The Eye of the Beholder

by Marc Behm

  He was completely taken aback. ‘I don’t understand, Mrs. Hutch …’

  ‘You wouldn’t be’ – she smiled bleakly – ‘fishing by any chance, would you?’

  ‘Fishing?’

  ‘Going to try to bring a lawsuit against the home after all these years?’ He laughed flatly. ‘She told me she’d sue me one day. Wouldn’t put it past her. Brazen little minx.’ He had no idea what she was talking about. He waited.

  ‘It was her own fault. Just like that business with the electricity. Almost got herself electrocuted playing with the fuses. Blew the lights out all over Mercerville. Or when she was working in the kitchen. She left the gas turned on all night once. Could’ve killed us all.’

  She moved a paperweight on the desk. ‘She was always demolishing things. She was clumsy, inept, incapable of touching anything without smashing it. She ruined three sewing machines. Had to replace them. Put her elbow through the window of the greenhouse, had to have five stitches. If I were to send her a bill for all the damage she caused, it would cost her a fortune. She had nobody but herself to blame for her hand.’

  ‘Her hand? Do you mean her finger?’

  ‘Just carelessness.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘You see? You’re fishing.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘If you are, say so’ – she pointed to the telephone – ‘and I’ll call our attorney.’

  ‘I’m not fishing, Mrs. Hutch. How did it happen?’

  ‘A sickle.’

  ‘A sickle?’

  ‘Cutting grass.’

  He looked past her. Hanging on the wall behind the desk was a dusty oil portrait of a pretty woman with a shy, frightened face. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked.

  She turned, looking up. ‘Me.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘One of our girls painted it. In 1929. The year of the Crash. Herbert Hoover. Everybody was on relief, but my girls ate three square meals a day. They had coal in the winter and a week in Atlantic City every summer. Nobody remembers the Depression now. It didn’t last long, thank the Lord. Everything passes.’ She moved a pair of scissors across the desk. ‘Time passes. I wonder what Joanna looks like today. The little bitch.’

  She broke wind gently, filling the room with the rank odor of locomotive smoke.

  The Eye went back to Trenton.

  He walked down Tyler Street.

  Number 127 was a small, square, livid wooden house next door to a grocery store. The railing of the front porch was broken. The windows were open, a TV voice was laughing and chattering in the living room.

  A young black came out the door. ‘Can I help you, stuff?’

  The Eye hesitated. What was the name Joanna had mentioned? ‘I’m looking for –’ What the hell was it? The old woman who gave her the pears. ‘Mrs. Higgins.’

  ‘Don’t know her.’

  ‘No – hold it. Mrs. Keegan.’

  ‘Oh, her. Lived up the block. Dead and gone long ago. Passed off when I was just a pygmy.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘What’s it to you, man?’

  ‘Nothing. Just curious.’ More blacks were standing around now, watching him blankly. Four … five … eight… ten of them. On the sidewalk, in the street, on nearby porches. ‘I used to know the family who lived in one twenty-seven. Mr. Eris and his daughter. Did you know them?’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘The fifties and early sixties.’

  ‘No way at all!’ he giggled. ‘This was honk territory then. The Zulus have taken over since, as you can see.’

  A huge man in a turtleneck sweater rolled up to the Eye, playing to the crowd. ‘You want something, you?’

  ‘No, I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Then why don’t ya just keep walkin’?’

  He caught the noon train to New York. He drove to White Plains, first to the courthouse, where he read a transcript of her trial, then to a service station on Hudson Avenue, where he talked to a hunchbacked mechanic standing in a grease pit. His name was Zalesney.

  ‘Yeah, Joey. Sure,’ he said wistfully. ‘Real good-looking chick. Wearin’ them white overalls, the guys really honked their horns. She didn’t last very long. Couple of months. She worked in the office, with Mr. Wozniak. And at the pumps when we was rushed. One day she climbed into a brand new Lancia Scorpion and just took off. The state cops busted her away up around Albany somewhere. The guy who owned the heap was tear-assed. He made the DA ram it to her, the prick. I don’t know why they had to make such a big deal about it. She was just takin’ a spin. She’d of probably brung it back. They gave her thirteen months.’

