more than her employers realized—to spot the subtle indications of several well-concealed improprieties. Quite unwillingly, she found herself learning more and more about the business practices of Norback, Perry, Clark, and Shaw each day. Foggy had said that Helen’s suspicions, once formed, were difficult to dispel, and that hers was the kind of mind whose subconscious would continue to draw conclusions despite the best efforts of her conscious to censor it.