Hamilton, Donald - Novel 02 (4 page)

 
          
The
stocky man retrieved the wallet with the cards that proclaimed him a
psychiatrist in good standing with a number of professional societies. He drew
out a folded newspaper clipping, opened it, and laid it in front of Emmett, carefully
turning it right way around. Emmett, looking down at it without touching it,
slowly filled and lighted his pipe. “Read it,” Dr. Kaufman suggested.

 
          
Emmett
found that he did not particularly want to know what was wrong with the girl he
had picked up, or allowed to pick him up, however the situation might be
construed; and that if there were something wrong with her, he did not want to
be involved with her. This, he realized, was a completely selfish reaction. He
picked up the rectangle of newsprint and frowned at it. The blurred photograph
showed a girl with a gaunt frightened face trying to shelter her thin body
between the bodies of the middle-aged, well-dressed man and woman helping her
away from a ship’s gangplank. The girl was wearing a tweed suit that looked
cheap, clumsy, and several sizes too large; and there was something wrong with
her mouth. Emmett read the column below the picture.

 
          
ANN NICHOLSON ARRIVES ON
lawson castle

 
          
New York
,
N.Y.
, March 26, AP: Still showing the strain of three years in a Nazi
concentration camp, Miss Ann Nicholson, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. R. Austen
Nicholson,
204 Poplar Ave.
,
Evanston
,
Illinois
, was met by her parents today as she stepped from the gangplank of the
ex-troop transport
Lawson
Castle
.
Reported missing when the Germans overran
France, Miss Nicholson, who had remained in Paris rather than leave her fiancé,
Georges Monteux, an officer on the staff of General Gamelin, was later learned
to have been active in the French underground. Captured by the Gestapo in the
spring of 1942, Miss Nicholson’s whereabouts were unknown until the American
advance into
Germany
discovered her a prisoner at the infamous concentration camp of
Hofstadt a week prior to VE day.

 
          
Miss
Nicholson’s father is president of Barr-Giddings Steel and Foundry Co.,
Chicago.

 
          
Emmett
looked up and saw the girl in the black dress coming down the far side of the
highway. The headlights of a passing car brought her hair and the scarlet
flowers on her dress abruptly to life, almost luminous. She waited until the
car had passed and came running across the concrete toward the lunchwagon,
silhouetted in the lights of another car approaching from the east.

 
          
“That
was about two years ago,” Dr. Kaufman said. “A little more than two years ago.
She spent over a year in a British hospital before they let her come home.”

 
          
Emmett
watched the other girl, safely across, stop to tug down her dress and then come
toward the diner with the taut short steps necessitated by the exaggerated
heels of the sandals she was wearing. She walked with her whole body. Then she
was inside, sitting down across from him. It occurred to him belatedly to
wonder what she had been doing across the road, there being a filling station
with a plainly marked restroom next door to the diner, but he did not ask.

 
          
The
counterman came to the booth with hamburgers and coffee, replacing Emmett’s
empty cup with a full one, and went back to the counter where he lit a
cigarette and stared moodily at a newspaper. The man to whom he had been
talking had left. The counterman found a pencil in a pocket of his apron,
folded the paper back on itself, and began to work the crossword puzzle.

 
          
Dr.
Kaufman said, “Excuse me. Miss Bethke, Mr. Emmett. Miss Bethke is a private
nurse.”

 
          
The
girl nodded her acceptance of the introduction, biting into a hamburger which
she held with both hands.

 
          
Dr.
Kaufman said, “You see, Mr. Emmett, her experiences left Miss Nicholson—I won’t
bother you with jargon—but it left her for a long time unable to face the
demands of ordinary society. She spent a considerable time in the hospital
after reaching this country, thinking up new symptoms with amazing ingenuity so
that she would not have to give up the security of the institutional routine.
When her parents took her home and tried, as they naively explained to me
later, to get her to take some ‘interest in life,’ she tried to kill herself.
Rather clumsily and ineffectually; Miss Bethke caught her almost in the act of
swallowing the capsules of seconal, which I have no doubt is what Miss
Nicholson intended to happen.”

 
          
The
nurse nodded her bright untidy head. “She made a noise like an elephant getting
back to bed. As if that wasn’t enough, she knocked over the bedside table.”

 
          
“She
did not want to die, you understand,” the doctor said. “She merely did not want
to have to cope with the effort of living. She wanted to return to the
hospital. I advised a quiet sanatorium, plastic surgery, dentistry, and, of
course, diet and rest. Not until she could have some confidence in her
appearance and had regained a certain amount of strength did I make an effort
to discover the roots of her insecurity feelings; and then I ran up against a
blank wall, Mr. Emmett. She has forgotten everything that happened between the
time she was taken by the Gestapo, and the time she arrived in Hofstadt, a
period of some three months.”

 
          
“Everything
except a name,” Miss Bethke said quickly.

 
          
“Yes,”
the doctor said, “of course. A name. Kissel.”

 
          
“Reinhard
Kissel,” the girl said. “Dr. Reinhard Kissel.”

