AMES FOLLOWED DOWN THE long corridor of whitewashed concrete. The orderly knocked on a door and stood aside. Ames went in.
The room was low-ceilinged. An orange rug and framed watercolors tried to fight the flat white of the walls. Sunlight shone through the open barred window. The air smelled of formaldehyde.
Vanessa sat stiffly on the quilted bed, holding herself back from the light. Ames approached. She didn’t move.
He prepared a smile and then he put his arms around her. She turned her head and let him kiss her.
He sat in the chair facing the bed and held her hand. “Sunny today. Did you go walking this morning?”
He had never seen such eyes as hers had become. They had the emptiness of wells reflecting the starless night sky. He stared into them and felt the utter absence of her.
“Everyone asks how you are. Everyone misses you. Especially me. You don’t know how much I miss you.” He squeezed her hand. “Come back to me, Vanessa. Come back soon.”
She seemed to be looking beyond him, watching the sunlight as it fell slanting on the linoleum tiles. There was only silence. After a long moment he rose and walked to the door.
“She’s an extraordinary woman and right now she’s in extraordinary pain.”
Dr. Carl Sandersen’s voice possessed the quiet resonance of power. So did his office, a chilly room of gray carpet and chrome and leather. Ames noticed only one area that had warmth, the bookshelves where several volumes had been put back on their sides. “I wish you’d tell me about the pain,” Ames said. “Two forces are battling for her spirit: the normal human will to survive, and a devastating fear that there’s no longer any reason whatsoever to go on living.”
“Has she said she’s afraid? Has she actually told you that?”
The doctor’s brow wrinkled. He was a well-built man, his jet-black hair crew-cut like a soldier on active duty. “Indirectly.”
“Has she spoken to you? If she has, quite honestly I’m jealous.”
“There’s no need to be jealous. She doesn’t talk to anyone.”
“This is all my fault. If I hadn’t been so damned self-centered…”
Dr. Sandersen’s voice became kinder. “Guilt is just a way of pretending we’re in control. It hurts to admit we’re powerless.”
“But it was because of me that she tried to…”
“The predisposition was already there. It could have been anything that sent her over. Look, what she’s suffering from is awful, but it’s not rare and it’s no mystery. It’s an epidemic in this country. There are more depressives in hospitals than schizophrenics.”
“Has she gotten any better in the year she’s been here?”
Dr. Sandersen wished he could say something encouraging. “All recoveries hit plateaus. It may not look as though she’s moving ahead right now, but she is. And believe me, it’s damned hard work—so give her the benefit of your doubts. She needs them.”
Dr. Sandersen touched Vanessa’s arm. “I had a chat with your husband yesterday.”
Her gaze did not move from his face. He went on just as though she had answered.
“He’s a likable man.”
She did not agree, did not deny. The sun made dusty yellow patterns on the wall behind her, like thrown pollen.
“Would you like to tell me about your husband?” He wondered why he could never sustain a doctorly tone with her, never muster the false caring or the cool curiosity he could with the others. With her the caring and curiosity were real.
She seemed to be staring at the space cutting him off from her.
Dr. Sandersen had to remind himself that silence is simply a message in a language we do not recognize.
He thought of what she must have been in the full fury of performance, igniting the hush of the opera house with the flame of her voice. He’d had a glimmer of it. He owned her recordings. He’d seen her on television three times. She had acted out passions that most human beings only dreamt in the secrecy of their hearts. She had loved, sacrificed, betrayed, and murdered. She had done it fortissimo and in front of a million witnesses.
He couldn’t stand the thought of letting all that wither into silence.
“I have a confession to make,” he said.
He had been saving this. He sensed a flicker of interest in his direction. A shyness came into him that was almost like awe.
“I collect autographs. Perhaps, when you’re better…”
He’d been hoping the word autograph would summon up some reflex, some neural imprint that bypassed thought. But she sat catatonic and mute like a strip of movie film trapped in a broken projector.
He had seen it in patients before, the willed renunciation of consciousness, the flight from life into the seamless finality of psychosis.
Tonight, he thought, I pray for a miracle.
Sunday the third of August was Wanda Zymanowski’s fifty-sixth birthday, and she and Charley celebrated the event with a little barbecue in the backyard. It was not a large backyard, but this time of year it caught the late afternoon Bay Area sun perfectly.
“You take it easy, sweetie,” Charley called. “I’ll do the work.”
Wanda settled into a deck chair and Charley brought out steaks and salt and coarse pepper. He set the sack of charcoal and can of lighter fluid down beside the grill. He made sure the charcoal was perfectly placed and the fluid perfectly squirted. Then he struck a match, and soon the fire was going.
He came up to Wanda’s chair, smiling. “Happy birthday, sweetie.”
He handed her a package. It was a small pyramid of red-and-green striped paper, tied with a blue ribbon. The pyramid turned out to be two smaller packages, a little jeweler’s box on top of a larger wallet-sized box.
She opened the jeweler’s box first.
He had given her a locket on a gold chain. She wondered why the dickens he’d thought she’d like it. It was flea market stuff. The amethysts were probably genuine, but she wondered about all the little rubies set in something that was probably meant to look like gold.
