In the Absence of Angels (7 page)

“Want to step around and take a really good look?” Miss Baxter’s face was white again.

“Why, you — why, this is
outrageous
!” Rage did not dignify the woman’s inadequate features. “Why, I could
report
you!”

“Get out.” Miss Baxter’s immobility was more offensive than her words.

“I’ll report you for this!” Looking around for adherents, the woman met the bright, hushed stare of the clerks. Drawing her coat around her, she stalked off, her face working and mottled, the paper bag crackling convulsively in her hand.

She will, too, thought Miss Abel. She kept her glance carefully apart from Miss Baxter. The clerks, heads bent ostentatiously over their books, returned to their tallying of the day’s receipts.

With a thin, releasing sound, the five-thirty bell rang through the store. If I tell Baxter to get out quickly, she won’t, thought Miss Abel. She said nothing. After a face-saving moment, Miss Baxter opened the desk drawer slowly and took out her purse.

“My turn to close up,” said Miss Abel. “Good night.”

“ ’Night,” said Miss Baxter. She hesitated for a moment as if there were something she wanted to say, then gave a half-smile, as if the concession shamed her, and left.

Methodically Miss Abel set the desk to rights for Monday morning. Baxter had left without signing out. As she signed the chart for both of them with a grim feeling of conspiracy, she saw Mr. Eardley, the floor superintendent, a sandy-haired, middle-aged man with tiredly pleasant manners, being pulled toward her down the aisle by the gesticulating woman. They stopped in front of her.

“She isn’t here,” said the woman. “This girl will tell you, though. The idea!”

“Yes, Madam.” Mr. Eardley looked at Miss Abel, his brows raised over his glasses in weary inquiry.

Miss Abel looked at the woman. She was still babbling angrily to Mr. Eardley and her silly hat, held on by elastic, was cocked awry on her head, far beyond the angle of fashion. Even the exertions of her annoyance had not been able to endow her with individuality, but under stress the details of her person, so dependent on the commonplace, appeared disorderly, even daft.

Miss Abel looked past her at Mr. Eardley. Imperceptibly she shook her head and, raising her hand to her temple, she moved her index finger discreetly in the small circle, the immemorial gesture of derision.

As if he had caught a ball deftly thrown, Mr. Eardley nodded imperceptibly back. Turning quickly toward the woman, he burbled the smooth reassurances of his trade. He took note of her name and address in a voice which was soothing and deferential, and on a wave of practiced apologies he urged the woman inexorably toward the door.

Miss Abel walked down to the basement once more on one of the escalators which had stopped for the day, got her hat and coat and a spare umbrella from her locker and left the store. Under the jaundiced cast of the rain the faces of the people on the street looked froglike and repellent. In the subway she sat numbly in a catalepsy of fatigue, her feet squirming in her soggy, drenched shoes. She walked the long blocks from the station at a blind pace, the umbrella slanted viciously in front of her, her mind fixed on the chair at home.

At last she was there, and the dead, still air of the apartment welcomed her, inspiring a relief close to tears. Dropping off her damp clothes and soaked shoes, she put on a wrapper and mules and set a pot of water to boil. Usually when she came home she had cup after cup of dark coffee, but now the thought of its flavor, hearty and congenial, sickened her. Tea, meliorative and astringent, recalled those childhood convalescences when it had been the first sign of recovery, and half-medicine, half-food, it had settled the stomach and warmed the hands. She set a pot of tea to steep, brought the tray around in front of the chair and sat down. After a moment she kicked off the slippers with a dual thud which was like a signal to thought.

Looking back on the day, she curled her lip at the mawkish sentiments of that morning in the train, at the nascent fellowship which had seemed so plausible. The day seemed now like a labyrinth through which she had followed an infallible, an educative thread — to a monster’s door.

Everybody,
she thought, shivering. The woman in the store was “everybody.” Multiplied endlessly, she and her counterparts, varied slightly by the secondary markings of sex, education, money, flowed in and out of the stores, in and out of all the proper stations in life, not touched by the miseries of difference but indomitably chewing the caramel cud of their own self-satisfaction. Escape into the long dream of books, behind the ramparts of your special talent or into some warm coterie of your own ilk, and they could still find you out with a judgment in proportion to the degree of your difference. The Misses Baxter they would pillory at once, with the nerveless teamwork of the dull; the Misses Abel might escape their gray encroaching smutch of averageness for a while, behind some
maquillage
of compromise, only to find one day perhaps that the
maquillage
had become the spirit — that they had conquered after all.

