The Three Roads Read online

  The newspaper clippings Paula had given him the night before were in the inside pocket of his coat. If Taylor’s mind was moving toward reality and health, a full knowledge of the event that had alienated him from these things would help him on his way. But if his mind was seriously ill, caught in the grip of a psychotic perversity, the knowledge of the murder might strengthen his disease. Truth was a potent drug that could kill or cure, depending on the patient’s stomach for it. His problem, as always, was to understand the individual man.

  He turned to Bret, who was silent in his chair, emptily gazing at the floor.

  “Please go on. I should like to learn more of your childhood life.”

  Bret stirred uneasily. “From the beginning?”

  “Not necessarily. I do not attach the importance which Adler does to the earliest memories. I am more interested in what you consciously think important.”

  “My attitude, you mean?”

  “Give me the facts. Your attitude has been speaking for itself.”

  After some embarrassed hesitation Bret resumed his interrupted narrative.

  “You must have gathered that my home life when I was a kid was pretty queer. I don’t think it was before my mother died, but she died when I was four so I don’t remember much about that. My father’s older sister came to keep house for him, and for a couple of years I was under her thumb. Aunt Alice, or perhaps it was my father, set up some rather peculiar rules for a five-year-old to live by. I remember she spanked me on at least one occasion for asking questions about my mother. She wouldn’t even tell me what had happened to her. Aunt Alice died herself when I was six, and I can’t say I was sorry.” He smiled his disturbing smile again, tightening his mouth as if these memories had a bitter taste.

  “That’s natural enough,” Klifter said. “The stern old aunt would make a poor substitute for your dead mother. Who looked after you when the aunt died?”

  “My father took care of me himself. He was a full professor at that time, and vice chairman of his department, and he could have afforded a nursemaid. But for some reason he wouldn’t have a woman in the house. He went to an inordinate lot of trouble with me, and probably slowed up his own work considerably, simply in order to avoid living with a woman. He hired male students of his, off and on, to help with the cooking and the cleaning, but he and I did most of the housework ourselves. I could cook quite well when I was eight, but I didn’t learn to play baseball until I went to prep school. He only let me stay in prep school for one term, by the way. All of which probably accounts for my inability to fit into a group, my feeling that I have no definite place in society.”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “When I look back on it I can see that I’ve been a good deal of a lone wolf all my life. Even my profession—I don’t believe I told you I write history, or used to—was a one-man sort of thing. I never did much in team games, but I was good at boxing and swimming. The only thing I ever got into where I felt carried away by something greater than myself was the Navy. After I was given my commission, and especially when I was assigned to my ship, I felt for the first time in my life that I belonged to something. I was a member of a team fighting for a good cause, and it gave me a satisfaction I’d never had. I turned out to be a pretty good officer, curiously enough. I got along well with my men and did my job. When the ship went down I had a sense of irreplaceable loss.”

  “You were—invalided out, I believe, before the war ended?”

  “Yes. I think I know what you’re driving at. I’ve gone into it rather thoroughly with Commander Wright. It’s true I felt guilty about dropping out of the fight before it was finished. It’s also true that I didn’t want to go back after my ship was bombed. I was completely tired out after more than two years at sea, and I guess I was frightened too. I didn’t admit it then, even to myself, but I do now.”

  “What exactly do you admit?”

  Bret withdrew his eyes from Klifter’s and looked away out of the window again. His hands strained against the arms of his chair as if it were a trap. “I admitted to Commander Wright, and to myself, that I was secretly glad when my ship went down. It meant survivor’s leave for me.” His voice cracked on the final word.

  “I see. You are still suffering from a sense of guilt?”

  “Maybe I am,” Taylor said impatiently. “But it has nothing to do with that.”

  “I think it has. You cannot yet live comfortably with the knowledge of your own weakness. Remember that it is a normal human weakness to value self above all others. I have harbored a similar wish, Mr. Taylor. When the candidates were selected for the crematorium each day, I silently prayed that I would not be one of them, though there were many others less fit to die. We all must learn to live with the dreadful fact of our own selfishness. There is no virtue in futile guilt.”

  “That’s what Wright said, and I believe it. Some of these dreadful facts take a lot of getting used to, that’s all. But it isn’t that that’s bothering me now.”

  “What is bothering you now?”

  “The things I can’t remember,” he said in a dry, wretched voice. Suddenly he blurted: “Doctor, what happened to my mother?”

  “Your mother?”

  His smile was equally wretched. “Did I say ‘mother’? I meant to say ‘wife.’ I meant to ask you what happened to my wife. I didn’t even know I had a wife until today.”

  “She is dead. I am sorry.” Klifter spread his hands in a gesture of embarrassment and sympathy.

  “But how did she die?”

  Klifter had not yet made his decision, and he took refuge in a Jesuitical half-truth: “I do not know exactly. Tell me about your mother, Mr. Taylor. Do you remember her?”

  “Yes.” After a long pause he added: “She was quite a pretty woman. I remember that much, but she’s rather vague. I told you she died when I was four. She was good to me. I had fun with her. She used to stand on her head on the bed for me, things like that. We had pillow fights. And we had a game at meals, about my eating. One bite for each of her ten fingers, or something. She had lovely hands.”

