Babe ran her fingers up and down her arm, touching the little circular bandage Dr. Corey had put over the vein. “But the girl was a prodigy. The memory was hers.”
The column of the doctor’s neck swelled. His tone became explanatory, as though he were addressing a student. “The memory of the pastor was hers—but the memory of Leviticus wasn’t hers in the same sense. She’d suppressed the pastor but retained the sound, not the meaning, of his nocturnal recitations. Memory is an idiot with one hundred percent retention. Like an old relative who babbles on too long. On the other hand, consciousness and understanding are selective. It’s the selecting process—the selecting out of links—that gives us the impression of uncanny recall.”
“I’m not following that.”
“I’ll give you an example. One patient of mine—president of a leading brokerage house—remembers President McKinley’s assassination even though he was born forty years later. What he doesn’t remember is that his grandfather witnessed the assassination and loved to talk about it.”
“How do you know he heard his grandfather if he can’t remember?”
“His mother remembers her father telling the child when he was four years old. The shooting terrified the child, but he adored his grandfather. So in his mind he separated the two.”
“But Leviticus in Hebrew really exists, and McKinley’s assassination really happened. What about things that didn’t happen? Is it possible to think you remember them?”
“Absolutely. You could remember a dream. And you might even remember it as a fact. After all, in their own terms, dreams are as real as a tree or a Pythagorean theorem or the sound of a violin. Dreams happen. All physical and mental data coexist in the universe.”
“You sound mystical.”
“There’s nothing mystical about common sense.” Dr. Corey was silent, as though lost for a moment in some limitless space of conjecture. “Or maybe there is. I’ve never given it much thought.”
Her eyes came around to him, cautiously. “Could I have dreamt while I was in coma?”
“During certain stages of coma, absolutely. The mind has to keep busy or it goes crazy.”
“Why would I dream about a cocktail party with guests wearing joke-store masks?”
“Because that might just possibly be your considered judgment of cocktail parties. Pay attention to those little warnings your unconscious sends you. Often they’re right on target.”
Phones were ringing and echoes were spilling in from the corridor; there was an unending chatter of humans and computers and printers as Babe let herself into her office. A rush of emptiness, like an air current, swirled up to greet her.
She had stacked the sketches of the last three seasons’ cruise lines in five enormous piles on her worktable and desk and chairs. They were part of a program she had worked out for herself to try to recapture her edge. As she stared at the piles she felt an emotion somewhere between hopelessness and defiance.
She gave herself a five-second you-can-do-it pep talk, hung up her jacket, leaned her crutches against the wall, and sat down.
She began with last year.
As she puzzled over the 150 sketches, her eyes tightened into thin, frustrated slits. All she saw was crude stripes and checks, strident op-paisley and industrial-strength colors, willfully eccentric tailoring that would be impossible to execute without sags and cinches. It all seemed to be part of the three-thousand-dollar look.
She felt a queasy wobbling of her own judgment, as though somewhere in her long sleep she had lost track of how reality was built, of what cause led to what effect.
She had in front of her the printout of Babethings’ profit sheets: it showed that hundreds of rich young women—and probably some wanting to be young—bought these skirts and jackets and blouses.
Babe was puzzled. How did designs like these make any woman feel female or beautiful or successful or good about herself? Where was the affirmation? Could Babethings’ customers, the women who had made the company a thirteen-million-dollar grosser, all be fashion masochists?
I’m cranky, she told herself. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this today. Maybe I should relax and fool around with a piece of blank paper and a plain old caran d’ache.
She cleared the worktable.
“Okay—genius at work.”
She arranged herself at the drawing board in a spirit that was iffy but hopeful.
She started a design immediately, a pale blue spring dress, but she didn’t care for it and crossed it out. She began another design and again came to a blank wall. Her hand had trouble putting down the shapes she saw in her head. She drew a simple blouse and it was impossible for her to draw the collar. She tried it without the collar and it looked as though a guillotine had chopped it off.
After an hour she had gotten no further than simple outlines, increasingly simple, it seemed, and increasingly uninspired.
Finally she had to admit that determination was getting her nowhere. With a decisive slap she closed her sketchpad on the pages of crossed-out designs.
A sense of utter futility filled her. I’ll be damned if I’m going to go on a crying jag in this office, she told herself.
As she pushed the draftsman’s lamp away from the worktable, the picture postcard that she had attached to the extendable arm fell to the drawing board.
Her eye went to the photograph of the old farmhouse in Brittany. At that moment one of those little messengers Dr. Corey had warned her about blipped something from her unconscious.
She picked up the card and frowned at the partial postmark, piecing together the name of the town.
Fingers trembling, she opened the phone book and looked up the directions for international dialing. She called information in Brittany and in her best school French asked if there was a listing for Mademoiselle Mathilde Lheureux.
A moment later the phone was making the French two-buzzes-in-a-row signal.
A voice answered. “Allo?”
A band of surprise tightened around Babe’s throat. “Mathilde—you’re alive!”
“Bien sûr I’m alive. Who is this?”
“It’s Babe, Mathilde. I’m alive too.”
An instant’s astonishment blipped from Brittany up to a satellite over the Atlantic and down to Manhattan. “But they told me you were dead!”
“They told me you were dead!”
“Well, what do they know. Chérie, you must take the very next plane and come visit.”
“I can’t. I’m working. You come visit me.”
“I can’t. I’m rebuilding the farmhouse. The timbers are beautiful but old. Like me. Three hundred thousand francs to put in steel supports. What can I do? It’s my home.”
They chatted for almost three quarters of an hour, and when Babe hung up, she felt cheerfulness bubbling in her blood.
She bounced into Billi’s office. “Billi, guess what—Mathilde’s alive!”
Billi looked up from his desk. He seemed quite unexcited. “How in the world did you find that out?”
“I phoned her.”
“Well, well, imagine that. Is she going to come visit us?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t persuade her.”
“Too bad. Would have been fun to see the old grouch again.” Billi steepled his fingers together. “Say, Babe, would you care to give me the benefit of your expertise on something?”
He showed her a sketch of a pink silk cocktail dress with an extraordinarily long and very high waist, worn with a matching quilted satin bolero. Granted, fashion sketches tended to a sort of impressionistic exaggeration, but the thought came to Babe that this was an attractive sketch of an extremely impractical outfit.
“One of my designers put a 1954 Chanel on the computer and reworked it,” Billi said.
“The bolero looks like something Valentino would do,” Babe said.
Billi smiled. “He did. Two seasons back. We changed the color and shaped the collar a little.”