The Second Coming (15 page)

Dr. Duk smiled, pleased with himself. He could talk Southern.

They all looked at her.

She shrugged. She didn't know which she meant or whether she meant anything.

Dr. Duk's plan: I think yall are overlooking one little thing. Both plans are excellent. But the fact remains that Allison is not quite herself yet—though she is clearly making progress, progress toward a decision to have something to do with us. My own feeling about Allison is that she knows a great deal more than she lets on. Right, Allison?

Wraing.

You see, said Dr. Duk. What she said was halfway between
right
and
wrong.
She's afraid to commit herself. My own wish is that she have a final little refresher course of treatment.

I don't think she needs any more shock treatments, said her mother. There's nothing wrong with Allison except that she's an extremely sensitive person who is more subject to tension than most people. So am I! Tension! That's the enemy. She gets wound up just like me. You know what I do? Stretch out and tell my toes to relax, then my knees—they do it!

You want to know what I think it all comes down to, said her father to the world around, looking at no one in particular. It all comes down to accepting your responsibility. Once you do that, you got it made.

Shape up or ship out, she thought. Right. I'm shipping out.

This little refresher course is my own contribution, said Dr. Duk. I'm reading a little paper on it in San Francisco. My finding is that a refresher course of six treatments in selected cases is even more effective than the usual thirty.

No buzzin cousin.
It was her voice but it sounded like a radio with a bad volume control.

They all looked at her.

She herself will tell you, said Dr. Duk, that after receiving my own modified ECT, she feels better, relates better to people and her environment, speaks freely, eats better, sleeps better.

Fried is crucified,
said the radio.

They all looked at Dr. Duk, she too.

Dr. Duk smiled down at his little Dead-Sea-scroll Marlboro. Allison is giving us her own theory of why ECT works—which is as good as any, to tell you the truth. Namely that going through the ordeal of ECT is a kind of expiation for guilt. Having expiated, one naturally feels better.

Guilt? said her mother, arching her back so suddenly that gold shivered and glinted. Guilt for what?

That is something we might well get into, said Dr. Duk. Now. How does this grab you? I wonder if you two would be interested in coming up, participating in some family sessions. Some studies have been done on the subject and are quite promising. Come to think of it, I might just mention that our Founder's Cottage here is available and you might consider that in lieu of the chalet—

Look, Doc, said her father. He was on his feet and for the first time unsmiling. It made him look queer. White showed in the smoothed-out crow's-feet. Taking off his new pink crinkly jacket, he draped it carefully over the back of the wooden chair. Now he faced them unsmiling but nodding, hands resting lightly on his hips (seeing himself, she knew, as General Patton surveying the mess at Kasserine Pass). Let's get this show on the road, Doc.

Show? said Dr. Duk, turning to
her
for translation.

She translated:
you and them but not me.

That's right, Doc. We got some business to talk over that Allison is not interested in. Could we talk in your office?

Oh, said Dr. Duk. He rose in some confusion. Okeydoke.

You know what we do at home, Doc, when we have a little problem, said her father. I call a conference, around the dining-room table, after Dinah the cook leaves. I believe in getting it all out on the table. Then we take a vote.

Then the chairman decides, said her mother.

Chairman? Again Dr. Duk asked
her.

Of the boring board.

In the confusion of ushering them into his office, Dr. Duk got crossed up between wanting to please her father, wanting to get the show on the road, wanting to rent (or sell?) the vacant Founder's Cottage, and forgot about her. Dr. Duk smelled the money, Kelso said. Your folks must have struck oil, babe. He forgot to call McGahey to come get her, forgot even to send her back to her room. They all forgot her.

Alone in the parlor, she felt good. She had been given leave, sanction, through omission. She felt like a child left at the movies and forgotten. She could see the best part again.

No sooner had the office door closed than she knew what she would do. Her father wanted to get down to business with Dr. Duk—bidness he called it—and the business had to do with her. Therefore it was her business.

