(1969) The Seven Minutes (80 page)

‘Now, wouldn’t that be something?’ said Mr Holliday with a note of reverence in his voice. ‘Let me recheck our lists of current patients and recent patients. I’ll go through them like I’m after the Mother Lode.’

Five minutes later he had again failed to find Cassie’s name or any name resembling McGraw in his lists.

‘Nothing?’ said Barrett.

‘Nothing. The only remaining possibility would be that she is registered here under her maiden name.’

‘McGraw is her maiden name,’ said Barrett. ‘But she was married once, briefly, after Jadway’s death.’

‘Well, that may be it, then. What was her married name?’

‘I don’t, know,’ said Barrett wretchedly. ‘What about her first name, Mr Holliday ? Do you haye any Cassies among your female patients, no matter what their family names?’

‘I’ll look again.’ The manager’s eyes followed his finger down the given names, and at the last they registered disappointment. ‘No Cassies either,’ he said.

‘Let’s try another’ approach,’ said Barrett. He handed the manager one of the photostats. ‘Here is a sample of Cassie’s handwriting and signature in the 1930s. And you have the postcard with her signature as it is today. You can see they are not exactly alike, but similar enough. Do you have any means of comparing these two signatures with the signatures of your patients? After all, in a way, a signature is like a fingerprint.’

Mr Holliday made a negative gesture. ‘Not here it isn’t. Few patients sign their own names any more, and if they did, their writing might vary completely from one day to the next. We have no file of patients’ signatures. The relatives who put them in here usually do the signing. As for going around this afternoon trying to collect every old lady’s autograph, I couldn’t. It would be an embarrassment to those of our patients who have trouble writing, and some would resist. Oh, maybe if you gave me a few weeks…’

‘I haven’t got a few weeks, Mr Holliday, only a few days. Okay, so much for that idea. Could you have a nurse go around and show these signatures to each female patient? I don’t want to disrupt your operation, but this is so -‘

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mr Holliday. ‘I’ll do it myself.’ He stood

up. ‘I’ll do more - I’ll show each patient these signatures and ask if she recognizes them, and I’ll ask each one if she is familiar with the name Cassie McGraw. A few may be napping, but I’ll wake them. I’ll cover them individually, if you don’t mind waiting maybe a half hour or so.’

‘Mind ? I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. I wish there was some way to repay you.’

Mr Holliday had gone to the door. There is. If I find Cassie McGraw for you, you just send me a copy of The Seven Minutes with your autograph in it.’

Barrett rose. ‘If you find her, I’ll be able to send you ten copies. Otherwise I’m afraid there’ll be no copies at all, anywhere.’

‘You can keep yourself busy with television in the recreation room, if you like.’

‘I think I’ll take a walk. I’ll be back here in a half hour.’

‘Make it closer to three quarters of an hour.’

After the manager had departed, Barrett sat himself down, smoked his pipe, and brooded. Frustration had become an almost physical ache. Considering all that Maggie and he had gone through to bring him here, realizing how much Zelkin and he had at stake in this quest, it was maddening to be this close to Cassie and still be as far away as he had been a week or a month ago.

The door behind him opened, and he jumped to his feet.

It was Mr Holliday, poking his head into the office. ‘Wondered if you were still here. Just checked with my head R.N. about the volunteer organization that was here two and a half weeks ago. Worse luck. It was a band of senior citizens, hale and hearty ones, taking a bus vacation across the country and stopping off at sanitariums along the route to cheer up and lend encouragement to their less fortunate fellows and then going on their way again. They were here about three or four hours that afternoon. No record of the name of their group or where they’re from. Sorry. Now I’ll get going on questioning my patients.’

Discouraged, but clinging to some invisible long-shot ticket, Barrett finally left the manager’s office. The sanitarium corridor was busier now. Several old ladies were inching along with the support of rolling walkers. Two were in wheelchairs. One was making slow progress along the wall by grasping the railing there. In the patio, blurred sunlight could be seen at last, as well as a half-dozen women in shawls and bathrobes, and a scattering of elderly men with canes.

Once more Barrett was overwhelmed by a feeling of frustration. One of these women, or one woman lying in one of the bedrooms or wards beyond, must be Cassie McGraw.

But which ?

