Wonderland (65 page)

He would have liked to turn to his wife, but he respected her sleep. He feared her a little. If he had turned to her she would have guessed that he sought only her flesh, the certainty of her flesh, something he could embrace.

He thought of the President: dying, and dead. He thought of his daughter: her hysterical little body, her drained face. All that crying, struggling. As if she hadn’t known him. Staring up into his face as if, so close to him, she hadn’t recognized him.
Someone was dying, no, dead
.… For hours someone had been dying but had really been dead. Now he was dead. The world was filled with people who were dying, and dead. The dead have been dead a long time. Jesse lay flat on his back, a chill of terror passing through him as he thought of the dead and their claim upon the earth—how many more dead there were than living, how deeply the earth was filled with the fine siftings of their bones!

Tomorrow we’ll be home, Jesse thought. Tomorrow this will be history.

The conference had ended abruptly. Confusion and grief. Jesse thought of his paper on memory, of how well it had been received, of his own cautious satisfaction—and now all that had fled from him, rapidly, into the past, the inconsequential past of the day before. There was only one truth about that day: someone had been killed.

Dr. Vogel and his wife had spent the evening with a small group of doctors and their wives, people who hadn’t been able to get out of New York that evening. They had watched television—the film clips, the
endless reports—and after a while they had milled around loosely, nervously, beginning to joke, drinking too much. Jesse had stayed by the television set, watching. There was something he must learn. Must understand. He could not quite believe that the President was dead. What did that mean? Dead? A bullet in the head—the brain—yes, the brain—and so someone was dying, someone was dead? The President was permanently dead?

He kept thinking of how Shelley had seemed to run to him, and then to run away from him—her terror, her screams. She was a high-strung, very pretty little girl; he was fascinated by her, and yet, when she had struggled with him in that crowd, he had felt rage like a flicker of heat passing over his brain, maddening him. Why had she fought him?

Shelley, stop that!
he had shouted.

He had not told his wife about Shelley.

Now he lay awake and did not dare to move. The bedclothes beneath him were damp with his sweat. All his nerves were keen, as if pinched hotly; he was exhausted; his mind raced back and forth over the day he had just lived through. All day long someone had been dying, and had died. Finally died. He had been dead all along and Dr. Vogel had known it, but when he had finally died Dr. Vogel had been unable to comprehend it.

He wanted to get out of bed, throw on his clothes, run down into the street—

The Vogel Clinic, Chicago, Illinois.

He would be The Vogel Clinic. Himself.

Dr. Perrault had not bothered to come to this conference of neurologists and neurosurgeons. He kept saying to Dr. Vogel: “Yes, yes, you are ahead of me when I was your age, is that what you want to know? You are ahead of yourself. The world is ahead of itself.”

Dr. Vogel, with his own plans for the future, awaiting quietly the future when Dr. Perrault would be retired, respected the old man’s bitterness and said nothing. He knew how to be silent. Never argue. Never. His face stiffened at such times, but he said nothing.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Dr. Perrault sometimes asked. “Do you think I am something to stare at? Eh?”

Jesse defended him at the hospital. The old man’s insults were getting worse—he was getting crude, offensive. Jesse defended him to the
families of patients.
Why, why was he so unfeeling?—didn’t he respect death?
It was Dr. Vogel’s belief that Dr. Perrault did not respect death, no. That was the old man’s secret. But he would have never said this out loud, not to anyone. It was a secret of Dr. Perrault’s that Perrault himself did not understand.

At the conference he had skillfully avoided saying much about Perrault to men who asked about him. Working hard as ever, Jesse told them. Working on his book. As he talked with these ex-students and associates of Perrault, some of them fairly old themselves, he had felt an eerie tugging at the back of his mind, as if Dr. Perrault were present, listening, spying on him, taking in all this with his sardonic birdlike expression.… Dr. Perrault hated Dr. Vogel, obviously. Staring at Dr. Vogel, he would appear fascinated, utterly enraptured, as if something about Dr. Vogel’s face gave him no peace. He could sit for fifteen, twenty minutes without moving, in a kind of catatonic calm, staring and thinking. What was he thinking about? Dr. Vogel felt the old man always thinking, always contemplating him, even when he was nowhere near. He felt the old man opposing him. He shivered, thinking of that persistent, eternal opposition, not understanding it. “Your hair is an extraordinary color,” Perrault sometimes said, smiling.

“My hair?” Jesse said, alarmed.

“Yes, your hair. An extraordinary unhuman color.”

Perrault wanted to drag him down. But he would not drag him down, not Dr. Vogel.

In a few more months Jesse would be free of him. And he was really free of him now. Always, he was subservient to Perrault, he accepted Perrault’s most biased criticism, he did what Perrault wanted, and yet he was free, freeing himself. It had to be done cautiously.
Someone was dying, was dead
. Jesse had gone to talk with Grandfather Shirer’s attorney in Lockport and he had settled out of court—Dr. Pedersen had intended to contest the will—for half of what he had been left, so he had money, he had a great deal of money to finance a small hospital of his own; in a sense he was already free but he had to move cautiously. Dr. Perrault could still ruin Jesse if he wanted. He could shake himself out of his dark inertia and ruin Jesse.… It took him so long to withdraw, to sink; as he drifted farther from life Jesse moved to take his place, taking on more and more of Perrault’s responsibilities, being exposed himself. At times he felt the raw panic of exposure. Working
himself free of the old man, so caught up with the old man, he yet realized that Perrault protected him from the world even now. He knew that. He could not erase in himself a sense of absolute, utter, sweetish dependency, a helplessness in the presence of the old man that grew out of love. It was permanent in him. But at the same time he thought eagerly, guiltily, of the years when he would be free … a better surgeon than Perrault himself … with a clinic of his own, a private clinic that would be the center in the Midwest for certain types of work.… And then all that would remain of Dr. Perrault would be Dr. Vogel’s carefully cherished memory of him.

