Michael Baden - Remains Silent

“I’ll bet she will if I introduce you,” Ms. Crespy said. She jumped up and started for the door. “Come on, I’ll take you. We can swing by the mall site; there’s been lots of progress. You seem like nice enough folk, and you were Dr. Harrigan’s friends.” She sighed. “Cassandra’s sure to be home.”

“Forgive me,” Cassandra Collier said. “I don’t entertain, so I can offer you only tea.”

It had not taken much of Marge Crespy’s persuasion to get her to agree to see Manny and Jake, and the three stood awkwardly in the large foyer of a once-splendid house now sagging in disrepair.

Cassandra was a small woman with luxuriant white hair down to her shoulders and the muscles, Jake noted, of a gymnast. Her eyes were bright, her skin ruddy and wind-tanned, and her hands, peeking out from the sleeves of a bright green wool turtleneck sweater, were those of a young woman.

“Actually, we just had coffee with Ms. Crespy,” Manny said, “and we don’t want to take much of your time.” If she’s insane, I’m a Martian.

“I have time to spare. Would you like to see the garden?”

We’ve no choice. She’ll talk if we’re patient.

Cassandra led them through a living room that seemed to Manny out of an English manor house. A large portrait of a man- her father?- hung over the fireplace; a chandelier blazed light; the leather chairs were scratched but otherwise not worn; the Oriental carpet- an original- had lost none of its opulence. A fraying couch, a pockmarked coffee table, and tattered lampshades over splendid Chinese lamps were the only signs of the passage of time.

“The house was once a showplace,” Cassandra explained. “I keep it up as best I can, but it’s the garden that gets my main attention. I’m happiest there. You’ll see, though, that in the battle between a single woman and nature, nature wins.” They went through the back door to the garden.

The trees were oaks, the vines wisteria, rose bushes, the flowers geraniums, impatiens. But there were weeds among them, and a gazebo in the center had partially collapsed.

Cassandra read Manny’s gaze. “There’s no beauty in destruction. Only sadists like my father think that.”

“Ms. Crespy told us something about him- and your history,” Manny said. “You’ve had a hard life.”

“He was a hard man. Marge told you he sent me to the mental hospital?”

“Yes. It must have been awful for you.”

“It’s what we’re here to talk to you about,” Jake said. “What was going on when you were there?”

She shied back as though he had slapped her. “No, sir. I won’t discuss it.”

“We think there were crimes committed. Crimes that reach into the present.”

“Yes, crimes,” she mumbled. “I don’t want to think about them.” She waved a hand. “Please go away.”

“But you’re the only one who can tell us-”

“Go away!” She fled toward the house.

“Isabella. Isabella de la Schallier,” Manny called.

Cassandra stopped, turned. “What did you say?”

“Isabella de la Schallier. She was at Turner when you were.”

“We found her bones,” Jake said. “Now we need you to help us find out what happened to her.”

She approached them, arms out as though sleepwalking, her face a portrait of grief. “You found her bones?”

“Secretly buried in the field behind the hospital.”

Cassandra’s voice was hushed. “Was anyone buried with her?”

“Yes. Three men.”

“Only grown men?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Isabella and three men. That’s all?”

“Yes. Why?”

Cassandra looked down, unwilling to meet their eyes. “Isabella-” she began, then stopped, her voice catching. “You see, Isabella… There was a child…” Her voice was a whisper as she gazed into a lost world. “Where is Joseph? Where are the bones of her baby?”

They went back to the living room. Cassandra made them tea and now sat with her eyes lowered, as if she had committed a sinful act herself. Manny and Jake faced her from the couch, both sensing that questions would be counterproductive.

At last Cassandra sighed, a sound of such regret that Manny had to fight back an urge to leave and bother her no longer. We’re subjecting her to something terrible. She’s reliving Turner. It’s too cruel. She could tell from his expression that Jake was having similar thoughts.

“It’s all right,” Cassandra said. “If I didn’t want to tell you I wouldn’t. A psychiatrist at Turner- one of the rare good men- said that to survive psychic pain you had to confront it.” She smiled weakly. “Perhaps better late than never.” She walked to the door opening into the garden and stopped there without turning back. When she spoke, her voice was steady and clear.

“I was eighteen when Dad sent me to Turner. The age of majority in the sixties was twenty-one, so I had no choice. It was a hellish place. The doctors and psychiatrists were mostly old men, interested in the patients only as specimens, clay to mold as they wished. The patients were mostly old, too, and most of them were genuinely crazy. One man, younger than the majority, was maybe the craziest of all. He had fought in the Korean War and thought all of us- doctors, nurses, and patients- were the enemy. Often he had to be restrained. When he was untied, he’d explode. And his screams in the night- dreadful.”

“James Lyons,” Jake said.

She looked at him in surprise. “That’s right. I’d forgotten his name. He was one of the few close enough to my age to talk to, but I was kept away from him for my own safety. The doctors didn’t want the child of their biggest benefactor hurt.

“God, I was lonely! I’m lonely here, too, sometimes, but I have my garden and the sunlight and I can move about as I please. The cries are the cries of birds; the howling is the wind. It’s a pleasant loneliness. No one bothers me.”

“And you have Ms. Crespy,” Manny said, too brightly.

“Yes. She’s someone I can trust. I lost all trust at Turner. The first six months there were so awful I wished for madness. To be imprisoned and sane in such a place is torture worse than a thumbscrew.”

She fumbled for control, regained it. “I was saved by Isabella. She was admitted in the summer- my age, and also sane. She was put there by her parents, as I was by my father, only in her case it was that they couldn’t afford to keep her and thought a hospital was a better place than their other option, a home for delinquent girls.

“Isabella cried for weeks, because she thought her parents didn’t want her and because she was in such great pain from her teeth. That turned out to be a simple thing; she got her cavities filled, and the pain went away. We were put in the same room and were friends from the first. We even learned to laugh.”

Her face clouded. “She met one of the new doctors. He was young, probably not ten years older than she was. He was kind to her; he was the one who arranged to have her teeth fixed. And soon they fell in love.”

Manny watched the blood drain from Jake’s face. He sat spellbound, his right leg jiggling up and down in his anxiety. “Go on,” he said hoarsely.

“I was happy for her, and jealous, too. I recognized their passion for each other and wished I could feel it, too- I never have, you see. When she found out she was pregnant, she was thrilled. She was going to call the baby Joseph if it was a boy, and that’s how she referred to it: Joseph.”

“What was the doctor’s name?” Manny asked, sure of the answer. Jake seemed incapable of speech. “Can you remember?”

“Of course I remember. He was an attractive man, the only doctor at Turner capable of laughter. Dr. Peter Harrigan. Is he still around?”