  The Eye drove to Norwich and had a look at the Women’s Detention Farm. It was a village of immaculate white buildings in a hundred acres of woods and pastures. Girls in olive drab suits were driving tractors and marching around carrying shovels on their shoulders. From a distance they looked like soldiers.

  A guard at the gate phoned the administration building and a few minutes later a warder in a Jeep drove out to talk to the Eye. His name was Giulianello.

  ‘Time magazine.’ The Eye gave him one of his fake cards. ‘I’d like to interview your shrink.’

  ‘Shrink?’ Giulianello blinked at him.

  ‘You have one, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Dr. Brockhurst.’

  ‘We’re going to do a story on prison psychology. I’m handling the girls’ detention angle in New York State.’

  ‘We couldn’t let you in without authorization from Albany, sir. Besides, Dr. Brockhurst isn’t here. He’s lecturing at Yale this month.’

  ‘Well, I’ll get in touch with him later then. And I’ll check with Albany first.’

  ‘That would be best, sir. I have a three-year subscription to Time.’

  ‘Good for you. How long has Brockhurst been with you?’

  ‘Since seventy-three.’

  ‘Who was it before that? Maybe I could talk to his predecessor, I could miss all the red tape bit.’

  ‘That would be Dr. Darras,’ Giulianello said. ‘Martine Darras. She’s in private practice now. In Boston.’

  The Eye spent the night in New York and took a morning shuttle flight to Boston. He found Dr. Martine Darras’s St. James Avenue address in the phone book.

  Her office was a tenth-floor suite with inch-thick tempered-glass walls facing the John Hancock Tower. The waiting room was bare and blue, with one long low couch against the window and a zodiacal chart on the wall.

  A young woman in a faultless garnet-coloured Chanel tailleur came out of the inner office. She was about thirty-two, dark, exquisite, mirror-eyed. Hanging around her neck on a thin chain was a silver disc engraved with a Virgo symbol. She was holding a pack of Gitanes.

  ‘We’re closed,’ she said pleasantly. ‘It’s Saturday.’

  ‘Dr. Darras?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were the prison psychologist at the Norwich Detention Farm a few years ago.’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  He decided not to lie to her. He gave her one of his Watchmen, Inc. cards. ‘I’m investigating one of the former inmates. Could you give me just a few minutes?’

  ‘Who are you investigating?’

  ‘Joanna Eris.’

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  8

  ‘She was brought there in August, 1970. I processed her the day she arrived. That’s what they called it – processing.’ She laughed.

  ‘A few simple-minded tests to determine whether or not an inmate was a total moron. Most of the girls were. The place was a Babel of ignorant, illiterate, demented female hoods. Armed robbery, larceny, extortion, burglary. There were even a few counterfeiters. They were all phonies, putting on a Goody Twoshoes penitent act so they could pull their time at the farm instead of going behind walls. Being locked up with them was nauseating. What Sartre calls huis clos. Joanna’s coming there was like a benediction. I didn’t really get to know her, though, until I had her taken off the work gang.’<
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  They were sitting at either end of a long couch in the glacial blue room, facing the window. Before them the Hancock Tower reared up in the morning haze like a cliff of yellow ice.

  ‘Our teachers always warned us,’ Dr. Darras said, ‘about falling in love with our patients. But there I was, in that putrid zoo, with that rabble … and suddenly she was standing before me like Joan of Arc. What could I do? Eris, Joanna. Number 643291. She was so clean and faultless and salutary. I used to watch her marching around the yard … standing in line … sitting in the auditorium and in the dining hall … I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I would get up at five thirty just to hear her say “Here!” when her name was called at roll call. There was a grisly dyke there who bullied everybody. She was a Seneca Indian doing ten years for manslaughter. I had her transferred to the psychopath ward at Bellevue when she started putting her claws out for Joanna. Ethical, hmm?’

  ‘And why did you have Joanna taken off the work gang?’ the Eye asked.

