Мариус Габриэль - The Ocean Liner

Thinking of her naked body in the bed, tipped with pink, lined with pink, waiting for him, he felt his heart leap up in his breast. His blood was rushing hotly along his hardening arteries; the old light of battle was burning in his weakening eyes. He could hardly wait to bury his muzzle between her plump, blonde thighs, grasp her full bosoms in his hands. And the stirring in his loins promised that he would be able to discharge his fervour satisfactorily today.

He reached her apartment and pressed the buzzer with a trembling finger.

Her voice reached him through the speaker.

‘Who is it?’

‘Your lover,’ he hissed into the grille.

He heard her mischievous laugh. The door clicked open. Checking swiftly up and down the street for observers, and seeing none, he darted into the marble lobby and made for the golden portal of the elevator.

The sanatorium was not an easy place for a visitor to get into. It had helped greatly that Cubby was in uniform, and that there were ribbons on his breast. A Navy uniform and a Silver Star got you into most places these days without too many questions asked.

The mansion was Victorian Gothic, red brick and stone, with spires and mullioned windows. Ivy hugged the walls. The grounds were all rolling lawns and woods, more reminiscent of a country club than a psychiatric hospital. There was a golf course and a swimming pool and charming views of the Hudson River, like a nineteenth-century oil painting.

The talkative nurse, who made no attempt to hide the fact that Cubby was the most interesting visitor she’d had in a long time, told him that there was a gymnasium for the patients, not to mention rooms for painting or other creative endeavours, and a large library. She also confided that there were a lot of famous patients here. You had to be very wealthy to get your relations into Craig House. The fees ran to over a thousand dollars a month, a staggering amount, especially in wartime. Henry Fonda and F. Scott Fitzgerald had both brought their crazy wives here, although the story of Mrs Fonda had ended badly. Nurse Olsen, lowering her voice to a whisper, had pointed out the turret where Mrs Fonda had cut her throat with a razor.

And then, of course, there was Rosemary Kennedy.

‘She’ll be so glad to see you,’ Nurse Olsen assured Cubby. ‘She gets very lonely. She needs stimulation. The family don’t come for months at a time, and they’ve given strict orders that nobody else is to see her either. That’s not really fair, is it?’

‘No,’ Cubby replied, ‘it’s not.’

‘But you’re not really family, are you?’ The question was half-flirtatious, half-professional.

‘Miss Kennedy and I were engaged to be married. It didn’t work out.’

‘Is that right? That’s too bad.’ She eyed him speculatively, but didn’t ask why it hadn’t worked out. ‘How long are you on leave, Lieutenant?’

‘I have just forty-eight hours. Then I have to re-join my ship.’

‘What ship is that?’

Cubby smiled. ‘I’m not supposed to say. Loose lips sink ships, as they say.’

‘Do I look like a Nazi spy?’

‘You’re pretty enough to be one,’ he said gallantly.

Nurse Olsen giggled. She was a freckled redhead with a buoyant bust which her starched pinafore could not quite subdue. ‘You never know, do you?’

‘Well, I guess I can trust you. She’s the Saratoga .’

Her eyes opened very wide. ‘The Saratoga ! Wasn’t she torpedoed?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That must have been terrible.’

‘It was interesting.’

She laid a stubby finger on his Silver Star ribbon. ‘Was that when you got this?’

‘Kind of.’ He was impatient to see Rosemary, but the nurse was hesitating, and he needed her good graces to get to Rosemary. ‘We all had to look out for each other. I don’t know why they gave me this. I accepted it for all the other guys.’

She seemed to make up her mind at last. ‘I’ll give you a private room. It’ll be quieter.’

‘That’s great. Thank you.’

She led him to a room overlooking a rose garden. It was a masculine sort of den, the furniture upholstered in tobacco-coloured leather and the panelled bookcases holding rows of bound medical journals with dates in the eighteen-hundreds. ‘This is Dr Slocum’s study, but he’s delivering a lecture in Baltimore today. Take a seat. I’ll bring Rosemary down.’

Cubby sat in a hard armchair to wait. It was getting to be late in the year. Through the diamond-paned window, he watched the heavy yellow heads of the autumn roses nodding in the breeze outside. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say to Rosemary. It was four years since he had last seen her, and in all that time he had not received a single letter from her, though he had written – in spite of Mrs Kennedy’s warning – many times.

When he looked back on that Cubby of four years ago, he hardly recognised himself. He had been a different person then, untouched by life, though he’d fancied that his heart had been broken.

In the years of war that had followed his enlisting in the Navy, he had been through fire and blood. He had witnessed the death of friends, the loss of innocence, all the terror and boredom and fury of war. He knew he would never play music again.

He looked now upon his earlier self as a man might look upon a younger brother, pitying his naiveté, wanting to protect him from harm, yet knowing that nothing could protect anyone from harm in this life. Sometimes the gulf that separated this Lieutenant Hubbard from that earlier Cubby was so deep and wide that he felt he must inevitably fall into two pieces, fractured beyond repair. Those moments usually happened when he was ashore, and he survived them by going into a kind of somnambulistic trance, sleepwalking his way through everything he was asked to do with eyes wide open, yet feeling nothing.

He heard a footstep outside the door and rose to his feet. Nurse Olsen came into the study, leading a woman; but to Cubby’s acute disappointment, it was not Rosemary. It was someone much older, someone who had evidently suffered a terrible accident, for she walked with painful slowness, her head hanging down to one side, her shoulders crooked, with one arm twisted awkwardly in front of her.

‘Here she is,’ Nurse Olsen said cheerfully. ‘She’s been quite perky today. Haven’t you, Rosemary? Look who’s come to see you. Isn’t that a lovely surprise?’

Cubby felt as though he had been plunged into an ice bath. He could not speak. As Nurse Olsen steered the shuffling figure to a chair, he saw that this human wreck was indeed Rosemary – or rather, what was left of her, because Rosemary had departed the twisted body, leaving it empty. The dull eyes that met his from under the crudely cropped hair were incurious and did not linger on him. Although the lips were moving, they did not frame any words of greeting. It was no more than a tremor.

‘I’ll just put this under her, in case of accidents.’ The nurse laid the folded towel on the chair, and then carefully helped Rosemary to lower her body down. When Rosemary was seated, the nurse propped a pillow under her head to keep her from sliding over. ‘Do you want me to stay?’ She smiled at Cubby. ‘Of course you don’t. You have a lot of private things to talk about. I’ll leave you in peace. There’s a buzzer on the desk. Just press that when you need me.’ She left the room.

Cubby couldn’t see Rosemary’s face clearly, since her chin was resting on her collarbone. He knelt on the carpet in front of her chair, looking up at her.

‘Rosemary,’ he whispered. ‘Do you know who I am?’

The dull eyes drifted across his face indifferently for a moment, then slid away. He studied her, hardly able to believe what he saw. The beauty of her face, so much of which had come from the vivacity of her expressions, was completely gone. What had once been plump was now drooping. The once-rounded cheeks were pouchy, the once-full lips thin and cracked. Her skin, which had bloomed with youth, was sallow. He saw that even her hands were prematurely aged, their grace gone, the nails cut short. They lay in her lap like two dead birds.