For Love of Audrey Rose (40 page)

In dismay she closed her eyes.

“Let me think about it. It seems too dangerous.”

Frustrated, he only clenched his jaw. His eyes looked lost, as though he had failed miserably, and having exposed the message of his trance, having shown her the sanctity of the room where his deities found their worship, he was even more vulnerable.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you have to give me time.”

“That’s all right, Janice. Perhaps I’ve rushed things.”

In the next room there was a small thump. Janice instantly remembered the nights when Ivy had fallen from bed, only to be driven half mad by the dream from which she could not awaken, the dream of her own coming death.

“Did you just think of Ivy?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes,” she said, startled. “I did.”

“You see? The child calls out to you. In your own heart, you can’t deny her. Go to her, Janice. Tend to her.”

Janice opened the door and fumbled into the darkness. Behind her Hoover followed, and they groped toward the lamp. Jennie lay on the floor, her pajamas rumpled, and a tiny trickle of red lay over her nostril.

“Elliot, she’s hurt herself!”

“It isn’t like her to fall out of bed. James does that with a vengeance, but not Jennie.”

Janice took a tissue from the night table and quickly dabbed at the tiny nose. Strangely, the child seemed only now to awaken to the touch of Janice’s hand. There was the fragrance that a mother instantly recognizes, the soft smell of a sleeping infant, and the warm cotton of the pajamas.

“F-five—T-two—” Jennie mumbled.

“She’s awake,” Janice said.

Hoover bent down.

“So she is. I wonder if she knows whether or not she’s dreaming?”

The green eyes of the child gazed through them. Though she took notice of their presence by virtue of being alert, even aware of everything in the room around her, she refused to look at their faces. Janice sensed the protective hostility of the child, the fear that wrapped around her like a robe.

“Jennie,” she whispered. “It’s me. Do you know who I am?”

“F-five—T-two—”

Janice looked at Hoover. He shrugged.

“Three-three means bathroom. Maybe this is a further refinement. Would you like to do the honors?”

Janice laughed. “I’d love to. I haven’t done it in a long time.”

Hoover stood in the center of the room, without moving. The light went on in the adjoining bathroom. He watched as Janice gently removed the bottom pajamas, sat Jennie on the small toilet seat. Then Janice washed Jennie’s hands, then her own. Hoover watched Janice comb down the girl’s hair. Time seemed to slow down and die as Jennie gazed into the mirror, held in Janice’s arm.

Slowly the small hand slid down Janice’s neck, down the throat, toward the curve of her breast. Jennie relaxed, and the other arm wrapped itself slowly around Janice’s neck. The light went off. Janice carried the sleeping girl back into the bedroom.

“What’s wrong?” Janice whispered. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“She’s never returned an embrace before,” he said slowly.

As Janice lowered the child to the bed, the small arm had to be pulled from Janice’s neck. Jennie turned to Janice, the sleeping body curled, the arms stretched lengthwise across the sheets. From Hoover’s room the amber light mixed with the blue, and a curious glow appeared on the girl’s forehead.

“She seems warm,” Janice said.

Hoover went to the bathroom and in the darkness wetted a towel. He brought it back, gave it to Janice, and she daubed it lightly over Jennie’s forehead. Then Janice rose, took the towel back to the sink, rinsed it, and hung it on the bar to dry. She turned and was startled to find that he had followed her, looking just as tired as she.

“Will you not be her mother?” he asked, his voice oddly husky. “She needs that kind of care. The kind of love you can provide.”

“No. She’s a lovely girl, but—”

In the predawn gloom they spoke in soft voices, as though the long night had rid from them any anxieties. Janice felt she had been at the clinic for a month. She was familiar with its every sound, its every smell, and the children seemed, oddly, extensions of herself as well as Hoover. She slumped against the white basin, as the sleeplessness danced into her eyes. Jennie seemed to float in the light where the sheets were visible across the room.

“And the frightening shall not be frightening,” Hoover said gently.

She looked up at him. Odd glints of light swarmed in her vision where he stood.

“That’s what he told me. My master, the guru,” Hoover said softly. “The frightening shall not be frightening.”

Suddenly he leaned down over her, his lips against the soft warmth of her neck.

