Escape the Night (5 page)

Levy caught himself smoothing his cowlick, a habit born of confusion. “What else would I do?”

Charles called for another round.

The din grew louder. A sailor next to them pitched from a sitting position face forward onto the table, as two others talked over him without missing a beat. The barman brought their drinks. Charles raised his in a mock salute and said, “Become a psychiatrist.”

Levy tingled with surprise. “A shrink?”

Carey's eyes locked with his. “I've watched you. You see people—look, I know you're on to me.” His gaze broke. In one quick motion he snapped a lighter at his cigarette: drunk, he had the trick of doing small things perfectly, seeming suddenly sober. “The point is that you've got the insight to help people, maybe even the need. Think of this business with your father. He wants a chest-cutter, so you wear yourself out over whether to be one. What psychiatry says is that people can escape the ambush of their own childhood.” Charles stopped as if embarrassed, then began laughing. “Besides, think of all the great cocktail-party stuff you'll have: football molesters, guys who are fixated on Eleanor Roosevelt, frigid women …”

Now, treating Alicia Carey, Levy recalled with double poignancy that Charles had helped him to do so.

After that drunken night in Boston, Levy took his first psychology course. It was Charles who had queried him about it, smiling at his increased animation.

Levy took a second course, then a third, and excelled.

He told his father of this new ambition at lunch in Cambridge, with Charles present. With all the passion he could muster, he explained that he wished to treat the human mind, not the body.

Martin Levy leaned over the table. In a torrent of words he rasped that this would be a waste of his money, that psychiatrists were charlatans and that screwed-up people were born that way, beyond anyone's redemption. Levy felt himself shriveling inside; Charles, who knew that the suicide of Levy's mother was the unspoken subtext to this tirade, fixed Martin Levy with an icy stare. When the speech was finished, it was Charles who answered softly, “But suppose you're wrong.”

Martin Levy's head jerked toward Charles. They stared at each other; Levy saw in his father's shocked face that he felt the thrust of Charles's meaning, and knew it was intended.

Martin Levy did not answer.

The lunch had two results. The first was that Martin Levy no longer admitted Charles Carey to his home. When his son apologized for this, over a late-night beer, Charles only smiled. “Well,” he said, shrugging, “it was never kismet, anyhow.”

At that moment, sensing a cool determination his smile could not hide, Levy knew suddenly that Charles meant
him
to escape a tie: the ambition of a father, with which Charles himself might have to grapple all his life.

The second result was that Martin Levy still sent him money.

In medical school, when his father could no longer help him, Charles lent him some of his own savings from the war, to help him over a few tough months. Later, at the times in Levy's internship when he felt most down and tired, Charles would call to suggest dinner, diverting him with chat of publishing or satiric imitations of bizarre imaginary patients. “I just
love
wet suits,” Charles would tease, until Levy began to laugh. And so it went, through dinners and periodic evenings out, until the two men became pillars of each other's reality, making their separate worlds seem better than they were.

And then Charles had married Allie Fairvoort.…

“She refuses electroshock,” Levy told him now.

“I don't really blame her.” Charles Carey cast an ironic eye at the diploma on Levy's wall. “I thought you'd learned to cure these things without witchcraft.”

“What I learned is that you don't revamp personality, only modify it by a few degrees.
If
the patient wants to.”

Charles lit a cigarette. “And Allie doesn't.”

“She won't talk to me as a real person.” To Levy, Alicia Carey seemed impaled on her inner life, like a butterfly in a box. “Most of us consign our fantasies to daydreams, and peek at them every so often to help us get through the day. Others, like writers or actors—remember, she used to act—try to live off their imaginings, and are sometimes driven crazy by it. She's moved one step past that. Reality is poison to her, and this new baby is its symbol.” Levy scowled. “I know all this sounds like such crap.”

“At least your metaphors are improving.” A smile flickered at the corner of Charles's mouth without changing his eyes. “You were never long on metaphor.”

