The end of the night (16 page)

At midnight on Sunday, Dr. Paul Wister sat alone in the kitchen of the silent house. His mind moved slowly, aimlessly, heavy with misery. He asked the eternal, umeasonable Why — and there could be no answer. He had given his wife sedation. He envied her the loss of awareness.

The kettle boiled. It boUed for some time before he became aware of it and got up and fixed himself the cup of instant coffee. Paul Wister did not look at all like the public conception of a fine surgeon. He was a big man, with a heavy torso, a large head, big reddish, chapped-looking hands. He moved ponderously, somewhat awkwardly. His eyes were a clear, impenetrable porcelain blue. He had a clipped way of speaking, a rusty, abrupt, shocking guffaw of a laugh. Those who did not know him thought they detected something comical about him, a Colonel Blimpishness, a slowness of mind. Those who knew him well—and there were very few—knew of the sensitivity and the dedication and the subtle, ranging mind. They knew that the pseudo-military brusqueness was his wall against a trivial world. He had to be a strong and tireless man to be able—for example—to work steadily for eight hours, repairing all the miraculous intricacies of a human hand, making it useful again, something that could hold, grasp and turn. He was a devout man, respecting the living materials that yielded to his skills. The big red hands, clumsy with cups and keys and neckties, were steady and quick and certain under the bright, hot lights of the operating room. His hobbies—for which he had too little time—illustrated the textures of his mind. He collected jade, and his knowledge of it was encyclopedic. This had led him into a study of the history of China and the Chinese peoples. He had learned the twenty thousand

basic, symbolic ideographs of the printing style, used from the third century until the Conmiunist revision of the language in 1956, and he had translated early poetry into English, two volumes of which had been published by a university press under a nom de plume. And he had kept abreast of the literature and technical advances in his profession. His energies were vast.

He sat in the kitchen of his home and thought about his daughter. He was a realist, a man of sentiment without senti-mentahty. He saw how easy it was to abuse himself for not giving her more of his time, yet it would have been artificial and unsatisfying to have done so. The relationship had been loving and good. He knew that genetically and emotionally they had had good luck with her, and he knew that luck is a factor with children. The twin boys were going to present far more serious problems.

Yet, reaUst that he was, he could not completely ignore the superstitious feeling that in some way he was at fault. This was his small ship, and he was captain, and someone had been lost, so it was his fault. Paul Wister knew that hfe is an almost excessively random affair. Health and love and safety are not earned. They are not rewards for behavior. They are part of the luck that you have or you don't have. When you have it, in your blind human innocence you think you have earned it. And when it is gone, you feel you have offended your gods.

He sipped the steaming coffee and he thought of the things that had happened to others—so abrupt, so cruel, so meaningless. The Stallings family. Ard Stallings hcd been head of surgery at Monroe General. A lovely wife named Bess. Two teen-age children, a boy and a girl, bright and popular. For them it was as though a wall had suddenly been breached, releasing disaster. Ard had been walking in the woods with Bess. A stray bullet, never traced, had struck his right hand at a devilish angle, inflicting maximum damage. Paul Wister had operated three time, nerve grafts, muscle transplants. But he could not put the cleverness back. That had been the beginning. The boy was driving back from a dance with his date. A truck driver fell asleep. The boy and his date were killed. The truck driver suffered a sprained wrist and superficial lacerations. Bess had a cervical biopsy, a diagnosis of malignancy. Radical surgery was too late. It had spread. The only good thing about it was its speed. She died in a hard, dirty way, but it was quicker than most. Father and daughter went

away. They were fleeing from disaster, but it was their appointment in Samarra. Their turismo left the highway in the mountains east of Mexico City. Ard Stallmgs was thrown clear. The giri died with the other passengers. Three months later, in the basement of the house in Monroe which was listed with the real-estate people, Ard injected himself with a lethal dose of morphine. He left no note. There was no one to leave a note for. From the time the bullet struck his hand until the night of his suicide, it was only thirteen months. It was as though there had been a magic circle around them, protecting them. And when the bullet struck, the circle was gone, and the blackness came in upon them. They were gone as though they had never existed. People clucked and shook their heads. Terrible bad luck for those folks.

You could ask a man of God about it, Paul Wister thought. You could ask Why. He would say it is God's will. He would speak of a pattern we cannot see or understand. So do not try to understand. Just accept.

This, he told himself, is the ultimate sophistry. Life is random. Luck is the factor. The good and the evil are struck down, and there is no cause to look for reasons. There is a divine plan, but it is not so minute and selective that it deals with individuals on the basis of their merit. Were that so, all men would be good, out of fear if nothing else. Those unholy four could have gathered up a tart in front of a bar. They happened to take Helen. It was chance. No blame can be assessed. And any hving thing is the product of a series of intricate accidents—46 chromosomes in each living cell— the stupendous roulette wheel of fertilization. So even as a man cannot accept the cold knowledge that all his uniqueness, all his magical identity, is the product of chance, he will not accept disaster as the other side of the casual coin. He must look for a pattern. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He gave Helen her special identity, her soul, her heart, the shape of her mouth, in a random genetic pattern. And He can take it away through another accident, and in that sense it is an offense against Him to demand in a puny and indignant way that any pattern be made clear, or even to demand that there be a pattern, discernible or not.

