For Love of Audrey Rose (3 page)

“Shut that damn thing off,” growled the physician.

The nurse left.

“Look, Mr. Templeton,” the physician said, licking his lips, “the court—er, ordered the test, legally. There is a mechanism of law that works through the judge and jury and the court officers. The hospital only acted as a tool of that legal apparatus.”

Bill realized the doctor was trying to exonerate the hospital.

“It was my idea,” he moaned. “I fed it to Velie. I helped him come up with it. Oh, my God…”

The nurse came back. Now the silence was complete. She had closed the doors and the air was still, smelling faintly of clean linens and antiseptic.

“I don’t like the way he’s responding,” she whispered.

“Some clown gave him fifteen cc’s. His system’s all junked up.”

“Is there somebody he could talk to?”

“Just the psychologist. Lipscomb. I sure wouldn’t bring him in here.”

Bill heard their words, discussing him as though he were not there. The words did not reach down into his brain. Nothing reached down. Several sheets of steel separated his brain from his body, or at least it felt that way. There were no connections anymore. The body parts had retreated as though to survive on their own as best they could. Brain in one place. Feelings in another. Eyesight registering. And grief. Grief and guilt, like a whole universe, radiated through him, flowed like electricity along every nerve fiber, obliterating each and every memory, each and every hope.

“I… meant…to save…to save…her….”

“You did everything you could, Mr. Templeton,” the physician said, squeezing Bill’s shoulder.

The physician conferred with the nurse, and then was gone. After a few minutes, the nurse left for other patients. Bill staggered to the closet, found his clothes, and dressed. Wobbly, he peered out into the corridor. When the desk nurse answered an emergency light, he walked, reeling, down the receding floor to the elevator, then heard steps, turned, and ran stumbling down the stairway.

Tears flowing from his eyes, he ran across the icy parking lot, clutching his thin coat around his chest. Overhead a dim break showed pale gray between the night clouds.

Suddenly he came upon the Darien Central Hotel. He recoiled. Had he escaped from the hospital to be with Janice? Or had he escaped to avoid seeing her later? Bill ducked into an alley. His shoes filled with icy slush, his socks were soaked, and he wandered among the garbage cans and parked buses of the Greyhound Bus depot.

Inside, people milled about the terminal, staring at him. Surely they knew that he had killed his own daughter. He was a figure of ridicule, pathetic and morbid, a creature of the hospital, morally deformed, who had concocted a wild scheme.

In the distance, the tall, dark silhouette of the hospital loomed. A few lurid yellow lights gleamed in long rows at the top floor. Bill wondered if that was where they stored the bodies.

His reflection in the dirty window looked abnormal. He looked like a murderer.

Behind his reflection, he saw a small, humpbacked clerk turn on a light. On the wall were arrival and departure schedules. Bill whirled around, saw two elderly women staring at him, and then he went quickly inside.

The two elderly women still looked at him through the window. They were certainly discussing him.

“May I help you?” said the clerk.

Startled, Bill turned. The clerk was a round-faced woman, her eyes squinty, with freckles over a tiny nose.

“You want to buy a ticket?”

“Yes—a ticket.”

“Where to?”

“What’s the next bus?”

“Southbound,” the clerk said. “Interstate to Baltimore.”

“When?”

“Should leave in an hour and thirty-five minutes. Depending on the roads.”

“I’ll take it.”

“One way?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty-five fifty, please.”

“Will you take a check?”

“Sorry. Not allowed to.”

“Credit card?”

“What kind?”

Bill showed her. The clerk frowned but retrieved a banged-up roller from under the shelf and filled out the credit card slips. Bill signed.

“No baggage?”

Bill shook his head. “I’ll wait outside by the buses.”

“It’s your frostbite.”

Outside, several giant buses stood in the blue shadows under a corrugated roof. Beyond the alleys and telephone poles, the west wing of the hospital rose high, cream colored, its windows reflecting the pale blankness of the snow.

Bill watched several cars pull up to the hospital parking lot by the wide revolving doors. A van without a rear window drove around to the back. A choking gasp coughed out of his lungs.

A bus driver looked up from a clipboard at Bill. “You okay, mister?”

“Which is the bus to Baltimore?”

“You’re leaning against it.”

