Росс Макдональд - The Three Roads

Evidently her nerves were playing her tricks again. If they were, it was no wonder. The strain of facing Miles and saying what she’d said had put her in a state beyond fear. She felt hollow and light, like a blown eggshell. She had poured out all her strength in sustaining that final stand, but it had worked.

Her only regret was that she hadn’t stood up to him months before. The money didn’t matter to her, but the last few months had eaten away her moral fiber, and it was wearing awfully thin. She moved her hands and feet and drove by the little sparks of life that hung on flickering in her nerve ends. She felt too weak to face the rest of the night alone, and she turned down Wilshire in the direction of Dr. Klifter’s hotel.

She phoned him from the desk, and he came to the gate of the pueblo to meet her, a quiet-walking little man in bright, informal clothes, with the air of a wizard in disguise.

“It is a pleasure to see you again, Miss West.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“Then walk into my parlor. Come.” His English was remarkably pure, she thought absently, but his attempts to make gay little remarks gave him away.

When they were in his living-room he offered her a chair and a drink.

“I’m afraid a drink would make me drunk. Can you possibly give me coffee?”

“I make rather good Turkish coffee.”

“Just some plain American coffee. Please.”

“Certainly.” He disappeared into the kitchen, and she heard the sounds he made filling the coffee maker. “Shall I expect Lieutenant Taylor tomorrow?” he called.

“I don’t know.” When she raised her voice it sounded dry and harsh. “He’s walked out on me.”

“Walked out on you?” The bearded face appeared in the doorway, complete in itself, like John the Baptist’s head. She felt no certainty that it was attached to any body.

“He’s trying to hunt down the murderer,” she said unreally to the disembodied head.

“Yes?” The little trotting body followed the head into the room.

“He left me yesterday as soon as we got here. I saw him this afternoon. He’d been wandering around the city looking for the man. I tried to talk him out of it, but he was obsessed with the idea of finding the murderer. He said justice is more important than anything else.” The room itself seemed disembodied now, a cube of soft light adrift in space, menaced by the jagged clamor of the stars.

“Perhaps justice is as important as that to him,” said the other inmate of the wandering room. “His superego is remarkably strong, I think, even for an American.”

“Superego!” she cried in the midst of bubbling laughter. “Can’t you forget your jargon for five minutes? We’re talking about a man. What right had you to tell him about his wife? It’s had a terrible effect on him. He thinks he’s found the murderer, and I don’t know what he’ll do.”

Her uncontrollable laughter was suddenly displaced by tears. She covered her face and cried like a child. Klifter sat down and waited.

After a while she raised her eyes and looked at him. He was sprawled carelessly in a corner of the chesterfield, one arm over the end, his right ankle resting on his left knee. His trouser leg had crept up above his garterless sock, showing a pale and spindly segment of his right leg.

“I hear it boiling.” He jumped up and went into the kitchen. “You wish it black?”

“Black, please.”

He sat and watched her silently while she gulped the scalding coffee. It helped her to get rid of the end-of-the-world feeling she had had, the terrible immediate sense that the earth was whirling and plunging in open space. Wild dreams always had a whisky taste, but reality was bitter and hot and smelt of breakfast in her mother’s kitchen in Highland Park, Detroit.

“Thank you,” she said when he poured her a second cup. “If you’ll show me where your bathroom is, I’d better fix my face.”

Her faith in herself came back with the removal of eroded powder and the application of fresh lipstick, and her faith in the doctor came back along with it. When she returned to the living-room she told him about her visit from Bret’s mother.

For the first time in their acquaintance she saw Klifter look surprised. “You are absolutely certain that this woman – what is her name?”

“Mrs. Swanscutt.”

“You are certain that this Mrs. Swanscutt is really his mother?”

“No woman could act that part. No woman would want to. Anyway, what reason could she have for deceiving me?”

“I do not know. There are many things about this case I do not know. There was no apparent reason for deception, yet your Bret has been a victim of deception for many years.”

“His father must have told him his mother was dead. I can understand a man doing that under the circumstances.”

“Yes, but he had a memory image, a pseudo memory, of his mother’s death. He described the occasion to me in some detail. He said he went into her room and found her cold body, the hands folded on the breast, the head on a white satin pillow.”

“I don’t know what that false memory proves about his mind. If there’s something irreparably wrong with his mind there’s good reason for it. The thing he found that night must have been as shocking to him as death could be.”

“Perhaps.”

“I’m afraid I hate that woman,” Paula said. “It isn’t adultery I object to so much. It’s the sloppy kind of adultery that couldn’t be bothered to protect a child from its consequences.”

“After twenty-five years the consequences have not yet ceased. I should have guessed the truth. I noticed those unreal elements in his story: the crossed hands, the satin pillow. Women do not normally sleep on white satin pillows, even in America. They do not arrange their hands in a funeral attitude when they die in their sleep. No doubt he saw the body of someone in a coffin when he was young – perhaps his aunt – and invented his mother’s death scene from the material to satisfy his mind.”

“But why should his mind seek that kind of satisfaction?”

“Evasion is a less clumsy word, and it may be closer to the truth. I cannot tell until I have talked with him at greater length and learned to know him better. He and I together must learn to know him. Still, let us suppose. Let us suppose that his father told him that his mother was dead. What might a small boy think? What might he not? He had blundered into her room in the middle of the night and found her doing something which he did not understand. It is very likely that he felt that in admitting this man to her bed his mother was cheating him of his filial rights. He ran at her in a childish fury and struck her. Then the lover and the cuckold fought in the hall, and the little boy ran back to his own room. In the morning his mother was gone.

“Perhaps it was then, so soon, that his father told him she was dead. Death is a mystery to a child’s mind, an awesome mystery. To us, too, it is a mystery, an inexplicable accident, but to a child! May he not have imagined deep in his heart that he had killed his mother with his feeble fists? Such a secret, too dreadful to be spoken of to his stern father, may explain the genesis of his guilt. All of us are guilty, plagued by anxiety and self-loathing, but there are some who are more susceptible to this than others. Your Bret has always been oppressed by guilt, and I think we may have found its source. If we can re-establish in his memory that strange night, that queer morning, we should free his mind of its burden.”

“You can’t,” Paula said. She sat upright in her chair with her cup held steadily on her knee.

He stared myopically at her uncovered face. His white hands fluttered limply and returned to their perch on his knee. “You seem very certain,” he said mildly.