For Love of Audrey Rose (34 page)

He remembered too well the crippled children he had met daily in Calcutta, in Bombay, and even in Kotagiri. Diseases that had no name in English. Forms of malnutrition. Deliberate deformity to produce beggars for parents. And the worst, the lowest of the low, at the bottom of any caste system, were those who were insane. Those were written off—by parents, by other children, by nature it-self—and they died by the scores of thousands, unable to comprehend the brief torture of their own misplaced incarnations.

Even in Pittsburgh, one saw them.

Thou art a healer of children, thou shalt make their souls to rejoice again.

He smiled and leaned against a sapling recently planted. Those had been the words of his first guru. A quiet man whose
ashram
was located on the north bank of Benares. After Hoover had confessed his search for his own daughter, the guru had told him that, with a light, pleasant lilt in the voice that comforted him.

“Where do you want the floodlights, Mr. Hoover?” yelled a gruff voice.

“Along the wall, please,” he answered.

Even now the words of his guru extended a protective hand over the transformation of the derelict motel. But there was precious little time. Hoover went back inside and locked himself in his office. For the rest of the afternoon he studied textbooks, the experimental data, and newsletters printed on cheap paper. He worked until he found his eyes blurring with fatigue.

Why was he doing all this, he wondered? Was it simply a pathetic and frantic effort to atone for the spiritual murder of Bill Templeton? Or did his motivations, deeply hidden in his unconscious, rise from another, less pure wellspring? It was at this moment that the image of Janice Templeton came to him: the quick intelligence, the strange mixture of hesitation and need that drove her to India, and quite simply the perfect outline of her neck and shoulders; and instead of feeling qualms of guilt, he felt better. Strangely empty, but the comfort was there. He rose, turned on a small Tensor lamp, and studied until well past midnight.

Janice sat under a gaily colored umbrella with Elaine Romine. Lunch in the park was a novel idea, but the sunshine seemed to demand it. Children raced among them, throwing bread to the pigeons, balancing their new bicycles, falling from skateboards. Elaine basked in the sunshine, then looked lazily at Janice.

“Thank you,” she said.

Janice looked up, puzzled. “For what?”

“For giving us both a break this afternoon. In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve been driving yourself like a piston.”

Janice smiled. “You should be the last person to object.”

“Well I do. Your zeal is contaminating. You’ve got the whole shop going at full tilt. Everybody’s looking over her shoulder. Honestly, Janice, even the QEII pauses occasionally to recharge her batteries.”

Janice said nothing.

Elaine pursued. “You don’t date at all, do you?”

After a while, Janice simply said, “No.”

“Would you like to?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“Because I know several men.”

Janice laughed pleasantly. “I’m sure you do.”

“Well, then? What do you say?”

It was not until they entered the studio and the familiar sight of tables, pin-up sketches, and brushes and pens surrounded them that Janice answered.

“About that invitation—if it’s just company. You understand, Elaine, that has to be clear.”

Elaine smiled. “Trust me.”

It happened very casually. One of the salesmen for a photography firm, who affected a blue pinstripe suit but had a pleasing white smile on a well-tanned face, was introduced. He shook Janice’s hand carefully, and evidently found it reassuring that she and Elaine were good friends.

Two nights later, he called on Janice. That weekend, they attended a Broadway show with very expensive tickets. Afterward, they had espresso coffee in a small club on a side street. Apparently, he was heir to a small fortune, his father having invented something in the electronics business. As he talked, it became obvious that he had an obsession about his father, about competing with him. He needed someone to support him in his struggle.

They walked along the southern edge of the park, where he seemed to feel very much at home among the wealthy international set that flowed in and out of the Plaza Hotel and into Harry’s Bar. He seemed preoccupied with something as they said good-night. He shook her hand outside Des Artistes and apologized for having talked so much. Janice assured him she had loved the play, and he smiled gratefully and left in the taxi.

Janice walked alone into the elevator, rode to her apartment. The one thing about a date, for all its illicit qualities, that she had never expected, not in her wildest fantasies, was its utter sexlessness.