Her left hand instinctively went up around his neck and drew him closer. They were both exhausted, their blood racing, and the moment seemed to undulate in a slow motion, a giddiness as though the earth had wobbled from its foundations. Nor did she object when his hand slowly rested against her breast. Her breathing pushed out against him, and one by one he unbuttoned the buttons of her blouse.

She sighed, turned against his cheek, and his fingers slid across the hollow of her throat. For a long time they found comfort in each other’s proximity, a dreamlike stillness, the pressure of breathing so near each other’s ear. His fingertips pressed down, soft as velvet, to her undergarment, flowed down under and found the breast very warm, and there was a soft but sudden intake of her breath against his cheek.

“Elliot,” she whispered, “I’m so confused without you. I’m even more confused with you.”

“I am never without you,” he whispered.

She felt the warm comfort of his hand against her bare breast, and was, in her confusion, grateful for it. She leaned her head against his shoulder and watched as the tinted lamp illumined her blouse, making it look as though it belonged to someone else, and watched his fingers remove the next button, felt the soft sliding of the fingertips around and under the other breast.

Her body belonged to someone else, to a Janice long buried under time’s sorrow and the fatigue of survival. From far away she seemed to sense her dulled limbs awakening, pushing heavy weights away, and yet the disembodied feeling was unnatural. It made her feel anxiety in the warmth of his friendship.

“Kiss me, Elliot,” she whispered.

He moved slowly toward her face, and their lips pressed together, an almost discreet encounter, a mutual signal of their desolation. She stood up from the basin counter, his hand found the nipple of her breast, and she pressed herself against his lips.

The alienation went away. Janice felt herself rising from the dead, from the corridors of the asylums, from long journeys that lead to death, from the abstraction of pretending she was no woman. She closed her eyes. When they kissed again, it was delicate, though his tongue found hers; a sudden thrill passed through her, a shudder of surprise, and his hand ran down the length of her body, resting on the small of her back.

She clung to him, standing with her weight against him, on the quiet threshold to Jennie’s room. It seemed to be an eternity thus, while the child slept. Dogs barked, unseen in the neighborhood, and a heavy truck rumbled past the clinic. The street became quiet again. She felt as though she were falling asleep, that in fact there could be nothing more blessed than to sleep forever in his arms, in view of the mysterious child who, in some inscrutable way, blessed their being together and reminded them of their own lost children.

She laughed softly in his ear. He raised his head, smiled, and raised an eyebrow, questioning.

“I don’t ever want to move,” she whispered, her face flushed. “Not ever.”

He lowered his face against her neck and pressed her close.

“Then we shall not,” he said softly.

“I feel like I’m dancing,” she said in a faraway voice.

She sighed and accepted his tongue softly in a second kiss, a longer thrill, and did not seem ready when he broke it off, smiling. In a sudden burst of happiness he squeezed her to him. It was unmistakable, the desire that pressed against her.

“Elliot,” she murmured, and her hand slipped down from his arm, hesitated, and nervously squeezed his elbow.

She was confused when there was a movement, and abruptly he had lifted her into his arms, like a child, and carried her into the red sweep of his bedroom. It swirled past like a sensuous dream, and except for the pounding of her heart, like an animal gone wild, the whole world seemed to flow swiftly and silently like a river of mist.

“Please—”

Her voice was cut off by a playful kiss on the mouth. He put her down. The light was still on. The Indian deities, the red curtains, the rumpled bed, all stretched out in front of her, a landscape more uncertain, more inviting, more dangerous than any subcontinent.

She was transfixed with fear.

Behind her, Hoover softly closed the door. Autumn leaves blew against the window, and the blood throbbed in her temples. He did not advance, but only put his hand against the small of her back, and she suddenly whispered, as though unwilling to walk any farther, unable to move paralyzed limbs.

“Carry me, Elliot.”

With a slow, simple movement, as though raising an almost holy icon, he carried her as before, in his arms, and lowered himself with her to the bulging mountains and valleys of the madras bedspread, sheets and a single pillow.

He said nothing. Quickly he removed her blouse, kissing her on the eyes, so that her eyes remained closed and she saw nothing. He carefully unhooked her undergarments and removed them, and though her eyes were closed, she gasped slightly, aware that he observed her.