“Mind if I get in?”

“No, go ahead. But we don’t leave till three.”

Bill stepped up into the cold bus, walked to the rear seat, and huddled for warmth. He saw the humpbacked clerk making conversation with the driver. Another light went on inside the station. Bill shivered and could not stop shivering. All he knew was that he had to get away from Darien.

At 2:59 the driver stepped in, turned on the engine, and then the passengers, dressed in heavy overcoats, got in. The baggage compartment slammed shut like a coffin lid and the bus drove away. Darien slid by on both sides, wet roads and dirty stores, cars smeared with heavy, muddy slush underneath, a general air of downtown poverty. The only modern edifice was the hospital.

Bill started to cry. When he stopped, they were rolling onto the broad Interstate, past flat white fields, in a thick, gentle snowstorm.

Six seats in front, a mother bounced a small blond girl on her knee, drew pictures on the frosted windows, and sang softly.

“This is the way to Grandmother’s house, Grandmother’s house,” the mother sang. “This is the way to Grandmother’s house, so early in the morning.”

It was a melody Bill had sung to Ivy. Ivy had loved the snow. Her blond hair and fair complexion had been a throwback to Scandinavian ancestors Bill had never known. She had learned to ice skate almost before she could walk. She was happiest when the fat white snowflakes came down like a blanket, obscuring everything but the trees.

“This is the way to Grandfather’s house, Grandfather’s house. This is the way to Grandfather’s house, so early in the evening.”

Bill covered his ears with his hands.

“Please stop!” he whispered hoarsely.

Then it was silent. The road hummed gruffly under the wheels. Bill realized that the passengers were staring at him.

“Why did that man say stop?” said a little girl’s voice.

“Shhhhhh,” her mother cautioned.

The bus detoured into a small town, with the familiar series of dismal streets, an occasional pedestrian wrapped in a winter coat. But here the streets were slick with ice, and icicles hung down from garages and telephone wires.

Bill stared at his hands. They were shaking like leaves in a storm. There was no feeling in them.

I am a murderer, he thought.

Deep down, he knew why he had supported the idea of the test. It had nothing to do with Ivy’s well-being. He wanted to crush Hoover. Torn to pieces by the strain of the trial, Bill had wanted to make sure that Hoover was destroyed. That was the real purpose of the test.

Bill’s hands rubbed, gouged at his eyes as though to eradicate the images of Ivy, beating at the mirrored glass. He moaned. This time the bus driver turned around.

“You feel okay, back there?”

Bill did not answer.

“We don’t allow drinking on here.”

Two hours passed. Bill dozed. Awoke. Dozed again. He had a dream. In the dream he was sitting on the witness stand, explaining to Janice why he had left the hospital. Suddenly, Gupta Pradesh rose, dressed in a fiery red swirling cloth, and held in his arms the body of dead Ivy. Gupta Pradesh reached down, touched her leg, and then contemptuously threw gray ash into Bill’s face.

“Ahhh—” Bill jerked awake.

As soon as he opened his eyes, the dream vanished. All that was left was a sensation of having wanted to explain things to Janice. His mind violently obliterated the dream.

Outside, the snow was streaked and dotted with patches of dark gray ice. Bare trees hugged the hills and hollows. Farms spread out, cold and isolated. Then there were electric transformers, auto garages, and a series of brick warehouses. The density of cars and people increased. After two stops, Bill recognized the Hudson River, troubled and turbulent, deep gray and rolling swiftly under the brown and white hills.

“We’ll be in New York in about fifteen minutes,” the bus driver called through a static-ridden microphone. “Stopover for breakfast, thirty-five minutes.”

Bill watched the tall buildings, the forbidding gray canyons, slush, taxi cabs, early morning pedestrians, the violent rhythm of the great city awakening around him. He became frightened, vulnerable.

At the bus terminal, twenty more passengers tried to get on but were told to wait for thirty-five minutes. The driver checked the passengers coming off, making sure they still had their tickets. Bill followed them out, stepped on an escalator, found a grill in the main hall, ate quickly without tasting, then wandered out through the main doors.

A smell of vomit reached him, mingled with roasted chestnuts and salt pretzels heated on a grill. Hundreds of people strolled in through the wide doors. New York always had a stony, murderous quality, and this time it had almost a physical taste.

