Thunder and Roses (7 page)

He was a legend by then, and there was plenty of copy about him for the columnists and the press agents to run, so that in spite of his prominence, his absence was only gradually felt. But gradually the questions asked in the niteries and on the graveyard shifts at newspaper offices began to tell. Too often reporters came back empty-handed when assigned to a new R. E. story—
any
new R. E. story. An item in the “Man About Town” column led to a few reader’s letters, mostly from women, asking his whereabouts; and then there was a landslide of queries. It was worth a stick or two on the front pages, and then it suddenly disappeared from the papers when all the editors were told in a mimeographed letter that Mr. English’s business would be handled
by his law firm, which had on proud exhibition a complete power of attorney—and which would answer no queries. All business mail was photostated and returned, bearing Robin’s rubber-stamped signature and the name of his lawyers. All fan mail was filed.

The categories of men who can disappear in New York are extreme. The very poor can manage it. The very rich can manage it, with care. Robin did it. And then the rumors started. The rôle of “Billy-buffoon” which he had taken in his musical was a mask-and-wig part, and it was said that his understudy didn’t work at every performance. English was reported to have been seen in Hollywood; in Russia; dead; and once even on Flatbush Avenue. Robin’s extraordinary talents, in the gentle hands of idle rumor, took on fantastic proportions. He was advisor to three cabinet members. He had invented a space drive and was at the moment circling Mars. He was painting a mural in the City Morgue. He was working on an epic novel. He had stumbled on a method for refining U-235 in the average well-equipped kitchen, and was going crazy in trying to conceal that he knew it. He was the author of every anonymous pamphlet cranked out to the public everywhere, from lurid tracts through political apassionatae to out-and-out pornography. And of course murders and robberies were accredited to his capacious reputation. All of these things remained as engagingly fictional as his real activities had been; but since they had nothing like books and plays and inventions to perpetuate them, they faded from the press and from conversation.

But not from the thoughts of a few people. Drs. Wenzell and Warfield compiled and annotated Robin English’s case history with as close a psychological analysis as they could manage. Ostensibly, the work was purely one of professional interest; and yet if it led to a rational conclusion as to where he was and what he was doing, who could say that such a conclusion was not the reason for the work? In any case, the book was not published, but rested neatly in the active files of Mel Warfield’s case records, and grew. Here a flash of fantasy was a sure sign of suprarenal imbalance, there a line of sober thought was post-pituitary equilibrium. One couldn’t know—but then, so little could be known.…

Dr. Mellett Warfield was called, late one night, to the hospital,
on a hormone case. It was one of the sedative and psychology sessions which he had always found so wearing; this one, however, was worse than usual. The consultation room was just down the corridor from Peg’s office—the office into which he used to drop for a chat any time he was nearby. He had not seen the inside of it for three months now; he had not been forbidden to come in, nor had he been invited. Since Robin disappeared, a stretched and silent barrier had existed between the doctors.

And tonight, Mel Warfield had a bad time of it. It wasn’t the patient—a tricky case, but not unusual. It was that silent office down the hall, empty now, and dark, empty and dark like Peg’s telephone voice these days, like her eyes … inside the office it would be empty and dark, but there would be a pencil from her hand, a place on the blotter where she put her elbow when she paused to think of—of whatever she thought, these distant days.

Efficient and hurried, he rid himself of his patient and, leaving the last details to a night nurse, he escaped down the corridor. He was deeply annoyed with himself; that room had been more with him than his patient. That wouldn’t do. Realizing this, he also recognized the fact that his recent isolation in his own laboratory had been just as bad, just as much preoccupation, for all the work he had done. “Overcompensation,” he muttered to himself, and then wanted to kick himself; here he was dragging out labels to stick on his troubles like a damned parlor psychologist. He opened the half-glazed door and stepped into Peg’s office.

He leaned back against the closed door and closed his eyes to accustom them to the dark. Peg seldom used scent, but somehow this room was full of her. He opened his eyes slowly. There was the heavy bookcase, with its prim rows of esoterica, green and gold, black and gold; some twin books, some triplets, some cousins to each other, but all of the same concise family, all pretending to be Fact in spite of having been written by human beings.… He shook himself impatiently.

