Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

As Janice exhaled slowly, she watched Jennie. The small girl wore a red jumper, sneakers, and a red plaid shirt. The black silken hair was freshly washed, brushed into a hundred soft curls that lost their form in the sultry heat. A small area of rash threatened to break out inside her elbows. Jennie’s movements were now more fluid. Passing doctors and hospital personnel took no notice that the little girl on the vinyl couch looked into the air at nothing. From a distance, Jennie looked only bored, fidgeting by the tall aluminum ashtrays, waiting for a father or brother swallowed up somewhere in the recesses of the institution.

“Mrs. Templeton—”

Janice turned, and saw Dr. Geddes.

“Have they started?” Janice asked.

“No. They’re waiting for Mr. Hoover.” He sat down beside her on a worn brown chair.

“I don’t want you to build your hopes up too much,” he said. “What we’re attempting is a long-shot at best.”

“I only wish it were over,” Janice whispered.

Down the corridor there was a blurred motion. An orderly carried a brass canister from a storeroom and disappeared into the darkness. A slow parallelogram of light diminished as the storeroom door silently shut and locked.

That was how the light had gone out behind Bill’s eyes, Janice thought. It just got locked up. It took sixty days for him to realize that they wanted him to see a child. Forty-five days before he stopped cursing them all. Depriving him of his rightful daughter, he yelled. Illegitimate fruit of their lust. A scheme to falsify his religious quest. It was not until the beginning of summer that the silence began. That was worse. A slow, cynical smile on his lips, dark hostility in his eyes, and saying nothing — nothing at all.

He tore up Jennie’s photograph. Laughed at their claims. But finally, maybe out of boredom or a hideous despair, he assented to see Hoover. Just once. There were a few religious questions to pose. And they damned well better be answered, he warned.

That was when matters began to spiral in. Elliot Hoover procured a copy of a birth certificate from the Pittsburgh Hall of Records, paid an engraver to duplicate the scrolls and objects embedded in the margins. Then another man was found to forge the inks and signatures. A kind of evil began to filter into the entire enterprise.

“I’d better go,” Dr. Geddes said. “See if Hoover’s arrived.”

Behind the locked door, vague premonitions of voices insinuated themselves into Bill’s mind. He could not distinguish them from other, exterior voices. Sweat broke out along his forehead. In an agony of horror he shook himself from side to side, but the voices insisted, stung, and poked icy fingers through the nerves within his temples.

Bill’s wrists chafed against leather straps connected to the bar of a hard, iron bed. He could sit up, feet on floor, but his arms were bound down beside his thighs.

Suddenly the door opened. Bill stared at the incoming figure through the dampness of sweat fallen along his eyes. Bill’s slow, grinding teeth were audible. In the doorway, Dr. Boltin paused, breathing heavily, mopping his neck.

“Well, Bill,” he said breezily. “How are we doing? Not too badly, I trust?”

Bill’s gaze followed the portly director.

“Where is he?” Bill whispered, his forearms bulging against the restraining straps.

“Come now, Bill. I was told you were calm. Calmness is everything now. Do you understand me?”

Bill licked his lips, stared moodily at the floor, and made his body relax.

The lock on the door gave off a metallic scratching, then it clicked. Dr. Geddes stepped in. Bill slumped against the wall. Dr. Geddes avoided Bill’s eyes.

Dr. Boltin checked his watch. “Are you sure he knew it was for two o’clock?”

“Absolutely,” Dr. Geddes said quickly.

For a long time none of the men in the chamber moved. Their breathing was vaguely audible. Dr. Geddes stared at the discolorations on the floor. They looked like streaks left by dragging shoes. Fights, violent suppressions. He turned away.

“You don’t think this is all a horrible mistake?” Dr. Boltin whispered.

Before Dr. Geddes answered, the lock clicked again. An orderly opened the door, and beside him, forehead glistening with sweat, stood Elliot Hoover in a blue suit. The light picked up his light hair, like a bruised halo, and the heat had reddened his face as though he blushed.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said, catching his breath, smiling. “Sorry I’m—”

“Let’s get on with it, Mr. Hoover,” Dr. Boltin wheezed, pointing to the single empty chair opposite the iron bed.

Hoover hesitated. Bill’s body seemed to repel him with an almost magnetic barrier. Hoover seemed unable to stand the gaze of the manacled man on the bed. He stared at Bill’s shoes, at the standing orderly, back at the psychiatrists; then, he went slowly to the chair and sat down. He did not look at Bill. He licked his lips and swallowed heavily. The door closed behind them and a horrific silence drummed in their ears.

“The, uh, certificate,” Dr. Geddes suggested.

Hoover reached into his interior coat pocket. He produced a long brown envelope. Carefully, controlling nervous fingers, he slit it open. An elegant, scrolled document slid into his palm.

He cleared his throat. “This is the birth certificate of Jennie Dunn.”

Hoover looked up, recoiled from Bill’s stare, and in a kind of psychic defense, held out the document. Bill slowly pulled himself upright, using powerful forearms, until the two men sat facing each other, less than two feet apart. Dr. Geddes now observed that Bill’s feet were unstrapped.

“Look at it, Bill,” Dr. Boltin said.

Bill glared at Dr. Boltin, but like a talisman the document slowly drew his eyes back.

“Jennifer Dunn,” Hoover recited. “February 3, 1975. 10:43 A.M. Signed by the Registrar of Births.”

Bill stared at the document for a long time.

“What do you think, Bill?” Dr. Boltin asked.

“Nice forgery.”

“What makes you think it’s a forgery?” Dr. Geddes asked.

Bill sneered, but he could not take his eyes from the document.

“Look,” Hoover reasoned. “How could anybody duplicate the old scrollwork, the emblems, of the State of Pennsylvania? Only the Hall of Records in the City Hall has these plates.”

Bill’s lips pressed together. He agreed to nothing, but he looked demoralized. Sensing the shift of moral power, Hoover quickly leaned to the attack.

“Now listen to me, Bill,” he said. “ Ahimsa requires it.”

“Who?” Dr. Boltin asked.

“The humility of universal love. Ahimsa. ”

“Oh.”

Hoover turned slowly back to Bill. Bill had softened even more. Compulsively he twined his fingers at the restraining straps. It was pathetic, ritualistic, a bizarre muscular reaction to frustration.

“Listen to me, Bill,” Hoover said softly. “Jennie Dunn is a lovely girl, Bill. She is fragile in many ways, but she is also full of tiny secrets. She moves as though afraid of disturbing the air.”

Bill sighed, and let his hands fall back onto the iron rail. He sat inert under Hoover’s hypnotic monotone.

“When she sleeps, she curls her left leg, as though ready to fly away into the night.”

“Shut up.”

“She’s delicate, Bill. She walks up and down, like a figure on a music box. She dances with herself in the morning sunlight.”

“So does every kid.”

“She needs a soft blue night-light. No other color will do. Her dreams make her sit up, still sleeping.”

“Hoover, I’m warning you.”

Hoover leaned forward, smiling. Suddenly Bill’s foot lashed out, the point of the shoe smashed against Hoover’s right knee. Hoover gasped, turned pale. The sound had cracked like the chop of an axe.