Frank De Felitta - Audrey Rose

“I believe that hot is hot and cold is cold!” He picked up a book of matches from the table and struck one. “I believe that if I hold my finger to this flame, it will burn and cause a blister!” His finger approached the flame and remained there.

“Bill, don’t!” Janice put out her hand to stop him.

Bill blew out the match and held his reddening finger up to her.

“See it getting red,” he said with absolute seriousness. “It will form a blister—as it should!”

He picked up the glass of ice water with his other hand.

“Now, if I place my finger against this frosted glass of ice, it will cool it, for ice does not burn! And no power on earth can make this ice burn my finger!” The words were spilling out of him, compulsively, and he was shouting, attracting the stares and side glances of people around them.

“Ice doesn’t burn! No matter how long I hold my finger to the glass, it will not burn or form a blister!”

It slowly came to Janice that what she was hearing was not a man’s drunken ramblings, but the anguished cry of a man whose sense of reality had been sorely tested and who was fighting to hold onto the last shred of sense and reason left to him.

“Fire burns! Ice cools!” he continued, loudly. “Now if that isn’t a law of Copernicus or Galileo, let’s just call it the law of fucking Templeton! Accepted? Fire burns! Ice cools! And never the twain shall produce the same effect! Accepted?”

The room had quieted noticeably. People were looking directly at them. Tommy appeared with Bill’s drink and genially asked if they cared to order.

“Sure,” Bill said, “what the hell—”

But the force and energy were gone from his voice. The earthquake had subsided. He ordered for them both, mechanically, Janice nodding in agreement to his first suggestion.

Watching Bill raise the drink unsteadily to his lips, seeking to allay his turmoil and confusion in its numbing effect, a gust of pity and dread swept through Janice. The frosted glass had been the giveaway. Ice is cold. Fire burns. The cold and frosted window had burned Ivy’s hands, not the radiator. He had seen, with his own eyes, the groping, seeking hands press against the pane of frosted glass, then pull away, reddened and scorched. “Fire burns! Ice cools!” The hot, fiery radiator had been the logical culprit, not the cold, Jack Frosted pane of glass directly above it. To a mind as well ordered and rooted in reality as his, this could be the only possible, the only acceptable explanation.

Oh, Bill, Bill! Janice’s heart reached out to him. Sweet, confused, beset darling! Her eyes, moist with tears, gazed across the table at the dear face, lowered over the plate of food, scooping forkfuls into his mouth, chewing, tasting, or perhaps not tasting.

Toying aimlessly with her own food, Janice felt a further pang of hopelessness. While she had resented Bill’s purposive obtuseness, his unwillingness to buy all the “mumbo jumbo,” she had found a certain comfort in it, too. Whatever the facts were, his rigid, doubting-Thomas attitude had lent a certain balance to their lives, had brought a note of sanity to their world suddenly gone mad. It would be missing now, this leveling force, this good, solid, healthy skepticism. From now on, there would be two of them to corroborate insanity, to galvanize the atmosphere of fear and tension in their home.

Outside on the street, Bill and Janice waited for a cab. The day had turned gray again, and the air had a smell of rain in it. Bill waved his arm toward cabs as they proceeded sluggishly down the street, but the gesture was useless; the cabs were either filled or unwilling to stop. Still, he continued to wave at them, while Janice insisted that she really preferred to walk home. The food had sobered Bill somewhat, and his face held a slightly guilty, sheepish expression as he bent down to her and kissed her lips. Holding her tightly, he softly apologized for his behavior and told her that he would phone her at nine in the morning, her time. Tears stung at Janice’s eyes as she clung to him, loving him, wanting to comfort him, wanting to tell him that she knew of his terrors and confusions, and not knowing quite how to say it.

He gave her a slip of paper with his itinerary typed on it: the times of arrival in LA and Honolulu, the name of the hotel where he was registered, and several phone numbers at which he could be reached. It also contained Harold Yates’ office and home phone numbers in the event she might need him. He begged her to call him in Honolulu at any time and for any reason.

“And if things work out,” he added, “get in touch with my secretary, and she’ll have your tickets validated in less than an hour.”

Janice nodded and told him to put a Band-Aid on his finger, which had formed a small blister. They kissed again and whispered, “I love you,” to each other, standing in front of Rattazzi’s; then Bill left her and started to walk toward Madison Avenue. The tears in her eyes blurred her vision as she stood watching his tall form mingle and finally get lost in the crowd.

A sharp gust of wind swept up the narrow side street, chilling Janice to the bone. She drew her coat collar tightly around her throat and walked briskly toward Fifth Avenue. Her thoughts remained with Bill, gently reiterating the image of his kind and generous face, smitten now by shock and bewilderment, challenging the evidence of his eyes, defending his reason, struggling to survive.

The heavy-laden clouds were reluctant to commit themselves as Janice walked up Fifth to the corner of Fifty-first Street and waited with an army of people for the light to change.

Looming above her, across the street, stood St. Patrick’s Cathedral—its Gothic lines plunging upward, springing like a fountain at the leaden clouds. The weird transplant from the Middle Ages, nestled incongruously in the midst of Manhattan’s steel, glass, and pollution, seemed to Janice less an anachronism than a monstrous joke that the Catholic Church had played on the city.

Walking past its complex gray stonework and carved metal portals—several of which were open and draped with purple velvet bunting—Janice had the sensation of walking past a colossal genie, squatting imperiously with his fly open, inviting the world to enter and partake of his magic and miracles.

Groups of tourists were entering the church through the open doors at the southern end; at the same time other tourists were emerging from the doors at the northern end, maintaining a constant equilibrium within the church. Janice walked up the steps and merged with the stream of people going through the doors at the southern end.

Entering the nave, she sensed a stillness that absorbed the hollow sounds of shuffling, pushing, whispering humanity as it sluggishly circled around the cavernous hall. Just inside the doorway was a marble font of holy water, the basin stained with greenish rings of sediment denoting various water levels throughout the years of its use. The couple in front of Janice, an elderly man and woman, dipped their fingers into the water and crossed themselves. Janice walked by it without partaking of its solace.

There in the semidarkness Janice was moved counter-clockwise down the side aisle along with a group of tourists craning their necks toward the various points of interest. To her left was the central apse of the cathedral, ringed by lines of stained glass windows caught in the upward drive of buttressed walls that seemed to rise to the very heavens. The main altar and sanctuary dominated the center of the cathedral, with long rows of pews falling back from it. Except for several prayerful people occupying the pews, there was no service in progress at this hour.

To the right of the side aisle were a series of lesser chapels, each devoted to a particular saint. In the chapel of St. Joseph was an open coffin, draped in purple, with the body of some church dignitary lying in state and solitude. Janice saw the tip of the corpse’s nose peeking out of the coffin and was momentarily mesmerized. The people behind her gently, insistently pushed her onward.