(1969) The Seven Minutes (81 page)

Last night, with Maggie Russell, Barrett had enjoyed and suffered reality in a reciprocal relationship with a woman for the first time.

It had been more than her pointed hillocks and wide chasm, and more than his erect penis, and more than the wonders inside the chasm. It had been the hours of talk before, the discovering things held in common, the laughter, sorrow, indignation, and a secret knowledge that they were united and special and above the world and appreciative of their secret uniqueness. It had been their desire to be closer, touching, loving, merging into one. It had been their simultaneous decision, and their wordless going into the bedroom, and her use of a contraceptive before, and their intial embarrassment at their nakedness, and her appendix scar, and his wishing he had lost weight before he’d ever met her, and their awkwardness, and his difficulty entering, and her initial outcry not of ecstasy but of discomfort, and their victory in joining, and the sound of a gas burble in her stomach, and the fleeting thought of Cassie McGraw and Chicago in his mind before his early orgasm, and his apologies, and her kisses, and their whisperings afterward, and their tea and crackers together, and more sleepy talk, and her rhythmic breathing in her sleep, and his catching himself snoring.

It was this, and so very much more.

Still, even though he was sure of his feelings for her, positive about the rightness of the two of them, he was uncertain and

worried about her feelings for him, feelings that must wear for a lifetime. She had endured too much insecurity, he suspected, to invest the rest of her love, her vitality, her childbearing, her chances for safety, her years on earth, in a man who would be a failure. In this society, a failure was only half a man, and Maggie needed an entire man. If he failed to win this case, he knew that he would never be able to ask her to join him in partnership, and even if he did ask her it was unlikely that she would be imprudent enough to say yes.

He turned on his bar stool to order a third drink.

‘Mr Michael Barrett!’

He spun the rest of the way around to face the maitre d’ approaching him. He raised an arm to acknowledge his name.

‘Mr Barrett, there is a telephone call for you.’

He paid his bar bill quickly, and chased after the maitre d’, asking, ‘Is it long distance or local?’

‘I do not know, sir. Please accept it in the booth in the lobby.’

He hastened into the booth, took up the receiver, and identified himself.

The call was local.

It was a femine voice that he heard. ‘Oh, Mr Barrett -I am phoning about the reward -‘

He was instantly alert. ‘Yes? Who is this?’

‘My name is Avis Jefferson. I am one of the practical nurses on the late shift at the Sunnyside Sanitarium. I was busy earlier, so I just now saw what was on the bulletin board. Mr Holliday is out, so I thought I’d call you direct. It says there you’ll pay anyone a hundred dollars who can help you about the postal card or picture on the board.’

‘The - that’s right,’ he stammered.

‘I can help you. About the picture, I mean.’

‘You recognize the woman in the photograph, Miss Jefferson? That photograph was taken almost forty years ago.’

‘I’ve seen the picture before, Mr Barrett.’

‘Where?’

‘In the sanitarium here. I can even show it to you. If that’s what you want.’

He was sky high, beyond gravity now. ‘Honey, that’s exactly what I want! I’ll be over immediately. Don’t go away. I’ll be there in twenty minutes flat. Meet me at the reception desk.’

Avis Jefferson was waiting at the reception desk of the Sunnyside Convalescent Sanitarium when he arrived. She towered over him by three or four inches when they shook hands. The inky blackness of her skin was broken by the whiteness of her buck teeth and accented by the clean white nurse’s uniform. She was friendly, effervescent, and Mike Barrett liked and trusted her at once.

‘Follow me,’ she said to Barrett, and she led him up the corridor. Feeling as clumsy as a schoolboy going to his first prom, he carried

the bouquet of long-stemmed roses with which he hoped to woo Cassie McGraw, if there was finally and actually a Cassie McGraw.

As they turned the corner, Miss Jefferson said, The minute I saw that photograph on the bulletin board, I said to myself, I’ve seen that before. And I remembered right off when and where. It was a year ago when we were doing some spring housecleaning in the patients’ rooms, and it was in 34A. I was going through her suitcases, inventorying and straightening her personal effects, and seeing if there was anything wearable that wasn’t being used, when I came across one of those old paste-in photo albums. So just out of natural curiosity - because you always think of the patients as old people only, forgetting they were once young like yourself - I looked to see what she was like when she was young. There were pages of snapshots inside, and some were taken in Paris - she’d told me she’d traveled and lived abroad, but I was never sure if it was true - and there was this one of her between the two young gentlemen in front of that Eiffel Tower, and it stuck in my mind because she had the devil in her eyes and looked so full of nature, if you know what I mean. So when I saw that photo again, on the bulletin board, where you had Mr Holliday put it, I remembered the same one in her album, and another thing made me remember it especially. The one in her album had a corner torn off just like yours. That made me positive.’

