“Of course. But can’t you at least—”
“I’d rather not. Look, suppose I come up to your office. I ought to get there about noon. Wait for me, will you?”
He spent most of the morning in the computer room feeding figures to the programmers. It was easier than thinking. Jack had never been the kind who hinted at mysteries; he wasn’t playing a game. It had to be something to do with Carol — but that was all the more puzzling. Paul had phoned last night, he had kept in constant touch from Arizona, and nothing had occurred that hadn’t been predicted — Carol was responding to therapy, the doctors expected to release her within a few weeks...
He was back in his office by ten minutes to twelve. When Thelma buzzed he pounced on the intercom but she said, “It’s Mr. Kreutzer.”
Sam came loping through the door with a slothful smile beneath his moustache. “Well, how was it out there in all that sunshine?”
“Fine — fine.”
“How about lunch? Bill and I thought we’d just pop downstairs and grab a liverwurst. Join us?”
“Afraid I can’t. Jack’s coming by any minute.”
“We’ll squeeze him in, what the hell. We don’t discriminate against lawyers.”
“No, it’s family business. I’ll take a raincheck. How’s Adele?”
“Just fine. Kind of worried about you. She seems to feel we owe you an apology for that night. You were pretty upset, understandably, and I guess we shouldn’t have jumped all over you that way. Forgiven?”
“Sure, Sam. Nothing to forgive.”
“Then you won’t turn down an invitation. It’s our fifteenth, two weeks from tomorrow — that’s Friday the third. We’re having a little anniversary get-together at our place. No presents, we’re adamant about that. Just bring yourself. Right?”
“Well — yes. Thanks, Sam. I’ll be there.”
“Great, great. Write it down in your calendar so you won’t forget it.” Sam glanced at his watch and shot his cuff. “Well, I’ll toddle along. See you.” And went.
By twelve-fifteen Paul had started to fidget. He drew a heavily crosshatched doodle around the Kreutzers’ party in his appointment book; went down the hall and washed his hands; came back to the office expecting to find Jack waiting, and found it empty and sat behind the desk fooling with the revolver.
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.