CHAPTER SIX

After breakfast the next morning Mayra became about as miserably ill as if she had the worst kind of seasickness. She retched continuously and couldn’t find any position that gave her any comfort. By two o’clock she decided that the only way to pass the intelligence test would be to see if the place had a doctor, so she called Gubitz, and in ten minutes a steady, reassuringlooking man named Dr. Garrison arrived with Willie Tobin. The doctor asked Willie to wait until he had completed an examination, then he talked to Mayra in a calm, confident way, explaining that he was Mr. West’s staff physician and mentioning the various glorious hospitals at which he had been chief of staff, then he asked her questions, discovered she was pregnant, took medicine from his satchel, made her swallow it, and in no time at all she felt safe for the first time in almost six hours.

Willie was deeply concerned, and conveyed that he felt himself to be responsible for Mayra while Mr. West and Mayra’s husband were away, in that order, and seemed to be listening to Dr. Garrison’s prognosis, while his hands clenched and his feet were drawn tightly together. Mayra couldn’t piece it out why they hadn’t let Willie in on the plan. Dr. Garrison said, “What Mrs. West has been suffering is a rather pronounced form of morning sickness. Usually these things happen somewhat earlier on—she’s never had the slightest symptom of morning sickness before, she tells me—and usually the mother-to-be is well over this sort of discomfort by the end of the third month—which Mrs. West tells me is about two weeks way—but this morning’s attack was so acute that we’ll just have to wait to see if it recurs or whether, possibly, she has been afflicted with some form of food poisoning—although she tells me she had cinnamon toast and tea for lunch yesterday, and nothing for dinner last night but tea, so that doesn’t seem likely. We’ll just watch and wait for these subsequent mornings to see what happens.”

Mayra thought she knew what was happening, and when, the next morning, she was even more violently ill, and Dr. Garrison said that the best treatment would be for her to remain right in bed until the usual time for that condition was passed, she thought she ought to ask him if there was any guarantee that it would be all over by the end of the third month of pregnancy. He said, not necessarily. He said that frequently—in fact, it was amazing how frequently—expectant mothers remained in bed throughout their pregnancies and never did get over being violently ill until the day of birth. He said they’d just have to see that she had the best obtainable care and that he knew that, if required, Mr. West would fly in the best obstetrical team in the United States for the duration, and that she was not to worry.

So that afternoon she called Mama.

“Mama? Mayra.”

“Hey!”

“How’s everything?”

“We’re winning. How’re you?”

“You know. A little baby-wonky. In the morning.”

“Miserable, but standard.”

“But they got a fine doctor here, and he says if I rest it out in bed I’ll beat it.”

“Oh, you’ll beat it.”

“But I will be in bed for a while and”—Mayra took a deep breath—“I thought maybe you’d send me up in the mail the old family scrapbook and I could pass the time leafing through it and maybe filling in a couple few pages of snaps of Walt and me that I been lugging around.”

Mama dug. Mayra could tell by the change. Not a big take. Not a power hose of questions. Just “The scrapbook?” softly, no emphasis in particular, but just like she wanted to be sure they were talking about the same thing.

“Yes. The family snapshots and your diploma, and all like that.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Think maybe you could get it in the mail today? Special delivery, registered, would be the quickest, and mark like Scrapbook right on the front of the package. The best way.”

“Uh-huh. How’s Walt?”

“He’s just fine. He had to go off on a business trip, but he’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You meet his father?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Is he like they say?”

“Oh, yes. Just like you thought. But he’s away right now too.”

“That’s nice. Well, I’ll get right on out to the post office. Think you could phone me every day at about this time?”

“That would be just fine, Mama.”

“Okay then.”

“If you don’t hear from me, maybe you could call Walt here, because if I’m feeling poorly he’ll take the message and pass it on. It’s Hawk Bay number one, Herkimer County, and Information has it.”

“What if I can’t get you or Walt?”

“Then maybe I could ask you to call Walt’s brother? The senator? In Washington?”

“How do I get him?”

“Just call Information and tell her you want the number of the Senate Office Building, I guess.”

“You all right so far?” There was alarm in Mama’s voice for the first time. It was naked and off guard.

“Just that little bit of morning sickness. ‘Bye now, Mama.” Mayra hung up before Mama could say anything else, because she was sure the room was bugged. She knew what to look for and where to look because Mama had once gone out with a police captain, and the captain was an electronics man who talked about nothing else. He’d told them two dozen times that most of the rooms of the world were bugged, and he would lead them all around and show where and how and keep describing the different ways. Come to think of it, Mama had been friends with two different police captains in her time.

Mayra went over the room carefully, inch by inch, but she didn’t find anything until she started unscrewing the mouthpieces of the four telephones in the two rooms and the one in the john. Every one of them had a cadmium-nickle miniaturized transmitter packed in under the mouthpiece, and it was the kind of a gimmick that picked up whether the telephone was on or off the hook. She let them be. When Walt got home and she had figured the whole damn mess out and was ready to talk, she could handle all of them with a few pillows.

She got back in bed and turned on the radio. She noted that the sick feeling left almost the moment she took the medicine. She also noted that they were working to pin a bad pregnancy on her—like it had made her blow her wig because the first thing Willie had said to explain why she had thought she had seen and heard Mr. West, who everybody in their right mind knew was in Chicago, was that everybody also knew that those kind of hallucinations were just an everyday part of being pregnant. Now they were laying on a little mild breakfast poison. Well, she had to play. Then she heard what the radio was saying.

“… reports that the private aircraft of Edward Courance West, which was carrying Mr. West’s younger son, Walter, age thirty, and former Congressman Benito Rei, the prominent Chicago banker and great friend of American civil aviation, together with pilots A. Ehrlich and C. Anderson and Chinese steward Mat Sun, was reported missing today in a flight between San Francisco, California, and Washington, D.C.”

She stared at the radio. The doorbell began to ring hurriedly, then the door opened and Willie came into the living room, pale with fright. She watched him cross the room toward her before she was able to nail down into her consciousness what the radio had said.

“Mayra,” Willie gasped, “I have bad news. I just talked with Mr. West in Washington. Walt—”

“I know. I just heard it on the radio.”

“No, we must not panic. Mr. West was very clear about that. The fact that the plane is missing does not mean that there has been an accident. It is entirely possible that it was just forced down by some mechanical demands, and Mr. West has a country-wide search of the flight pattern being made right now by the air force and civil authorities.”

“How could it be forced down? I mean, where could it land that there wasn’t a telephone?”

“But that’s just it. Mr. West even anticipated that question by saying what reason would they have to telephone when they wouldn’t even have known anything had happened to them? The pilots would naturally figure they could radio the changed ETA when they were airborne again.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Please rest. Please let Dr. Garrison help you to rest.” He sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand. “Please try not to think about it.”

“I’ll think about it. I can’t not think about it.” She watched Dr. Garrison through the open door as he proceeded with stately pace across the living room carrying his black satchel. “But I won’t believe it.”

“That’s good. That’s fine.” Willie said.

“I won’t believe it because I know it hasn’t happened. It’s just another stunt. It’s just one more sadistic trick.” She watched Dr. Garrison slide the needle of the hypodermic syringe into the ampoule. Willie wasn’t just holding her hand to pat it, she noticed. He was holding her arm. So it was okay. Walt was safe and sound, and it was all done just to move her around a little bit more, to set her up so that nobody, not even her own precious, wonderful Walt, could believe that she was all right in the head. Going crazy is just a part of being pregnant, Mrs. West, she told herself as Dr. Garrison slid the needle into her vein.