They were even there, latent, in the rumpled letter, simple with love, still lying on her table. In the end they could push everything before them with the nod of their terrible consanguinity.

She moved deeper in the chair. Soon the boy, Max, would come, and in the desperate wrenches, the muffled clingings of love-making they would try again to build up some dark mutual core of inalienable wholeness. For there was no closeness, she thought, no camaraderie so intense, so tempting as that of the rejected for the rejected. But in the end those others would still be there to be faced; in the end they were to be faced alone. Meanwhile she sat on, shivering a little, over the steaming tea, and making a circle of her body around the hardening nugget of herself, she clasped her chill, blanched feet in her slowly warming hands.

T
HE LIGHT, GRITTY
wind of a spring morning blew in on the doctor’s shining, cleared desk, and on the tall buttonhook of a man who leaned agitatedly toward him.

“I have some kind of small animal lodged in my chest,” said the man. He coughed, a slight, hollow apologia to his ailment, and sank back in his chair.

“Animal?” said the doctor, after a pause which had the unfortunate quality of comment. His voice, however, was practiced, deft, colored only with the careful suspension of judgment.

“Probably a form of newt or toad,” answered the man, speaking with clipped distaste, as if he would disassociate himself from the idea as far as possible. His face quirked with sad foreknowledge. “Of course, you don’t believe me.”

The doctor looked at him noncommittally. Paraphrased, an old refrain of the poker table leapt erratically in his mind. “Nits” — no — “newts and gnats and one-eyed jacks,” he thought. But already the anecdote was shaping itself, trim and perfect, for display at the clinic luncheon table. “Go on,” he said.

“Why won’t any of you come right out and say what you think!” the man said angrily. Then he flushed, not hectically, the doctor noted, but with the well-bred embarrassment of the normally reserved. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“You’ve already had an examination?” The doctor was a neurologist, and most of his patients were referrals.

“My family doctor. I live up in Boston.”

“Did you tell him — er ...?” The doctor sought gingerly for a phrase.

One corner of the man’s mouth lifted, as if he had watched others in the same dilemma. “I went through the routine first. Fluoroscope, metabolism, cardiograph. Even gastroscopy.” He spoke, the doctor noted, with the regrettable glibness of the patient who has shopped around.

“And — the findings?” said the doctor, already sure of the answer.

The man leaned forward, holding the doctor’s glance with his own. A faint smile riffled his mouth. “Positive.”

“Positive!”

“Well,” said the man, “machines have to be interpreted after all, don’t they?” He attempted a shrug, but the quick eye of the doctor saw that the movement masked a slight contortion within his tweed suit, as if the man writhed away from himself but concealed it quickly, as one masks a hiccup with a cough. “A curious flutter in the cardiograph, a strange variation in the metabolism, an alien shadow under the fluoroscope.” He coughed again and put a genteel hand over his mouth, but this time the doctor saw it clearly — the slight, cringing motion.

“You see,” added the man, his eyes helpless and apologetic above the polite covering hand. “It’s alive. It
travels
.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” said the doctor, soothingly now. In his mind hung the word, ovoid and perfect as a drop of water about to fall. Obsession. A beautiful case. He thought again of the luncheon table.

“What did your doctor recommend?” he said.

“A place with more resources, like the Mayo Clinic. It was then that I told him I knew what it was, as I’ve told you. And how I acquired it.” The visitor paused. “Then, of course, he was forced to pretend he believed me.”

“Forced?” said the doctor.

“Well,” said the visitor, “actually, I think he did believe me. People tend to believe anything these days. All this mass media information gives them the habit. It takes a strong individual to disbelieve evidence.”

The doctor was confused and annoyed. Well, “What then?” he said peremptorily, ready to rise from his desk in dismissal.

Again came the fleeting bodily grimace and the quick cough. “He — er …he gave me a prescription.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows, in a gesture he was swift to retract as unprofessional.

“For heartburn, I think it was,” added his visitor demurely.