Unless she had determined to hide herself from the world, surely she would admit her identity to the manager when he spoke her name and exhibited her autographs. This was a hope. He carried it

out the exit with him and into the Chicago afternoon.

He walked and walked - how many blocks he did not know -until he reached a shopping district and saw the time, and then he did an about-face and started to retrace his steps to the Sunnyside Convalescent Sanitarium on the double.

When he returned, he had been away fifty-five minutes, and Mr Holliday was waiting for him outside his office.

‘It’s pretty much as I had expected it would be, Mr Barrett,’ he said. ‘No recognition of the name Cassie McGraw whatsoever. Not even the slightest hint of recognition. Either because none of them is Miss McGraw or because the real Miss McGraw doesn’t want to acknowledge it. I’m afraid that’s it, Mr Barrett. I don’t know what else I can suggest. I guess we’ve got to add her name to the roll call of the vanished. Charlie Ross, Ambrose Bierce, Judge Crater, now Cassie McGraw.’

‘I’m afraid you’re right, only I hate to admit it,’ said Barrett.

As he retrieved the postcard and the photostat and began to shove them into his pocket, he felt the other photostats. He extracted them, considered one, then handed it to Mr Holliday. ‘I didn’t show you this, did I? That’s taken from an old photograph, Cassie in Paris in the 1930s. Would there be any point in circulating that among the patients?’

‘Hardly. If they wouldn’t admit to the name or identify the autograph, they’d hardly respond to this.’

‘What about your personnel here ? Maybe one of the staff might see something in that face that would remind them of one of the patients?’

‘Most unlikely, Mr Barrett. This is a picture of a girl in her twenties. I doubt if anyone would, find the remotest resemblance between this girl and a patient who is in her sixties or seventies.’

There was nothing left to say, except one thing, the forever final act of desperation. ‘I’d like to offer a reward, Mr Holliday.’ He still had the postcard, and he pushed it into the manager’s hand. ‘Would you mind showing the postcard and photograph to your nurses, and telling them that if either exhibit sparks something it’s worth a hundred dollars to anyone if they’ll call me at the Ambassador East by early evening.’

‘ We-ll, I don’t know. Most of the nurses on this shift have already seen the postcard, and the old photo won’t mean a thing. I think it’s useless -‘

‘Just on the off chance, Mr Holliday.’

‘I assure you, I want to be of assistance. It wouldn’t be bad publicity for us if you did find Cassie McGraw here. But I don’t think these two exhibits can produce anything further. Still, if it’ll make you happy - well, we have another shift coming on at four o’clock. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll pin the postcard and the photo up on the bulletin board along with a notice instructing any employee who knows anything about the card, or who recognizes the girl in

the photo, to get in touch with me, or if I’m not in, with you at the Ambassador East, and I’ll make it clear that you’re offering a hundred-dollar reward. How’s that?’

‘It’s all 1 can ask.’

‘I won’t be here when the new shift comes on at four. But I’ll be looking in again around eight in the evening. So if I learn anything then that you haven’t already heard, I’ll get in touch with you myself. Though, frankly, Mr Barrett, I think you’d better consider this a lost cause.’

‘I know.’ Barrett allowed the manager to accompany him down the ramp to the street door. At the door he paused. ‘I’ll be at the hotel until eight, Mr Holliday. If I don’t hear from you by then, I’ll go back to where I came from.’

‘Can’t you win your case without Cassie McGraw?’

‘No,’ said Barrett flatly, and with that he went out the door.

By five-thirty in the afternoon, he had needed a drink, and he was having one at the darkened plush bar in the elevated alcove of the Pump Room of the Ambassador East.

He had spent a mean and wasted afternoon in his single room upstairs, the Chicago telephone directory in his lap, calling every major sanitarium and rest home in Cook County, monotonously inquiring over and over whether there was a patient on the premises named Cassie McGraw.

There was not, any place, anywhere.

It had been an illogical effort, based on no reason, and it had provided him with what he had expected - no information at all.

After that he had telephoned Donna in Los Angeles, so that she might report his failure to Abe Zelkin later, and to ask how Zelkin was faring with the day’s defense witnesses. Zelkin had checked in once, briefly, during the noon recess, to inquire whether there had been any word from Barrett and to bemoan the fact that the defense witnesses were continuing to prove unimpressive and inept and were sitting ducks for Duncan’s cannonading in the cross-and re-crossexaminations.

