I must have said the right things, somehow. She turned to go up the stairs, just as I heard the steps creak from above, where no one was standing! Then I stumbled out and into my car. I was lucky enough to find a few ounces of whisky in a bottle in the glove compartment. But the liquor didn’t help much.
I avoided Matthews’ place. I cut onto the main highway and opened the big engine all the way, not caring about cops. I wanted all the distance I could get between myself and the ghost steps of little Jimmy. Ghost? Not even that! Just steps and the weak sound of a door that didn’t open. Jimmy wasn’t even a ghost—he couldn’t be.
I had to slow down as the first laughter tore out of my throat. I swung off the road and let it rip out of me, until the pain in my side finally cut it off.
Things were better after that. And when I started the Cadillac again, I was beginning to think. By the tune I reached the outskirts of Des Moines, I had it licked.
It was hallucination, of-course. Matthews had tried to warn me that Mother was going through a form of dotage. She’d created a child for herself, going back to her youth for it. The school that wasn’t there, the crush on the teacher, the measles—all were real things she was reliving through little Jimmy. But because she was so unlike other women in keeping firmly sane about everything except this one fantasy, she’d fooled me. She’d made me think she was completely rational. When she’d explained the return of the old furniture, she’d wiped out all my doubts, which had centered on that.
She’d made me take it for granted that Jimmy was real. And she had made me expect to hear steps when her own listening had prepared me for them. I’d been cued by her own faint reactions to her imagination—I must have seen some little gesture, and followed her timing. It had been superbly real to her—and my senses had tricked me.
It wasn’t impossible. It was the secret of many of the great stage illusions, aided by my own memories of the
old house, and given life by the fact that she believed in the steps, as no stage trickster could believe.
I convinced myself of it almost completely. I had to do that. And finally I nearly dismissed the steps from my mind, and concentrated on Mother. Matthews’ words came back to me, and I nodded to myself. It was a harmless fantasy, and Mother was entitled to her pleasure. She was sane enough to care for herself, without any doubt, and physically far better than she had any right to be. With Matthews’ interest in her, there was no reason for me to worry about anything.
By the time I pulled the car into the garage, I was making plans for setting up the trucking concern again, following Mother’s advice about making myself the senior partner. It hadn’t been a wasted day, after all.
Life went on, pretty much as usual. My younger boy was back home for a while. I’d looked forward to that, but somehow the Army had broken the old bonds between us. Even when I had time, there wasn’t much we could talk about. I guess it was something of a relief when he left for some job in New York; anyhow, I was busy straightening out a brawl the older one got mixed up in. My daughter was expecting again, and her husband was showing a complete inability to cooperate with me. I didn’t have much time to think about little Jimmy. Mercifully, Liza hadn’t asked me about my trip; there was nothing to keep me from forgetting most of it.
I wrote Mother once in a while, now. Her letters grew longer, and sometimes Jimmy’s name appeared, along with quite a bit of advice on the trucking business. Most of that was useless, naturally, but she knew more than I’d suspected about the ways of business. It gave me something to write back about.
I paid a fat fee to a psychiatrist for a while, but mostly he only confirmed what I’d already reasoned out. I wasn’t interested in some of the other nonsense he tried to sell me, so I stopped going after a while.
And then I forgot the whole thing when the first tentative feeler from New Mode Roofing and Asphalt suggested a merger. I’d been planting the seed for the idea for months, but getting it set to put in my control was a
tricky problem. I finally Jiad to compromise by agreeing to move the headguilters to Akron, tearing up my roots overnight and resettling. Liza made a scene over that, and my daughter flatly refused to come. I had to agree to turn the trucking concern over to my son-in-law completely, just when it was beginning to show a profit. But the rift had been coming ever since he’d refused to fire my oldest boy from the job of driving one of the trailers.
Maybe it was just as well. The boy seemed to like it. We’d be in Akron, nobody would know about it, and he’d be better off than he was hanging around with some of the friends he’d had before. I meant to write Mother about that, since she’d suggested it once, and I suspected she’d had something to do with it. But the move took all my attention. After that, there was the problem of organizing the new firm.
I decided to see Mother, instead of writing to her. I wasn’t going to be fooled again with the same hallucination. The new psychiatrist assured me of that, and advised the trip. I had already marked off the date on my calendar for the visit next month.
It didn’t work out. Matthews called me at two o’clock in the morning with the news, after wasting two days tracing me down through acquaintances. Nobody thought of looking me up in a business directory, of course.
Mother had pneumonia and the prognosis was unfavorable.
“At her age, these things are serious,” he said. His voice wasn’t professional this time. “You’d better get here as quickly as you can. She’s been asking for you.”
“I’ll charter a plane at once,” I told him. This would raise the deuce with the voting of stock we’d scheduled, but I couldn’t stay away, obviously. I’d almost convinced myself Mother would go on for another twenty years. Now… “How’d it happen?”
“The big storm last week. She went out in it with rubbers and an umbrella to fetch little Jimmy from school! She got sopping wet. When I reached her, she already had a fever. I’ve been trying everything, but…”
I hung up, sick. Little Jimmy! For a minute, I wanted him to be real enough to strangle.
I pounded on Liza’s door and got her to charter the plane while I packed and roused out my secretary on the other phone. Liza drove me to the airport where the plane was warmed up and waiting. I turned to say good-by, but she was dragging out a second bag from the back.
“I’m going,” she announced flatly.
I started to argue, saw her expression, and gave up. A few minutes later, we took off.
Most of the rest of the family was already there, hovering around outside the newly decorated bedroom where Mother lay under an oxygen tent; huddles of the family and their children were in every other room on the second floor, staring at the closed door and discussing things in the harsh whispers people use for a scene of death.
Matthews motioned them back and came over to me at once. “No hope, I’m afraid, Andrew,” he said, and there were tears in his eyes.
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” Liza asked, her voice dropping to the hoarse whisper of the others. “Anything at all, Doctor?”
He shook his head. “I’ve already talked to the best men in the country. We’ve tried everything. Even prayer.”
From one side of the hall, Agnes sniffed loudly. Her militant atheism couldn’t be downed by anything, it seemed. It didn’t matter. There was death in the house, thick enough to smell. I had always hated the waste and futility of dying. Now it had a personal meaning, and it was worse. Behind that closed door, Mother lay dying, and nothing I could do would help.
“Can I go in?” I asked, against my wishes.