‘Jadway’s face was torn off?’

‘I don’t know whose face.’

‘You never heard her mention Jadway?’

“Not so’s I can recall. For that matter. I never heard Katie mention the name Cassie McGraw either.’

‘What is her name here?’

‘Katie’s? Well, formally I’ve always known her to be Mrs Katherine Sullivan.’

‘Sullivan.’ Barrett savored the sound of the family name that had so long eluded him. “That must have been the name of the man she married after Jadway died, her husband who was killed in the Second World War. Did she ever speak of him?’

‘Not by using the name Sullivan. Only a couple times saying as to how she’d been widowed and that’s what made her girl turn to the Lord.’

‘I see. So it is Katherine Sullivan. Okay, the Sullivan part is solved. But I wonder where she got that given name of Katherine.’ No sooner had he asked himself the question than he had the answer. Early in the case, when he had been browsing about Ben Fremont’s Book Emporium, he had come across a book called Naming the New Arrival, which gave the derivation of female and male Christian names, and he had looked up his first name and Zelkin’s. He had learned that the name Michael was not Irish, as he had always thought, but of Hebrew origin, meaning Vho is like God,’ and one diminutive was Mike, and that Abraham was also

from the Hebrew, meaning ‘father of the multitude,’ and one diminutive was Abe. Then, fascinated, he had looked up other names that had become familiar to him in the pretrial preparation, and one of these had been Cassie, and he had read that Cassie was derived from the Greek and meant ‘pure’ and was one of the diminutives of Katherine. And just now he realized that one variant of Katherine was Cathleen, the name of the fictional heroine of The Seven Minutes.

He had forgotten this archeological dig into appellations until this very moment. Now it was clear. With her marriage Cassie had shed the past and eyen taken on a new given name, yet she had paid homage to her immortality in Jadway’s book and to her fictionalized self in its pages, and from Cathleen she had also held on to a single strand of a more wondrous time by calling herself Katherine.

Miss Jefferson had halted before an open doorway. On the wall next to it was painted ‘34A-34B.’ The nurse crooked her finger. ‘Right in here.’

He followed her inside. There were two single beds, neatly made up with maroon covers, and separated by a hospital curtain. Beyond the beds there were sliding glass doors and screens that opened into the inner patio.

Miss Jefferson touched the headboard of the first bed. ‘This one here is Katie’s,’ she said. ‘We let her stay up a while after dinner, before bringing her back to tuck her in.’

Barrett surveyed Cassie’s nook, so removed from Montparnasse’s Dome and the Brasserie Lipp. There was a movable tray, perched on rollers, across the foot of the bed, and it held a half-filled glass of orange juice and a paper cup of pink pills. Beside the head of the bed was a metal night table holding a carafe of water, a drinking glass, a transistor radio, and a pair of spectacles.

Barrett turned back to find Miss Jefferson kneeling before a built-inwardrobe from which she had removed a scuffed brown suitcase. She opened the suitcase - her back blocked him from a view of the contents - and then with a gurgle of triumph she held up a rectangular photograph album with navy-blue imitation-leather binding.

‘Here it is, just like I remembered,’ chortled Miss Jefferson, rising to her feet.

A veteran of so many disappointments, Barrett entertained one last doubt. ‘Miss Jefferson, I was wondering, does this Katherine Sullivan who is here, who owns that album, does she in any way resemble the Cassie McGraw in that old photograph taken in front of the Eiffel Tower?’

‘Of course not. Who would, after so much time? Even me. Do I look like I used to look when I was going to school ? No, not a bit.’

‘Then how do we know the photograph in Mrs Sullivan’s album is of her? Maybe it’s a keepsake sent by the real Cassie McGraw, who might have been a friend of Mrs Sullivan’s.’

Avis Jefferson’s buck teeth showed in a broad grin. ‘You are the worryingest man. You don’t need to question this. There’s other pictures in this book of hers and under some she wrote long ago such things as “Me in Paris in ‘35” - and they’re the same, I mean the woman in the other pictures is the same one that’s in the Eiffel Tower picture with the two men. You’ll see.’

