Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

She put her hand over his taut fingers, which were gripping the arm of his chair. “You’re very much alive, Bret. You’re making a perfect comeback.” But his gloomy tension alarmed her and set her thinking. What if she wasn’t good for him? What if he’d be better off without her? No, that couldn’t be true. The doctor had told her more than once that she was just what he needed, that she gave him something to live for.

“It’s taking a long time,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get out of this place. Sometimes, I don’t really want to. I feel a little bit like Lazarus. He couldn’t have been very happy when he came back and tried to take up his life where he left off.”

She told him sharply: “You mustn’t talk like that. Your life isn’t half over, darling. You’ve only been ill for less than a year.”

“It feels as long as prehistoric time.” He had enough humor to smile at his own hyperbole.

“Forget the past,” she said impulsively.

“I have to remember it first.” He smiled again, not a good smile, but it was something.

“You are remembering it. But you can think of the future too.”

“I’ll tell you what I do think about a good deal of the time.”

“What?”

“I think of us together. It’s thinking of that that keeps me going. It must be hard for you to be a hospital widow.”

“A hospital widow?”

“Yes. It must be hard for a woman to have a husband in a mental ward. I know a lot of women would clear out and get a divorce–”

“But, darling.” It would have been so much easier to pass it over or to humor his delusion, but she stuck to the difficult truth. “I’m not your wife, Bret.”

He looked at her blankly. “You said you didn’t use your married name–”

“My married name is Pangborn. I told you I divorced my husband.”

She watched the manhood draining out of his face and could think of no way to rescue it. “I thought we were married,” he said in a high, weak voice. “I thought you were my wife.”

“You have no wife.” She didn’t trust herself to say anything more.

He was searching desperately for some excuse, for anything to mitigate his shame. “Are we engaged then? Is that what it was? Are we going to be married?”

“If you will have me.” There was no atom of irony in any crevice of her mind.

He got out of his chair and stood awkwardly and miserably in front of her. His blunder had shaken him badly. “I guess it’s time for you to go. Will you kiss me good-bye?”

“I’d die if I couldn’t.”

His mouth was soft and uncertain, and he held her very gently. He left her abruptly then, as if he could not bear to stay with her any longer after his humiliation. She was proud of the way he went back to his room alone, like any normal man retiring to his hotel room, but his mistake had shocked and worried her. She had had him in her grasp for a moment, and then he had slipped away again, to a place where she did not dare to follow.

Commander Wright raised his arm and pointed across the valley. “See that chap with the golf club?”

Paula heard the words without grasping their meaning. It seemed to her that the afternoon was repeating itself. Her meeting with Bret had only been a rehearsal, and the set was being arranged for a final retake. The tiny man in suntans was pursuing his invisible ball back and forth along the hillside. Soon Bret would come out on the veranda, and he and she would read their lines again. But this time there’d be no mistakes, no hideous sting in the tail of their conversation. She’d have a chance to tell him the good news about Klifter, and they’d part on a note of hopefulness for once.

Then she felt the chilly touch of the wind that always sprang up from the bay in the late afternoons. It brought her back to reality with a pang. Bret had come and gone, and the mistake he had made could not be changed by dreaming.

Wright cocked his finger impatiently and pointed again. The heavy black hair on the back of his hand glistened like iron in the sun. “You see him, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening. I’m afraid Bret’s notion that we were married got me down.”

The doctor grunted and shifted his body in the creaking deck chair. “That’s precisely what I’m trying to explain. That chap with the golf club has a simple problem compared with Taylor’s. He lost an arm, and that’s no fun, but he can get along without it. He’s only got a physical adjustment to make, and he’s doing that now. That’s what Taylor would like to do.”

“I don’t quite see the analogy.”

“Taylor would rather suppress certain memories than live with them. He’d rather go armless than grow a new arm. But so long as he suppresses those memories of the past he can’t make a healthy adjustment to the present. Past and present are so intertwined that you can’t abandon one without losing your grip on the other. Loss of the present is a fair description of insanity.”

“But he’s not insane!” The words flew out in protest, almost of their own accord.

He turned to smile at her, baring his strong white teeth. “You shouldn’t get excited about words, Miss West. They’re all relative, especially the ones we use in psychiatry. I think he’s listed in the files as ‘traumatic neurosis with hysteric symptoms.’ Does that suit you better?”

“I have no deep respect for words. They’re my business after all. But ‘insanity’ sounds so hopeless.”

“It isn’t necessarily hopeless. But I didn’t mean to imply that Taylor is insane. Insanity is a legal concept, and from the legal point of view he’s compos mentis. He goes through intelligence tests in a breeze. His orientation is still uncertain, but he could probably leave here tomorrow and get along for the rest of his life as well as most.”

“Could he really?”

“If he didn’t have to face any serious crisis.”

“But there seem to be such dreadful gaps in his memory. In some ways he’s worse than he was four months ago. He didn’t think we were married then.”

“I wasn’t surprised when that cropped up. He’s taken a little step back in order to take a big step forward. Four months ago he refused to admit the possibility that he had been married.”

“Doesn’t he remember his wife at all?”

“No, but he will. I see a great deal more of him than you do, and I’m honestly not worried by these temporary setbacks. He’s on the point of total recovery, and unconsciously he knows it. His mind is fighting that prospect with every weapon at its disposal, and fighting a losing battle.”

“You think he doesn’t want to get well? He said something like that today.”

“Why do you think he became ill in the first place?”

“Isn’t it fairly obvious? He had two terrible shocks in rapid succession. The bombing and then his wife’s death–”

“Nothing about the human mind is obvious.” There was a trace of professional pomposity in his tone, which shortly became more apparent. “As a matter of fact the healthy mind is quite as mysterious as the unhealthy mind. I’ve often wondered, for instance, why a woman like you–”

His hand, like a fat and hairy spider, was gently approaching hers along the arm of the chair. She withdrew her own hand into her lap. “Since Lieutenant Taylor and I are going to be married–”

The hairy spider stopped in its tracks.

“–I have to ask you whether his brain could have been damaged by the explosion. Physically damaged?”

“Not a chance. It’s a purely psychological problem, Miss West. It’s hardly oversimplifying it to say that he lost his memory because he wanted to.”

“But you’ve said yourself that the shocks had a great deal to do with it.”