Here I Stay (29 page)

She had not been able to look at him at first. Now she could face him, for his mocking voice and half-smile contradicted the declaration whose truth he had just confirmed. "That depends on you," she said
uncertainly.

"Me? I'm not going to do anything. You're safe from my lecherous advances, if that's what is worrying you."

"I'm not worried."

It might have been taken the wrong way, but she knew Martin would understand. "Thanks," he said soberly. "Andrea, what I said last night doesn't really concern you. It's my problem. All you have to do—if you can—is forget I said it. If I had any dignity I'd get the hell out of here, but I'm not going to do that unless you tell me to go. I want to stay."

"Because of Jim?"

"That's part of it. I care for him a great deal. Even if I didn't—care—for you, I'd want to do what I can for Jim."

Andrea sat down on the bed, her hands clasped. "I want you to stay."

He understood that too—the promise, and the limitations. Eyes shuttered, he watched her without speaking until she could go on. "I want you to stay as a friend. I didn't fully realize until last night how much I depend on you. It's a little late to say thank you, but it's never been easy for me to say thanks, or ask help from other people."

"You didn't ask for it, it was thrust upon you. What's bothering you, Andrea?"

"It's so unfair," she burst out. "I take so much from you and I can't give you anything in return—"

Martin's laughter was free and uninhibited. "You've been wallowing in romantic novels, dear. I thought you were too intelligent to believe that tripe. 'The pale rose of friendship does not satisfy a heart yearning for the crimson rose of love.' Friendship is rarer than love, Andrea. Coming from you, it means a great deal."

"Then it's all right?" she asked hopefully.

"Yes, you poor little thing, it's all right. Just leave it to Uncle Martin."

He was, said the internist, in excellent health. By the end of the week he had checked out one hundred percent with everyone except the psychiatrist. Benson had agreed to see Jim three times, for diagnostic purposes. Andrea knew they owed this consideration to Martin's influence. A psychiatrist of Benson's reputation did not take new patients on such short notice.

The results of the medical examination encouraged her, but the change in Jim's behavior was the most conclusive proof of his return to normalcy. Cheerful and buoyant, affable, cooperative, he showed not the slightest sign of the moodiness that had affected him earlier. He had said that taking the pills was a mistake. Andrea believed him. The sleeping capsules were labeled, but Jim might not have read the label or recognized the name; he could have mistaken them for tranquilizers or amphetamines. His generation used drugs as panaceas for all their troubles, looking for highs, lows, increased perception, augmented sexual potency, and God knew what else. The only surprising thing was that he had not resorted to them before.

She was on pins and needles the day Jim and Martin went for the third and final visit to the psychiatrist. Not that she was afraid Benson would say Jim still had suicidal tendencies; if he said that, he was wrong. What she dreaded was Benson's interpretation of her relationship with Jim. He was bound to find something nasty and Freudian lurking in the woodshed, especially with Martin instilling his own prejudices. Martin's criticism wasn't based on Freud, but it was equally unpalatable: "Smother love, tied to his sister's apron strings..."

What she resented most was the fact that she might never know what Benson said. She had been outraged when Martin told her the psychiatrist was not going to report his findings to her. "You are not entitled to know," he said flatly. "You're not Tony's
patient, Jim is."

Jimmie will tell me, Andrea assured herself. I'll get it out of him somehow.

She had no intention of trying to pump Jim when Martin was present. They would have a casual, companionable evening, as they did every Monday. She put a bottle of wine on ice and made Jim's favorite canape—cocktail sausages stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon, ready to put under the broiler.

They were even later than usual, and by the time they arrived Andrea was talking to herself. "He knows how worried I am...Inconsiderate, thoughtless..." When the kitchen door opened, the bright smile she had fixed on her face two hours earlier started to slip. Hastily she turned to put the canapes in the oven.

They didn't say hi, how are you, sorry we're late. Instead they continued with their argument about raising the legal drinking age.

"Statistics prove you're wrong," Martin insisted. "The eighteen-to-twenty-five age group has the highest fatalities from drunk driving—"

"Statistics don't count with individuals. What that law does, it punishes me for somebody else'
crime."

Andrea swung around. "Hello, there," she said.

"Hi," Jim said, throwing his jacket on the floor. "My point, Martin, is that—"

"You're late."

"Sorry. Reba, flagged us down while we were passing the restaurant. She wants to know if we can have Christmas dinner with her."

"I can't plan that far in advance. I want to know what we'll be doing next week."

"Same as usual, I guess,"- said Jim.