“She calls for it.” Alicia Carey made him feel poetic and impotent, like the tall, cool women he had dreamt of in school, and could not touch. Now it was Charles Carey's wife he could not touch, even through his profession: eight months had accomplished only his own immersion in her flight. He wished he could protect her, or perhaps use his gifts to give a woman back to Charles, but he had no means. He could stir in her no interest for her infant son; she would not stay in analysis, and Thorazine—an alternative he despised—depressed her further. Finally, he had received a late-night call. Charles had found Alicia in their garden, dressed in her debutante's gown, its silk glistening in the thin silver moonlight. Levy felt a chill at the image, and at the flatness in Charles's tone as he said now:

“Well, no point in being sentimental. HUAC nips at my heels while the patriarch sits on his hands; I've got Zelda for a wife, a four-month-old son, and my sex life is giving me hairy palms.” He rose, shrugging on his coat. “I'd better think of what to do.”

“I suppose so.” Hesitant, Levy added, “Look, I know my timing's awful, but you remember me telling you about Ruth, my sister?”

Charles looked curious. “That imminent threat to Maxwell Perkins? Has she passed puberty?”

Levy nodded, uncomfortable. “She's copy-editing at
Time
now. But she wants to work with fiction.”

“She could always write their editorials.”

Levy looked away. “I'm sorry, Charles. I'd promised to say something next time I saw you.”

Charles waved a hand as he moved toward the door. “Oh, send her in, Sigmund, send her in. I made a dubious shrink out of you, I can surely make a bad editor of her. It's probably stamped on her genetic code.” He turned in the doorway to catch Levy's smile of surprise. “You're still liking this work, I take it.”

“Sometimes it's hard. It's hard now. But yes, I like it.”

Charles smiled, the ghost of his college grin. “Well, I suppose that's something.” He gave the coat a final shrug, squared his shoulders, and then paused. “You know, it's funny, Bill—this time
I'm
the father.”

For a moment the two friends, first sons of their fathers, smiled at each other. And then Charles Carey turned and left, closing the door behind him.

As it shut, Levy remembered Charles, driven by some solitary winter mood, slipping from their dormitory into the cool night. It was late; only Levy saw him. Snow had fallen, gray as ashes, and swirled at Carey's feet. He moved into the shadows, lean and graceful and alone, until he became one of them. Levy had felt a momentary fear, was captured by the image: one lone man watching through his window as the other, merging with the unknown dark, steals his imagination. For that brief instant, Levy had believed that Charles Carey's fate would also be his own.

Watching the infant Peter sleep, Charles tried remembering his own father.

The five-year-old Charles had stood stiffly in Penn Station, waiting with Phillip and their mother for John Carey to return from weeks of selling, toting his black trunk. It had held few presents, even for Ellen Carey. Her hand was cool and dry, the face she wore for her sons still expectant and serene amidst the rush of passengers and porters with luggage, the litany of trains leaving for strange places, gasping steam as they departed. Next to her, Charles would close his eyes and try recalling his father's face. He could never quite remember. Then his mother would squeeze his hand, saying, “Here he is,” and Charles would strain once more to absorb John Carey's features as he strode toward them: black, bushy eyebrows, fierce black eyes snapping from granite planes all surfaces and angles, jaw jutting like a prow. Three-year-old Phillip would hide behind his mother.

John Carey would shake each son's hand and kiss his wife once, on the cheek. She had died from cancer when Charles was fifteen. In Charles's mind she had died from lack of love.

Undemonstrative with women, he began holding Peter often, smelling the newness of his skin. But, looking for some change in Allie, he saw only jealousy. He spent more time with Peter.

That Thanksgiving, Peter learned to crawl.

Charles had been playing with him after dinner, in Peter's room. Allie looked in on them; suddenly, as if hurt by Charles's absorption, she left. Charles rose to bring her back.

At that moment, Peter began moving.

The process seemed to enthrall him. At first he ignored his father, inching forward one knee at a time, the bottom of his corduroy overalls wriggling. Charles stopped, then knelt to watch. Peter moved faster, got to his crib and turned. More confident, he set out toward the fireplace. Suddenly he stopped, turning toward his father with bright pumpkin eyes. He moved two feet further and looked back again, waiting. Charles fell to his knees. Peter went one more foot, and turned. Charles began crawling after him. Peter's face lit up. He scurried away, pivoting to see Charles's pursuit, scurried again. For the first time, from over Peter's shoulder, Charles heard his son's throaty laugh.

