Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

“You’re just a deception,” he whispered sadly, running his fingers through her fine, jet black hair. “Just a lovely, quiet little deception.”

Through the day he exhausted his prepared video tapes. Nothing worked. He detected a sly smile of triumph on her face. He grew angry. He wanted to break down the barriers, remove the potential locked up behind the grim walls and make a wonderful person of her. But she refused, willfully countered his every stratagem.

She was deception.

The idea lingered with him long after she went to bed. Jennie was a deception. Why did that have an odd ring? Something awesome toyed with his brain, edging into consciousness, dying away again. Jennie, the deception. Deceiving whom? Himself? Herself? Bill?

Suddenly he stopped. He had been walking along the side of the pool in the basement, so lost in thought that he barely realized where he was. The light flickered on the gently moving water. The banners and mobiles looked pitiful against the cold pipes, the dirt of the windows, the grime of Pittsburgh that seeped into everything, even floating on the surface of the water near the filter.

Bill? Jennie deceive Bill? What odd thoughts were coming? He sat down on the diving board at the dark end of the underground chamber. He pictured Bill with Jennie, but it made no sense. What was the connection? There was a missing equation. He walked the tiled floor, his shoes squeaking on the wet surface. He sensed the missing connection in this grand deception that he was plotting, but could not quite put his finger on it.

So he stared into the water. His own reflection was so distorted in the dark, moving hideously against the single bulb dangling from the far wall, that he appeared to be some form of monster come from the deep. So his thoughts worked into the idea of monster, and to heavy animals, and dark water; and, as always, he remembered lifting the enormous black bullocks from the dead children of the Indian villages, and the ugly masses of dirty, dead chickens that got stuck among the stinking boulders where the road had been, now all sucking mud. And the soldiers shooting diseased dogs. Rifle cracks echoing horrifically through the hills. A looter shot. Hoover scrambled through masses of brush, tangled debris, carrying his pitifully small canister of antibiotics, white cloth bandages, and water purification tablets.

The monster that was himself smoothed out as he remembered Janice as he had found her and washed the mud slowly from her legs. The small undulations of her hips and breasts, the navel so oddly smeared with grime, her unconsciousness throwing her pelvis forward in such deep sleep. So Janice was the missing equation, he thought.

He walked back to the diving board. Jennie was the deception. Bill was the object. Janice was the missing equation. Nothing else came to his fatigued mind, except that the meaning of the clinic was emerging. And the meaning of the clinic was more than the rehabilitation of thirteen vulnerable children. It was much more, and its purpose was on the verge of coming into the light of day.

Lying awake in his room, staring at the dark ceiling, listening to the sounds of the clinic — the warm-air heating ducts, the underground motor for the swimming pool, the kitchen refrigerators that hummed, and Uncle Earl moaning in his sleep — Hoover felt a presence in the darkness. And that presence took control of him. It was the way the growing root of a plant will insinuate itself into the crack of a rock, and with time, split it, the power so strong. Hoover’s lean physique had become leaner with the hard work at the clinic, his legs thinner even than they had been in South India. But it made his body taut. It vibrated with an interior desire. It insinuated itself into his very purpose on earth. The muscle and flesh began to take on a life of its own, and he felt overwhelmed by it.

Was it the continent of America? Its absence of spirituality? Its hardness, its meanness, its grasping for the material world? Or was it the isolation? Where even Hirsch and Mr. Radimanath could not form a strong enough brotherhood to raise his spirit to its former level? Or was it Pittsburgh, which awakened the dormant memories of Sylvia — the slender arms, the soft smell of her perfume, the Bartok string quartets long after Audrey Rose was asleep upstairs and the late autumn dust filtered into the house from the neighboring woods, like the fragrance of nature itself, until their blood burned and they were consumed, the one within the other.

He was washing dishes late at night in the kitchen. All the staff shared the menial tasks in rotation. Steeped in the hot steam, the water sloshing to his elbows, the tiny radio full of tinny voices as inconsequential as the rest of the world had become to him, a different memory came to Hoover. As he carefully hosed the red plastic dishes under the spray, his yellow gloves like emblems of a foreign life, he recalled the vermilion and yellow cloth that swirled through the bazaars of Benares, the cloth that floated into the holy Ganges, where the dead and the dying came to be bathed one last time.

A rapid mélange of imagery flashed through him. Dusty hills, debates at the brotherhood, Sesh Mehrotra, rain in the hills and soldiers everywhere — like a speeding train crashing through time and space, a movie film gone hay-wire — and he remembered, not the flood, but afterward. Not the safety of the mountains, or the loveliness of the Tamil ashram, but, again, inevitably, it was the dirty hut that he recalled, when his breathing had felt warm and difficult and Janice Templeton lay on the hard floor, her breasts rising and falling at the same rapid rate. Like some dark dream, as though following himself out of himself, unconscious of everything, as though the self tarried behind an unknown dimension of his own body, he had gotten close to her. He had pressed against her and her warmth had intoxicated him until he felt dizzy. His two hands pressed forward until the small, delicate softness of her breasts responded, and her hands pressed on his, and he had never in all his life been so awakened to any woman, so transformed without embarrassment by the strength of his need.

Remembering, almost dizzy with the remembrance, Hoover awakened to find himself standing in the brilliantly lit kitchen of the clinic. The water had filled over the sink and was cascading onto the floor, over his shoes, being sucked down into the drain. He turned off the tap. What had happened afterward? He remembered vaguely how he had trembled, gone off alone, to be safe, to sleep in the isolation at the edge of the tiled field. There he had prayed for deliverance, for strength, for even a portion of the purity once promised him by the master of his very first ashram. So the night had passed in prayer and in agony, in meditation and in hell, and somewhere in the blackness he had heard the sudden rumble of heavy hooves, the snorting of a bullock and a cow in the mud, locked in bestial, explosive copulation — or had that been a dream? Had it all been a transference of his own torment to the innocent night? There were sects, after all, which taught that the spirit may, in fact, infuse the spirit of an animal, to perform those acts which may not be performed by a religious pilgrim.

Depressed, Hoover mopped the floor. He turned off the radio. His mind felt as though it had gone through a shredder. Sleep was something of a luxury now. Every time he lay down, Janice Templeton came close to him in the darkness, and her spirit tortured his, not to mock him, but to challenge him, for he knew now, that like him, she had not forgotten the pressure of their bodies that distant night.

Hoover felt the need of prayer.

He needed guidance. And it had come from outside the clinic. It was clear now that the destinies of them all — Bill, himself, Janice, even Jennie, for all he knew — were in some perplexing way intermingled, and would find fruit together. Hoover took off his apron and toweled the perspiration from his face. He walked out of the kitchen, through the corridor, listening to Jennie mumbling incoherently in her sleep, and fat Janeen beating heavily against the protective rails of her cot. The sounds soothed him in some obscure manner. As he walked to his office, the desire of his body, aroused by the strong memory of the South Indian night, receded, relaxed, leaving only a vibrant, trembling sensation through his wracked frame.