Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

The last words hissed out between clenched teeth. It startled her. The silence abruptly descended. He became afraid that he had frightened her. With a great will he resumed control of his voice, and he lowered it and tried to speak reasonably.

“It was the wanting that we perceived,” he said with an almost infinite sorrow. “Not the reality.”

Janice felt a pang of regret shoot into her heart. She knew all too well that he was right.

“Once life was filled with pretty things,” she said softly. “Now it’s all gone so dark. Was it really so much to hope for?”

Janice’s head slowly lowered onto his shoulder. He was surprised, then simply cradled her face in his hand. He felt the hot tears coming into his palm, and he blinked rapidly.

“I’m so alone,” she whispered.

He stroked her hair, but found himself unable to speak.

“So alone,” she repeated in a tone so desperate that it frightened him. “Alone… alone…”

“Each of us… equally alone,” he whispered.

She stirred. Something in Jennie’s sleep changed. The child’s eyes were open, looking at them, through them, the green irises now dark in the blue lamplight.

“She does seem like Ivy,” Janice said, smiling faintly. “So mischievous, all-knowing. Why do I feel this kinship? Even when I know better?”

“I told you. It’s the wanting that you perceive.”

“No. It’s something else. Something that makes me feel strange.”

“Haven’t you guessed what it is?”

She turned. He was smiling at her, the pupils of his eyes catching glints of the night lamp. His face had softened.

“Because we both wish it to be so. Don’t you see why?”

“Because…”

“Because we share the wish to be together. And she makes it possible. Without guilt. Without sin.”

Janice acknowledged what he meant by “sin” and turned away. The silence remained. The darkness remained. And Janice remained, confused, uncertain.

“She is the medium through which Bill could be cured, and through which our relationship can be made whole,” he said in a dark, hypnotic voice.

She looked at him. He was more silhouette than man. He came closer but she felt only the darkness of his form, and the subtle rim of blue around his shape. Her own body seemed to have dissolved, leaving a residue of purest darkness, afraid of him, afraid of herself, as they edged together in a compact that knew neither reason nor patience.

“H-how can she do that, Elliot?” she stammered.

“If Bill were to believe that Jennie is his child, he would have reason to live again — become whole again.”

“But—”

“I said believe, not she is. But that he believe it.”

She was silent. Hoover reached for her and took her hand. “If he only thought it. And he could be made to think so.”

“Elliot, I can’t be a party to this. What if he found out?”

“The whole point is to establish a bridge into his fortress,” he said softly. “That’s what I’ve learned here. You must learn how to include yourself in the interior panic, in the terror, where the fantasy begins.”

She shivered in the cold. He drew her against him.

“It can’t work, Elliot.”

“It can’t fail! We’ll simply produce a suitable birth certificate….”

He ignored her glance, the surprise she showed at how well his plan was worked out, even down to forgery.

“Introduce him to the child. Time will take care of the rest.”

“It’s you who live in fantasy, Elliot. He believes that Juanita is his child.”

“Then I’ll convince him otherwise.”

She laughed bitterly.

“He’s in no condition to be spoken to.”

For a long time Hoover said nothing.

“I know that kind of deafness,” he said. “These children have it. But they do hear. Unconsciously.”

But she only shook her head in despair. And they both understood that behind the struggle for Bill’s sanity was the secondary struggle, the most complicated of their lives: if, through Jennie, they could be together while curing Bill. But it was Janice who suddenly broke it off.

She got up and began walking slowly from the room.

“Wait!” he insisted. “You could put a doll in the room and Bill would think it was his!”

Janice was startled by his remark. “They tried dolls in the hospital.”

“But how much better a real girl. And Jennie has that quality, hasn’t she? Of awakening love?”

“Elliot, how can it possibly succeed?”

“Because I know it will.”

His voice had an odd ring to it. It reminded her of his voice when he first came to New York. A disembodied, yet passionate voice, nervous because of fear of his own strength.

“How? How do you know it?”

“Because I’ve had proof.”

“Proof?” she asked vaguely.

The dreamlike quality of the moment dominated again. The seesaw of reality to unreality switched for the thousandth time. Once again there was a different system of rules, the kind of rules that one believes in India or in ashrams, places where the material world grows transparent and vaporous.

“I had a visitor,” he said strangely. “Let me show him to you.”

Hoover creaked open a door a door and they went inside. He flicked on a light. It was his bedroom. Long red curtains ran down to the floor across the windows. A disarray of books, stationery, a radio, and crumpled clothes lay over the floor. Artifacts from India: sculptured goddesses, the elephant deity painted crimson, incense holders, gold-spangled saddlebags, and teakwood carvings of Krishna lined the room. It was a voluptuous, softly lit environment, completely different from the analytical, cold corridors. Even the unmade bed, the sheets clean but rumpled in the amber light, seemed to glow softly like a hazy sunrise.

Hoover went to his desk. Behind a framed painting of the blue-skinned Krishna relaxing in the courtyards of pleasure in the moonlight of the Himalayas, Hoover gently removed a faded photograph. Shyly, he brought it forward. It was a small photograph, a passport photograph of an old man with surprisingly black eyebrows under white hair, with an unkempt white beard.

“I keep the picture protected,” he said softly. “It’s my only real treasure here.”

She stared at the unfamiliar countenance. She guessed the man was about seventy years old, stern, yet with soft eyes that showed pale, almost white in the photograph.

“My first teacher,” he whispered.

“In India?”

“In Benares. I don’t even remember how I got there. Somehow I ended up in an ashram speaking not a word of Hindi, very confused, and he knew some English. He saved my life.”

She looked at him, surprised at the trembling tenderness in his voice. His face had grown suffused in the amber light of the lamp.

“He began the process toward my enlightenment, many years ago.”

He took back the photograph as though it were a holy relic. Carefully he returned the photograph to its hiding place behind the painting. Hoover seemed oblivious of the disorder in the room, or its sensuous reds and ambers, the soft madras fabric crumpled on the bed, the long red curtains that illumined the walls like exotic pillars.

“He came to me, Janice. Five days ago.”

“From Benares?”

He laughed. “Benares? Who knows? Maybe I went to see him. Maybe I was the visitor.”

She waited, but he seemed almost too happy to continue. The flush of joy did not leave his face. Nor did he approach her, but instead remained near the wall where he had hidden the photograph.

“It was in a trance,” he said gently. “I… ascended… I suppose that is the best word for it. I ascended far beyond any place I had ever been, because… because…”