“My real name, yes,” Corman said.
Dr. Rosen’s face grew stoney, as if his body had suddenly turned into a slab of granite, solid, immobile, unimaginably old. “What do you want, Mr. Corman?” he asked.
Corman realized that he had no precise answer to that question. For a moment he felt stymied. “The diploma,” he said finally, nodding toward the office. “The one they found with Sarah’s things. It came from your office.”
Dr. Rosen’s gray face studied him with a concentration Corman remembered only in pictures of doomed romantic poets, driven, tormented, people caught within the throes of tragic fermentations.
“What do you want?” Dr. Rosen asked again.
“To talk about her.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to understand what happened.”
Rosen shook his head. “You will never know what happened to Sarah.” He began to close the door slowly, with a strange courtliness, as if he were doing it with regret.
Corman raised his hand to stop it. “The diploma,” he repeated. “It came from here.”
Rosen eased the door forward again. “Yes, it did,” he whispered, lowering his head somewhat, his voice growing less robust and taking on the muffled quality of a whisper.
“It still smelled of lemon oil,” Corman added. “So you must have brought it down with you that night.”
Rosen looked at him plaintively, and with an expression of such overwhelming grief that Corman realized immediately that all his darkest ruminations about Rosen were entirely wrong. “To save her,” he said.
The door stopped its forward progress as Dr. Rosen stepped back slightly, watching Corman intently, but with eyes that seemed battered into softness. “To save her,” he said quietly. “But she’s dead now, and nothing can be done about it.”
The last words came in a gentle coda, and instantly Corman understood how much the sounds of things mattered to Dr. Rosen, how much he shaped each word with the intonations of his voice, giving each one the music called for by its meaning in the context of the sentence, pure as his daughter’s indecipherable imitations, her titanic striving to be like him.
“She’s gone,” Dr. Rosen said. “Gone. So what’s the use of going into Sarah’s death?”
“I want to know what happened,” Corman said. “Over the last week or so, I feel that I’ve sort of …”
“Come to know her?” Rosen asked.
“Not exactly.”
“What then?”
“Come to know you,” Corman blurted before he could stop himself.
Rosen looked at him, amazed. “Me?”
“As a father,” Corman added. “How you tried to save her.”
Dr. Rosen’s eyes studied him thoughtfully for a few seconds before he spoke again. “After the accident, the way her mother died …” He shook his head. “It’s how arbitrary things are. Random. You have to work within that frame, don’t you?”
Corman said nothing.
“That there is absolutely no pattern to anything,” Rosen said. “None at all.”
Corman watched silently as Dr. Rosen drew in a long slow breath, then continued.
“And so, you try to intervene,” Rosen said. “Rewrite the world, you might say. You have a daughter, and you try to save her. You try to teach her everything she needs to know. You try to control her experience. That’s all I ever wanted to do for Sarah.”
She rose in Corman’s mind as he listened, the air surrounding her dense and lightless, the rain falling in long gray sheets as she stood at the window, the doll clutched to her breast.
“She lived on my terms,” Dr. Rosen went on. His eyes took on a fierce wonderment. “She was a perfect daughter.” The wonderment deepened into amazement, intense, magical, a prophet in the midst of his promised transformation. “She heard every word I said, did everything I asked.”
“Even with the baby,” Corman said.
Rosen’s face darkened. “Yes, even that.”
“You wanted to eliminate the risk.”
“All risk,” Rosen said. He looked at Corman pleadingly. “Isn’t that what every father wants to do?”
Corman saw the rain sheeting in windy blasts across the dark windows of the fifth-floor landing. She was leaning against the wall, the doll held loosely, dangling from her hand, the rain slapping mercilessly at its bare plastic legs. “Is that what broke her?” he asked. “The baby?”
Rosen shook his head. “Only the last thing. She was already slipping away.”
“Why?”
“She was never well, Mr. Corman,” Rosen said. “There were tendencies. In her mother’s family.”
“Toward what?”
“The general term?” Dr. Rosen asked. “Schizophrenia.” He smiled mockingly. “It’s just a word for something no one understands. It means ‘broken soul.’”
Corman recalled her short paper, knew now that her scattered sentences had been an effort to draw her soul back together through a rope of words.
Rosen looked at Corman as if he were explaining himself to a tribunal of ancient gods. “And so, given all of this, I felt that I had to control her environment as much as possible.” He took a pair of glasses from his pocket and wearily drew them on. “I thought about some kind of institution for her,” he said. “Especially after the baby.” His face took on a terrible conviction. “We have to have what our souls require, don’t we?” he asked passionately. “No matter how strange it may seem to some other person, we have to have it.”
Corman looked at him evenly. “What did your soul require?’ he asked.
“That she be safe,” Dr. Rosen said desperately. “Isn’t that what we all want for our children, just to keep them safe?”
Corman studied Dr. Rosen’s face and understood the terror that drove him. In him, the passion of fatherhood had taken on a mystery beyond what could ever be described to someone else. It had become heroic in its refusal to accept what all fathers had heretofore accepted, that they could not rid the world of its dark snares, nor provide safe passage through them for their children. It was an effort that had lasted all the years of Sarah’s childhood and adolesence, and which she had resisted only once, perhaps in dreams during one long night, her small white teeth tearing fiercely at her bottom lip.
“You were there the night she died,” Corman said matter-of-factly, with no sense of accusation.
“Yes, of course,” Dr. Rosen answered without hesitation.
“How did you find her?”
Rosen’s eyes fell toward his hands. “By chance. I was down at the library annex, the one on Forty-third Street. I’d been working there all day. It was late in the afternoon. I started home, and there she was. Across the street.”
“You followed her?”
Rosen nodded slowly. “To that … place … that …”
“Did you talk to her?”
Rosen shook his head. “No. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know where to begin. I just went home.” His eyes darkened. “After the baby, I realized what I’d done, so, when she disappeared, I didn’t try to find her. I had learned by then that she had to get away from me, make a life of her own, regain, if she could, the sanity she’d lost. But when I saw her that day, the way she was, I knew I had to intervene, so I went back that same night.” He seemed to tremble at the thought of it. “The rain was terrible,” he said. “There was no one on the streets.”
Corman nodded. He didn’t have to imagine the rain, the streets, only Dr. Rosen moving through them, glancing fearfully at the wet, unpeopled stoops, then up toward the dripping metal fire escapes, down again to where the gutterwash swirled toward the steadily clogging drains.
“It seemed unreal,” Rosen said. “That she was in a place like that.”
Corman’s mind moved through it again, saw the littered alleyway, the naked ceilings, the empty cans of Similac, the pictures he’d taken as she lay on the street, her arm reaching desperately for the doll. “What happened the night she died?” he asked.