It, the moment of the closing of the office door, was the beginning of her freedom. As she sat alone, it crossed her mind for the first time in her life: What if
I
make the plans for me? What then? Is there an I in me that can start something? An initiating I, an I-I. What if I had left the black maid hanging out clothes, broke off the conversation and left, would it have killed her? Would my embarrassment kill me? Perhaps not.

Why of all places, in this sour little parlor, should it have come to her, not only that she could make a plan but the plan itself? She knew what to do and how to do it. All her life she had watched people do things. She knew that Dr. Duk would be sitting behind his desk in the casemented bay. A Nikon camera fixed to a tripod stood next to him. One window, the one with the feeding station, was always cranked open in good weather. If an evening grosbeak or a goldfinch showed up, Dr. Duk could snap the camera by moving his hand only an inch or so to a remote-control device. Sometimes he kept the shutter switch in his hand. If she was talking to him and he heard a bird alight behind him, his eyes did not move from her face yet he seemed to be looking through the back of his head. A thick tree-sized pittosporum smelling of bitter bark covered window and feeding station.

Under the station was a space, a little leafy room where one could sit in comfort on a limb of pittosporum.

3

Tuesday the man came again. Again it was she who saw him before he saw her. She was in the shadow of the rock filling a Clorox jug from the tiny waterfall. The dog rumbled and his spine hairs went stiff as boar bristles.

The man was walking toward the greenhouse from the glade. His hands were in his pockets. Something in brown paper was tucked under his arm. The sunlight made a glint on a facet of his forehead and his brown hair, which had streaks on it. Was it turning gray or was it burnished and bleached by the sun? Was he gray-haired or a platinum blond? He was not good-looking. His eye sockets were too deep, his eyes too light, his mouth too grim, his skin burned too dark by the sun. Her father always smiled; he never smiled. A shadow like a German saber scar crossed one cheek. Today he was dressed differently. Instead of golf clothes, he wore an ordinary white shirt and ordinary pants. No, not ordinary. The shirt was tailored and had a soft rolled buttoned-down collar and the pants were narrow in the cuff and at least two inches above the dirty tennis shoes. Was he dressed carelessly as her father would dress if he put on shirt and pants on Saturday morning? No, he thought about how he would dress. The way he walked reminded her of the yachtsmen who stopped in Williamsport and strolled about town: not exactly ambling and not striking out, foot coming down heel first, but toed in, left shoulder coming forward with left leg. It was either a Northern walk or a yachting walk.

Yes, that's what he was, she thought watching him through the waterfall, a Northern millionaire with his platinum-streaked hair growing carelessly-carefully under and over the soft collar, who would spend a hundred dollars for corduroy pants so they would look uncreased and too small but too small in the right way not the wrong way like her father's khakis, which made his stomach look too big, or Dr. Duk's double knits, which were too tight in the crotch.

Just as before, his head was turned slightly—was he listening for her in the greenhouse?—so that he faced her but did not see her though she was less than twenty feet away. Under the jut of his brow, his eyes were cast into deep shadow but as she watched they seemed to open and close, now shut and dark, now open and pale, like a trick picture of Jesus. Yes, it was a trick of light or of her own retina. She shut her eyes. The image of him went dark then bright with eye sockets like a skull.

There at her door he stood in the same odd and absolute stillness, the same way she had seen him standing in the glade. Ha, what to do at a greenhouse door clearly full of nothing but plants? ring a doorbell? knock on glass? Yes, because he was lifting a hand to the door.

Perhaps she had opened her mouth to say something or perhaps she had moved, but before she could do anything else and just as the man's hand touched the house, the dog charged. The man had time to turn, it seemed to her slowly, the sunlight striking a different plane of his forehead, and held out his hand palm down to the dog. Too slowly it seemed to her: was this too part of his studied Northern nonchalance? No, because even now his eyes could not or would not focus on the dog. He didn't care whether the dog bit him or not!

