7191 (17 page)

In summary, what we have here is a child who, at age two and a half, appears to have developed, much earlier than one usually sees it, a somnambulistic form of hysteria … she appears to be reenacting som,e earlier traumatic experience in which heat or fire is the motivating force … there are very peculiar circumstances which have come up during treatment - namely, that within somnambulistic state, both language and motor activity show a degree of maturity greater than what the child shows normally, which is a most striking and unusual thing …

The next page read:

Treatment: somnambulism is a manifestation of hysteria … hypnotherapy indicated, yet not possible because of early age of child … suggestive therapy applied with some positive results … strong authoritative suggestions during dream state - strong insistence and pressure to give up the symptom - found some response indicating child is a very susceptible somnambulist … hence, using the suggestibility of the child in order to command the traumatic experiences to go away, positive results were achieved over a period of forty-one sessions of varying durations …

The next page of the notebook was blank. Bill riffled through the rest of the pages, expecting to find nothing more and was surprised to see another entry on the last page.

We are dealing here with something of which limited knowledge and information preclude full diagnostic evaluation. Jung’s concept of archetypes … possible relation to behaviour here … possibly child is reenacting an experience which is not her own, but is in her mind, without having happened to her, lends some credence to possible Jungian interpretation … may be event not expressing child’s own experience, but something from the collective unconscious??? …

Bill turned over the black-pebbled cover and closed the notebook. The perspiration on his neck had turned to an icy chill. He sat still, emptying his mind of all thought, for thought at this moment was an enemy, challenging reason, encouraging doubt. He could almost see the German woman’s face grinning at him.

The door pushed inward. Dr Schanzer’s secretary held it open for Janice.

‘Your wife is here, Mr Templeton,’ the secretary said cheerfully, and quickly left.

‘Come join the fun,’ he said, pulling out the chair next to his. Janice looked very pretty, he thought: cool, fresh, and wearing an outfit he didn’t remember seeing before. She had obviously taken pains to please him, which was a good omen.

‘Better take off your jacket,’ he warned. ‘This place is a steam bath.’

‘I’m okay,’ she said, sitting down beside him.

‘How’s Ivy?’

‘Much better. Her temperature is down to one hundred. Dr Kaplan stopped by and changed her bandages. He doesn’t think the burns will leave a scar.’

‘Thank God,’ Bill said strongly, then asked, ‘Carole with her?’

Janice nodded. ‘They were watching Let’s Make a Deal when I left.’

‘Anyone call this morning?’

‘No,’ Janice said, knowing to whom he referred.

Bill sat down and tossed her the folder. ‘Dig in,’ he said.

‘Anything interesting?’ Janice opened the folder and started reading the first scrap of yellow paper.

‘A lot we already know; a lot I don’t understand.’

Bill rose, put on his jacket, and excused himself to get a drink of water. Walking down the long corridor, looking for a water fountain, he almost collided with a young, swarthy man emerging from a brightly lit office on the right and wondered if this might be Dr Perez. He found a men’s room hidden inside a small alcove and went in. The water felt cold and bracing against his face as he bent his head down into his cupped hands and even drank some of it. He gave Janice enough time to finish reading before returning to the conference room.

Dr Schanzer was with Janice when he arrived, the folder clutched in his hand possessively. Janice looked decidedly paler than when he had left her.

‘Forgive me for keeping you waiting, Mr Templeton.’ Dr Schanzer’s dark-brown eyes twinkled at him. He was a stocky white-haired man with powerful arms and chest. ‘I was telling Mrs Templeton here that Dr Noonis, one of our associates, might find a slot for your daughter later this week. He has five thirty on Friday afternoon open; if that’s convenient, we could set up an appointment for a family interview.’

‘I don’t know,’ Bill hedged. ‘We were planning a trip …’

‘My daughter and I will be here, Doctor,’ Janice interposed. ‘Friday will be fine.’ The statement was uttered in the same dull monotone he had heard that morning: impassive, indifferent, apathetic.

‘Fine,’ Dr Schanzer intoned. ‘Then I’ll make the appointment for you.’ He rose to leave.

‘Doctor—’ Bill’s voice stopped him. ‘Can you tell me what archetypes are?’

Bill noticed Janice’s quick, grave look through the corner of his eye. The doctor shut the door and formed a small smile on his face. He seemed almost amused by the question.

