Institute (22 page)

“Take your time.”

I began ticking it off, beginning with my first meeting with the Garretts. He sat looking at me, and then I realized that I was talking into a recorder which he had placed between us. I kept on and on, working down to Mr. Garrett’s arrival and what he had come about, his fear that Inga might push Hortense off a balcony. Then I brought the two women in, explaining that they had come without knowing Mr. Garrett would be there. Then I told him about the argument we’d had, trying to keep it brief but, at the same time, clear. I got to the shooting and my jumping at Inga, and finally that seemed to be it. He seemed satisfied.

“O.K., Mr. Palmer,” he said very respectfully, picking up the recorder. “I’ll ask you to come with me now while I get this down on paper. We’ll have to go to the police office in the County Building where I have a typewriter.”

“I have a typewriter here.”

“You do? Then, if I can borrow it... ?”

“Be my guest. I’ll get it.”

I didn’t use it much, and it was in the spare bedroom. I got it for him and he set it up on the table, then started his recorder. So I wouldn’t hear my voice croaking at him, I wandered back to the bedroom I had shared with Hortense and lay on the bed in the dark. Then I heard someone come in and went out to find more police and orderlies there to take the bodies away. They made it quick, and then I was there with the sergeant who was still pecking away at the type-writer, accompanied by my voice. I went back to the bedroom. After awhile he called me. He seemed to be through and was studying what he had written.

“What do you do with it now?”

“Turn it in, of course.”

“Will newspaper reporters have access to it?”

“Well, that’s the whole idea. Under the law, they have the right. When copies are made of it, one will hang on a hook in the clerk’s room there in the County Building. Anyone can look, including even them.”

“You don’t seem to like them much.”

“Does anyone?”

He asked me to check it over “for facts,” so I had to read it. It was all there in police lingo, from my first call on the Garretts to the doctor’s pronouncement of death, with the “intimate relations” between Garrett and Inga precisely spelled out. But one thing I managed to hold back. If he suspected it, he didn’t show it, and that was the “intimate relations between Mrs. Garrett and me.” That wasn’t in the report, thank God, and when I had read it, I said to him: “Fine. It looks O.K. to me.”

He got up to go, telling me to stand by, “in case,” meaning don’t leave town till the case is wound up. Then he left. I sat for a minute and then went downstairs, got in the car, and drove to Cheverly where the Prince Georges General Hospital is.

The girl at the window spoke to me by name. “Do I know you,” I said to her.

“Not really, I suppose, Dr. Palmer. I was in your poetry class a couple of years ago, just for three days, till I switched my course. But I remember you well. What can we do for you?”

I said that I had come about “Mrs. Garrett, Mrs. Richard Garrett, to inquire how she is and see her if that’s permitted at this hour.”

“Well, I’m afraid it wouldn’t be—” running her finger over a memo of some kind. “Oh, here she is—yes, she’s in Intensive Care. Her condition, unfortunately, is critical.”

“Thank you. When can I see her?”

“At two this afternoon—for ten minutes, if, if the doctor will let you see her at all.”

I
DROVE HOME AND
put in a twelve-o’clock wake-up with Western Union. Then I went to bed and when the call came, got up. In between, I guess, I slept, at least some kind of way. When I’d dressed, I went down to the lobby, picked up the paper, and read it, at least the high spots. It was all over page one and a couple of pages inside, with pictures of me, Hortense, and Mr. Garrett. But none of Inga, I suppose because they didn’t have any. When you’re a servant you don’t even have a picture of yourself in the files if you kill someone. And there was no mention of my relationship with Hortense beyond my being the director of the Institute, my resignation not having been announced yet. My being—or supposedly being—director of the Institute was the only explanation offered for the visitors I had at one in the morning. “Refusal on Mr. Garrett’s part to accept divorce and marry Miss Bergson” was the explanation for the shooting, according to the papers.

It took about twenty minutes to skim through. All during that time, Miss Nettie said nothing, although we were pretty good friends. But when I got up to go to the hospital, she said: “Quite a time you had last night.”

“You can say that again,” I grumbled.

“I want to hear all about it.”

“I’ll tell you, but not now, if you don’t mind. I’m not in the mood for talk.”

“Oh that I can well understand.”