It was not courage, not even inattention but rather, she saw, a kind of indifference yet a curiosity with it. Would the dog attack? Would tooth enter flesh? If it did, would it matter?

The hand was held out like a piece of meat proffered by the man. It was easy to imagine him examining the wound as if it belonged to someone else.

She hollering something, the bristle-backed dog charging flat out, past all snarling, and even as he took the hand in his mouth in the same instant fetched up stiff-legged, shoulders jutting up one then the other like a reined-in horse, sliding to a sit, pushed the hand out of his mouth with his tongue and cocked a yellow tufted eyebrow around but not quite to her. Embarrassed again.

They watched as the dog settled his mouth and looked away. The man came over to the rock.

“Did he stop because of my saying or because of your not saying?” asked the girl.

“I'm not sure. Probably because of your saying. Would you give me a drink of water. I've had a long walk.”

It was sweat, she saw, that made his hair and forehead shine.

He followed her into the greenhouse. Without raising his head, he looked around, his lightish eyes moving in deep sockets. “It still smells like a greenhouse. Once I was in Cincinnati. I liked the smell of a greenhouse there so much I worked in it for six months.”

“Doing which and how and was it for consideration? How much?” she asked, eyes widening with interest. “Would you—” She stopped. Would he what?

“Work for you?” he said. “How much do you pay?”

“Never mind.” She gave him the Clorox bottle. He drank a long time.

“Thank you. Is this where you have to get your water?”

“Yes. How thirsty. It's been a long time.”

“Since what? Since seeing anybody thirsty?”

“Something—something is up front but not all the way.”

“You mean you're having difficulty remembering things and that you almost remembered something?”

“Yes, that's—”

“I had that once. In my case it was a question of not wanting to remember. In fact, I remembered something here in this spot that I hadn't thought of for years.”

“Was it for a gladness or the same old Sunday coming down?”

“No, it wasn't the same old Sunday coming down. I can't say it was a happy memory but I was glad I remembered. I feel much better. You will too. Thank you for the water.”

“You are—Are you?”

“I brought you something.”

“What?” She noticed the brown bag. “Oh, I don't need. I am fine though I was in the hospital for—it is the time I can't remember.”

“I know.”

“I was somewhat suspended above me but I am getting down to me.”

“Good.”

She was about to say something but she saw in his eyes that he had drifted away.

They stood in silence. It was not for her like a silence with another person, a silence in which something horrid takes root and grows. What if nobody says anything, what then? Sometimes she thought she had gone crazy rather than have to talk to people. Which was worse, their talk or their silences? Perhaps there was no unease with him because he managed to be both there and not there as one required. Is it possible to stand next to a stranger at a bus stop and know that he is a friend? Was he someone she had known well and forgotten?

“Are you—?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you my—?”

“Am I your what?”

For a moment she wondered if she had considered saying something crazy like “Are you my lover?” Or “Are you my father?”

She sighed. “You said the bag.”

“What? Oh yes. I brought this for you.” He gave her the bag.

She opened it. “Avocados? I think. And—what? A little square can of—” She read: “—Plagniol.”

He watched her.

“What a consideration! But more than a consideration. The communication is climbing to the exchange level and above. And the Plagna is not bologna.”

Gazing at her, he almost smiled. In her odd words he seemed to hear echoes of other voices in other years. One hundred years ago Judge Kemp might have said on this very spot: “How considerate of you!” with the same exclamatory lilt. But there was another voice, something new and not quite formed. Did she mean that his consideration (being considerate) was more than just a consideration (a small amount), more than exchange (market value of the Plagniol), which was after all baloney?

“I think you will like that olive oil. It is very good. Some friends brought the avocados from California. They're the best kind, not hard and green, but a little soft and brown. They're very good for you. You're too thin. Fill a half with olive oil.”

The avocados were as big as coconuts. “I'll plant the pits in the greenhouse,” she said. “No tricks with toothpicks.”