Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

“You were – invalided out, I believe, before the war ended?”

“Yes. I think I know what you’re driving at. I’ve gone into it rather thoroughly with Commander Wright. It’s true I felt guilty about dropping out of the fight before it was finished. It’s also true that I didn’t want to go back after my ship was bombed. I was completely tired out after more than two years at sea, and I guess I was frightened too. I didn’t admit it then, even to myself, but I do now.”

“What exactly do you admit?”

Bret withdrew his eyes from Klifter’s and looked away out of the window again. His hands strained against the arms of his chair as if it were a trap. “I admitted to Commander Wright, and to myself, that I was secretly glad when my ship went down. It meant survivor’s leave for me.” His voice cracked on the final word.

“I see. You are still suffering from a sense of guilt?”

“Maybe I am,” Taylor said impatiently. “But it has nothing to do with that.”

“I think it has. You cannot yet live comfortably with the knowledge of your own weakness. Remember that it is a normal human weakness to value self above all others. I have harbored a similar wish, Mr. Taylor. When the candidates were selected for the crematorium each day, I silently prayed that I would not be one of them, though there were many others less fit to die. We all must learn to live with the dreadful fact of our own selfishness. There is no virtue in futile guilt.”

“That’s what Wright said, and I believe it. Some of these dreadful facts take a lot of getting used to, that’s all. But it isn’t that that’s bothering me now.”

“What is bothering you now?”

“The things I can’t remember,” he said in a dry, wretched voice. Suddenly he blurted: “Doctor, what happened to my mother?”

“Your mother?”

His smile was equally wretched. “Did I say ‘mother’? I meant to say ‘wife.’ I meant to ask you what happened to my wife. I didn’t even know I had a wife until today.”

“She is dead. I am sorry.” Klifter spread his hands in a gesture of embarrassment and sympathy.

“But how did she die?”

Klifter had not yet made his decision, and he took refuge in a Jesuitical half-truth: “I do not know exactly. Tell me about your mother, Mr. Taylor. Do you remember her?”

“Yes.” After a long pause he added: “She was quite a pretty woman. I remember that much, but she’s rather vague. I told you she died when I was four. She was good to me. I had fun with her. She used to stand on her head on the bed for me, things like that. We had pillow fights. And we had a game at meals, about my eating. One bite for each of her ten fingers, or something. She had lovely hands.”

“Do you remember her death?”

The dreaming blue eyes hardened in rejection. “No. Wait a minute – I remember something.” His eyes glazed and lost their focus. His brown face became smooth and blank, a wooden image of a young boy set out to decoy the past. “I went into her room, and she was dead. Some nights when I was afraid, she would let me come into her bed and stay until I was asleep. I had a bad dream that night and went into her room, and she was stiff and cold. I could see her dead face in the light from the head of the bed. Her hands were folded on her breast. I touched her face, and it was as cold as a wet cloth.”

“Was she wearing her nightgown?” Klifter recalled that Lorraine had been naked when Taylor found her.

“No.” The answer was very definite. “She was wearing a black silk dress with a white ruffle at the throat. Her eyes were closed, and her head was resting on a white satin pillow. I didn’t know that she was dead until my father told me. I had never seen a dead person before.”

“Did your mother usually sleep on a white satin pillow?”

“What do you mean? How do you expect me to remember a thing like that? My mother died when I was four.”

Klifter refrained from pointing out that Taylor had recalled the detail himself. Because this line of inquiry seemed to be disturbing to the young man, he abandoned it for the moment.

“Tell me, was your mother’s death a frequent memory, or a painful one?”

“In my childhood, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t often think of my mother at all. One reason must have been that my father never mentioned her. I think he may have grieved for her in private. Certainly he wasn’t a happy man and he never remarried, but so far as I remember he didn’t talk about her. He wouldn’t even answer my questions about her, and he discouraged my asking them. He let me understand that the subject was taboo. Naturally I got the impression that there was something wrong there, but I never dared to ask him what it was.”

“Perhaps he did not love your mother?”

“Perhaps he didn’t. The thought wouldn’t have occurred to me when I was a kid, but it has since. I told you how he felt about women in general. He brought me up to regard them as whited sepulchers, lovely receptacles of the world’s filth – that sounds like exaggeration, but it isn’t. So long as I was at home, and I was with him up to the age of seventeen except for my term at prep school, I wasn’t allowed to have anything to do with girls. He wouldn’t let me buy a girl a soda or go to a mixed party. I didn’t go out with a girl until after his death – I was in my senior year at Chicago – and then nothing came of it. I was a virgin until my marriage.” He corrected himself hastily. “The night before my marriage.”

Paula West? the doctor wondered. Surely she would have told me. But perhaps not. Every woman has her reticences, like every man.

Bret understood the silence and answered the unspoken question. “I slept with my wife the night before I married her. It’s a curious thing,” he added hesitantly. “I dreamt about it this morning.” He told Klifter what he could recall of the kewpie-doll dream. “I suppose it means I married Lorraine under the influence of my father’s morality?”

“Or slept with her as a gesture of revolt against him? A dream may have multiple meanings. We will talk about your dream at another time.”

Klifter rose from his chair and moved impatiently about the small office. While great areas of the biography were blurred or missing altogether, the patterns of Bret’s mental life had begun to configure in his mind. There was clearly a fixation on the death of the mother for which the father’s foolish treatment of his son seemed partly responsible. But the evidence of it had come too easily, almost without resistance. The very readiness and clarity of the infantile memory made it suspect, especially in view of the similarity between the death of the mother and the death of the wife. It was clearly possible that the mother’s death scene was a substitute, elaborately staged by the analysand’s imagination, for the inadmissable memory of the murdered wife. This possibility was strengthened by the evident identification of the mother and the wife, whom Bret had confused verbally. The pattern was Oedipean, complicated by a melancholia arising from what Bret described as his sense of loss. He had lost his mother at a vulnerable age, lost his ship and the comradeship it symbolized, lost his wife. He was one of those who had formed the habit of loss and acquired a need for it, especially where his affections were concerned. He had done his best to lose Paula West. Finally he had lost his memory and for a while reality itself.

Commander Wright believed that the truth Bret had lost should be withheld until Bret found it himself. Like many American doctors, even some who had learned from Freud, Wright was basically a moralist. He believed that mental disease was an evasion of responsibility by the patient, and that it was therefore a doctor’s duty to his patients to let them cure themselves so far as possible. Heaven helped those who helped themselves.