  “Do you remember her death?”

  The dreaming blue eyes hardened in rejection. “No. Wait a minute—I remember something.” His eyes glazed and lost their focus. His brown face became smooth and blank, a wooden image of a young boy set out to decoy the past. “I went into her room, and she was dead. Some nights when I was afraid, she would let me come into her bed and stay until I was asleep. I had a bad dream that night and went into her room, and she was stiff and cold. I could see her dead face in the light from the head of the bed. Her hands were folded on her breast. I touched her face, and it was as cold as a wet cloth.”

  “Was she wearing her nightgown?” Klifter recalled that Lorraine had been naked when Taylor found her.

  “No.” The answer was very definite. “She was wearing a black silk dress with a white ruffle at the throat. Her eyes were closed, and her head was resting on a white satin pillow. I didn’t know that she was dead until my father told me. I had never seen a dead person before.”

  “Did your mother usually sleep on a white satin pillow?”

  “What do you mean? How do you expect me to remember a thing like that? My mother died when I was four.”

  Klifter refrained from pointing out that Taylor had recalled the detail himself. Because this line of inquiry seemed to be disturbing to the young man, he abandoned it for the moment.

  “Tell me, was your mother’s death a frequent memory, or a painful one?”

  “In my childhood, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t often think of my mother at all. One reason must have been that my father never mentioned her. I think he may have grieved for her in private. Certainly he wasn’t a happy man and he never remarried, but so far as I remember he didn’t talk about her. He wouldn’t even answer my questions about her, and he discouraged my asking them. He let me understand that the subject was taboo. Naturally I got the impression that t
here was something wrong there, but I never dared to ask him what it was.”

  “Perhaps he did not love your mother?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t. The thought wouldn’t have occurred to me when I was a kid, but it has since. I told you how he felt about women in general. He brought me up to regard them as whited sepulchers, lovely receptacles of the world’s filth—that sounds like exaggeration, but it isn’t. So long as I was at home, and I was with him up to the age of seventeen except for my term at prep school, I wasn’t allowed to have anything to do with girls. He wouldn’t let me buy a girl a soda or go to a mixed party. I didn’t go out with a girl until after his death—I was in my senior year at Chicago—and then nothing came of it. I was a virgin until my marriage.” He corrected himself hastily. “The night before my marriage.”

  Paula West? the doctor wondered. Surely she would have told me. But perhaps not. Every woman has her reticences, like every man.

  Bret understood the silence and answered the unspoken question. “I slept with my wife the night before I married her. It’s a curious thing,” he added hesitantly. “I dreamt about it this morning.” He told Klifter what he could recall of the kewpie-doll dream. “I suppose it means I married Lorraine under the influence of my father’s morality?”

  “Or slept with her as a gesture of revolt against him? A dream may have multiple meanings. We will talk about your dream at another time.”

  Klifter rose from his chair and moved impatiently about the small office. While great areas of the biography were blurred or missing altogether, the patterns of Bret’s mental life had begun to configure in his mind. There was clearly a fixation on the death of the mother for which the father’s foolish treatment of his son seemed partly responsible. But the evidence of it had come too easily, almost without resistance. The very readiness and clarity of the infantile memory made it suspect, especially in view of the similarity between the death of the mother and the death of the wife. It was clearly possible that the mother’s death scene was a substitute, elaborately staged by the analysand’s imagination, for the inadmissable memory of the murdered wife. This possibility was strengthened by the evident identification of the mother and the wife, whom Bret had confused verbally. The pattern was Oedipean, complicated by a melancholia arising from what Bret described as his sense of loss. He had lost his mother at a vulnerable age, lost his ship and the comradeship it symbolized, lost his wife. He was one of those who had formed the habit of loss and acquired a need for it, especially where his affections were concerned. He had done his best to lose Paula West. Finally he had lost his memory and for a while reality itself.

  Commander Wright believed that the truth Bret had lost should be withheld until Bret found it himself. Like many American doctors, even some who had learned from Freud, Wright was basically a moralist. He believed that mental disease was an evasion of responsibility by the patient, and that it was therefore a doctor’s duty to his patients to let them cure themselves so far as possible. Heaven helped those who helped themselves.

  But it was possible that the motives behind Wright’s muscular attitude were not entirely moral. Klifter had noticed during their conversation on the road that Wright was deeply interested in Paula West. This sexual interest in his patient’s lover might have influenced him to take the longest way in his treatment of the case, avoiding the drastic shortcut on which Klifter had decided. There was also the fact that Paula was opposed to Bret’s being told the truth, and Wright took her opinions very seriously.

  Wearily he dismissed the elaborate train of conjecture. The case must be judged on its merits rather than on the basis of hypothetical motives of the other people involved. The only question to be decided was Taylor’s relation to the blurred and wavering line that separated the sheep from the goats, and his mind was already made up.

  His hand was in his pocket palpating the wad of clippings when he was overcome by caution. What if he made his potent gift of truth and Taylor then refused to become his patient? The results could be embarrassing, not to say disastrous. He must be certain before he prescribed this medicine that the case was his.