‘Jungian archetypes. The word is a contrivance of Dr Jung’s. It refers to what he called the collective unconscious. In his work with schizophrenics, he was struck by the frequent appearance of images which were remarkably similar for patients of widely varied backgrounds. The evidence suggested to him that the mind of man as well as his body bears traces of his racial past, that his longings, expectations, and terrors are rooted in the prehistory over and above his experiences as an individual.’

‘Do people in your profession subscribe to this theory?’

Dr Schanzer chuckled. ‘Let me say, Mr Templeton, that people in my profession attempt to keep an open mind at all times. Dr Jung was a brilliant man, but something of a maverick - a lot of his theories are pretty explosive, yet there is merit in a great many of them.’

‘Do you believe that people can remember things that they didn’t personally live through?’

The smile on Dr Schanzer’s face lessened somewhat.

‘I, for one, do not believe in a racial unconscious, Mr Templeton, or in memories inherited from the collective prehistory of an individual’s background.’

Thank you,’ Bill said.

*

‘Ten days without the two of you - it’s gonna be pure hell, you know that.’

They were back in Rattazzi’s, sitting, Janice thought, at the very same table. It was a few minutes before one o’clock, and the room was filled with people and noise. Everyone seemed to be shouting, Bill included.

‘I mean,’ he continued, a touch too sorrowfully, ‘you don’t even leave the hope that you might join me in a day or so.’

His face was flushed; his eyes were beginning to glaze. The straight gin was having a decided effect on him. Janice had resolved to stay sober. Since she would be alone now with Ivy and an uncertain future lay before them, a clear head was essential.

‘I don’t believe there is a hope that we can,’ Janice answered quietly. ‘Considering what’s been happening to us lately, do you?’

‘I think you’re taking this whole business too seriously.’

Janice looked at him, unbelieving.

‘What amazes me is that you don’t.’

‘Okay, I left myself wide open for that one. Let me rephrase. The health and happiness of my family are of prime concern to me. Your depression, Ivy’s problem, I take very seriously. I am trying to do something about them.’ His sentences were spaced out and slightly tipsy. ‘To you, I can only pffer love, understanding, and extreme patience. To Ivy, I offer the additional benefit of expert medical help, which she will receive. The business I do not take seriously is all the business with Hoover and archetypes, and all the crazy mumbo jumbo that’s been going on in our lives, lately…’

‘For God’s sake, Bill—’ Janice exploded. “You honestly think that what’s been happening to Ivy is nothing more than a simple illness like … like the flu? And what you read in Dr Vassar’s book - you don’t see a connection to Hoover - you consider her opinions and conclusions all a pack of mumbo jumbo?’

The waiter brought Bill’s martini.

‘Do it again,’ he mumbled and, picking up the fresh drink, quaffed half of it in one gulp. He focused bleary eyes across at Janice and continued in a low, husky voice.

‘I don’t think that a D-r in front of a person’s name necessarily makes them infallible. You know, there are a lot of dumb doctors in the world—’

‘Oh, wow! You really believe that?’

‘Yeah. And since you bring it up, let me tell you a little more about what I really believe. I am a firm believer in things as they are. Not what they seem to be, but what they are. Dig? I may not like some of those things, but I know damn well I can’t change them, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna try…’ He raised the glass and finished the drink down to the olive. ‘I believe that up is up and down is down. I believe that if I stood on this table and dived off headfirst, I’d probably break my neck. There’d be no guardian angel around to cushion my fall. I’d be taken either to a hospital or to the morgue. If I died, I would either be cremated or planted in the ground, and it would be the end of me. No harps, no wings, no pitchforks, no nothin’. Finis!’ He paused to allow the message to sink in. ‘I do not believe that I would ever find myself floating around some maternity ward, waiting to sneak into the body of some unsuspecting infant as he came popping out. I’m sure he would resent it, and I know I would be horrified..,’

Janice suddenly found herself laughing, in spite of herself.

‘No, don’t laugh!’ he cautioned, raising his voice. ‘I’m not kidding, and I’m not finished!’

The laughter departed Janice’s face as she saw the look of intense sincerity in his red-rimmed eyes.

‘I believe that hot is hot and cold is cold!’ He picked up a book of matches from the table and struck one. ‘I believe that if I hold my finger to this flame, it will burn and cause a blister!’ His finger approached the flame and remained there.

