When the intercom buzzed he shoved the gun quickly into his pocket and looked up as the door opened and Jack came in dragging his heels, his eyes faded and his drooping pinched mouth suggesting dejection and anxiety. He kicked the door shut behind him.
“Well, what is it?”
“Let me sit down.” Jack went to the leather chair and sank into it like a fighter collapsing on a ring-corner stool after the fifteenth round. “Christ, it’s hot for this time of year.”
“What’s the matter with Carol, Jack?”
“Everything.”
“But she was getting on so well——”
“Not all that well, Pop. I didn’t see any point getting you all disturbed over it on long-distance telephones. I put a better face on it than the facts deserved.”
“I see.”
“Please don’t do the chilly number on me, Pop. I thought it was best at the time. What was the point of worrying you? You’d only have loused up your work, or quit altogether and flown back here. There wasn’t a thing you could do. They haven’t even let me see her in two weeks.”
“Then I would suggest,” Paul said through his teeth, “that we hire ourselves another psychiatrist. This man sounds as if he belongs in an institution himself.”
Jack shook his head. “No, he’s all right. We’ve had consultations with three other shrinks. They’re all pretty much agreed. One of them voted against the insulin therapy, but other than that, they’ve all subscribed to the same diagnosis and the same program of treatment. It isn’t their fault, Pop. It just hasn’t worked.”
“What are you telling me?”
“Pop, they’ve tried hypnosis, they’ve tried insulin shock twice, and it just hasn’t worked. She’s not responding. She keeps drawing farther back into that shell every day. Do you want the technical jargon? I can reel out yards of it and cut it to fit, I’ve been listening to it for weeks. Catatonia. Dementia praecox. Passive schizoid paranoia. They’ve been slinging Freudian argot around like bricks. It boils down to the fact that she had an experience she couldn’t face and she’s running away from it, inside herself.”
Jack covered his face with his hands. “God, Pop, she’s nothing but a God-damned vegetable now.”
He sat blinking across the desk at the top of Jack’s lowered head. He knew the question he had to ask; he had to force himself to ask it. “What do they want to do, then?”
Jack’s answer was a long time coming. Finally he lifted his face. His cheeks were gray; his eyes had gone opaque. “They want me to sign papers to commit her.”
It hit him in waves. His scalp shrank.
Jack said, “It’s my decision and I’ll make it, but I want your advice.”
“Is there an alternative?”
Jack spread his hands wide and waved them helplessly.
“What happens if you don’t sign the papers?”
“Nothing, I suppose. They’ll keep her in the hospital. The insurance is about to run out. When we run out of money the hospital will throw her out.” Jack’s head was swinging back and forth rhythmically—worn-out, dazed. “Pop, she can’t even feed herself.”
“And if she’s committed? What then?”
“I’ve checked. I have a policy that covers it, up to six hundred a month. Doctor Metz recommended a sanitarium out in New Jersey. They charge a little more than that but I can swing the difference. It’s not the money, Pop.”
“This commitment—is it a one-way thing?”
“Nobody can answer that. Sometimes after a few months of therapy they come out of it themselves. Sometimes they never do.”
“Then what are you asking me?”
He watched anguish change Jack’s features. “Look, I love her.”
“Yes,” very gentle.
“You don’t just throw somebody you love into an institution and turn your back. You just can’t.”
“No one seems to be asking us to turn our backs.”
“I could take her home,” Jack muttered. “I could feed her and wash her and carry her into the bathroom.”
“And how long could you last doing that?”
“I could hire a private nurse.”
“You still couldn’t live that way, Jack.”
“I know. Rosen and Metz keep saying the same thing.”
“Then we’ve got no alternative, really. Have we.”
When Jack left he took the gun out of his pocket. It was what had kept him from going to pieces. The refrain in his mind: the killers. So. Now they add this to their debts.
They’ve got no right to do this to us. To anybody. They’ve got to be stopped.
15
He took the Lexington Avenue line uptown to Sixty-eighth. Had dinner in a counter place, walked by dogleg blocks to Seventy-second and Fifth, and went into Central Park there, walking crosstown. It wasn’t fully dark yet—dusk, and a cool gray wind, leaves falling, people walking their dogs. The street lamps were lit but it was a poor light for vision.
He walked slowly as if exhausted by a long day’s hard work. This was the time of night when they came out from under their rocks to prey on tired home-bound pedestrians. All right, he thought, prey on me.
The anger in him was beyond containment. It was a chilly night and he wasn’t the only solitary pedestrian in the park with his hands rammed into his pockets. He didn’t look like an armed man. Come on. Come and get it.
Two youths: Levi’s, scraggy hair down to their shoulders, acned faces. Coming toward him with their thumbs hooked in their belts. Looking for trouble. Come get some, then.
They went right past without even glancing at him; he caught a waft of conversation: “… a bummer, man, a real down. Worst fucking movie ever made.…”
Two kids on their way home from a movie. Well, they shouldn’t dress like hoodlums; it was asking for trouble.
The twilight had gone completely, behind the high monoliths of Central Park West; the light was failing quickly. He walked along the path with a light traffic of theater-bound taxis sliding through the crosstown loop beside him. A blatant homosexual with two huge hairy dogs on leashes went past him with an arch petulant expression. Two elderly couples strolling, guarded by a leashed Doberman. Three young couples, smartly dressed, hurrying past him, obviously late for a curtain at Lincoln Center.
A cop on a scooter, his white helmet turning to indicate his interest in Pauclass="underline" every solitary pedestrian was suspect. Paul gave the cop a straight look. The scooter buzzed away.
He stopped midway across the park and sat down on a bench and watched people walk by until it got to be wholly night-dark. In his pocket, sweat lubricated the handle of the gun in his fist. He got up and continued his walk.
Central Park West. He turned north a block and cut across on Seventy-third because you weren’t too likely to get mugged on Seventy-second, it was too crowded. Columbus Avenue. Now the dark long block to the Amsterdam-Broadway triangle.
Nothing. He crossed the square and glanced up Broadway. That was the bar where he’d listened to the beer-drinker complain about welfare-niggers. Seventy-fourth, a block from here—that was where the kid with the knife had come at him from behind. Try it again now.
Carol.… It was too much to bear.
* * *
Seventy-third and West End Avenue. He stood under the street light looking downtown toward his apartment building two blocks south. Nothing sinister between here and there. Damn. Where the hell are you?
Getting chilly.