At a quarter to two that afternoon, I was back at the hospital, talking to another nurse and getting the same report. “She’s in Intensive Care. Her condition is critical. You can visit for ten minutes if the physician in charge permits it.” So, following directions, I took an elevator, went down a long corridor, and found myself at a door with a dozen people in front of it. They were waiting while a nurse stood there with a card in her hand. When I stopped, she asked who I wanted to see, glanced at her card, and said: “You may stay ten minutes. Stand over there, please.” And she motioned for me to go back to the end of the line, and there I went. But a woman had looked up when I mentioned Hortense’s name, and now she came up to me.

“You must be Dr. Palmer,” she said. “Horty’s spoken of you, and your picture was in the papers.”

I kept wondering who she was, then a bit grandly, she said: “I’m Mrs. Mendenhall, Horty’s mother.”

So I knew who she was at last, and I also knew the reason for the pink complexion after what Teddy had told me. But I played up to her, assuring her: “Oh, yes, of course; Hortense has mentioned you often. How is she?”

“Critical, is all they’ll tell you, which sounds bad, and I guess is. The paper’s not much help. She was still in surgery when they went to press.”

“We’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

“It’s all we can do.”

We stood there for another dead ten minutes on a day that had seemed all dead. I had not had any breakfast, which may have been one reason I felt so dull. And, of course, I was numb from loss of sleep and the reaction to what had happened—or lack of reaction, actually, as part of my trouble seemed to be that I couldn’t quite get caught up on where I was. But not
knowing
where I was was partly the reason for that. I couldn’t possibly know until I knew something about Hortense’s condition. So I stood there, first on one foot and then on the other.

At last the door opened and a nurse was whispering to the nurse standing with us. Then one by one, after checking against the card, they led us into a large room with beds head to the wall, a doctor walking around, and another nurse directing us. She said something to Mrs. Mendenhall and led us to a bed at one side halfway down the room, and finally we were with Hortense—if the wraith in the bed was her. I hardly knew her, she was so pale. Her hair was combed out in a strange, unnatural way, she had a hospital jacket on, and tubes led down to her arms from bottles above her head. Mrs. Mendenhall whispered to her: “Horty, it’s your mother, and here’s Dr. Palmer.”

She patted one of Hortense’s hands, and I patted the other. She didn’t open her eyes, but I could tell that she heard what we said and felt what we did.

“We’re pulling for you,” I said softly; “I love you.”

“Yes, we both do,” Mrs. Mendenhall said.

That made a family matter out of something I meant as personal; but I let it pass. Then a doctor came by holding his watch up at us, and we left after whispering: “See you tonight.” Then we were out in the hall. I told Mrs. Mendenhall that I hadn’t had breakfast and asked her to join me. But she said she had to get on to Watergate and “get myself organized there. They caught me in Chester with it. I can’t say I was much surprised, since Richard was playing with fire, as I, for one, tried to tell him. Yet when a thing like this happens, it’s like bricks falling on you. I drove straight here; I haven’t even been to the apartment.”

She seemed to know where we were going, and I went along without paying much attention, down a flight of stairs and along a hall to a large window with a lighted room behind it. She tapped on the glass and a nurse appeared inside. The nurse disappeared, then came back pushing a bassinette. Then we were staring down at a tiny, sleeping infant under a blue blanket.

“He’s simply beautiful,” Mrs. Mendenhall said. “The spitting image of Richard.”

To say I was stunned would be the understatement of my life. I suppose, little by little, my mind caught up with what this woman had known, that before surgery could be performed to remove the bullet, this baby had to be taken out. My mind also caught up with the remark she had just made about the child’s resemblance to Garrett, which seemed to say that she had no idea of its relationship to me. I still stood there. Suddenly she said “Be back” and fluttered down the hall. Then she was back, but a whiff of her breath told me what she had been doing, no doubt from a flask in her handbag, in the ladies’ room.

T
HAT NIGHT WAS A
repetition of the afternoon, but the next day at two, I was there again in line outside the door of Intensive Care. In a minute here came Mrs. Mendenhall in a neat, navy-blue dress that showed off her very good figure, which was much the same as Hortense’s but, if I do say so, it was perhaps a little better on the fine points of curve and proportion. She certainly wasn’t bad-looking. She walked down the hall and for the first time gave me some of the dope on what the surgeon had been up against while probing for the bullet and performing the Caesarian to deliver the child.