Miss Jefferson was flipping the loose pages, and abruptly she stopped and handed the album to Barrett.

There were four snapshots on the facing pages, two of them discolored and brittle, and the one at the extreme left was the one he had discovered in the Sean O’Flanagan Collection. It was the exact photograph: O’Flanagan, Cassie, the headless Jadway. The snapshot next to it showed Cassie in front of a medieval building, and beneath it she had written, ‘At the Musee de Cluny, Oct., 1936.’ The handwriting was as familiar as that on the photostat of the back of the picture, which was in his pocket. The snapshots on the right-hand page showed Cassie alone, one posing on what Barrett guessed to be the Pont-Neuf, with the Seine behind her, and the other showing her saluting into the camera while standing smartly at attention beneath a street plaque that read ‘Boulevard St. Michel.’

Oblivious of the gangling nurse who was peering down over his shoulder, Barrett leafed hastily through the entire album, from the first page to the last. Most of the pages were empty. There were only about a dozen more photographs. Two stiff portraits that Barrett presumed to be of Cassie’s parents. Some mementos of her childhood - Cassie between the ages of six and twelve, in a wagon, on a sled, in a tree. A photograph of the young Sean O’Flanagan in Paris. A few snapshots of Cassie in Zurich, and one of her feeding pigeons in St Mark’s Square in Venice. A long snapshot of a curly-headed, plain-faced, unsmiling girl of perhaps fourteen, with the single name ‘Judith’ printed beneath it. Then there was a shot, streaked with light from overexposure, that appeared to be of a youngish soldier, with crew cut, crooked smile, blocky build, in the uniform of an enlisted man in the United States Army. No doubt this was Sullivan after the marriage and before being shipped out to become a casualty. And one final picture. No human figure in it. Simply a doorway above which was clearly visible the lettering: “The Etoile Press - 18 rue de Berri.’

Barrett stared down at that final photograph, and the album was unsteady in his hands.

That clinched it. He closed the album. Cassie McGraw, at last.

He waited for Avis Jefferson to return the album to the suitcase and lift the suitcase back into the wardrobe.

The nurse shut the wardrobe and came around to face him once more.

‘Where is she?’ Barrett asked nervously.

‘In the recreation room,’ said Miss Jefferson. ‘I always leave her

there, in her wheelchair, after dinner. I like her to have some company before bedtime.’

Barrett picked up the bouquet of roses from the bed. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

They were in the corridor again, on their way to the recreation room. Miss Jefferson looked at him approvingly. ‘That’s nice of you, bringing those roses. When I first saw the notice on the board, I thought you were a distant relative or something. I sured hoped so. Because no one ever comes to see her.’

Barrett shook his head. ‘She has no one left, except a daughter in a convent.’

‘But then that postcard that you had posted on the bulletin board puzzled me, and I asked about you, and our R.N. reminded me you were a lawyer mixed up with that sexy book and the trial out in California, and that our Katie Sullivan had something to do with that book.’

‘She was the mistress of the man who wrote that book.’

‘You’re kidding! Our Katie ? That nice little old lady ? Lordy, the things you don’t know about people. It’s hard to believe that, when you see her sitting like anybody’s grandma in that wheelchair.’

Something new niggled at him. The wheelchair. He would uphold his reputation as the worryingest man. ‘Why is she in a wheelchair, Miss Jefferson ? She’s ambulatory, isn’t she ?’

‘Not no more. When I first came here a few years back, she was recovering from a broken hip, and getting therapy and using a walker. Then, right after that, she had another fall, shattered the same hip, nearly died of pneumonia after the surgery. But she’s a sturdy one. She came through. But no more walking for her. Too bad, you know, because sitting like that all the time makes you get sort of frail and wasting away.’

‘Yes, it’s pitiful’ he agreed. Even as he spoke, Barrett was considering the difficulties of transporting Cassie McGraw to Los Angeles and delivering her into the courtroom, but it could be done. Perhaps, if the price was right, Mr Holliday would loan him the services of Avis Jefferson to look after their star witness. With every step he took, every word he heard, Cassie McGraw was closer to being a real person for him. He thought about her sentenced to that wheelchair. ‘What does she do with herself all day?’ he inqured. ‘What’s she doing now - watching television ?’