William still knew nothing. His mother had written him a masterpiece of a letter, filled with accusation, silliness and platitudes. It also compared parents, saying that her father had worked all his life, which was more than you could say for his father, who spent all his time swindling people and called it big business: she didn’t know why he was so stingy, either: William was going to be just the same when he grew up, which would probably be never. And she was taking her parents’ advice, by the way, and having an operation because she didn’t want to have anything more to do with him: she was hoping to get a steady job some day and meet a real man: and she was staying away from home for good, so he didn’t need to write any more dumb letters to her.
A key was enclosed. His mother had had duplicates made. She hadn’t worked out the details of her scheme at the beginning, but everything had seemed to go very well. She stopped writing any letters herself. She merely collected and read theirs. At any moment she expected to find that William had written to Jean’s parents – that would have spoiled everything: but he’d lost his trust in them. He stopped sending letters. He’d come to the conclusion, suddenly, that it was over between him and Jean. He hadn’t done anything, or been able to do anything, to make a difference. She had changed; she was sorry about what had happened. She hadn’t loved him, after all.
His Uncle Bertram said over the phone that William was desolate: he swam, and he went out in the boat with the rest of the gang, but he was so unhappy it was pitiful to see. And he’d gotten drunk one night and passed out cold. ‘He’s getting over it,’ his father said.
When William returned to town and to school, Jean had gone. He finished his school year. His mother continued to collect the letters Jean was sending to the post office. At last a letter arrived that was much shorter than the others: it said simply that she loved him but she couldn’t go on – she knew they were going to take the baby away, and she was tired of everything anyway. She’d decided to kill herself.
His mother didn’t believe it. Girls tried that kind of threat all the time. She put the letter with the rest of them. She kept a regular check on the mailbox. Week after week there was nothing. Nothing for months. If Jean had killed herself, if she’d died – what could anyone do? It would be too late to go back. Long ago it was too late. But there was no question of suicide; that couldn’t be. Obviously the girl had just given up, finally. There was no reason to wait for more letters. The keys could be turned in at the post office.
William did well at school. He drank at parties, but he stayed away from drugs like Benzedrine and Dexedrine, which had begun to make an impression on the college campuses of nearby states. He started to go around with a girl from his own graduating class, and then went out with her friend. He slept with both of them. He had fun. He didn’t intend to get serious again. He began to feel better and to think of Jean with a sense of disappointment and revulsion. She had let him down. It seemed to him that all women would act the same way in the end. They didn’t want love. Their sights were fixed on other things: safety, pride, interior decorating. He saw Jean’s mother in town one day. They both turned away at the same time, instantly, as soon as they recognized each other.
He went away to college, where he also did well. And to law school. He came back briefly for his father’s funeral and then, after he’d started work with a law firm, to visit his mother. She’d had a heart attack. She was only fifty-seven. William was horrified by the injustice of her illness. Because his father had been so much older, that death had seemed to come at a reasonable age. She was too young. He knew she still had hopes that he’d marry one of the girls she’d introduced him to. He hadn’t come home so often as she’d have liked, either. He had been thoughtless. He’d neglected her.
She had a series of slight attacks and then the massive failure that carried her off. William phoned every relative he could think of. He asked them all to come to the funeral: stay at the house, be with him. He had nobody now. When the funeral was over, he sat downstairs with Uncle Bertram and his cousins from Kentucky. He told them he felt like the last of the dodos; for the first time in his life he thought it might be nice to have some brothers and sisters. ‘Even though all of you turned up trumps,’ he said. He thanked them for coming. They spent a long and raucous night reminiscing, but they were gone the next day.
Later there were the clothes to give away, the accounts to put in order, the question of what to do with the house when he was away – whether to sell it, or rent it, or leave it standing empty. There was a lot of junk to sort through. And his mother hadn’t thrown out any of his father’s clothes; she’d just left everything of his the way it had been.
William took a bottle of whiskey upstairs with him. He plugged in his father’s portable phonograph and turned it on in the empty house. He put the volume way up. He played Verdi. He started with his father’s study, moved to the attic and then to his mother’s room. He was glad he was alone. He could cry without restraint.
He stuffed his parents’ clothes into suitcases, laundry bags and cardboard boxes. He threw combs and brushes and shoes after them. He opened drawers containing half-used lipsticks and unopened perfume bottles. He discovered all his old school reports back to when he was six years old. And he found the box that held the pink, flowered notepaper, the sheets covered with repeated phrases scribbled as practice for the final draft. He saw the originals in his mother’s handwriting, the bundle of letters he’d written himself, and the ones from Jean: all of them. He went out of his mind.