Charles grinned.

Abruptly, Peter curled on his side, and yawned.

A smiling Charles changed his clothes and then deposited him in the crib, bunching blankets over his shoulders as Peter yawned and squirmed in the last resistance to sleep. Bending to kiss his son, Charles Carey felt a surge of real happiness …

Then Allie called to Charles from their bedroom.

It was lit by one lone candle on each night stand.

She lay on the bed, wearing the black silk dress she had worn the first night they made love. Her arms and legs were outflung. She was half smiling. The strange glint was back in her eyes.

Charles gazed down at her. Slowly she reached to the hem of her dress and pulled it above her waist.

She wore nothing else.

Candlelight cast shadows on her face and the hollows of her thighs. Charles felt excitement brush his skin. She opened her legs.

He undressed without speaking.

She looked into his eyes, and then at his erection. He reached for her …

She began laughing.

He froze, arms extended, shrill laughter in his ears. Unconsciously, he touched himself.

She stared at the erection in his hand. “Oh God, Charles, oh my God …”

She turned on her side and started weeping, hands covering her face, racking sobs coming from deep within her. For the first time, Charles saw the half-empty bottle of Chivas Regal on her night stand.

Then he heard the sound of Peter crying.

Charles looked down at his naked, sobbing wife, candlelight moving on her body, curled in an awful parody of childhood.

Turning away, Charles dressed and walked slowly to Peter's crib, to hold him. “It's okay, honey,” he kept murmuring, “it's all right,” until Peter fell asleep.

Carefully, he put his son back in the crib, and went downstairs.

With painful intensity, Charles Carey sat in the library and looked backwards, at his life.

He started with the past year: the birth of his son and the failure of his marriage, this nagging erosion of his privacy his father would not permit him to resist.

Until close to dawn, he weighed his lifelong conflict with John Carey, and the childhood that caused it. In their clashes, even in the hated image of his brother's triumph at what he now must do, Charles saw the need of his own son.

The next day, Charles Carey resigned.

Looking at Charles—pale but contained, staring coldly back—John Carey could not accept what he had heard.

“It's final,” Charles was answering. “Besides, I thought you wanted this to pacify HUAC.”

“After what it took for me to get you here?
That's
what ‘pacifying HUAC' was about.” John Carey pointed at the floor. “I used to stoke coal down below in a stinking furnace room you've never even
seen
, while Van Dreelen's blank-eyed sons sat in this very office you now say you don't want, all because they were
born
to it.” He stood, leaning toward Charles with his palms flat on the desk. “Those pathetic cretins reached their height as
sperm
, Charles, and so did you. If I weren't your father, you'd be stoking their furnace.”

Charles sat very still. In a low, sardonic voice, he said, “Some men are born right. Others marry well.”

John Carey stared at his son. “Do you think that's why …?”

“I don't have to see the furnace room, Father. After all, I saw your bedroom.”

John Carey's face stiffened. Into a silence like a caught breath he hissed, “If you weren't my son …”

“I'm sure the time involved was minimal.” Charles paused to catch himself, finishing softly, “As it was until the day she died.”

Charles's eyes were chips of ice in an aquiline mask; a vein throbbed at John Carey's temple. “You
blame
me for that, damn you—you always have.” His breathing felt ragged. “I did what I had to do, and by marrying her I also saved this firm. She knew that, and if it meant she couldn't always have my attention at least she could say she slept with a man.” He paused to steady his voice, then added with silken cruelty, “Which is more than
your
vain and neurasthenic wife will ever say, isn't it?”

For a minute Charles's look was open, surprised, like that of the boy John Carey remembered waiting at the train, before his face would close. Charles lit a cigarette. “I was fifteen, Father, and I was all she had.” He looked up at John Carey, face set once more. “And as she died I knew she was all
we
had.”