Tender is the Night (40 page)

Half appreciating his feeling, Franz travelled quickly over an opinion:

“It was neuro-syphilis. All the Wassermanns we took won't tell me differently. The spinal fluid——”

“Never mind,” said Dick. “Oh, God, never mind! If she cared enough about her secret to take it away with her, let it go at that.”

“You better lay off for a day.”

“Don't worry, I'm going to.”

Franz had his wedge; looking up from the telegram that he was writing to the woman's brother he inquired: “Or do you want to take a little trip?”

“Not now.”

“I don't mean a vacation. There's a case in Lausanne. I've been on the phone with a Chilian all morning——”

“She was so damn brave,” said Dick. “And it took her so long.” Franz shook his head sympathetically and Dick got himself together. “Excuse me for interrupting you.”

“This is just a change—the situation is a father's problem with his son—the father can't get the son up here. He wants somebody to come down there.”

“What is it? Alcoholism? Homosexuality? When you say Lausanne——”

“A little of everything.”

“I'll go down. Is there any money in it?”

“Quite a lot, I'd say. Count on staying two or three days, and get the boy up here if he needs to be watched. In any case take your time, take your ease; combine business with pleasure.”

After two hours' train sleep Dick felt renewed, and he approached the interview with Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real in good spirits.

These interviews were much of a type. Often the sheer hysteria of the family representative was as interesting psychologically as the condition of the patient. This one was no exception: Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real, a handsome iron-gray
Spaniard, noble of carriage, with all the appurtenances of wealth and power, raged up and down his suite in the Hôtel des Trois Mondes and told the story of his son with no more self-control than a drunken woman.

“I am at the end of my invention. My son is corrupt. He was corrupt at Harrow, he was corrupt at King's College, Cambridge. He's incorrigibly corrupt. Now that there is this drinking it is more and more obvious how he is, and there is continual scandal. I have tried everything—I worked out a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for a tour of Spain. Every evening Francisco had an injection of cantharides
⁵⁶
and then the two went together to a reputable bordello—for a week or so it seemed to work but the result was nothing. Finally last week in this very room, rather in that bathroom—” he pointed at it, “—I made Francisco strip to the waist and lashed him with a whip——”

Exhausted with his emotion he sat down and Dick spoke:

“That was foolish—the trip to Spain was futile also—” He struggled against an upsurging hilarity—that any reputable medical man should have lent himself to such an amateurish experiment! “—Señor, I must tell you that in these cases we can promise nothing. In the case of the drinking we can often accomplish something—with proper cooperation. The first thing is to see the boy and get enough of his confidence to find whether he has any insight into the matter.”

—The boy, with whom he sat on the terrace, was about twenty, handsome and alert.

“I'd like to know your attitude,” Dick said. “Do you feel that the situation is getting worse? And do you want to do anything about it?”

“I suppose I do,” said Francisco, “I am very unhappy.”

“Do you think it's from the drinking or from the abnormality?”

“I think the drinking is caused by the other.” He was serious for a while—suddenly an irrepressible facetiousness broke through and he laughed, saying, “It's hopeless. At King's I was known as the Queen of Chile. That trip to
Spain—all it did was to make me nauseated by the sight of a woman.”

Dick caught him up sharply.

“If you're happy in this mess, then I can't help you and I'm wasting my time.”

“No, let's talk—I despise most of the others so.” There was some manliness in the boy, perverted now into an active resistance to his father. But he had that typically roguish look in his eyes that homosexuals assume in discussing the subject.

“It's a hole-and-corner business at best,” Dick told him. “You'll spend your life on it, and its consequences, and you won't have time or energy for any other decent or social act. If you want to face the world you'll have to begin by controlling your sensuality—and, first of all, the drinking that provokes it——”

He talked automatically, having abandoned the case ten minutes before. They talked pleasantly through another hour about the boy's home in Chile and about his ambitions. It was as close as Dick had ever come to comprehending such a character from any but the pathological angle—he gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco to perpetrate his outrages, and, for Dick, charm always had an independent existence, whether it was the mad gallantry of the wretch who had died in the clinic this morning, or the courageous grace which this lost young man brought to a drab old story. Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away—realizing that the totality of a life may be different in quality from its segments, and also that life during the forties seemed capable of being observed only in segments. His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war's ending—in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself—there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element
of loneliness involved—so easy to be loved—so hard to love.

As he sat on the veranda with young Francisco, a ghost of the past swam into his ken. A tall, singularly swaying male detached himself from the shrubbery and approached Dick and Francisco with feeble resolution. For a moment he formed such an apologetic part of the vibrant landscape that Dick scarcely remarked him—then Dick was on his feet, shaking hands with an abstracted air, thinking, “My God, I've stirred up a nest!” and trying to collect the man's name.

“This is Doctor Diver, isn't it?”

“Well, well—Mr. Dumphry, isn't it?”

“Royal Dumphry. I had the pleasure of having dinner one night in that lovely garden of yours.”

“Of course.” Trying to dampen Mr. Dumphry's enthusiasm, Dick went into impersonal chronology. “It was in nineteen—twenty four—or twenty-five——”

He had remained standing, but Royal Dumphry, shy as he had seemed at first, was no laggard with his pick and spade; he spoke to Francisco in a flip, intimate manner, but the latter, ashamed of him, joined Dick in trying to freeze him away.

“Doctor Diver—one thing I want to say before you go. I've never forgotten that evening in your garden—how nice you and your wife were. To me it's one of the finest memories in my life, one of the happiest ones. I've always thought of it as the most civilized gathering of people that I have ever known.”

