CHAPTER EIGHT

“Your wife’s condition is wholly classical,” Dr. Palmer said, evenly and sympathetically. “It is called Doctorow’s Syndrome in our work. It is potentially very dangerous because of two things. First of these, of course, is the destruction the patient wishes to turn upon herself. Second is the patient’s total unawareness that she is ill, her denial of any delusions of self-destructive ambitions. If she can be watched at all times, the prognosis is simple. Watch her, wait until the baby is born, then know that all danger has passed. If the patient cannot be watched—and we believe these patients must be watched, not by members of the family, whom such patients can convince that they are rational, but by strong, impersonal psychiatric nurses—then we would urge that the foetus be aborted to save the patient from harm.”

The three doctors faced Walt seated in an arc. They were grave, mature, obviously intelligent men of considerable experience. Flanking Walt were his father on his right hand and Willie on his left. It was a terribly effective, terribly convincing scene. Walt began to weep. He put his face in his hands and he sobbed as though he were alone. Willie patted him softly on the back. “I’ve got to see my wife,” Walt said. He stood up, averted his face and walked out of the library to the elevator in the main hall. He ascended to the top floor. He let himself into the apartment with his key. Mayra was fully dressed and was arranging flowers in a crystal vase. She turned and grinned as he came into the room, dropped the flowers and flew across the room into his arms. She kissed him again and again and tasted his tears.

“Please, baby. Don’t get yourself sick with this. I see they convinced you. Well, that had to be. That’s the way it was set up for you. What the hell. But pay it no mind, because not only is this whole thing a fantasy, but I am going to prove it is a fantasy.”

Pillows were piled upon the two telephones in the room. The door to the bedroom was shut.

Mr. West was seated at the monitoring equipment, fiddling with the gain dial. “Something has gone wrong with the transmitters in that room,” he said to Willie. “I’m not getting anything. I can’t hear one word they’re saying.” He took off the earphones and wheeled in the swivel chair to face Willie. “What the hell is the matter with you?” he asked.

“I’m sick of this,” Willie said. “I think this has gone far enough.”

“What has gone far enough?”

“Ed. Please.”

“I ask you again, what has gone far enough?”

“What you are doing to this girl.”

“What I am doing? Are you mad? Do you mean flying doctors in here to help her or putting up with a half-crazed woman pregnant with a half-caste baby?”

“Those men aren’t doctors.”

“Dr. Garrison isn’t a doctor? Is that what you’re saying? You hired Doctor Garrison out of a half-dozen alleged doctors two years ago, and all this time you led me to believe he was a doctor.”

“Garrison is a doctor. He’s a crook or you have something on him, but he’s a doctor.”

“He’s a crook?”

“I mean those two actors who were supposed to have come here from Johns Hopkins. I can’t prove anything else, Ed, but I can prove they aren’t doctors.”

“How?”

“Do what I did. Call Johns Hopkins. They don’t have doctors named Palmer or Youngstein in any department, and in the psychiatric department no one has ever heard of Doctorow’s Syndrome.”

“I don’t understand this. Garrison arranged to bring them here. He handled everything.”

“The way he handled putting the stuff in her food to make her sick was more efficient, Ed. Or knocking her out so you could have the security men ride her up the mountain and dump her in that lift.”

“Willie, there’s been something wrong with you for a long time now. I haven’t trusted your judgment for a long time now, and this is proof that I was right. You’ve gone rotten on me, Willie. Your mind isn’t the same. You’re older than I am and I think you’re senile.”

“Okay. But nothing is going to be done to that girl any more, and you’re going to tell those two young people that you are too tired to stay on through the winter up here on this mountain and that you’re going to leave in the morning for Palm Springs and you’ll send them back to New York.”

“I am, am I?”

Willie stared at him, not answering.

“Willie, did you know that I’ve had you stacked to take the fall for Goff—just in case something like this came up? I have the gun. I have your prints on the gun. Doc Yankel is still alive. He runs a chicken farm in southern Illinois with his grandson, and he’s there to tell how you broke into the apartment, holding a gun on him to make him get you in, and that you then shot and killed Goff because of a woman. Jesus, what a scandal that would make.”

Willie couldn’t speak. He sat down weakly.

“For the past few years you’ve had the idea that because you’ve got me isolated up here you are the real boss, because you think you control the boss. Isn’t that so? Well, that hasn’t bothered me. You worked hard and you’re entitled to kid yourself if you want to. What the hell. But you never tried telling me what I was to do. You bossed flunkies and felt real good, but you never made mistakes like this before—over this nigger girl who doesn’t mean a damn to you, except you like the taste of being boss, and you thought I’d gone soft and old, and you thought you’d make a test run to see if you could move me as you wanted to. Well, I haven’t gone soft, and I’d break your back just as quick as I broke Goff’s back or Capone’s back or Warren Harding’s.” He stared at Willie with distant contempt, colder than hatred, as though he were unable to justify how Willie had ever somehow gotten into his life. Willie’s eyes filled with tears. He turned away from West as he sat in the chair and hid his face in his left hand. West said, “You’ve always been worth about what a full spittoon is worth, Willie, and we both of us know it.”

“I’m trying to kill myself, right?”

“That’s what the three doctors said.”

“Okay. Now I’ll lay it out straight. And I’ll even have exhibits like they do in court. Like you’ll have to eat my breakfast in the morning just to sort of bear out what I’m going to tell you. Then—but we mustn’t talk while we’re doing it—I’m going to show you how your daddy has this place bugged and how he’s either been listening in or recording everything we’ve said since we’ve been in this room. I got a lock on it now, so we can say what we want—but I can see you’re looking all wary like what I’m saying is proving that I’m crazy. I better start at the beginning.”

