“Do you believe that people can remember things that they didn’t personally live through?”
The smile on Dr. Schanzer’s face lessened somewhat.
“I, for one, do not believe in a racial unconscious, Mr. Templeton, or in memories inherited from the collective prehistory of an individual’s background.”
“Thank you,” Bill said.
“Ten days without the two of you—it’s gonna be pure hell, you know that.”
They were back in Rattazzi’s, sitting, Janice thought, at the very same table. It was a few minutes before one o’clock, and the room was filled with people and noise. Everyone seemed to be shouting, Bill included.
“I mean,” he continued, a touch too sorrowfully, “you don’t even leave the hope that you might join me in a day or so.”
His face was flushed; his eyes were beginning to glaze. The straight gin was having a decided effect on him. Janice had resolved to stay sober. Since she would be alone now with Ivy and an uncertain future lay before them, a clear head was essential.
“I don’t believe there is a hope that we can,” Janice answered quietly. “Considering what’s been happening to us lately, do you?”
“I think you’re taking this whole business too seriously.”
Janice looked at him, unbelieving.
“What amazes me is that you don’t.”
“Okay, I left myself wide open for that one. Let me rephrase. The health and happiness of my family are of prime concern to me. Your depression, Ivy’s problem, I take very seriously. I am trying to do something about them.” His sentences were spaced out and slightly tipsy. “To you, I can only offer love, understanding, and extreme patience. To Ivy, I offer the additional benefit of expert medical help, which she will receive. The business I do not take seriously is all the business with Hoover and archetypes, and all the crazy mumbo jumbo that’s been going on in our lives, lately.…”
“For God’s sake, Bill—” Janice exploded. “You honestly think that what’s been happening to Ivy is nothing more than a simple illness like … like the flu? And what you read in Dr. Vassar’s book—you don’t see a connection to Hoover—you consider her opinions and conclusions all a pack of mumbo jumbo?”
The waiter brought Bill’s martini.
“Do it again,” he mumbled and, picking up the fresh drink, quaffed half of it in one gulp. He focused bleary eyes across at Janice and continued in a low, husky voice.
“I don’t think that a D-r in front of a person’s name necessarily makes them infallible. You know, there are a lot of dumb doctors in the world—”
“Oh, wow! You really believe that?”
“Yeah. And since you bring it up, let me tell you a little more about what I really believe. I’m a firm believer in things as they are. Not what they seem to be, but what they are. Dig? I may not like some of those things, but I know damn well I can’t change them, and I sure as hell ain’t gonna try.…” He raised the glass and finished the drink down to the olive. “I believe that up is up and down is down. I believe that if I stood on this table and dived off headfirst, I’d probably break my neck. There’d be no guardian angel around to cushion my fall. I’d be taken either to a hospital or to the morgue. If I died, I would either be cremated or planted in the ground, and it would be the end of me. No harps, no wings, no pitchforks, no nothin’. Finis!” He paused to allow the message to sink in. “I do not believe that I would ever find myself floating around some maternity ward, waiting to sneak into the body of some unsuspecting infant as he came popping out. I’m sure he would resent it, and I know I would be horrified.…”
Janice suddenly found herself laughing, in spite of herself.
“No, don’t laugh!” he cautioned, raising his voice. “I’m not kidding, and I’m not finished!”
The laughter departed Janice’s face as she saw the look of intense sincerity in his red-rimmed eyes.
“I believe that hot is hot and cold is cold!” He picked up a book of matches from the table and struck one. “I believe that if I hold my finger to this flame, it will burn and cause a blister!” His finger approached the flame and remained there.
“Bill, don’t!” Janice put out her hand to stop him.
Bill blew out the match and held his reddening finger up to her.
“See it getting red,” he said with absolute seriousness. “It will form a blister—as it should!”
He picked up the glass of ice water with his other hand.
“Now, if I place my finger against this frosted glass of ice, it will cool it, for ice does not burn! And no power on earth can make this ice burn my finger!” The words were spilling out of him, compulsively, and he was shouting, attracting the stares and side glances of people around them.
“Ice doesn’t burn! No matter how long I hold my finger to the glass, it will not burn or form a blister!”
It slowly came to Janice that what she was hearing was not a man’s drunken ramblings, but the anguished cry of a man whose sense of reality had been sorely tested and who was fighting to hold onto the last shred of sense and reason left to him.
“Fire burns! Ice cools!” he continued, loudly. “Now if that isn’t a law of Copernicus or Galileo, let’s just call it the law of fucking Templeton! Accepted? Fire burns! Ice cools! And never the twain shall produce the same effect! Accepted?”
The room had quieted noticeably. People were looking directly at them. Tommy appeared with Bill’s drink and genially asked if they cared to order.
“Sure,” Bill said, “what the hell—”
But the force and energy were gone from his voice. The earthquake had subsided. He ordered for them both, mechanically, Janice nodding in agreement to his first suggestion.
Watching Bill raise the drink unsteadily to his lips, seeking to allay his turmoil and confusion in its numbing effect, a gust of pity and dread swept through Janice. The frosted glass had been the giveaway. Ice is cold. Fire burns. The cold and frosted window had burned Ivy’s hands, not the radiator. He had seen, with his own eyes, the groping, seeking hands press against the pane of frosted glass, then pull away, reddened and scorched. “Fire burns! Ice cools!” The hot, fiery radiator had been the logical culprit, not the cold, Jack Frosted pane of glass directly above it. To a mind as well ordered and rooted in reality as his, this could be the only possible, the only acceptable explanation.
Oh, Bill, Bill! Janice’s heart reached out to him. Sweet, confused, beset darling! Her eyes, moist with tears, gazed across the table at the dear face, lowered over the plate of food, scooping forkfuls into his mouth, chewing, tasting, or perhaps not tasting.
Toying aimlessly with her own food, Janice felt a further pang of hopelessness. While she had resented Bill’s purposive obtuseness, his unwillingness to buy all the “mumbo jumbo,” she had found a certain comfort in it, too. Whatever the facts were, his rigid, doubting-Thomas attitude had lent a certain balance to their lives, had brought a note of sanity to their world suddenly gone mad. It would be missing now, this leveling force, this good, solid, healthy skepticism. From now on, there would be two of them to corroborate insanity, to galvanize the atmosphere of fear and tension in their home.
Outside on the street, Bill and Janice waited for a cab. The day had turned gray again, and the air had a smell of rain in it. Bill waved his arm toward cabs as they proceeded sluggishly down the street, but the gesture was useless; the cabs were either filled or unwilling to stop. Still, he continued to wave at them, while Janice insisted that she really preferred to walk home. The food had sobered Bill somewhat, and his face held a slightly guilty, sheepish expression as he bent down to her and kissed her lips. Holding her tightly, he softly apologized for his behavior and told her that he would phone her at nine in the morning, her time. Tears stung at Janice’s eyes as she clung to him, loving him, wanting to comfort him, wanting to tell him that she knew of his terrors and confusions, and not knowing quite how to say it.