He did not cover her with sheet or blanket, but left her nude. She lay like a sculpture in the soft light, the rounded forms of hip and thigh clearly modulated. She felt her face was flushed and finally opened her eyes and watched Hoover’s eyes and wondered if her own burned with the same radiance.

Far, far away he seemed to be, obscure, formless, and he went through motions, removing his shirt and trousers. His uncovered chest startled her with its smoothness, a pale white skin like marble against the bloodred curtains behind.

It was as though they were fighting—the two hearts like impatient birds beating their wings—and in their fatigue there was dark, driving joy. Pleasure accelerated, until Janice grew unconscious under its demands. Shamelessly she sought the last barrier to oblivion. An abrupt pulsating filled her throughout, she became dimly aware of her leg twisted around his hip, and there was the sound of her own moaning, and his, dying away like a receding thunderstorm.

Nor did he remove his body to her side, but repeated her name over and over, almost silently, in her ear. She smiled, stroked the back of his head in a dreamy, sensuous softness that had no outer definition. She had triumphed in some way, and her every sensibility had flowed to the far corners of the earth.

She felt once again that her breath was coming short. Once again he was extended deep within her. Her leg twisted slowly, languorously at first, around his hip. Now they rolled in a deep of their own making. At the bottom of an ocean known only to themselves, in a dreaminess where she commanded him, just as he commanded her, they pursued the relentless goal through the darkness. There was a sensation of a slow, irresistible welling, as though the floor of the earth, like a bubble, had begun to expand, and then she heard his small cries. Slowly then, through her exhausted body, the bulging, demanding pressure flowered a second time, and her cries followed his like an echo.

She felt that she was already asleep. He was at her side, his arm across her breasts. There was a relaxation surpassing anything she had known. The girl in the next room burbled softly, like a nightingale, and Janice slipped like a feather into the welcome and blessed purity of dreamless sleep.

BOOK IV

JENNIE

“He who with a clear vision sees me as the Spirit Supreme
Knows all there is to be known, and he adores me with his soul.”

The Words of Krishna

24

B
lue grit hung in the early summer air in slow currents, wallowing in the baking haze of day. New York was bottled in a smoky, whitish presence that sucked the oxygen from the river basins. Noise muffled itself in the stone canyons like muted thunder, boiling with the horrid hostility of ten million people jammed together. Day after day the atmospheric layers burned, until a putrid smell of something decomposed laid itself on everything that moved below.

Within Goodland Sanitarium, the air conditioners failed to keep pace with the heat, though water dripped from them onto towels on the floor, and steady throbs of machinery echoed down the dank corridors. Staff and patients perspired freely, and the grit flecked each and every window.

Janice nervously twisted the straps of her handbag. She was in a small lobby, an alcove where the tiles were stained by coffee and shoes, and the ashtrays stank of old cigarettes. She listened to the sounds of approaching footsteps, disappearing conversations, the vaguely threatening murmur of activity that was so horrible because it was never defined, only whispered and hinted at in the labyrinth of corridors.

Janice reflected bitterly as she sat in the steaming lobby. Upon the guilts and maneuvers of administrators depended the lives of so many broken people. Dr. Geddes was reluctant at first to enter into their conspiracy with Jennie. Palming the sick child off to Bill as an Ivy substitute offended his professional and moral ethos. But Elliot Hoover’s persuasive arguments for the ultimate good that would accrue not only to Bill, but—and especially—to the orphaned child, at last mitigated the doctor’s qualms and drew him wholly into their compact. In his best eloquence before Dr. Boltin, Dr. Geddes explained his approach to transfer-therapy, how Bill responded ever so slightly to objects of transference. Why not a real girl? Indeed, a girl of the right age, attractive, and with similarities of personality to those of his own late daughter? Finally, Dr. Boltin acquiesced, but demanded safeguards for the sanitarium. Dr. Geddes executed an application to the State of Pennsylvania for permission to transfer the continuation of Jennie’s treatment to the Goodland Sanitarium in the State of New York, and Pennsylvania responded by agreeing to a six-month trial period of treatment. It took all of May and June to accomplish, but it was done.