“Honey, let’s just get out of here. Let’s just pack up and go home.”

“I don’t think we can.”

“You don’t think we can?”

“No.”

“My father is holding us as sort of prisoners?”

“Yes.” She looked at him levelly. “Did your father say we could leave Monday?”

“No. As a matter of fact he—well, because of what’s happened to you—anyway, he said he’d prefer it if I set up an architectural office here, in the tennis house, and bring draftsmen and Derek and so on up here so he could be in the closest touch with the job from the very beginning.”

“I see.”

“I said okay, but now I’ve changed my mind.”

“Baby, listen. Please. Let me talk. You’re the one who has to stay loose, because as long as you’re convinced I’m sick, you can move in and out of here. He was on that mountain at about twenty to five Wednesday afternoon. You saw him last at twelve-thirty or so in Chicago, and there was plenty of time for his Learstar to take him back here and back to Chicago. But I’ll let that one go by. It can all be proved from the outside, and maybe that’s why you’ve got to stay loose. Tell him we’re leaving, and he’s got to put a lock on you. Tomorrow morning I’m going to ask you to eat my breakfast because—”

“It takes two and a half hours to fly to Chicago. I didn’t see him for six and a half hours,” Walt said dazedly.

“Oh, sure. No doubt about it.”

“But what did he say to you?”

“He said I was a sex-crazy nigger and that I had to be punished for marrying you. I had to be beaten until I bled from every orifice, then thrown off the mountain down the cliff beside the elevator shaft—’cast down,’ he called it—so I could be punished through eternity.”

“But why would he say such things, Mayra?”

“You ever see me have morning sickness?”

“No.”

“I don’t think anybody in my family ever had it. That’s for true. But tomorrow you’re going to have it.”

“Me?”

“You’re going to have it right after you eat my breakfast, then I’ll give you the antidote and you won’t have it any more unless you eat my breakfast the day after that. You know about the dogs here?”

“Yes.” He felt sad. He could never be found by his father now. His eyes had turned inward upon his grief, but his grief was being suffocated by his rage. Mayra was pulling at his lapels. “They got nine killer shepherds. All bigger than wolves. All trained to tear anything that moves into dead, bloody pieces. They’re loose all night. But I walked from this hotel to that Hammetschwand elevator and nothing bit me. And there was deep snow, but my slippers weren’t wet and my feet weren’t cold. How come?”

“How?”

“Because they doped me to make it look like I’m in psychiatric shock because your plane was missing and me being in a very delicate condition as any doctor will shortly prove, then they rode me up the trail and put me in that elevator car and stopped the car halfway up the shaft.”

“Why? Why?”

“I told you why. Because he’s crazy. And because he wants you to think I’m crazy so when they find me dead at the bottom of the mountain everybody can say poor girl, too bad.” She closed her eyes and began to sway. He held her tightly by the shoulders. “But why would all these people conspire with him to kill you?”

“Not all these people. Just Willie Tobin. Willie fixes up my morning breakfast before it comes in here. Willie brainwashes that dimwitted Dr. Garrison. Willie took me up the mountain to make sure I’d know the way if I wanted to paint up there. He’s done it all before. Your father has murdered Italian-speaking niggers before.”

“Mayra!”

“Mama’s scrapbook will be in the mail Monday morning. When I can show you that I’ll tell you all about it.”

“What’s in the scrapbook?”

“I can’t say it until you see it under your own eyes. Nobody could believe what I have to tell you unless they can look right at this scrapbook.”

“What are we going to do?”

“First, you have to believe him or me. One of us is crazy.”

“I believe you. I believe in us.”

“Then everything has to be okay. He can’t kill me if you believe he’s trying to kill me. Next, you’ve got to believe that he can keep us here as long as he wants us here. He controls all the transportation. All the cops. And he controls the telephones, so we just aren’t about to call out to your brother Dan to send in an air force and some troops.”

Walt looked ill. “But I can get out,” he said. “If you can stand to take the chance to stay up here alone with him, then I can get out and get all this finished.”

“How?”

“Business. I’ll tell him I’ve got to meet Derek in New York to line up a drafting crew. I won’t even tell him. I’ll keep it casual and just ask Willie to arrange to have the plane take me into the city.”

“Then what will you do in New York? What can you do? I mean, if you bring Dan back here with you, then he’ll just be one more prisoner.”

“Dan and I can have him committed. Maybe I couldn’t do it all alone without a big fight and without its taking a long time. But if Dan and I both sign the papers, we’re the only sons. And Dan is a United States senator. I can convince Dan—I know I can—because over the years he’s as much as said that Father isn’t right in the head. We can get it all done in twenty-four hours—the court order committing him, the psychiatrists, and we can come back here with all of it, and his whole force of security police won’t dare go against the law.”

“That’s it. That’s how we could do it.”

“But—but, I can’t. I can’t leave you here. I can’t do it, Mayra.”

She was trembling violently, so she sat down suddenly. She sat on her hands, and that held her arms rigidly at her sides, so that he could not see that she was shaking with fright. “It’s the only way,” she said, as easily as she could. “If we don’t do that, honey, we are cooked. We dead.” Her face seemed gaunt from all the morning retching as she stared up at him, and her eyes were desperate, but the steadiness of her intelligence and her courage overwhelmed all that. “Fix it up to get out of here Monday morning,” she said lightly, “and we’ll have all day tomorrow to figure out how he can’t get near me.”