Someone was dying, was dead
.

Helene stirred. Jesse, wanting suddenly to embrace her, to talk with her, leaned up on one elbow. “Are you awake?” he whispered.

She did not reply.

“Helene?”

She had had too much to drink last evening. Her father had been in and out of New York, too busy, too mysteriously busy, to take part in the conference. He had stayed around for a while that evening, dashing and yet pert, delivering his opinions on the assassination—the “assassination plot”—in the crowded hotel room, fixing himself and his daughter drinks, standing for a while behind Jesse to watch the television coverage, but gradually drifting away to join a circle of other people. Jesse was relieved that Dr. Cady hadn’t bothered much with him. He was relieved to have been spared Cady’s perpetual questions about his work and about Perrault and about his family life.… Cady was aging, but not shabbily. Not like Perrault at all. He seemed to be getting nervier, sharper. Neither Perrault nor Cady had finished his book, but Perrault kept on with his or gave the appearance of keeping on—Jesse did much of the research for him, the compiling of figures, he had a large file of correspondence with other doctors, in fact he was almost writing the book himself—while Cady only joked about his book. His work was a semiclassified project that had been funded over the past fifteen years by government agencies. “With all they’ve poured into me they could have financed a small war,” Cady joked. “They could certainly have financed an assassination done with more finesse, with more style.”

He had shocked a few people by saying that. Jesse, annoyed, had pretended not to hear. “Now Robert Kennedy will be next, that is a
prudent assumption,” Cady said. Helene had smiled a small, strained smile at this. But most of Cady’s conversation had been about a car he was having built for him. Jesse had tried not to listen to this, wanting to put his hands over his ears, staring at the television screen—but there was his father-in-law, the renowned Benjamin Cady, talking loudly about an automobile someone was building for him. On this day the President of the United States had been killed, but Dr. Cady insisted upon talking about an automobile.

“It’s absolutely a custom job; there will be only one of its kind in the world,” Cady had explained. “The chassis, engine, and automatic transmission are being built by General Motors, then modified by hand by the Richler engineers. The final assembly, coachwork, instrumentation, and finishing will be done in Germany, of course. The leather interior will be done by Connolly Brothers—they supply Rolls, you know—it should be done shortly after the first of the year–”

Jesse had not dared look at his wife’s face.

Now they lay side by side in this hotel bed, the two of them in the darkness of a strange room. They seemed to be floating upon the darkness, separate. Whatever sorrow Helene felt about her father, Jesse did not know about it; whatever sorrow Jesse felt about Perrault, Helene did not know about it and would not have wanted to know. Other women had wept at the President’s death, but Helene had not wept. Jesse had felt tears of anger and frustration burn in his eyes, but Helene had remained calm because she hadn’t wanted to frighten the girls. “Jeanne is already too morbid. Shelley is feverish,” Helene had said. She was always assessing the girls, speaking of Jeanne and then of Shelley as if reporting on them to Jesse or to herself, making sure of them. “Too much is going to be made of this,” she had said of the assassination, “the country always makes too much of everything.… It will turn out vulgarized and clownish. I don’t want the girls to wallow in it.”

The President had been killed. Now there was a new President. Before two o’clock it had all happened and had become history: the motorcade in Dallas fired at, the President struck in the head, the President pronounced dead. Jesse felt again and again the impact of those bullets in his own body; the head, the vulnerable head, the precious brain.… Why was it always this way, men dying, men dead?
Why the exploded skull, the burst brain, why so many men in a procession that led to death? Dr. Vogel, sweating, could not understand it.

He would think of Reva instead.

No, not Reva. Not tonight.

His senses stirred suddenly, painfully. Always Reva. Reva. But he would not think of her tonight. He would remain faithful to Helene.

When he could not sleep he often thought of Reva, and a kind of storm would grow in him. But he must not think of her tonight, not when someone had just died. His mind raced, looking for something to attach itself to. Not Reva. Not the demands of his body. He often lay awake for hours at night, unable to sleep, and in his head there were people, patients, deaths, diagnoses, problems, recoveries, improvements, surprises. Dr. Perrault had just filed a suit against someone, and Jesse would be dragged into it. No way out. He must acquire an attorney of his own. Must protect himself. His mind filled up with Perrault’s words, Perrault’s grimaces, Perrault’s soul. He lay awake in a perpetual consciousness, a perpetual flow of words. He could never catch up with his own consciousness.

What was consciousness, what was life? What was death?

He thought he heard a sound in the adjoining room, where the girls were sleeping. One of the girls moaning in her sleep?

He wondered if he should get up to check. But Helene was sleeping purely, flawlessly, and he did not want to disturb her. He listened and heard nothing more. Shelley had been so frightened, so wild.… He had not been able to say the right words to Shelley. He had not been able to console her. Holding her, embracing her, trying to comfort her, he had felt with a terrible certainty the failure of his words, his touch, even the fact of his fatherhood … what could he bring to this terrified eight-year-old, this pretty, feverish child? It was terrible, that he should love his daughter so much and yet be unable to help her.