Bill was lost. After walking several blocks, oblivious of the taxis which missed him by inches, the drivers hurling epithets, he found himself in Hell’s Kitchen. Even in the cold, there were crates of fruit slanted by the doors to attract buyers. Cold eyes watched him go by, suspicious eyes sizing him up.

Motion was the only cure for what Bill felt. He walked a mile uptown, a second mile backtracking, and lost any sense of direction. It was approaching the noon hour. Suddenly, he had an abnormal, almost infinite desire for alcohol.

Inside a pink, smoky bar full of laborers and Hispanics, Bill peeled off the last of his five-dollar bills. All that was left were four singles. Dark eyes scrutinized him, the expensive suit gone dirty with mud and slush, the handsome face now drawn in to resemble some kind of fleshy death’shead. Bill plastered down his hair with a shaking hand.

“Double whiskey,” he said.

Bill sat at the wet, stained bar. The bartender brought him a bottle of whiskey and a glass. Bill watched the liquid pour into the glass. He lifted the glass to his lips. I wish to die, was his thought as the burning liquid traveled quickly down to his stomach, etching its way into his body, promising deliverance.

He ordered a second drink.

His hands stopped trembling. Dream images of snow-driven landscapes occurred to him. In his reverie, he looked out of a dirty bus window and saw distant farms wheeling past in great perspectival arcs. Then he also saw, on the horizon, the clearly visible, long, dark-roofed shape of the hospital in Darien. He drank.

Then he saw Ivy behind the window glass, beating her fists at the mirror, frightened.

Bill lowered his head onto his arms and wept.

No one paid him any attention.

After half an hour, he walked out into the cold, bitter wind howling up from the Battery. His legs were numb, though whether it was from the whiskey or the cold, he no longer knew. New York roared around him in an angry maelstrom of murderous voices, dark accusations.

In horror, he saw Des Artistes loom in front of him.

By some innate homing instinct, he had walked back through Central Park, past the lakes, and had drifted over to Sixty-seventh Street.

Before he could retreat, Mario, the doorman, spotted him.

“Mr. Templeton…Wait…”

Bill ran back through the park, sweating, then cut south and east and finally ended up at the derelict warehouses among the concrete piers of the East River. Somehow the day had passed and it was night again. Several bums sat in the shadows of a bridge, cooking beans, and he wandered into their circle to keep out of the cold wind.

In that darkness, the smell of beans and grease filled the space that also glistened with tar leaking down from the bridge. Trucks rumbled overhead, gears switching, carrying tonnage out to the west or bringing foodstuffs into the city markets.

“Warmer by the fire than it is over there,” said a thin, coughing man with a greasy gray coat and an ascot stained with tar.

Bill approached the low fire, rubbing his hands. He declined sweet amber wine. They left him alone. As he looked into the fire, he felt a deathly chill spread out within his body, a chill that no fire could reach.

Outside the night, the lights of midtown gleamed; the Empire State Building rose high into the light clouds like a mirage of happier times.

One by one, the men drifted away. Bill watched them shuffle into the darkness on the roads. They were a kind of subterranean living species he had never talked with before. Now they were gone and he had no company but his thoughts.

Ivy bolted from the blue couch. She threw herself violently to the floor. Then she was running, running and screaming, down the length of the glass.

“Huh?” Bill said, startled.

A noise died in the darkness of distant stone, then there was a stealthy rustle.

“Who’s there?”

Bill quickly shoveled a burning ember onto a piece of cardboard and threw it into the darkness. There was a scamper. Then it was quiet as before. Rats, Bill thought. City rats. He listened. No sound.

“… daddydaddydaddydaddydaddydaddy
—”

Suddenly Bill’s heart pounded. He covered his ears with his hands. I’m going mad, he thought. I’ve got to think. To reason.

But the fatigue made it difficult to think. Only images came, and the images were distorted. Snowy landscapes. The Greyhound station in Darien. The cold, long hospital. And Hoover, standing, shouting through the glass. Bill rubbed his eyes until red sparks danced.

Something became horribly clear: when it counted most, Hoover had had the presence of mind to smash the glass. Bill remembered only paralysis.