(1969) The Seven Minutes (82 page)

‘No, she hardly ever watches for long. She just likes to sit and dream and think, the way most of them do. I sometimes wonder what she’s thinking. I asked her one time, but she just smiled at me sweetly like she always does and said nothing. I sure wish I knew.’

‘Oh, she’s probably thinking of her youth and the past. That’s the only game for old folks.’

‘Maybe, but probably not,’ said Miss Jefferson. ‘Thinking much about the past would be pretty hard for her.’ They had reached the swinging doors that led into the recreation room. ‘So sad, the way

it has to happen, but Katie or Cassie or whatever you call her, she’s lost most of her memory by now.’

‘Lost her memory?’ Barrett stood stock-still, aghast. This had never occurred to him. This was the only obstacle that he had not anticipated, and it was a shock. ‘You mean - do you mean she can’t remember anything any more?’

‘She’s senile,’ Miss Jefferson said. Then, seeing the expression on Barrett’s face, she let go of the door she had pushed half open. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘It was her memory that I was counting on for the trial.’

‘Aw, that’s too bad. You mean finding her won’t help you now?’

‘Not if she can’t recall the past.’

‘That’s real bad luck. Well, I shouldn’t take any reward from you, then.’

‘No, you found her. You deserve the money. But senile ? Nobody mentioned it earlier. Yet I should have suspected it when Mr Holliday took that postcard and photograph around to every female patient today and none of them recognized either item. Cassie must have looked right at the postcard and the photograph without remembering them. Still -‘ Another related thought had come to him. ‘Miss Jefferson, tell me one thing. The postcard signed by her and sent to Los Angeles. In it she recalls and defends Jadway and The Seven Minutes, and speaks of herself as Jadway’s friend. That memory goes back almost forty years. So she did remember when she dictated her message on the card. How can you explain that ?’

‘You just don’t know about senility cases, Mr Barrett. They’re most of them like your Cassie. She’s got hardening of the arteries to the brain. It’s gradual-like, but it keeps getting more and more so. At first it makes the patient confused and she loses her sense of time. Little by little her memory fades away, until one day it’s gone and maybe she won’t even know who I am. Of course, it’s not to that point with Katie yet, but it’s getting close. There’s just one crazy thing about those senile cases when they’re in the stage she’s in. Sometimes, on certain days, they can remember what happened to them maybe forty or fifty years ago, yet not remember what they ate or who they met five minutes ago. Other times they can remember what’s just happened, but not another fact about where they were years ago or the people in their lives or anything. But most of the time their brains are like a horse’s, I heard one doctor say, meaning if a horse does something wrong and you punish him ten minutes later, he won’t know why you’re punishing him, won’t remember at all what it was he done wrong. No memory except for what’s happened this second. That’s it usually for our Katie.’

‘But the postcard, Miss Jefferson?’

‘Well, like I said, that must’ve been one of her sharp days. She has maybe an hour or two when she makes sense a couple days a month. I can pretty nearly tell you what probably happened with that postal card. When me or one of the other nurses sees she’s suddenly having one of her good alert spells, no confusion, alert and understanding everything, we take advantage of it by maybe reading to her from some newspaper or magazine that’s handy, just so she sort of should know there’s a world out there and know what’s been going on. So that postal card - When was it written?’

‘About two and a half weeks ago.’

‘So she was probably pretty alert on that day, the fogginess gone, real sharp for a short time, so then me or one of the others read to her from the front page of the newspaper, this and that, maybe a little politics, a murder, or something lively like that sexy trial. One of us probably read to her from the trial story, and it stuck in her head for an hour or two and she remembered Jadway and that book. And when whoever was reading to her stopped to go on with their other work, just then some of those volunteer helpers must have come around asking each patient if they could do anything, and one probably asked Katie. And since she had this trial on her mind until it slipped away again, she said, Yes, get me one of the picture postal cards and write down something I’ll tell you and send it for me, and address it to the home of that man with the son who was involved in that censorship case that was in the paper - and the volunteer did it and sent it off, and that’s how it happened.’

That was the way it had happened, and now Barrett understood. His hopes, like Cassie’s mind, had faded. Still, there was a mind that had a few good hours one or two days a month, and if there was that, then there was also hope.

‘How is she today?’ he asked.