  “Do you wish to see me again?” he said. “Do you think I can help you?”

  “I’d like to think so. I’d grab at anything that promised to pull me out of this backwater. If I don’t get back to work soon I’ll lose the habit permanently.”

  “What work are you planning? It is good for you to be thinking of going back to work.”

  “It’s a book I’ve had in mind for a long time. I call it The Political Fallacy. It’s nothing startlingly original, the idea goes back away before Thoreau, but I want to make some modern applications of it. The leading fallacy of our times, underlying fascism and communism and even most of the liberalisms, is the belief that political man is man in his highest function, that political forms are the salvation of the individual soul—But don’t let me bore you,” he concluded miserably.

  “On the contrary. Please go on. I take it you are no anarchist?”

  “Call me a political protestant. Your true anarchist is the enemy of political forms of any kind. I simply want government to know its place. A state, or a political party, is a means to an end. The end has got to be determined by non-political values, or politics becomes a snake gagging on its own tail. You have an analogous problem in psychiatry, don’t you? Whether to prepare your patients for the absolutely good life or for the life of society. That’s a crude antithesis, but you know what I mean.”

  “I do indeed. That is one of our basic problems. Especially in a period when the good life and the life of society may be at opposite poles. In an insane society it is the sane man who seems insane.”

  “I can’t take that comfort to myself,” Taylor said with his bitter smile.

  “You have no reason to despair. The final test is ability to work, and your mind displays great energy.”

  “And produces nothing. You can hardly imagine how unsettling it is not to remember certain things. It’s as if my own back yard were full of hidden land mines. I know I planted them myself, but I can’t remember where.”

  “You know as well as I that every man has within him, in his back yard as you say, the total range of good and evil. But nothing there is less than human. You will find that nothing there can blow you to pieces.”

  “Then what happened to my wife?” Taylor’s voice had suddenly become violent and high. “Why has nobody told me?”

  “Consider that you did not know you had a wife until today. Commander Wright has allowed your process of recall to follow a natural course.”

  Taylor twisted in his chair in order to look up into Klifter’s face. “I can’t live in a cage for the rest of my life. I feel as if they’ve shut me away in a drawer in a mausoleum.”

  “I understand your feeling,” Klifter said quietly. “Shall we meet again then?”

  “If you think it will do any good. Commander Wright said something about a leave.”

  “Yes. If you come to stay with Miss West in Los Angeles you will be accessible to me. She has already taken it up with Commander Wright’s superiors. You will come to see me this week in Los Angeles then?”

  “I have no choice, have I?”

  “Your choices are voluntary. You are legally a free man—”

  “I didn’t mean to be ungrateful,” Taylor said. “If I had a choice, or since I have, I’ll come.”

  “Good. In the meantime it will be well for you to read these.” He brought the wad of clippings out of his pocket and handed them to Taylor. “We will talk of them at our next meeting.”

  The young man stared at them. “What are they?”

  “The newspaper accounts of your wife’s death. She was murdered nine months ago. Your illness had its inception at that time.”

  Bret had sprung to his feet and was standing over the doctor, his irises shining grayly like small spinning wheels. “Who killed her?”

  “The murderer is unidentified and still at large. When you have read t
hose articles you will know all that I know.”

  “I see now what the mystery was,” Taylor said slowly. “The bloody fools!”

  “You must excuse me now,” Klifter said. “Good-bye. I should say au revoir.” The German phrase had risen to his lips, but he suppressed it, as he tried to suppress all German things to himself.

  Bret was so absorbed in the newsprint in his hands that he failed to answer. With a last look at his tormented face Klifter went to the door. Superficially, he reflected as he closed it behind him, these Americans were an optimistic and secular brood. Incessant radios routed their loneliness, five-color advertisements and chromium bathrooms exorcised their diseases, mortuaries like the mansions of heaven disguised their funerals. But the tragic inner life went on, strong in proportion to its denial and violent in proportion to its stealth. The handsome barbered heads and sun-tanned faces were shadowed by death. Even more than the others, it seemed to him, Taylor had been engaged in a lifelong struggle with death. Let him meet his adversary face to face.

  Part III

  MONDAY

  chapter 8

  The afternoon was warm for February, and they drove with the top down. It was good to be on the road again after the last dragging hour at the hospital, packing Bret’s luggage in the rear compartment of the roadster, listening to Commander Wright’s last-minute instructions: “There’s no reason why he shouldn’t enjoy himself in moderation. Sports like swimming and golf are just what he needs to build up his self-assurance. Maybe even the occasional night club, but he shouldn’t do any drinking.…”

  When they got away from San Diego’s dreary suburbs and onto the coast highway, Paula drove fast. Their physical speed, their tangible advance through the whipping air, gave her the illusion of progress and the promise of fulfillment. But she was disappointed by Bret’s attitude. After months in what amounted to custody he’d naturally feel awkward and shy on his first day in the outside world. Commander Wright had warned her to expect this. Still his continued silence worried her, nagging at the edges of her hope and threatening to spoil this sunny, blowing birthday of his freedom.