“The shock was simply frightful,” she said, whispering professionally. Then I remembered that she had once been a nurse. “He had to handle the whole small gut, letting it slip through his hands and closing each perforation as he came to it. But the real crisis will come in three days—from peritonitis. What leaked out of the gut, of course, fouled the whole abdominal cavity, and there’s no way of cleaning it adequately. The surgeon did the best he could. Only time will tell. Her temperature will mount and mount; it will simply be a test of her strength.”

“If you don’t mind, I’ve got the idea.”

We went in. It wrung my heart to see the shape Hortense was in. Her temperature had gone up, anyone could see that, and she kept whimpering when we touched her in a pitiful, frightened way. Then we were out in the hall again and down to the nursery. Mrs. Mendenhall kept talking about the baby’s resemblance to Mr. Garrett, though what resemblance it bore to anyone, including me, I couldn’t for the life of me see. To my eye, it wasn’t an infant that stirred me to my heels. It just looked like an infant.

We went our separate ways and met again that evening. This time, it turned out, her car had to go in the repair shop to have its right turn light fixed, so she arrived in a cab. So when we left, I ran her over to Watergate, and when she asked me up, I went. I seemed to dread being alone.

It was the first time I had been to Hortense’s apartment, and it gave me an odd feeling. It was full of pictures—of Hortense, of Mr. Garrett, of Mrs. Mendenhall, and of me, mostly in football attire, with the bare brisket showing.

We were hardly in the door, though, before Mrs. Mendenhall said: “I simply have to get out of these clothes and into something comfortable. If you’ll excuse me.” And she disappeared, going out through what looked like a dining room beyond a large arch. Then “Woo-hoo” came her voice. “You could keep company, Dr. Palmer.”

I decided it was time to leave.

When I took my place in the hall one day, the nurse beckoned to me. “She’s been moved,” she said and gave me the new room number. I found my way there and tapped on the door. Mrs. Mendenhall came out.

“She’s better,” she whispered. “The fever’s down and she’s well past the crisis, but she’s horribly depressed. She keeps talking about her baby, the one she thinks she lost. We haven’t told her yet, the way things turned out—thought the surprise would be nicer if we took her down to look and then all in one swoop, she’d see what we’ve been saving for her.”

I agreed that it was a nice way to handle it, and we went in. Hortense hardly noticed that I was there.

“I’m just a thing,” she wailed. “Not a woman at all anymore. Just a thing that looks like a woman but isn’t any more. My sweet little baby, the last one I can have. They took it from me that night. It’s not in me any more. I can feel with my hands: it’s not there. And I can never have—”

She kept it up until I motioned Mrs. Mendenhall. “O.K., Horty,” she said, “you’ll feel better in a moment. We’re taking you out for a ride. A little ride around so you have a change. Now, isn’t that going to be nice?”

“All right,” Hortense said listlessly.

The nurse instructed her carefully after pushing up the wheelchair on what she was to do: lock her hands on her neck and hold on while the nurse lifted her. “And then—”

“Hold it,” I said. “I have a better idea.”

I peeled the covers down, sat beside Hortense, put one arm around her back, the other under her knees, and lifted exactly the way I lifted her that first time when I had carried her back to the bedroom from my living room. It worked fine again. I slid her down in the chair with no trouble, hoping for a pat or smile or kiss—or something, at any rate, something that would tell me that she remembered. All I got was nothing. The nurse wheeled her out in the hall where Mrs. Mendenhall and I joined them, and off we went, to the elevator, with the nurse pushing Hortense down the hall toward the window of the nursery I had come to know so well. When we were almost to it the nurse stopped, leaving Hortense in the chair, and skipped ahead to the window where she tapped. The other nurse nodded and disappeared. Then our nurse came back and pushed Hortense to the window. The nurse inside was there, pushing the same bassinette. Mrs. Mendenhall said: “O.K., Horty, there’s the big surprise we’ve been saving for you. You didn’t lose your child. They saved it and here it is, right in front of your eyes. There he is—your little son.”