She sat in a melancholy mood on the couch. The television was on, but she did not bother turning up the volume. The entertainment was so vapid, it passed like a dream in front of her. A curious fatigue overcame her, and she remembered, as she did nearly every night, the first time Bill had brought her to Des Artistes. He had been filled with enthusiasm for New York, for her, for Ivy—his very steps bounced along and his nighttime passions knew no stopping. She smiled. Once she had tried to count the number of times they made love. She gave up as they approached the thousands. Even now she felt a blush in spite of herself, and she remembered how surprised she had been, not only at his ingenuity, but at his athletic prowess.

She turned off the television, felt her stomach, still flat, and wondered if other men might find her more tempting than the overgrown boy who had taken her to the Broadway show. She went slowly into the bathroom and filled the gleaming tub, adding flakes of powder that richly cascaded into luxurious foam. She undressed. She examined herself in the full-length mirror. How old did she look? She could not tell. Was it the way she dressed, which subtly but unmistakably gave signals—signals that whispered,
Stay away?

She lay in the steaming water. She remembered how carefully Bill had looked after his body. The gym he religiously went to, the dumbbells at home, jogging every weekend. She pictured the well-sloped shoulders, the powerful calf muscles, the slim forearms. As she lay, she recalled how the pectoral muscles were so nicely defined, how symmetrical he was, the strange, heavy way a man looks when he is naked. And suddenly, an immense vacancy was in her life, an awful emptiness; and no one to fill it, no one to ease the oblique, insistent demands of her physical self, not now, not anymore, except in some small way, like a little girl, without even happiness, herself.

That night she dreamt she performed in a Broadway play. The lights were very hot, and they burned on her face and hands. In the audience, barely visible in the darkness, she thought she saw her date, except that he looked like Dr. Geddes. She escaped by running backstage, and suddenly she was in a red bus kicking up a strange pink dust that had an almost sexual tinge in the sun as it climbed high into yellow mountains. Once again she was on a journey, an urgent journey, to meet…to meet…in the landscape of India… Elliot Hoover.

Through the skylight poured an inexhaustible light, and below, in the whirling baths, arms obscured by the churning white water among the yellow tiles, was a child. Elliot Hoover squatted on his heels, talking to his staff member, Mrs. Concepcion, who stood in the waist-high whirlpool, holding the child tightly in her arms. The child screamed, raged, his fists pummeled her thick neck and shoulders, and his face had turned an awesome shade of purple. Elliot Hoover nodded encouragement. Mrs. Concepcion merely held the boy tighter, rocked him slowly side to side through the hot bath, and sang a soft lullaby. The screams resounded through the tiled swimming area, echoed from the cheerful painted tiles, like the roars of a stunted lion.

The child, Roy, at age four, had been the first patient admitted to Hoover’s recently completed clinic. Most autistic children stiffened upon being touched. Or they went dead. Or they ignored whatever human being was there. But Roy fought for his life. He bit, he went for the eyes, he clawed at exposed necks, screaming that awesome, animal roar. Not even the merry bubbling of warm water could begin to drown it out. Something inside the boy, something unreachable, unknowable, was like an incessant raw nerve of distilled hatred. He was like a fish on the line. The more he struggled, the more he weakened. And he fought so terrifically because he knew instinctively that he was losing now, bit by bit, but inevitably. Mrs. Concepcion, a registered nurse, had only recently been admitted to the staff, but she had immediately understood Hoover’s method. The boy was being broken—by love.

Elliot Hoover indicated, with gestures, some encouragement for Mrs. Concepcion. She nodded and held the boy tighter, pushing the head toward her voluminous breasts, letting him feel the warmth there, learning to smell her. Hoover waved, gestured to his watch, and went along the pool to the accompaniment of Roy’s bellows.

A short but narrow series of stairs led up to the main clinic. Even when he closed the door, Roy was audible.

In the first floor corridors, the staff members and children filled the rooms. Screams and whimpers filled the air, and now and then the crash of plastic dishes or toys. But considering the number of children at the clinic—thirteen—the astounding thing, the frightening thing, was the long spates of pure silence.

