Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

Wright permitted himself to say yes.

“Where is she now?”

“Remember for yourself, man.”

Another face in another bed (the old spool bed his father had bought in Boston?) came over the horizon of his conscious mind and into memory’s middle distance. It wasn’t Lorraine. Yet he couldn’t be sure. Death did strange things to people’s faces.

“Is she dead?” he whispered.

“You tell me.” Wright’s predatory eyes were stalking him from the underbrush of his eyebrows.

“I remember a dead woman. She had on a black silk dress.”

“Your mother,” Wright said irritably. “That all came out in narcosynthesis, remember? She died when you were very young.”

“My sense of chronology seems to be a little scrambled.” And this fat-faced doctor, arrogant and smug like every man with too much gold braid on his sleeve, wasn’t giving him any help. He sat behind his desk as bland as a Buddha, with all the important secrets locked in his thick skull.

Instead of the truth he had asked for, Wright was making him listen to a talk on elementary metapsychology: “Time is a relative concept,” he was saying. “The mind is like a clock with several faces, each keeping its own time. One for the minutes and hours, one for the seasons and the years, one for the individual biological development, one for the mental life, and so on. On the level of motivation and emotional reaction the mind is practically timeless. Freudians like Klifter say that the clock is set once in early childhood and never changes unless you go back and give the hands a push. I think that’s an oversimplification, but there’s a good deal of truth in it. Klifter said on the way down that you’re probably identifying your wife and your mother, though they died over twenty years apart.”

“Then Lorraine is dead?”

“You know she is, don’t you?”

“How did she die?”

“You’ve got to remember for yourself. Klifter may have different ideas, but so long as I’m handling the case it’s going to be that way. It’s our only guarantee against a relapse. I could tell your conscious mind, but it wasn’t your conscious mind that wiped out the memory. The unconscious levels have to accept the fact. The only way you can demonstrate that they have is by recovering the memory yourself.”

“I can’t see any purpose in this mystification.”

Wright shrugged heavily, like a man shifting a weight on his shoulders. “It would be nice and easy to overhelp you, but I’m not going to do it. You’re going to stand on your own feet, understand?” He got to his feet as if to emphasize the metaphor.

Bret rose at the same time, but Wright waved him back into his chair. The gesture, in combination with his dark blue uniform, accentuated his resemblance to a burly policeman. “You might as well wait here. I’ll go and see if Klifter’s ready for you.”

Bret sat down to wait again. His resentment died down suddenly as soon as Wright had closed the door behind him, and depression took its place. In the space of a few hours he had been married to an unknown girl and widowed in an unknown way. It seemed to him that time was the meaning of his life, and he had lost it. His future was still in the inescapable past, and he was caught in a closed circle as meaningless as the treadmill in a rat cage and as timeless as hell.

Externally Bret seemed to be a typical young American, big, smooth-faced, and brown, with a strongly constructed nose and chin, and candid blue eyes. The only sign of inner disturbance that Klifter noticed in the first few minutes came when the young man’s eyes roved to the window. Then the heavy muscles of his shoulders bunched and strained under his gray fatigue uniform, as if the narrow office hemmed him in and he was held in his low steel chair by an invisible belt. When he withdrew his eyes from the green vista of the hospital grounds, his face had taken on a complexity that had not been apparent at first.

The eyes were not blue after all, but blue flecked with gray. The combination of color gave them depth and modified their transparency. They seemed to contain more than one surface, like a series of lenses that filtered and selected their perceptions before they reached the brain. The mouth was equally complex, the generous softness of its natural molding held in a firm line by an aggressive will. The conflicts in the young man’s nature, of which he seemed intelligently aware, gave him a kind of tense, self-conscious beauty. But Klifter was disturbed by the ironic bitterness that when he smiled cast a shadow in his eyes and deformed his mouth.

The newspaper clippings Paula had given him the night before were in the inside pocket of his coat. If Taylor’s mind was moving toward reality and health, a full knowledge of the event that had alienated him from these things would help him on his way. But if his mind was seriously ill, caught in the grip of a psychotic perversity, the knowledge of the murder might strengthen his disease. Truth was a potent drug that could kill or cure, depending on the patient’s stomach for it. His problem, as always, was to understand the individual man.

He turned to Bret, who was silent in his chair, emptily gazing at the floor.

“Please go on. I should like to learn more of your childhood life.”

Bret stirred uneasily. “From the beginning?”

“Not necessarily. I do not attach the importance which Adler does to the earliest memories. I am more interested in what you consciously think important.”

“My attitude, you mean?”

“Give me the facts. Your attitude has been speaking for itself.”

After some embarrassed hesitation Bret resumed his interrupted narrative.

“You must have gathered that my home life when I was a kid was pretty queer. I don’t think it was before my mother died, but she died when I was four so I don’t remember much about that. My father’s older sister came to keep house for him, and for a couple of years I was under her thumb. Aunt Alice, or perhaps it was my father, set up some rather peculiar rules for a five-year-old to live by. I remember she spanked me on at least one occasion for asking questions about my mother. She wouldn’t even tell me what had happened to her. Aunt Alice died herself when I was six, and I can’t say I was sorry.” He smiled his disturbing smile again, tightening his mouth as if these memories had a bitter taste.

“That’s natural enough,” Klifter said. “The stern old aunt would make a poor substitute for your dead mother. Who looked after you when the aunt died?”

“My father took care of me himself. He was a full professor at that time, and vice chairman of his department, and he could have afforded a nursemaid. But for some reason he wouldn’t have a woman in the house. He went to an inordinate lot of trouble with me, and probably slowed up his own work considerably, simply in order to avoid living with a woman. He hired male students of his, off and on, to help with the cooking and the cleaning, but he and I did most of the housework ourselves. I could cook quite well when I was eight, but I didn’t learn to play baseball until I went to prep school. He only let me stay in prep school for one term, by the way. All of which probably accounts for my inability to fit into a group, my feeling that I have no definite place in society.”

“Yes, probably.”

“When I look back on it I can see that I’ve been a good deal of a lone wolf all my life. Even my profession – I don’t believe I told you I write history, or used to – was a one-man sort of thing. I never did much in team games, but I was good at boxing and swimming. The only thing I ever got into where I felt carried away by something greater than myself was the Navy. After I was given my commission, and especially when I was assigned to my ship, I felt for the first time in my life that I belonged to something. I was a member of a team fighting for a good cause, and it gave me a satisfaction I’d never had. I turned out to be a pretty good officer, curiously enough. I got along well with my men and did my job. When the ship went down I had a sense of irreplaceable loss.”