‘Bill, don’t!’ Janice put out her hand to stop him.

Bill blew out the match and held his reddening finger up to her.

‘See it getting red,’ he said with absolute seriousness. ‘It will form a blister - as it should!’

He picked up the glass of iced water with his other hand.

‘Now, if I place my finger against this frosted glass of ice, it will cool it, for ice does not burn! And no power on earth can make this ice burn my finger!’ The words were spilling out of him, compulsively, and he was shouting, attracting the stares and side glances of people around them.

‘Ice doesn’t burn! No matter how long I hold my finger to the glass, it will not burn or form a blister!’

It slowly came to Janice that what she was hearing was not a man’s drunken ramblings, but the anguished cry of a man whose sense of reality had been sorely tested and who was fighting to hold on to the last shred of sense and reason left to him.

‘Fire burns! Ice cools!’ he continued, loudly. ‘Now if that isn’t a law of Copernicus or Galileo, let’s just call it the law of fucking Templeton! Accepted? Fire burns! Ice cools! And never the twain shall produce the same effect! Accepted?’

The room had quieted noticeably. People were looking directly at them. Tommy appeared with Bill’s drink and genially asked if they cared to order.

‘Sure,’ Bill said, ‘what the hell—’

But the force and energy were gone from his voice. The earthquake had subsided. He ordered for them both, mechanically, Janice nodding in agreement to his first suggestion.

Watching Bill raise the drink unsteadily to his lips, seeking to allay his turmoil and confusion in its numbing effect, a gust of pity and dread swept through Janice. The frosted glass had been the giveaway. Ice is cold. Fire burns. The cold and frosted window had burned Ivy’s hands, not the radiator. He had seen, with his own eyes, the groping, seeking hands press against the pane of frosted glass, then pull away, reddened and scorched. ‘Fire burns! Ice cools!’ The hot, fiery radiator had been the logical culprit, not the cold, Jack-Frosted pane of glass directly above it. To a mind as well ordered and rooted in reality as his, this could be the only possible, the only acceptable explanation.

Oh, Bill, Bill! Janice’s heart reached out to him. Sweet, confused, beset darling! Her eyes, moist with tears, gazed across the Sable at the dear face, lowered over the plate of food, scooping forkfuls into his mouth, chewing, tasting, or perhaps not tasting.

Toying aimlessly with her own food, Janice felt a further pang of hopelessness. While she had resented Bill’s purposive obtuse-ness, his unwillingness to buy all the ‘mumbo jumbo,’ she had found a certain comfort in it, too. Whatever the facts were, his rigid, doubting-Thomas attitude had lent a certain balance to their lives, had brought a note of sanity to their world suddenly gone mad. It would be missing now, this levelling force, this good, solid, healthy scepticism. From now on, there would be two of them to corroborate insanity, to galvanize the atmosphere of fear and tension in their home.

Outside on the street, Bill and Janice waited for a cab. The day had turned grey again, and the air had a smell of rain in it. Bill waved his arm towards cabs as they proceeded sluggishly down the street, but the gesture was useless; the cabs were either filled or unwilling to stop. Still, he continued to wave at them, while Janice insisted that she really preferred to walk home. The food had sobered Bill somewhat, and his face held a slightly guilty, sheepish expression as he bent down to her and kissed her lips. Holding her tightly, he softly apologized for his behaviour and told her that he would phone her at nine in the morning, her time. Tears stung at Janice’s eyes as she clung to him, loving him, wanting to comfort him, wanting to tell him that she knew of his terrors and confusions, and not knowing quite how to say it.

He gave her a slip of paper with his itinerary typed on it: the times of arrival in LA and Honolulu, the name of the hotel where he was registered, and several phone numbers at which he could be reached. It also contained Harold Yates’ office and home phone numbers in the event she might need him. He begged her to call him in Honolulu at any time and for any reason.

‘And if things work out,’ he added, ‘get in touch with my secretary, and she’ll have your tickets validated in less than an hour.’

Janice nodded and told him to put a Band-Aid on his finger, which had formed a small blister. They kissed again and whispered, ‘I love you,’ to each other, standing in front of Rattazzi’s; then Bill left her and started to walk towards Madison Avenue. The tears in her eyes blurred her vision as she stood watching his tall form mingle and merge and finally get lost in the crowd.