The clock at the end of the desk sent him its dicrotic whisper, and glowed as faintly as it spoke. Half-past three … in twelve hours it would be like that again, only Peg would be sitting there, perhaps
bowed forward, her chin on one hand, sadly pensive, thinking of—oh, a line of poetry and a ductless gland, a phrase from a song and a great, corrosive worry. If he opened his eyes wide to the desk in the darkness, he could all but see—

She sobbed, and it shocked him so that he cried out, and saw flames.

“Peg!”

Her shock was probably as great, but she made no sound.

“Peg! What is it? Why are you—it’s half-past—what are you—” He moved.

“Don’t turn on the light,” she said grayly.

He went round to her, held out his hands. He thought she shook her head. He let his hands fall and stood stupidly for a moment. Then he knew, somehow, that she was trembling. He dropped on his knees beside her chair and held her close to him. She cried, then.

“You’ve seen him.”

She nodded, moving her wet cheek against his neck. He thought, something has happened, and I’ve got to know what it it is—I’ll go out of my mind if I have to guess. “Peg, what happened?”

She cried. It was hurtful crying, the crying which granulates the eyelids and wrenches the neck-tendons with its sawtoothed, shameless squeaks.

He thought, I’ll ask her. I’ll ask her right out, the worst possible thing it could be, and it won’t be that. And then I’ll ask her the next worst thing. He wet his lips. “Did—did he—” But it wouldn’t come out that way. “He—asked you—”

She nodded again, her cheekbone hard and hot and wet against him. “I just said yes,” she gasped hoarsely. “What else could I say? He knew … he must have known.…”

Mel Warfield’s stomach twisted into a spastic knot, and his stopped breath made thunder in his ears.

He stood up, and spoke to himself levelly, with great care. He spoke silent, balanced things about behaviorism, about things which, after all, happen every day to people.… “God damn it!” Peg wasn’t people! Peg was—was—

“This is crazy,” he said. “This is completely insane, Peg. Listen
to me. You’re going to tell me the whole thing, every last little rotten detail, right from the very beginning.”

“Why?”

“Because I want you to. Because you’ve got to.” A detached part of his mind wondered what he would have to do to make his voice sound like that on purpose.

“If you like,” she said, and he knew she was doing it because of him, and not at all for herself.

She had been looking for Robin. She had been looking for him for weeks—near the theaters which were showing his plays, at the libraries, the parks—anywhere. She had admitted to herself that although his development would follow logic of a sort, the logic would be of a kind, or in a direction, that would be beyond her. Therefore a haphazard search was her most direct course. Random radiation can interfere with any frequency. A siren touches every note on any scale.

There is a place in the Village which serves no food or hard liquor, but only wines and champagne. There are divans and easy-chairs and coffee tables; it is more like a living-room, thrice compounded, than a café. Dr. Margaretta Wenzell, bound for an obscure Italian place in the neighborhood whence emanated rumors of spaghetti and green sauce, had yielded to some impulse and found herself ordering a wine cooler here instead.

She sat near the corner and looked at the surprisingly good paintings which filled most of the space between windows. Out of her sight someone stroked a piano with dolorous perfection. Near her a man with a book studied its cover as if he saw all its contents. Opposite, a man with a girl studied her eyes as wordlessly, and as if he saw all her soul.

Peg sipped and felt alone. And then there was a burst of laughter from the hidden corner, and Peg came up out of her chair as if she had been physically snatched. “It wasn’t that I recognized his voice,” she told Mel, “or even the way it was used. I can’t really describe what happened. It was like the impulse which had made me come into the place—a reasonless, vague tugging, the kind of thing that makes you say ‘Why not?’ … it was that, but a thousand
times more intense. That’s important, because it’s one of the few things that shows how he’s changed and—and what he is.”

She ignored her spilled drink and, like a sleepwalker, went back toward the gentle drumming of voices and the casual piano.

He was there, facing her, leaning forward over a long, low coffee table, his hands—they seemed larger or heavier than she had remembered—spread on it, his head turned to the girl who sat at the end of the chesterfield at his right.