Hanging up, Barrett had felt so low that he was tempted to telephone his apartment, just to hear Maggie’s voice, just for some kind of lift. But then the time was already well after four o’clock, and if he was going to bother to wait on here he should keep his phone open for any possible calls.

He had smoked a half pouch of tobacco, and throughout, the telephone remained mute.

And so, after leaving notice of his whereabouts with the switchboard, he had come down to the lobby to make reservations for the flight back to Los Angeles and then had moved on to the Pump Room bar to see whether it worked and whether there would be no pain.

He was drinking, and it wasn’t working, and he was wondering

whether a defeated and impoverished and unpromising middle-aged attorney had the right to ask a girl like Maggie Russell to spend her life with him. She was magnificent, he remembered, and he revived the pleasure of her company in his head, and the sweetness of her in his heart, and the heat of her in his loins, and he realized that last night had been the first time in all his years that he had ever experienced a complete and honest relationship with a woman who was totally female.

The period with Faye had not been a relationship. It had been one-sided. He had not been a man with a woman, but a stud who filled her with intimations of normality. The others before Faye had been little better, like two people dancing to no music.

For years he had felt a misfit, as if there wasn’t anyone on earth with whom to connect. Constantly he had read of fantastically satisfying relationships in novels, and these had depressed him, because they had told him that he could not measure up to any woman, could not find a relationship that would be comparable to the love scenes he read about in books. Most of the novels had led him to believe that any relationship with a woman was largely dependent upon sex.

But now he knew those books were fakes and he had been deceived.

He had divined the truth of what was a genuine and what was a counterfeit man-woman relationship during his studies before the trial. Last night, in fact, he had experienced what was truth and what was real.

This trial had taught him exactly what was lying, deceptive, delusive about most written pornographic fiction, even the best of it. Silently he sipped his drink and thanked his mentors.

Thank you, Professor Ernest van den Haag, mentor one, for exposing the fiction of pornography: ‘Sex rages in an empty world as people use each other as its anonymous bearers or vessels, bereaved of love and hate, thought and feeling, reduced to bare sensations of pain and pleasure, existing only in (and for) incessant copulations without apprehension, conflict, or relationship.’

Thank you, Jacques Barzun, mentor two: ‘The standardized sexual act for literary use’ starts with a brief conversation, moves to a couch or bed, has a man undress a woman or the woman disrobe herself, gives attention to some physical detail of her body, and then devotes itself to copulation at military speed. ‘In most cases, the enterprise is successful, despite the lack of preliminaries, such as the works of theory deem imperative; in most cases no thought is given to consequences,’ and ‘in most cases there is no repetition of the act, or indeed any sort of artistic conclusion, unless the orgasm itself and a sketchy resumption of clothes are to

be taken as such___The modern sex act in print is only a fable, a

device to correct this or that deficiency of our upbringing and culture.’

Thank you, Professor Steven Marcus, mentor three: in ‘Pornotopia,’ which describes the pornographic Utopia of books, the landscape world consists of ‘two immense snowy white hillocks … Farther down, the scene narrows and changes in perspective. Off to the right and left jut two smooth snowy ridges. Between them, at their point of juncture, is a dark wood… This dark wood - sometimes it is called a thicket - is triangular in shape. It is also like a cedarn cover, and in its midst is a dark romantic chasm. In this chasm the wonders of nature abound… This is the center of the earth and the home of man.’ The nature of pornotopia ‘is this immense, supine, female form… As for the man in this setting, he is reaily not part of nature. In the first place, he is actually not man. He is an enormous erect penis, to which there happens to be attached a human figure.’

This was the fairy tale about man and woman, the fairy tale exposed. It must necessarily be defended. But it must never be believed in.

Reality, in life, in literature, honest literature, was something else. It was, as Professor Marcus pointed out, how people lived with one another, what their changing feelings and emotions were, what their complex motives, and what their conflicts were with one another and within themselves. Reality was, as Barzun saw it, all the tenderness and hesitancies, the sensations and fantasies of love. Reality was precisely as Jadway’s Cathleen remembered it.