Dick continued a crab-like retreat toward the nearest door of the hotel.

“I'm glad you remembered it so pleasantly. Now I've got to see——”

“I understand,” Royal Dumphry pursued sympathetically. “I hear he's dying.”

“Who's dying?”

“Perhaps I shouldn't have said that—but we have the same physician.”

Dick paused, regarding him in astonishment. “Who're you talking about?”

“Why, your wife's father—perhaps I——”

“My
what?
”

“I suppose—you mean I'm the first person——”

“You mean my wife's father is here, in Lausanne?”

“Why, I thought you knew—I thought that was why you were here.”

“What doctor is taking care of him?”

Dick scrawled the name in a notebook, excused himself, and hurried to a telephone booth.

It was convenient for Doctor Dangeu to see Doctor Diver at his house immediately.

Doctor Dangeu was a young Genevois; for a moment he was afraid that he was going to lose a profitable patient, but, when Dick reassured him, he divulged the fact that Mr. Warren was indeed dying.

“He is only fifty but the liver has stopped restoring itself; the precipitating factor is alcoholism.”

“Doesn't respond?”

“The man can take nothing except liquids—I give him three days, or at most, a week.”

“Does his elder daughter, Miss Warren, know his condition?”

“By his own wish no one knows except the man-servant. It was only this morning I felt I had to tell him—he took it excitedly, although he has been in a very religious and resigned mood from the beginning of his illness.”

Dick considered: “Well—” he decided slowly, “in any case I'll take care of the family angle. But I imagine they would want a consultation.”

“As you like.”

“I know I speak for them when I ask you to call in one of the best-known internal medicine men around the lake—Herbrugge, from Geneva.”

“I was thinking of Herbrugge.”

“Meanwhile I'm here for a day at least and I'll keep in touch with you.”

That evening Dick went to Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real and they talked.

“We have large estates in Chile—” said the old man. “My son could well be taking care of them. Or I can get
him in any one of a dozen enterprises in Paris—” He shook his head and paced across the windows against a spring rain so cheerful that it didn't even drive the swans to cover. “My only son! Can't you take him with you?”

The Spaniard knelt suddenly at Dick's feet.

“Can't you cure my only son? I believe in you—you can take him with you, cure him.”

“It's impossible to commit a person on such grounds. I wouldn't if I could.”

The Spaniard got up from his knees.

“I have been hasty—I have been driven——”

Descending to the lobby Dick met Doctor Dangeu in the elevator.

“I was about to call your room,” the latter said. “Can we speak out on the terrace?”

“Is Mr. Warren dead?” Dick demanded.

“He is the same—the consultation is in the morning. Meanwhile he wants to see his daughter—your wife—with the greatest fervor. It seems there was some quarrel——”

“I know all about that.”

The doctors looked at each other, thinking.

“Why don't you talk to him before you make up your mind?” Dangeu suggested. “His death will be graceful—merely a weakening and sinking.”

With an effort Dick consented.

“All right.”

The suite in which Devereux Warren was gracefully weakening and sinking was of the same size as that of the Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real—throughout this hotel there were many chambers wherein rich ruins, fugitives from justice, claimants to the thrones of mediatized principalities, lived on the derivatives of opium or barbitol listening eternally as to an inescapable radio, to the coarse melodies of old sins. This corner of Europe does not so much draw people as accept them without inconvenient questions. Routes cross here—people bound for private sanitariums or tuberculosis resorts in the mountains, people who are no longer persona grata in France or Italy.

The suite was darkened. A nun with a holy face was
nursing the man whose emaciated fingers stirred a rosary on the white sheet. He was still handsome and his voice summoned up a thick burr of individuality as he spoke to Dick, after Dangeu had left them together.

“We get a lot of understanding at the end of life. Only now, Doctor Diver, do I realize what it was all about.”

Dick waited.

“I've been a bad man. You must know how little right I have to see Nicole again, yet a Bigger Man than either of us says to forgive and to pity.” The rosary slipped from his weak hands and slid off the smooth bed covers. Dick picked it up for him. “If I could see Nicole for ten minutes I would go happy out of the world.”

“It's not a decision I can make for myself,” said Dick. “Nicole is not strong.” He made his decision but pretended to hesitate. “I can put it up to my professional associate.”

“What your associate says goes with me—very well, Doctor. Let me tell you my debt to you is so large——”

Dick stood up quickly.

“I'll let you know the result through Doctor Dangeu.”

In his room he called the clinic on the Zugersee. After a long time Kaethe answered from her own house.

“I want to get in touch with Franz.”

“Franz is up on the mountain. I'm going up myself—is it something I can tell him, Dick?”

“It's about Nicole—her father is dying here in Lausanne. Tell Franz that, to show him it's important; and ask him to phone me from up there.”

“I will.”

“Tell him I'll be in my room here at the hotel from three to five, and again from seven to eight, and after that to page me in the dining-room.”

In plotting these hours he forgot to add that Nicole was not to be told; when he remembered it he was talking into a dead telephone. Certainly Kaethe should realize.

…Kaethe had no exact intention of telling Nicole about the call when she rode up the deserted hill of mountain wild flowers and secret winds, where the patients were taken to ski in winter and to climb in spring. Getting off the train she
saw Nicole shepherding the children through some organized romp. Approaching, she drew her arm gently along Nicole's shoulder, saying: “You are clever with children—you must teach them more about swimming in the summer.”

In the play they had grown hot, and Nicole's reflex in drawing away from Kaethe's arm was automatic to the point of rudeness. Kaethe's hand fell awkwardly into space, and then she too reacted, verbally, and deplorably.