He smashed the empty whiskey bottle, the mirrors, the windows, the phonograph. His hands were cut and bleeding. He threw the unbreakable records out of the windows and snapped the others over his knee: all his precious collection of 78s. He picked up chairs and banged them down on the tables, threw vases against the walls. He screamed unceasingly, like a monkey in the forest. He slashed all the paintings in the house, even the ones he had known from his childhood and had loved most – the portrait of his grandparents as children, the view of the summer-house from the bay. He tore up all the photographs of himself and his parents, set fire to the Anatolian rug and walked out of the room while it was still smouldering. He took his father’s bird guns from their cases, loaded them up and began to shoot into the walls, sideboards, ceilings, stairs. After a while people out in the street called the police, who came and broke down the back door. They got a doctor to give William an injection. He spent a couple of days asleep.
When he woke up, he didn’t realize where he was. A private nurse had been left with him. She fed him some soup and said, ‘You feeling better now?’ She made it plain that she expected him to answer yes.
‘It was the shock,’ he said.
‘That’s right. You take it easy,’ she told him.
He took it easy. He began to think. He thought for the first time in years about Jean; about how he and she had been tricked, treated with contempt; and how his parents’ hatred – especially his mother’s – had not been satisfied by merely frustrating his hopes and plans: they had had to destroy his chance of any kind of love for the rest of his life. Jean’s chance, too. What had happened to Jean?
As soon as he was on his feet, he went to her parents’ house. They were there but they wouldn’t let him in. To begin with, they wouldn’t even answer the door. His shouts and sobs convinced them that it would be better to talk him into being quiet than to have the neighbors hearing that old story dragged up again.
Her father opened the door a crack. The safety chain – a recent instalment – prevented entry. ‘We don’t want you here,’ he said. ‘Go away.’
William started to explain – fast, gasping, and doing his best not to yell – that his mother had written forgeries to Jean and to him too: she’d lied to both of them and now he had to find Jean, to ask her to forgive him and to make it up to her.
Her father said, ‘We don’t know where she is. That’s the truth. And it’s on account of you. She was staying with her aunt and she was five, almost
six months to – you know. She couldn’t stand the shame. She took some kind of poison.’
William stopped breathing for a moment.
‘She nearly died,’ her father said.
‘But she didn’t?’
‘They had three doctors working on her for twenty-four hours. They couldn’t save the baby: nobody in the family wasted any tears over that. They only just pulled her through. Soon as she was getting better, she ran off. Her aunt says she told Jeannie she’d better behave herself from now on, seeing as how what she did is a crime you can get put in jail for; and she would be, if anybody wanted to arrest her for it. It would be murder. I guess she took it the wrong way, got scared the police were going to come after her. That woman never treated her too kindly, from what I can make out.’
‘Where is she?’ William asked.
‘Like I told you, we don’t know. We haven’t heard from her since that day. We haven’t heard anything about her at all. All we know is, her aunt said her mind was a little unhinged from the time she took that poison. I reckon you’d better forget about her. That’s what we had to do. It’s like she was dead.’
William was about to ask some more questions when Jean’s mother called out from the hallway, ‘What are you telling him? Don’t you say anything to him.’ She sounded drunk. She raised her voice and screeched, ‘You get away from us. Haven’t you caused enough trouble? Go on, go away!’ William turned and ran down the street.
He believed what her father had told him. He went back to his parents’ house. All night long he howled and wept. He cursed his mother, he called on Jean, talking to her, explaining. He beat his head against the walls. He slept.
When he woke, his madness had developed into quiet conviction. He was no longer violent; the thought just kept repeating itself in his mind: that Jean was somewhere waiting for him, and that he had to find her. He’d find her if he had to search the world over. He had plenty of money: he could spend his life on it.
He got into his car and drove to the capital, where he hired a firm of private detectives. There were several clues, he told them: the hospital she’d been admitted to would have her name and address in its files. It would be in the same state where the aunt lived. He could let them have the aunt’s address, but he didn’t want them to go near her. They should concentrate on the medical register; there might even be a record of fingerprints.
He gave the agency approximate dates. Nothing could be learned from her parents, he said. It would be better not to disturb them: they might decide to get in touch with the aunt or somebody, and everyone would clam up. And maybe if the detectives got close to Jean or anyone who knew where she was, they ought to say they were looking for her because of a case that concerned distant relatives. They could pretend it was something to do with a legacy.
He couldn’t understand why her mother and father hadn’t tried to find her. Even though they wouldn’t have had the money for detectives, they could have tried the police. It seemed to him that if you looked at the whole story, right through to where it stood at the moment, her parents hadn’t behaved any better than his – maybe even worse, because Jean was their own child, whereas to his mother she’d been an outsider.
His detectives also had the clue of Jean’s illness – her reported illness, anyway, which meant that she could have been in hospitals afterwards. Her father had specifically cited mental instability, so the investigation could start there, with a check on all the public asylums and private clinics in the general area. She might have changed her name; the detectives should concentrate on anyone who was the right age. He had photographs but he knew, as the agency men undoubtedly did too, that people sometimes changed radically in a short space of time, especially if they’d been sick. The expression of the face, the look in the eyes, could become like those of another person. A gain or loss in weight could also make someone unrecognizable. Thirty-five pounds either way was a better disguise than a wig and glasses.
