Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

Six seats in front, a mother bounced a small blond girl on her knee, drew pictures on the frosted windows, and sang softly.

“This is the way to Grandmother’s house, Grandmother’s house,” the mother sang. “This is the way to Grandmother’s house, so early in the morning.”

It was a melody Bill had sung to Ivy. Ivy had loved the snow. Her blond hair and fair complexion had been a throwback to Scandinavian ancestors Bill had never known. She had learned to ice skate almost before she could walk. She was happiest when the fat white snowflakes came down like a blanket, obscuring everything but the trees.

“This is the way to Grandfather’s house, Grandfather’s house. This is the way to Grandfather’s house, so early in the evening.”

Bill covered his ears with his hands.

“Please stop!” he whispered hoarsely.

Then it was silent. The road hummed gruffly under the wheels. Bill realized that the passengers were staring at him.

“Why did that man say stop?” said a little girl’s voice.

“Shhhhhh,” her mother cautioned.

The bus detoured into a small town, with the familiar series of dismal streets, an occasional pedestrian wrapped in a winter coat. But here the streets were slick with ice, and icicles hung down from garages and telephone wires.

Bill stared at his hands. They were shaking like leaves in a storm. There was no feeling in them.

I am a murderer, he thought.

Deep down, he knew why he had supported the idea of the test. It had nothing to do with Ivy’s well-being. He wanted to crush Hoover. Torn to pieces by the strain of the trial, Bill had wanted to make sure that Hoover was destroyed. That was the real purpose of the test.

Bill’s hands rubbed, gouged at his eyes as though to eradicate the images of Ivy, beating at the mirrored glass. He moaned. This time the bus driver turned around.

“You feel okay, back there?”

Bill did not answer.

“We don’t allow drinking on here.”

Two hours passed. Bill dozed. Awoke. Dozed again. He had a dream. In the dream he was sitting on the witness stand, explaining to Janice why he had left the hospital. Suddenly, Gupta Pradesh rose, dressed in a fiery red swirling cloth, and held in his arms the body of dead Ivy. Gupta Pradesh reached down, touched her leg, and then contemptuously threw gray ash into Bill’s face.

“Ahhh—” Bill jerked awake.

As soon as he opened his eyes, the dream vanished. All that was left was a sensation of having wanted to explain things to Janice. His mind violently obliterated the dream.

Outside, the snow was streaked and dotted with patches of dark gray ice. Bare trees hugged the hills and hollows. Farms spread out, cold and isolated. Then there were electric transformers, auto garages, and a series of brick warehouses. The density of cars and people increased. After two stops, Bill recognized the Hudson River, troubled and turbulent, deep gray and rolling swiftly under the brown and white hills.

“We’ll be in New York in about fifteen minutes,” the bus driver called through a static-ridden microphone. “Stopover for breakfast, thirty-five minutes.”

Bill watched the tall buildings, the forbidding gray canyons, slush, taxi cabs, early morning pedestrians, the violent rhythm of the great city awakening around him. He became frightened, vulnerable.

At the bus terminal, twenty more passengers tried to get on but were told to wait for thirty-five minutes. The driver checked the passengers coming off, making sure they still had their tickets. Bill followed them out, stepped on an escalator, found a grill in the main hall, ate quickly without tasting, then wandered out through the main doors.

A smell of vomit reached him, mingled with roasted chestnuts and salt pretzels heated on a grill. Hundreds of people strolled in through the wide doors. New York always had a stony, murderous quality, and this time it had almost a physical taste.

Bill was lost. After walking several blocks, oblivious of the taxis which missed him by inches, the drivers hurling epithets, he found himself in Hell’s Kitchen. Even in the cold, there were crates of fruit slanted by the doors to attract buyers. Cold eyes watched him go by, suspicious eyes sizing him up.

Motion was the only cure for what Bill felt. He walked a mile uptown, a second mile backtracking, and lost any sense of direction. It was approaching the noon hour. Suddenly, he had an abnormal, almost infinite desire for alcohol.

Inside a pink, smoky bar full of laborers and Hispanics, Bill peeled off the last of his five-dollar bills. All that was left were four singles. Dark eyes scrutinized him, the expensive suit gone dirty with mud and slush, the handsome face now drawn in to resemble some kind of fleshy death’shead. Bill plastered down his hair with a shaking hand.

“Double whiskey,” he said.

Bill sat at the wet, stained bar. The bartender brought him a bottle of whiskey and a glass. Bill watched the liquid pour into the glass. He lifted the glass to his lips. I wish to die, was his thought as the burning liquid traveled quickly down to his stomach, etching its way into his body, promising deliverance.

He ordered a second drink.

His hands stopped trembling. Dream images of snow-driven landscapes occurred to him. In his reverie, he looked out of a dirty bus window and saw distant farms wheeling past in great perspectival arcs. Then he also saw, on the horizon, the clearly visible, long, dark-roofed shape of the hospital in Darien. He drank.

Then he saw Ivy behind the window glass, beating her fists at the mirror, frightened.

Bill lowered his head onto his arms and wept.

No one paid him any attention.

After half an hour, he walked out into the cold, bitter wind howling up from the Battery. His legs were numb, though whether it was from the whiskey or the cold, he no longer knew. New York roared around him in an angry maelstrom of murderous voices, dark accusations.

In horror, he saw Des Artistes loom in front of him.

By some innate homing instinct, he had walked back through Central Park, past the lakes, and had drifted over to Sixty-seventh Street.

Before he could retreat, Mario, the doorman, spotted him.

“Mr. Templeton…Wait…”

Bill ran back through the park, sweating, then cut south and east and finally ended up at the derelict warehouses among the concrete piers of the East River. Somehow the day had passed and it was night again. Several bums sat in the shadows of a bridge, cooking beans, and he wandered into their circle to keep out of the cold wind.

In that darkness, the smell of beans and grease filled the space that also glistened with tar leaking down from the bridge. Trucks rumbled overhead, gears switching, carrying tonnage out to the west or bringing foodstuffs into the city markets.

“Warmer by the fire than it is over there,” said a thin, coughing man with a greasy gray coat and an ascot stained with tar.

Bill approached the low fire, rubbing his hands. He declined sweet amber wine. They left him alone. As he looked into the fire, he felt a deathly chill spread out within his body, a chill that no fire could reach.

Outside the night, the lights of midtown gleamed; the Empire State Building rose high into the light clouds like a mirage of happier times.

One by one, the men drifted away. Bill watched them shuffle into the darkness on the roads. They were a kind of subterranean living species he had never talked with before. Now they were gone and he had no company but his thoughts.

Ivy bolted from the blue couch. She threw herself violently to the floor. Then she was running, running and screaming, down the length of the glass.

“Huh?” Bill said, startled.

A noise died in the darkness of distant stone, then there was a stealthy rustle.