 
          
Dr.
Kaufman said, “At first, of course, we thought that this Kissel had been the
cause of the traumatic shock Miss Nicholson had received while in the hands of
the Gestapo, which had caused her to withdraw as far as possible from contact
with life. Later it developed that, on the contrary, she wanted to meet this
man Kissel to reassure herself about something that had happened, to which he
had been a witness…” He bit cautiously into his hamburger, chewed and
swallowed, wiping his fingers on a paper napkin. “What she wants, in other
words, is for somebody to tell her what happened during the three months she
was with the Gestapo. This in itself will not necessarily help her to remember
the parts that her consciousness has suppressed, but it will make her feel safe
in beginning to try to remember.”

 
          
The
nurse had cleaned her plate and was redefining her mouth with dark lipstick.
She looked up. “Perhaps,” she said. “But doesn’t it depend on what Kissel says,
rather?”

 
          
The
doctor frowned. The girl pressed her lips together and then smoothed the
lipstick with the tip of her forefinger, watching the results in the mirror of
her compact. “I mean, Kissel
might
say something that wouldn’t help the patient at all, mightn’t he?”

 
          
“Please,
Miss Bethke.” After a moment, the doctor went on. “When I saw that my efforts
to establish communication with the patient—in the psychoanalytical sense, of
course; she never actually refused to talk to me—were meeting with violent
resistance and were, in fact, retarding the whole process of recovery, I
realized that I would have to be satisfied, for the time being, with a partial
cure, as a surgeon might leave a shell splinter in a man’s body if the
operation of removing it seemed too hazardous. I can say that I have been moderately
successful. For the past few months Miss Nicholson has been living at home,
driving about a little, accompanying her parents downtown occasionally, and
even doing simple errands alone. You understand, Mr. Emmett, she wants to be
cured, with reservations. She wants to be a normal person as long as no one
asks her to reveal the source of her abnormality. Today—” he glanced at his
watch, “—or, rather, yesterday, she took the plunge of attending a cocktail
party given by one of her mother’s friends. I was rather encouraged by her
willingness to undertake this ordeal. However, unfortunately or perhaps it may
prove, fortunately, a young man who had had a little too much to drink was
allowed to question her about her experiences, upsetting her so thoroughly that
she ran out of the house and drove away. Miss Bethke followed and called me
while Miss Nicholson was cashing a check. We have been keeping the patient in
sight, trying to work out some way of taking advantage of her action without
subjecting her to undue risk.”

 
          
“Taking
advantage…” Emmett murmured.

 
          
Dr.
Kaufman smiled. “We have learned that a Dr. Reinhard Kissel, recently admitted
to this country, is teaching at a small college near
Denver
. With Miss Bethke’s help, I have arranged
that the patient should learn about it—”

 
          
“It
was in
Time
magazine,” the nurse
said. “I left it where she could see it. She cut the piece out and keeps it in
her purse.”

 
          
“But
if you know that Kissel is in
Denver
…?”

 
          
The
doctor nodded. “I might have had her confronted by Dr. Kissel, true. But it was
our last resource, and I did not want to waste it. I wanted her to want to see
him, to put it clumsily. Even now, I don’t want to let her know that she is not
entirely on her own. It is a most hopeful sign that she should take the, for
her, reckless step of driving across the country; it shows that at last she has
developed a strong desire to learn the truth about herself. I don’t want to
distract her in any way.” He drained his coffee mug and returned it to the
exact center of the ring it had already left on the painted table. “On the
other hand, of course, she is my patient and I am responsible for her safety.
Which is why I’ve taken the liberty of approaching you and examining your
credentials, Mr. Emmett, and of divulging as much of Miss Nicholson’s medical
history as I have.”

 
          
He
sat back and offered his cigarettes first to the nurse, who accepted, and then
to Emmett, who refused, finally taking one himself. Emmett watched him light
the nurse’s and his own, feeling a little as if the lights of the diner had
suddenly brightened, like the lights going up in a theater after the fall of
the curtain. He had an impulse to rise and stretch his legs and walk into the
lobby for a drink of water. He was aware of the counterman in the corner,
having difficulty with his crossword puzzle; and he heard, outside, the rising
whine of a car leaving the town at well over the legal speed limit and
accelerating to still higher speeds as it swept past. The diner was alive with
the constant flicker of lights on the highway. He was back in the present
again, looking across the table at the small compact doctor, and at the nurse
with the shining untidy yellow-brown hair. He thought that it was a pity to
waste a nurse like Miss Bethke on a female patient.

 
          
The
doctor said, “I am going to take a chance on you, Mr. Emmett, that may cost me
my career. It would not look well, if anything should happen, for me to have
abandoned my patient to a stranger she picked up on the highway. On the other
hand, if either Miss Bethke or I were to force our company on her at this
point, she might very well relapse into her former attitude of resistance. It’s
a risk I do not want to take…”

 
          
Emmett
said, “Well, what do you want me to do?” He was not greatly impressed by the
sight of the doctor pretending to argue aloud a decision he had obviously
already made.

 
          
Dr.
Kaufman took a card from his wallet and wrote an address on it. Emmett read the
name he already knew: Paul Frederick Kaufman, M.D.; and the address: Estes Hotel,
Denver
.