  ‘She was with one of the labor units, out in the fields, digging a drainage ditch. Suddenly she stopped working and just stood staring at the woods. The guards tried to make her go back to the ditch. They couldn’t. They shouted at her and began shoving her around. There was no reaction at all. She was in a trance. When they brought her to the dispensary, she seemed to be in a state of catatonia. She couldn’t speak or move. I put her to bed and gave her a shot of thiopental. I asked her what was bothering her. She said she saw something in the woods.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She refused to tell me. That is, she refused to tell me then, during that first session. I found out much later what it was. It took me months to drag it out of her.’

  ‘What did she see, Dr. Darras?’

  ‘A man was standing under the trees, watching her. It was her dead father obviously. They’d been very close. She refused to accept his death. Well, to make a long story short –’ She got up and walked aimlessly across the room. ‘I put her through a – oh, a very superficial analysis. I found rage and hostility, hate and melancholia. What else would you like to know?’

  ‘Virgo,’ he said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Your zodiac sign.’ He pointed to the disc on her breast.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s a Capricorn.’

  ‘I know. That was my doing, bringing that out. I got her interested in astrology to keep her mind occupied. And –’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Music. There was quite a good record library at the farm. I made her listen to classics, operas, jazz, everything. Anything that would make her wake up, stimulate her, inspire her. I made her recite poetry. I taught her how to dance. And books. I made her read. She devoured hundreds of novels. Proust, Balzac, Dostoevski, Stendhal, Tolstoy. Would you care for a drink?’ She opened a cabinet, took out a bottle of Gaston de Lagrange and two glasses.

  ‘Are you wearing a wig?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ She poured two drinks. She sat down beside him and pulled off the wig, revealing short-cropped platinum hair. ‘I had her appointed librarian. That took her off the work gang.’ The limpid silvery effect of her eyes, the disc, and her hair blended, infusing her in argent tincture. She sipped the cognac.

  ‘Did you uncover any suicidal tendencies?’ he asked.

  She stared at him. ‘You must know her very well.’

  ‘No … I don’t know her at all. But when she was in that girls’ home in Jersey, she put her arm through a window and had to have five stitches. On another occasion, she left the gas on all night in the kitchen.’

  ‘She tried to kill herself several times. She was almost electrocuted with some wires or something. And she cut herself with a sickle.’ She shuddered. ‘A sickle!’

  He asked her suddenly, thinking not of the sickle but of the ledge, ‘Is suicide a form of insanity, Doctor? And hallll–’ he stammered, ‘hallucinations and all that?’ Like Grunder in the alley, he wanted to add, disguised as Mephistopheles.

  She refilled her glass. ‘Insanity is merely unhappiness,’ she said. ‘The mind is like any other organ, it becomes contaminated by pollution. And suicide is just another variety of thiopental shots.’

  Her lips tightened with anger. ‘That goddamned girls’ home almost finished her! Are you against capital punishment? I’d like to see all bastards who torment children drawn and quartered or disemboweled …’ Then she laughed and lit a Gitane. ‘And yet my own son left home the other day … He said I persecuted him. He called me a sadist.’ She shrugged.

  ‘How far did it go?’

  ‘How far?’ She blinked at him.

  ‘You and Joanna.’

  She got up and stood before the window, looking down at St. James Avenue. ‘I’m telling you all this and I shouldn’t. It’s absurd. This is how far it went.’ She moved to the end of the room, threw the cigarette in an ashtray. ‘We’d meet in the library every night after the lights were turned off. I’d bring a bottle of cognac. We’d get undressed and get drunk. We’d dance. We’d sit on the floor and talk. Or play chess, I forgot to tell you, I also taught her to play chess, or tried to. It was a dismal failure. Then we’d make love. Only it was more like despair than love. Desolation. Another form of insanity and suicide.’

  ‘Have you seen her since she was released from prison?’

  ‘No. Never.’ She walked back to the couch. ‘Tell me – what has she done?’

  He rubbed his forehead tiredly, the exertion of the last few days finally catching up with him. ‘What did you tell her to do, Dr. Darras?’

  ‘I?’ She frowned. ‘I told her to confront life. To fight. Not to yield or grovel.’

  ‘Well, that’s just what she’s done.’