‘Don’t know. Haven’t had a chance to talk to her since I came on. Let’s find out right now. I can see her from here, over there by herself in the wheelchair at the far table next to the patio door. Come on in and let me introduce you.’

Avis Jefferson wended her way through the recreation room, and Barrett stayed at her heels. Once they had passed the group around the droning color-television set and arrived at the center of the room, Barrett had his first full view of the legendary Cassie McGraw

He had been prepared, yet he knew one could never be entirely prepared. He understood that the pert and lovely gamin of the Left Bank and the 1930s was no more, just as Zelda Fitzgerald was no more, yet he had expected some recognizable relic of the heyday past. Perhaps a lovely old lady with traces still of a lost beauty and her bohemian heritage.

What he saw now was the concave shaving of what had once been a woman. An old lady, aged beyond her years, with flour-white mussed hair, dull eyes, sunken cheeks, a few sprouts of stiff gray hair on her chin, wrinkled thin neck and wrinkled blue-veined hands and swollen feet, draped all around with an oversized pale-blue bathrobe. She sat at the circular wooden table, staring not at the wax fruit centerpiece, not at the patio beyond, not at anyone or

anything, not even inward.

Jadway’s mistress, the lusty, love-giving heroine of the most suppressed novel ever written.

This was Cassie McGraw.

Barrett dropped his senseless red roses on a nearby chair as Miss Jefferson brought him past the table and into Cassie McGraw’s line of vision.

‘Hi, Katie, how are you?’ Miss Jefferson asked. She tugged at Barrett. ‘Katie, look at the nice man I’ve brought to see you. This is Mr Barrett, all the way from Los Angeles, California, come here all this way to Chicago just to see you. Isn’t that nice?’

Barrett took a hesitant step forward. ‘I’m please to meet you, Miss McGraw.’

Cassie’s head came up slowly, ever so slowly, and her dim eyes gradually seemed to fix her visitor in their focus. She held her eyes on him a number of seconds, and then as her head nodded slightly, ever so slightly, her chapped lips formed into a sweet smile. The effort of the smile had been her acknowledgment of a presence, and her welcome, and then her attention was given back to an object that lay in her lap. It was a shredded ball of Kleenex. Her weak bony fingers began to play with it, shredding it further.

‘You saw her smile,’ said Miss Jefferson with the overenthusiasm of a USO hostess. “That means she’s pleased to have you here. Do sit down, Mr Barrett. You go right on and talk to her. Ask her anything you like.’

Barrett accepted the chair, drew it up closer to Cassie McGraw, and sat down. Avis Jefferson took the remaining chair across the table for herself.

‘Miss McGraw,’ said Barrett earnestly, ‘do you remember a man who was a very close friend of yours years ago, a man named J J Jadway, or Jad, as you may have called him?’

Her eyes seemed to watch his lips as he spoke, but there was no recognition or understanding in them, and her fingers continued to pick at the Kleenex tissues.

She said nothing.

‘Perhaps, Miss McGraw, you remember a book that Jadway wrote. You helped get it published in Paris. It as called The Seven Minutes. Do you remember?’

She was attentive to his voice, and her brow contracted. She appeared interested but mildly confused.

‘Miss McGraw, do the names Christian Leroux and Sean O’Flanagan mean anything to you?’

She did not answer, but she seemed to be chewing something in her mouth.

‘She’s got a loose denture,’ Miss Jefferson explained, ‘and now she’s rocking it.’ The nurse wagged a finger at Cassie McGraw. ‘Now, Katie, don’t be stubborn and play possum like that. I know you can do better. This man, he’s here to ask you to help him with

his trial over that book in Los Angeles. I seen with my own eyes that postal card you dictated a few weeks ago and signed. You were sensible enough to sign it by your own hand then, and now I think you should tell this fine man why you wrote that postal card.’

The old lady offered a sweet smile to her nurse, as if commending a singer for a virtuoso performance. But still she said nothing.

‘Katie, you remember your daughter, don’t you ?’ Miss Jefferson asked.

Cassie’s eyes flickered, and the same smile remained, but so did the silence.

Avis Jefferson looked mournfully at Barrett and shrugged. T guess you’re out of luck, Mr Barrett. Like I warned you, this is most usually the way she is, this is normal for such patients. It’s no use.’