Hoover walked slowly down the corridor. In the first room, James, aged five, rocked furiously on his cot, back and forth, so violently that he began to pass out from sheer dizziness. Mr. Radimanath entered the room, fresh from the garden, where he had been cultivating the clinic vegetables, and went to the cot. Keeping his own head safely out of the way, Mr. Radimanath embraced James, not so tightly as Roy needed to be held, but firmly enough. And when the rocking started again, Mr. Radimanath rocked with him, two bodies in simultaneous motion, the one holding the other, eyes closed, in a curious embrace of both love and indifference.

James had been found as an infant, literally in the rubbish heap. No one knew who his parents were. No one knew even what his race was, a handsome mixture of African, Hispanic, and possibly Indian. But he was sealed off from reality. His defenses were so impenetrable that he had been diagnosed as deaf until he had been sent to the clinic and Mr. Radimanath had tricked him into revealing that he heard. He not only heard, but there were words he understood—
ball
and
supper
and, inexplicably,
teakettle.
So it was to Mr. Radimanath that the case was given. The old Brahmin was trained in the Vedic disciplines. Of all the staff members, he had the best control over his soul’s strength, its capacity for boundless but directed love.

Elliot Hoover nodded his approval. He left the room. James saddened him. But in the next room was an even worse case. Lily, the girl who ate sand, who ate bugs, who ate anything repulsive and dirty. She had an inexhaustible hunger for grit. By the time she was three, she had been on intravenous feeding at the County Hospital. But Welfare had no objection to letting Hoover’s clinic have a try at Lily. So Mr. Radimanath disguised her scrambled eggs with brown food color and let her eat it off the bookshelf in her room. Lily was a case which would never improve. She was very ugly, with a shower of freckles over a pointed, misshapen nose, and her eyes squinted almost shut. Hoover detected in her a soul so withdrawn that it floated as though helpless and disconnected through her being.

As Lily slept, a peculiar grace settled on her face. The dappled light from the exterior garden floated over her, glinting on the touch of spittle at the corner of her mouth. Elliot Hoover loved her. He loved her for her helplessness. In her mentally retarded state, she never quite understood that other human beings cared for her. Right now, it was all they could do to teach her to walk without shuffling her feet uselessly.

He closed the curtain so the sunlight would not wake her. Then he went back into the corridor, turned the corner, and gently opened a white door.

Inside were five video screens in front of five self-enclosed cubicles. A boy named Henry stared so wide-eyed at imagery of himself that Hoover chuckled. Henry was learning that he existed. The boy’s face drew near the screen, where an image of Henry sat upright on the bed in his room. It was a moment of discovery, with an almost holy awe radiating from the boy’s eyes. Hoover stopped smiling. Henry slapped the green plastic button and the tape began over again. At a small booth in the corner of the room, Hirsch waved cheerfully.

A second boy sat in the next cubicle. This was Jackson, the daredevil. No one remembered how he had gotten the name, but it suited him well. The small black face, the impish manner of crawling, twisting, eluding the staff members, often exploded without warning into violence. The tiny black hands beat in uncontrolled excitement on the console. Jackson had frozen the image: a test car, piling into a wall of bricks, hurled a dummy driver through the shattering glass. The film, courtesy of the Motor Vehicle Department of Pennsylvania, elicited the identical response at the identical moment. The image of the man being crushed against the bricks fired some nerve deep in Jackson’s primordial personality.

Hoover left the video room. There was Mary Ann, suspected of having sustained brain damage after being beaten by her parents in her crib. She simply gave up the use of arms and legs. Hoover tried to induce her to exercise the atrophying muscles, but without success. There was Earl, the lanky seven-year-old, nicknamed Uncle Earl because of his white hair and grave demeanor. Uncle Earl looked the most normal of the children. There was none of the dead look in the eyes, the lusterless, vapid absence of life there. But after a few moments, it was apparent to anyone that Uncle Earl was just not there. He grinned a lot. Hoover was fascinated by him. The boy carved out his own planet with its own rules and formations, and his body moved obliviously through the obstructions which the earth beings called reality. And nothing reached him. Not even the Popeye cartoons on the video.