William said, ‘I guess maybe the thing for you to do is to go through all those places, get the possible names and then, if you think you’re on the right track, I should go see for myself.’
One of the partners in the firm, a Mr McAndrew, presented William with a businesslike sheet of facts and figures, plus an estimate of costs. ‘Those are the short-term calculations,’ he explained. ‘This could take a long time. But if it does, our charges would drop significantly. We believe in keeping our customers happy.’
William said that all sounded fine. He hoped they’d phone soon, because he was eager for news. He got up from his chair jerkily and lurched towards the door. Ever since finding the letters, his movements had become slightly uncoordinated. And he’d fallen into the habit of looking off into space, as if searching or remembering. Mr McAndrew might have considered William a fit subject for the clinics himself, if the princely retainer he’d pushed across the desktop hadn’t proclaimed his sanity.
Weeks went by. William kept himself busy with the house. He couldn’t decide whether or not to sell it. He took a leave of absence from the office. His hands healed. He hired painters to clean up the house, inside and out. And he got other workmen in to repair the damage he’d done.
Mr McAndrew found four patients in public wards whom he described as ‘possible suspects’. Two of them were in the same hospital. If William wanted to go look for himself, one of their operatives could take him along. William said yes, he’d like that.
The detective called early. He was driving a company car. He was young, about thirty – only a couple of years older than William. He looked tough enough to deal with the rougher side of detective work, if he had to. He introduced himself as Harvey Corelli.
‘Like the tenor?’ William asked. ‘Franco Corelli?’
‘Don’t know him. Call me Harvey, okay?’
‘Sure. I’m Bill.’
‘Yeah, but you’re the client. You’re supposed to be Mister.’
‘If I call you Harvey, you call me Bill,’ William said. People had started to call him Bill as soon as he got to college.
‘Right,’ Harvey said. ‘That suits me fine.’ He’d noticed the sudden far-off look his boss had mentioned. He got behind the wheel.
On that first trip they spent a week going from one hospital to another. Harvey handled the receptionists and doctors; William took a quick look at the patient and shook his head. Sometimes it was enough just to have her pointed out in the distance.
Two weeks later they started out on a second trip. They visited three institutions, all no good. While they were still travelling, McAndrew came up with some more names. Harvey passed on the information after he’d made his routine call to check in. ‘You want to leave them till another time?’ he asked.
William said no – he’d rather keep going, and follow up as many leads as possible. They could stay in motels and go down the whole list in a few days, unless Harvey had another case he was working on.
‘Only this one at the moment,’ Harvey said. One, to his mind, was usually one too many. He had always found it less easy to sympathize with his clients than with the people who had run out on them, cheated them, or otherwise let them have what they deserved. William was no exception to that rule, but he seemed like such an idiot that he actually had possibilities. Harvey knew the area. He could speed up the chase or slow it down. He figured that he could spin it out for a long time; he could be collecting a salary practically forever, if he played his hand right. He didn’t like taking orders from McAndrew. He’d been bawled out in front of other people once: he hadn’t appreciated that. He wasn’t going to forget it. William, he thought, could turn out to be a pretty good meal ticket; he wasn’t up to much in the way of fun, but Harvey knew the ropes: he’d get William interested somehow. It might be a good idea for all concerned to give old William something to think about besides his quest for the holy bride. There were a lot of moneybags in the family vault; Harvey could think of several uses for them.
William was lonely, so it wasn’
t hard, despite his mania, or obsession, or – as he preferred to think of it – love. One evening Harvey suggested that they call up a couple of girls: he knew one or two in the neighborhood. William said no, he didn’t feel like it.
‘Do you carry on like this all the time?’ Harvey asked.
‘Carry on?’
‘No thanks, I don’t feel like it?’
‘Well, I don’t.’
‘Never?’
‘I’ve got other things on my mind.’
‘Mind isn’t what I’m talking about, Bill. Come on.’ He called up a woman he knew. He poured William a few drinks. When the woman arrived, she dropped her coat on the bed and said, ‘Hey Harve, just like old times.’ She then whipped off her dress and underclothes. William jumped to his feet. He intended to go to his own room, but he was too drunk. He fell over the corner of the bed. Harvey picked him up and slung him on top of the bedspread. The woman threw her arm over him. His buttons were being undone, his belt was being unbuckled. He heard Harvey going out of the room.
In the morning the woman was gone. Harvey knocked on the door. He dragged William into the bathroom and gave him two Alka-Seltzers. He said, ‘Now you’ve got the hang of it, you won’t have to get so plastered. Next time, we’ll have a party.’
‘I feel god-awful,’ William muttered. He had such a headache that he had to wear a pair of sunglasses all day, except for the moments when he looked at the hospital patients who might have been Jean, but weren’t.
They kept traveling for another week. William talked to Harvey about his story. He explained why it was so important to find Jean. Harvey didn’t seem to think the story was anything special. He said it was a tough break, but it happened all the time. ‘You got to move on in life,’ he told William. ‘You got to move forward.’
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