She looked at the girl, at the four other people in the group, at the bored man who played the piano, and back again at Robin and it was only in this second glance that she recognized him, though, oddly, she knew he was there.

He was different. His hair was different—darker, probably because he had used something to control its coarse rebelliousness. His eyes seemed longer, probably because in repose they were now kept narrow. But his face as a whole was the most different thing about him. It was stronger, better proportioned. The old diffidence was gone, gone with the charming bewilderment. But there was charm in the face—a new kind, a charm which she had never associated with him. In that instant of recognition, she knew that she could never couple the words “childish” and “Robin” together again.

She might have spoken, but her voice had quite deserted her. Robin looked up and rose in the same split second, with an apparent understanding of the whole situation and all of her feelings. “Miss Effingwell!” he said joyfully. He was at her side in three long strides, his strong hand under her elbow—and she needed it. “Remember me? I’m Freddy, from the Accounting Department.” His left eyelid flickered.

Too faint to think, Peg said, “F-freddy. Of course.”

He steered her to the chesterfield, into which she sank gratefully. “Miss Effingwell, I want you to meet my quaffing-cohorts. Left to right, Binnie Morrow, Missouri’s gift to show business. Cortlandt—he’s a real travelling salesman. Look out.”

“I travel in hops,” said Cortlandt surprisingly.

“The kind of hops they put in beer,” Robin supplemented, and laughed that new, confident laugh again. “And those two gentlemen
with spectacles and intense expressions are Doctors Pellegrini and Fels, who are psychiatrists.”

“I’m still an intern,” said Pellegrini, and blushed. He seemed very young.

“And this,” said Robin, indicating a tweedy, thin little woman, “is Miss McCarthy, a member of the second oldest profession.”

“He makes it sound very romantic,” smiled Miss McCarthy. “Actually I’m a pawnbroker’s assistant.”

“Her motto is
‘In hoc ferplenti
,’ ” said Robin, and sat down.

“How do you do?” murmured Peg faintly, with a small inclusive smile.

“We were in the middle of a fantastic argument,” Robin said. “I just asked for a simple little definition, and caused no end of fireworks.”

“Do go on,” said Peg. “What were you trying to define?”

“Maturity,” said Robin; and immediately, as if to attract attention away from Peg’s white twisted face, “Cortlandt, where on earth do you buy your ties?”

The salesman dropped his sandy lashes and pulled up his blazing four-in-hand, which then and there served the only real function of its gorgeous life, by holding the eyes of the party until Peg could calm herself.

“Where were we?” asked Miss McCarthy at length.

“I had just said,” answered Binnie Morrow, the showgirl, “that all psychiatrists were crazy.” She blushed. It went well with the glossy frame of chestnut hair round her face. “And then Dr. Pellegrini said that he and Dr. Fels were psychiatrists. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Don’t apologize,” said Fels.

“No, don’t,” said Robin. “If it’s true, it’s true whether or not we have these madmen in our midst. If it’s false, I’m sure they can defend themselves. What about it, Dr. Fels?”

Fels turned to the showgirl. “Why do you think psychiatrists are crazy?”

She twirled the stem of her glasses. “It’s the company they keep. The stuff comes off on them.”

Pellegrini laughed. “You know, I think you’re right! In the clinic,
we work in pairs and in groups. That way we can watch each other. Sometimes I think about the influences a psychiatrist must come under when he’s on his own, and I get scared.”

“What about that?” Robin asked the older doctor.

“I don’t worry much. Few neurotics are particularly dominating. There are minor monomaniacs, of course, but many of those just stay on the single track and don’t have operating conflicts. It’s the ones with internal frictions who come under our hands mostly, and they’re full of opposed or nearly opposed forces which work out to overall weakness.”

“And immaturity,” added Robin.

The salesman looked up. “There’s a definition, then,” he said. “Turn it around and make it positive, and you define maturity as strength and sanity.”

Robin opened his mouth and closed it again. What was so very different about his face?

“Strength and sanity,” said Miss McCarthy thoughtfully. “They don’t mean anything. Strength—stronger than what? A man is stronger than an ant; an ant can move much more, for its size and weight, than a man can. And sanity—who knows what that is?”