Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

Her body belonged to someone else, to a Janice long buried under time’s sorrow and the fatigue of survival. From far away she seemed to sense her dulled limbs awakening, pushing heavy weights away, and yet the disembodied feeling was unnatural. It made her feel anxiety in the warmth of his friendship.

“Kiss me, Elliot,” she whispered.

He moved slowly toward her face, and their lips pressed together, an almost discreet encounter, a mutual signal of their desolation. She stood up from the basin counter, his hand found the nipple of her breast, and she pressed herself against his lips.

The alienation went away. Janice felt herself rising from the dead, from the corridors of the asylums, from long journeys that lead to death, from the abstraction of pretending she was no woman. She closed her eyes. When they kissed again, it was delicate, though his tongue found hers; a sudden thrill passed through her, a shudder of surprise, and his hand ran down the length of her body, resting on the small of her back.

She clung to him, standing with her weight against him, on the quiet threshold to Jennie’s room. It seemed to be an eternity thus, while the child slept. Dogs barked, unseen in the neighborhood, and a heavy truck rumbled past the clinic. The street became quiet again. She felt as though she were falling asleep, that in fact there could be nothing more blessed than to sleep forever in his arms, in view of the mysterious child who, in some inscrutable way, blessed their being together and reminded them of their own lost children.

She laughed softly in his ear. He raised his head, smiled, and raised an eyebrow, questioning.

“I don’t ever want to move,” she whispered, her face flushed. “Not ever.”

He lowered his face against her neck and pressed her close.

“Then we shall not,” he said softly.

“I feel like I’m dancing,” she said in a faraway voice.

She sighed and accepted his tongue softly in a second kiss, a longer thrill, and did not seem ready when he broke it off, smiling. In a sudden burst of happiness he squeezed her to him. It was unmistakable, the desire that pressed against her.

“Elliot,” she murmured, and her hand slipped down from his arm, hesitated, and nervously squeezed his elbow.

She was confused when there was a movement, and abruptly he had lifted her into his arms, like a child, and carried her into the red sweep of his bedroom. It swirled past like a sensuous dream, and except for the pounding of her heart, like an animal gone wild, the whole world seemed to flow swiftly and silently like a river of mist.

“Please—”

Her voice was cut off by a playful kiss on the mouth. He put her down. The light was still on. The Indian deities, the red curtains, the rumpled bed, all stretched out in front of her, a landscape more uncertain, more inviting, more dangerous than any subcontinent.

She was transfixed with fear.

Behind her, Hoover softly closed the door. Autumn leaves blew against the window, and the blood throbbed in her temples. He did not advance, but only put his hand against the small of her back, and she suddenly whispered, as though unwilling to walk any farther, unable to move paralyzed limbs.

“Carry me, Elliot.”

With a slow, simple movement, as though raising an almost holy icon, he carried her as before, in his arms, and lowered himself with her to the bulging mountains and valleys of the madras bedspread, sheets and a single pillow.

He said nothing. Quickly he removed her blouse, kissing her on the eyes, so that her eyes remained closed and she saw nothing. He carefully unhooked her undergarments and removed them, and though her eyes were closed, she gasped slightly, aware that he observed her.

He did not cover her with sheet or blanket, but left her nude. She lay like a sculpture in the soft light, the rounded forms of hip and thigh clearly modulated. She felt her face was flushed and finally opened her eyes and watched Hoover’s eyes and wondered if her own burned with the same radiance.

Far, far away he seemed to be, obscure, formless, and he went through motions, removing his shirt and trousers. His uncovered chest startled her with its smoothness, a pale white skin like marble against the bloodred curtains behind.

It was as though they were fighting — the two hearts like impatient birds beating their wings — and in their fatigue there was dark, driving joy. Pleasure accelerated, until Janice grew unconscious under its demands. Shamelessly she sought the last barrier to oblivion. An abrupt pulsating filled her throughout, she became dimly aware of her leg twisted around his hip, and there was the sound of her own moaning, and his, dying away like a receding thunderstorm.

Nor did he remove his body to her side, but repeated her name over and over, almost silently, in her ear. She smiled, stroked the back of his head in a dreamy, sensuous softness that had no outer definition. She had triumphed in some way, and her every sensibility had flowed to the far corners of the earth.

She felt once again that her breath was coming short. Once again he was extended deep within her. Her leg twisted slowly, languorously at first, around his hip. Now they rolled in a deep of their own making. At the bottom of an ocean known only to themselves, in a dreaminess where she commanded him, just as he commanded her, they pursued the relentless goal through the darkness. There was a sensation of a slow, irresistible welling, as though the floor of the earth, like a bubble, had begun to expand, and then she heard his small cries. Slowly then, through her exhausted body, the bulging, demanding pressure flowered a second time, and her cries followed his like an echo.

She felt that she was already asleep. He was at her side, his arm across her breasts. There was a relaxation surpassing anything she had known. The girl in the next room burbled softly, like a nightingale, and Janice slipped like a feather into the welcome and blessed purity of dreamless sleep.

Blue grit hung in the early summer air in slow currents, wallowing in the baking haze of day. New York was bottled in a smoky, whitish presence that sucked the oxygen from the river basins. Noise muffled itself in the stone canyons like muted thunder, boiling with the horrid hostility of ten million people jammed together. Day after day the atmospheric layers burned, until a putrid smell of something decomposed laid itself on everything that moved below.

Within Goodland Sanitarium, the air conditioners failed to keep pace with the heat, though water dripped from them onto towels on the floor, and steady throbs of machinery echoed down the dank corridors. Staff and patients perspired freely, and the grit flecked each and every window.

Janice nervously twisted the straps of her handbag. She was in a small lobby, an alcove where the tiles were stained by coffee and shoes, and the ashtrays stank of old cigarettes. She listened to the sounds of approaching footsteps, disappearing conversations, the vaguely threatening murmur of activity that was so horrible because it was never defined, only whispered and hinted at in the labyrinth of corridors.

Janice reflected bitterly as she sat in the steaming lobby. Upon the guilts and maneuvers of administrators depended the lives of so many broken people. Dr. Geddes was reluctant at first to enter into their conspiracy with Jennie. Palming the sick child off to Bill as an Ivy substitute offended his professional and moral ethos. But Elliot Hoover’s persuasive arguments for the ultimate good that would accrue not only to Bill, but — and especially — to the orphaned child, at last mitigated the doctor’s qualms and drew him wholly into their compact. In his best eloquence before Dr. Boltin, Dr. Geddes explained his approach to transfer-therapy, how Bill responded ever so slightly to objects of transference. Why not a real girl? Indeed, a girl of the right age, attractive, and with similarities of personality to those of his own late daughter? Finally, Dr. Boltin acquiesced, but demanded safeguards for the sanitarium. Dr. Geddes executed an application to the State of Pennsylvania for permission to transfer the continuation of Jennie’s treatment to the Goodland Sanitarium in the State of New York, and Pennsylvania responded by agreeing to a six-month trial period of treatment. It took all of May and June to accomplish, but it was done.