Tipping back in his chair, the doctor tapped a pencil on the edge of the desk. “Did he suggest you seek help — on another level?”

“Many have suggested it,” said the man.

“But I’m not a psychiatrist!” said the doctor irritably.

“Oh, I know that. You see, I came to you because I had the luck to hear one of your lectures at the Academy. The one on ‘Overemphasis on the Non-somatic Causes of Nervous Disorder.’ It takes a strong man to go against the tide like that. A disbeliever. And that’s what I sorely need.” The visitor shuddered, this time letting the
frisson
pass uncontrolled. “You see,” he added, thrusting his clasped hands forward on the desk, and looking ruefully at the doctor, as if he would cushion him against his next remark, “you see — I am a psychiatrist.”

The doctor sat still in his chair.

“Ah, I can’t help knowing what you are thinking,” said the man. “I would think the same. A streamlined version of the Napoleonic delusion.” He reached into his breast pocket, drew out a wallet, and fanned papers from it on the desk.

“Never mind. I believe you!” said the doctor hastily.

“Already?” said the man sadly.

Reddening, the doctor hastily looked over the collection of letters, cards of membership in professional societies, licenses, and so on — very much the same sort of thing he himself would have had to amass, had he been under the same necessity of proving his identity. Sanity, of course, was another matter. The documents were all issued to Dr. Curtis Retz at a Boston address. Stolen, possibly, but something in the man’s manner, in fact everything in it except his unfortunate hallucination, made the doctor think otherwise. Poor guy, he thought. Occupational fatigue, perhaps. But what a form! The Boston variant, possibly. “Suppose you start from the beginning,” he said benevolently.

“If you can spare the time ...”

“I have no more appointments until lunch.” And what a lunch that’ll be, the doctor thought, already cherishing the pop-eyed scene — Travis the clinic’s director (that plethoric Nestor), and young Gruenberg (all of whose cases were unique), his hairy nostrils dilated for once in a
mise-en-scène
which he did not dominate.

Holding his hands pressed formally against his chest, almost in the attitude of one of the minor placatory figures in a
Pietà,
the visitor went on. “I have the usual private practice,” he said, “and clinic affiliations. As a favor to an old friend of mine, headmaster of a boys’ school nearby, I’ve acted as guidance consultant there for some years. The school caters to boys of above average intelligence and is run along progressive lines. Nothing’s ever cropped up except run-of-the-mill adolescent problems, colored a little, perhaps, by the type of parents who tend to send their children to a school like that — people who are — well — one might say, almost tediously aware of their commitments as parents.”

The doctor grunted. He was that kind of parent himself.

“Shortly after the second term began, the head asked me to come down. He was worried over a sharp drop of morale which seemed to extend over the whole school — general inattention in classes, excited note-passing, nightly disturbances in the dorms — all pointing, he had thought at first, to the existence of some fancier than usual form of hazing, or to one of those secret societies, sometimes laughable, sometimes with overtones of the corrupt, with which all schools are familiar. Except for one thing. One after the other, a long list of boys had been sent to the infirmary by the various teachers who presided in the dining room. Each of the boys had shown a marked debility, and what the resident doctor called ‘All the stigmata of pure fright. Complete unwillingness to confide.’ Each of the boys pleaded stubbornly for his own release, and a few broke out of their own accord. The interesting thing was that each child did recover shortly after his own release, and it was only after this that another boy was seen to fall ill. No two were afflicted at the same time.”

“Check the food?” said the doctor.

“All done before I got there. According to my friend, all the trouble seemed to have started with the advent of one boy, John Hallowell, a kid of about fifteen, who had come to the school late in the term with a history of having run away from four other schools. Records at these classed him as very bright, but made oblique references to ‘personality difficulties’ which were not defined. My friend’s school, ordinarily pretty independent, had taken the boy at the insistence of old Simon Hallowell, the boy’s uncle, who is a trustee. His brother, the boy’s father, is well known for his marital exploits which have nourished the tabloids for years. The mother lives mostly in France and South America. One of these perennial dryads, apparently, with a youthfulness maintained by money and a yearly immersion in the fountains of American plastic surgery. Only time she sees the boy …Well, you can imagine. What the feature articles call a Broken Home.”