She forced out a gasp of delight. “Oh, Charley, I love it!” She jumped up from the chair to kiss him. “It’ll go so well with—” She had to think. “It’ll be perfect with my red dress.”
“Open the other box,” Charley said.
This time Charley’s thinking had her totally buffaloed. He had given her a piece of scratch paper, ripped jagged from a lined notepad. He had had it mounted on velvet and framed under glass in beautiful gold-leafed maplewood.
There was handwriting on the paper. She had to angle the glass away from the afternoon sun to read the words.
Forgive me, Ariana.
“Charley, I don’t get it.”
Eagerness pulsed from him. “The note’s what they call an autograph letter. Vanessa Billings wrote it herself. They auction stuff like that for hundreds of dollars.”
Wanda’s heart was pushing uncomfortably at her ribs. “Charley, where did you get these?”
Charley’s glance wavered. “She left them in the dressing room the night she—you know.”
“You took these from Vanessa Billings’s dressing room?”
“You collect opera stuff. Look at that Melba postcard you have framed in the living room.”
Wanda stared at her husband. “But, Charley, they’re hers.”
“Come on, she left them behind. No one ever asked for them.”
“It’s not right, Charley.”
He was wounded now. “You don’t like them.”
“Oh, Charley, they’re the nicest presents anyone has ever given me. But we have to give them back.”
Something honked.
Ames had been staring at his typewriter for three hours. He swung around in his chair and looked out the window. Through the pines he could see the tiny red flat standing up on the mailbox. The mailman’s station wagon made a faint grunting down the road. He put on his shorts and sprinted, avoiding the puddles from yesterday’s rain. A lumpy, buff-colored envelope was lying in the mailbox on top of the New York Review of Books. Through the heavy paper he could feel ridges.
It was from the San Francisco Opera, which gave him a jolt, and it was addressed to him, not to her.
He returned to the house. He found the letter opener and poked the flap loose.
Inside was a second envelope addressed to Vanessa Billings, care of the San Francisco Opera. The return address indicated it was from a Mrs. Charles Zymanowski on Pine Street, S.F.
It was too bulky to be a fan letter.
Ames hesitated. Hell, I have her power of attorney.
He ripped Mrs. Zymanowski’s letter open.
Dr. Sandersen stared down at the note. His eyebrows knitted. “‘Forgive me, Ariana.’ Why would she have written that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who’s Ariana?”
“Vanessa studied with Ariana Kavalaris. Long ago.”
“But Kavalaris has been dead for years now. Are you telling me your wife wrote this note to a dead woman?”
“If she wrote it that night…yes, she wrote it to a dead woman.”
A pair of horn-rimmed spectacles began swaying from the doctor’s fingers.
“There was something else in the package.” Ames reached a hand into his pocket.
Dr. Sandersen stared at the ruby and amethyst locket. It was a striking little piece of jewelry.
“It belonged to Kavalaris,” Ames explained. “Vanessa used to wear it all the time. It was like a good luck charm to her. That night, for some reason, she took it off.”
The doctor was silent a moment.
“Doctor, the cassette she was playing in her dressing room—it was Kavalaris’s recording of the Verdi Requiem.”
Dr. Sandersen’s swinging spectacles came to a dead stop. “May I borrow the note and the locket?”
Dr. Sandersen stood a moment in the hallway, listening. There was no sound. He pushed the door inward and stepped into the room.
Vanessa was sitting on the bed.
“Good evening, Vanessa,” he said pleasantly.
Her gaze floated toward him.
He put the cassette player on the table, and then he placed the tape cassette beside it. Taking all the time in the world, letting her see every move and the purpose of it, he loaded the tape into the player. He pushed the start button.
The machine made a whirring sound. Then the music started.
She held her face in a calm rigidity. There was no indication of anything living or aware behind it.
Now came the entry of the first human voices, the chorus.
Something changed in her. Her gaze seemed suddenly grayer, softer, and then she blinked and he saw it was because her eyes had moistened.
The voice of Ariana Kavalaris detached itself from the chorus, like a single spark flying upward from a flame.
For six minutes Vanessa was silent, her face angled downward like a nun’s at prayer. Dr. Sandersen was reminded that hearing is any living animal’s first link with the outer world.
The music finished. Silence fell. Dr. Sandersen took the locket from his jacket and placed it on the table in front of her.
Her jaw tightened. Her knuckles were white knots. He could sense some power gathering in her, coming out against him, at long last forcing a crack in that wall of concealment she had faced toward the world.
“Vanessa.” He whipped her around to face him. “Why did you write ‘Forgive me, Ariana’?”
Her mouth hid behind pinching fingers. He yanked her hand aside, shook her with all his strength, determined to shatter the answer loose.
“Why were you wearing her locket? Why did you take it off that night? Why did you need her forgiveness?”
She looked at him and it was as though her eyes were screaming.
He heard the shriek, but for an instant he was so surprised he couldn’t tell where it had come from.
“Because I broke my promise!”
His heart was thudding, practically breaking through his ribs. “What promise, Vanessa?” Neither his eyes nor his hands nor his will let go of her. “What promise did you break? What promise?”