Andrea abandoned subterfuge. "When's your next appointment?"

Jim looked blank. "Oh, you mean the shrink. I'm through."

"I know you're through with Dr. Benson," Andrea said tightly. "What does he want you to do next?"

"I think something's burning," Jim said.

Andrea turned with a shriek. The canapes were a sorry wreck. The bacon was charred black and most of the cheese had oozed out onto the broiler.

"Hey, that's the way I like 'em," Jim said, as she mourned over the corpses.

Martin caught Andrea's furious eye and said quickly, "Tony suggested Jim might join an encounter group. Young people his age."

"Well?" Andrea turned on Jim, hands on her hips. "Are you going to?"

"Whatever you say." Jim blew moistly on a blackened hot dog and popped it into his mouth.

"What do you want to do?"

"I thought maybe if you guys were through taking me apart you might let me go back to what I really want to do," Jim said mildly.

"And what is that?" Martin asked.

"Enjoy life" Jim said, reaching for another canape.

"Come down off your cloud," Martin snapped. "You don't really believe Jim is going to spend the rest of his life here, do you? He's not seriously handicapped; people with far worse disabilities have made careers for themselves, married, had families. I swear, Andrea, I can see the picture in your mind— you and Jim fifty years from now, spinster sister and bachelor brother, running this place and puttering around with your harmless hobbies, sterile and withered and dried up—"

"You're the rudest man I have ever known," Andrea exclaimed. "I don't know why I listen to you."

"Because you know I'm right. Jim ought to be going back to college. It's probably too late now; his application should have been in months ago."

"That is an unreasonable attitude, Martin. The time to submit applications was last fall. Jim was just out of the hospital. He needed a period of recuperation."

Martin lifted his shoulders and threw his hands out. "Why do I bother?" he asked Satan.

Andrea answered for him. "I don't know. All I want you to do is admit you were wrong about—"

"Oh, no." Martin pushed a pile of books off a chair and sat down. "I don't give a damn what Tony says, I still don't buy the accident theory. Jim meant to kill himself that night. Something made him change his mind. I don't know what it was, and he isn't about to tell me. I don't doubt, however, that he has changed. For one thing, he has lost interest in the most morbid of his obsessions—the ghost of Alice Fairfax."

"What are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about. You were the first to notice his macabre interest in the graveyard. You were right there and I was wrong, three cheers for you and another helping of raw crow for me. Come on, Andy, you must have realized it wasn't Mary Jim was interested in. It was Alice. Her room in the tower, her grave in the cemetery—"

"Alice's grave?"

"You haven't a spark of imagination, have you?" Martin asked disagreeably. "That's Alice's grave,
next to her mother's. Why else would Mary choose to lie there, instead of being properly planted in the Episcopal cemetery where her father is buried? Why would she have that epitaph carved on her tombstone unless it was a warning to posterity: Don't move my bones, this is where I want to remain. And the flower, the damask, the Rose of Castile—"

"You told me yourself it was impossible for a rose to live that long. You're making that story up."

"I didn't say 'impossible' I said 'unusual.' And I can't prove Mary planted the rose on her daughter's grave. It doesn't matter. Maybe your cousin Bertha planted it, in her youth, after she noticed the stone and felt sorry for the girl who died at seventeen. It's a romantic age—sloppy and sentimental, you would say. But I think that may be the explanation for Jim's fantasies about Alice. Today's youth hasn't lost that romanticism, they have only learned to hide it. Jim was at loose ends and his secret fantasies turned sick on him."

Andrea had come to similar conclusions. Perhaps it was Martin's air of smug certainty that prevented her from admitting it.

"I still don't understand why you're so sure Alice is buried there. It's all surmise—"

"It's fact, my dear. And Jim knew it for a fact. That book he borrowed from Reba has the details."

"What book?"

Martin looked at her pityingly. "If you'd take the time to dream a little and laugh a little and pay a little attention to what other people are thinking...But I guess it's not your fault. You've never had the time, have you?

"The book I'm talking about is the one that contains records of local cemeteries. When the author
copied the stones in the Springer graveyard in 1938, many of them were still standing. Mary's was not among them, but Alice's was intact. He copied the name and the dates. That's all there was on the stone."

"He knew all along? Why didn't he tell me?" "You'd have laughed at him," Martin said. "I would not!" Andrea jumped to her feet. "I've taken all the insults I'm going to take from you, Martin Greenspan. In case it's slipped your mind, I was right this time and you were dead wrong. Eat your crow, and I hope it chokes you!"