  On the flight back to LA he did the crossword puzzle in The Boston Globe. Then he read through some TWA folders. In one of them was an airlines chart of Europe. He studied a map of Czechoslovakia. There was only one city indicated, Prague (Praha), serviced by an Air France connecting flight from Paris. He pulled out his paperback and opened it to Puzzle Number Seven. Capital in Czechoslovakia. Four letters. But he was too weary to go through all that again. He’d thrown the book away twice, and twice he’d retrieved it to try once more to break the goddamned thing. He’d crack it sooner or later. But not today.

  He tossed it on the seat beside him and borrowed a Los Angeles Times from a woman sitting across the aisle. He read about the economy. He read about the decline of steel production. He read about Soviet Missiles, about the Programme Commun in France and racism in Rhodesia. He read the society page. Miss Charlotte Vincent and Mr. Ralph Forbes announced their engagement yesterday at a party at the Mark Taper Forum …

  He sat up, wide awake. The wedding is scheduled for April … There was a photo of the couple, leaning against a stairway ramp, smiling. Fuck! She might just as well have been standing in a New York Police Headquarters lineup! Was she out of her mind? All any sharp-eyed homicide cop had to do was glance at her and – No, wait. He held the picture closer. She was wearing a shining Cardin evening gown, her head was wrapped in a turbanlike bandeau. Her face was a lovely mask of bland anonymity. She wasn’t Daphne Henry. He had to admit that. No, she was no one anybody in New York would recognize … or anybody in Chicago, either, for that matter. Miss Vincent is from New Jersey … What gall! Dr. Darras would be proud of her. Mr. and Mrs. Paul Newman congratulated the happy couple, as did Jodie Foster, Mr. and Mrs. Warner LeRoy, Lily Tomlin, LeVar Burton, Gore Vidal … A gala of future witnesses!

  Would the defendant please stand. Mr. Newman, do you recognize this woman?

  I do.

  Is she the same woman known to you as Mrs. Ralph Forbes, alias Charlotte Vincent?

  She is.

  Objection! The prosecution is testifying for the witness.

  Sustained.

  Mr. Newman, would you tell the court in your own words who this woman is?

  She’s Mrs. Forbes. The widow of Ralph Forbes, alias Charlotte Vincent.
/>   Jesus! She couldn’t go through with it this time. It was too insane.

  He’d have to stop her.

  An accident on the freeway blocked traffic for over an hour. It was after eight when he got back to Hope Street. The Librairie was closed. He made sure he still had his room at the Del Rio, then drove to Beverly Hills.

  Stop her? How? He had until April to find a way. Or had he? Maybe she intended to make her move before the marriage. An overnight drive somewhere … to the desert or the mountains or a beach. A blind man wasn’t difficult to kill.

  Maybe he was dead already. She could be gone by now. That trip to Trenton had been sheer idiocy! She’d been alone for three whole days!

  He drove along Oak Drive, slowing down as he passed the house. He sagged with relief. The Bentley was parked at the curb.

  But it was only a reprieve. What about tomorrow? No, he couldn’t wait until April. He had no idea when or where or how she planned to do it. Her whole pattern had been chaotic ever since she came to LA.

  He turned into Oak Lane, drove up Ledoux, cut back to Oak Drive via Stanley Terrace.

  Joanna Eris, Ralph, and the chauffeur came out of the house. The two men climbed into the Bentley and drove off. She went back inside.

  He parked in the lane and walked through the familiar dark maze of pathways to the rear of the house. He slipped past the garage into the shrubs to the living room window.

  She was sitting in the rocking chair, whistling softly.

  He smiled and relaxed. He was home again.

  She kicked off her shoes, lifted her skirt, rolled down her stockings. They were together. Nothing else mattered for the moment.

  She got up, unzipped her dress, peeled it off. She sat on the settee and removed her bra.

  He loosened his tie, leaned comfortably against the wall. Together. Indivisible. All the rest was unimportant.

  She yawned and stroked her breasts. His palms became heavy with the warmth of her flesh, her nipples greeting his fingers like old friends. He purred with pleasure.