Barrett sighed. Tm afraid you’re right, Miss Jefferson. What disappoints me so is to have finally got to her and to know how much is locked up inside her about J J Jadway - oh, well, I’m sorry not only for myself but for her. Dammit, that’s life, I guess.’

He pushed back his chair to rise, and then he heard an odd sound, almost a croak, and then a thick voice said, ‘How is Mr Jadway?’

He came down hard in his chair, facing Cassie McGraw, murmuring the Lord’s name in vain, watching as her lips continued to try to form words.

‘How is Mr Jadway?’ Cassie McGraw repeated.

‘Well, he was fine, he was fine, the last I heard,’ said Barrett quickly. He glanced over his shoulder at Miss Jefferson, who was excitedly waving her hand at him as if imploring him to continue. He turned back to the old lady. ‘Mr Jadway was fine. How was he when you last saw him?’

‘He was unhappy to leave Paris,’ said Cassie McGraw thickly. ‘We were both unhappy, but he had to go home.’

‘He went home? You mean he left Paris and went home to the United States?’

‘To his family in Conn… Conn.,.’

‘Connecticut?’

‘He went back because of his father. I was with Judy in New York. I thought maybe …’ Her voice trailed off. She chewed silently, trying to remember. She shook her head slowly. ‘No. I couldn’t stay. I had to leave him. I had to.’ Her eyes blinked, and her fingers found the tissues in her lap again, and she picked at them.

Trying to contain herself, Barrett reached out and touched her thin hand, which had the texture of old parchment, as he sought to regain her attention. ‘Miss McGraw -‘

Cassie McGraw lifted her head, but the eyes had dulled.

‘What were you telling me ?’ Barrett urged. ‘Were you telling me that you and Jadway left Paris together and returned to the United States for good? That he didn’t kill himself? That he came back

here to live with his family in Connecticut and kept you in New York? And you didn’t like it, being kept or being in America or having him go back to his family again? Is that what you were trying to say ?’

Cassie McGraw’s expression was one of bewilderment. Her fingers worked at the Kleenex, but her iips did not move.

‘Cassie, Cassie,’ he implored her, ‘we were so close to it, almost there. Please try, try to remember, try to finish or at least explain what you started to say. Tell me, please, did Jadway commit suicide in Paris, or is that a lie? Did he return to live in this country healthy and well? Please remember!’

She had become fascinated by Barrett’s intentness, as if it were an offer of devotion and love, but her sweet smile was like a non sequitur.

‘Cassie - Kate - try, try,’ he pleaded. ‘Just tell me this. Was Jadway alive after he was supposed to be dead ? Is he - is he alive today?’

Her eyes had become vacant, and her mind, what was left of it, had returned to limbo.

There would be no more, he knew. The promise of lightning and thunder, and then only the silence of the senile which was like the silence of the dead, only worse.

He pushed the chair away from the table and stood up as Avis Jefferson came to her feet.

‘She was trying to tell you something,’ said the nurse, ‘but I suppose she couldn’t. It flew away. She just got lost. Or did she tell you something?’

‘Not enough, really, nothing I could count on, considering her condition.’

‘Well, I was going to suggest, maybe if you could stay around here a week or two, you just might catch her on one of those good remembering days, like when she dictated that postal card.’

Barrett smiled wanly. ‘If I were writing history, I’d stay. But I’m conducting a trial, and I’ve run out of time. The trial may end the day after tomorrow. I guess we’re just cooked.’ He looked down at the old lady. ‘She was nice. She tried. She tried very hard. She’s a fine lady. She must have been a remarkable young woman.’

He saw his wilting bouquet of red roses. He went to get them and brought them back. ‘She deserves this, at least.’

He bent, and gently he placed the bouquet in Cassie’s lap. She looked up with a flicker of surprise, then looked down, touching the rose petals, then raised her head once more, and for the first time her smile had another characteristic. It was impish.

‘Flowers,’ Cassie McGraw said. ‘Is it my birthday?’

Miss Jefferson laughed gleefully, and Barrett chuckled, and finally Cassie McGraw began picking the petals off the roses and was lost to human contact again.

Miss Jefferson was still laughing, shaking her head, as they

walked away. ‘She’s a card, that one. Did you hear her? “Is it my birthday?” she says. You see, she can remember, she can remember some things. Once a year she gets flowers on her birthday, that’s the only time, just on her birthday, and I guess that’s what flowers mean to her now, and so she thought it was her birthday.’