He thought about his daughter as the coffee grew tepid. Obviously she had jumped or fallen from the moving vehicle. Laymen believe serious injury comes only when the brittle integrity of the skull is cracked. But far more deaths occur

when the skull is intact. The brain is a jelly, massively supplied with blood. A hard blow, as against an asphalt road, can do many fatal things. A few small subdural bridging veins can be torn by the abrupt movement of the mass of the brain within its bony carapace. The small subdural hemorrhage can grow slowly, exerting increasing pressure until in turn that pressure closes off other small veins by compressing the thin walls. When the dwindling supply is stopped, those starved portions of the brain die, and slowly death comes to that portion which controls the heart or the lungs.

Perhaps, he thought, if it happened that way, that would be the best thing for her. As the slow pressure built, she would be like a person drugged. She could not know what was happening to her.

He had thought of her as the Golden Girl, and he had been able to reach beyond the demands of his parental pride to see that she was a special thing in the world, a prideful, honest girl, with faults that time would cure—such as her sometimes infuriating stubbornness, and her rather obvious rudeness toward pretentious people, and her extreme patience with those empty ones who demand of you your time and your attention, and waste it, thus wasting and spending the only truly valuable thing in life.

Though his emotions recoiled from the thought with an almost explosive anguish, he could accept the cold supposition that she was already dead. It was a hellish waste. But life had a habit of wasting the best of itself.

He rinsed the cup and turned out the Ughts and walked slowly to the bedroom, unknotting his tie as he went. He paused, quite surprised, just inside the bedroom door and said, "What are you doing up, honey?"

Jane Wister, in a pale-gray robe, sat in the chaise longue near her dressing table. It was a big room, a bedroom-sitting room, with space for her desk, comfortable chairs, a shelf of his books, a big glass door that opened onto a miniature terrace.

"I guess you didn't give me enough."

"How long have you been awake?" he asked, walking over to her.

"I don't know. A half hour. Maybe more." Her voice was listless.

"What are you doing? What's that you're looking at, Jane?"

She made a childish, instinctive effort to cover what she held

with her hands, and then handed it to him. It was a folder of photographs, made like a visible file index, with overlapping glassine slots for the pictures. She had several of them, each covering different parts of their lives. This was all of the children.

He sat on the arm of the chaise where the light was better, and flipped it open at random to a picture. It was in color. Helen, a knobby twelve, stood with another girl, grinning and squinting into the camera. They each held tennis rackets and, in prominent display, tiny trophy cups.

"Remember?" Jane said. "They spelled Wister wrong on her cup when they had it engraved later. Wester, they had it. And she was furious."

He closed the folder. "Why do this to yourself, honey?"

"I lay there, remembering everything. So I got up ... to look at these. That's all. I just wanted to look at them. I haven't looked at them for a long time, dear."

"Don't do this to yourself."

"She's smiling in every one. You never had to tell her to smile for the camera. You never had to tell her."

"Jane, Jane, Jane."

Her face twisted. It was an expression like anger. She closed her hand into a fist and she struck her husband on the thigh as she said, "She was so joyous! So damn joyous! When she was little, even. She'd either be laughing, or so mad she was purple. And always running. No whining, no sulking. She was . . ."

And then she was beyond words. Dr. Wister dropped the folder on the floor and held his wife in his big, strong, clumsy arms. He could not comfort her. He endured the awkwardness of his position until the first storm of her anguish had passed and she had exhausted herself.

He went to the bathroom and brought her back another capsule and a glass of water. Her face looked stained and gray under the light.

She hesitated. "Will this put me so far under you won't be able to tell me if . . . they find out anything?"

"No. I can wake you easily," he lied.

"Are you going to take anything? You should sleep too, darUng. You look terribly tired."

"I took one," he said, lying again.

She took the capsule and drank half the water. He put the glass aside and took her hand and helped her up. He took her robe and she got into bed. He bent over and kissed her on the

forehead. He prepared slowly for bed. He went over and stood by her. She was breathing slowly and deeply.

"Jane," he said softly. She did not stir. "Jane!" he said in a louder tone. There was no response. He went to his dressing room and put on a robe and went back to the kitchen and turned on the burner under the kettle. It was nearly two o'clock.

While Dr. Wister sat in the kitchen of the house where his wife and his sons slept, Dallas Kemp sat at the drafting table in his studio, working, driving himself. He and Helen had planned that after they returned from the wedding trip, they would Uve at his place. And then, in a year or two, they would begin to build a place of their own. They had talked about the kind of house they would like, an enclosure for their love.

"I'll make hke a difficult client," she had said to him. "Light and space and air, yes. But I don't want to be on display. I don't want people gooping in at me. I don't want a huge place, because I'll have to be taking care of it, and I can only mop so many floors before I begin to feel futile. But I want a part of the house to have . . . scope. A big feehng of space. And I want part of it to be . . . cozy. Isn't that a hell of a word? And I want it to be a place where children can romp, but also where they have their own place, shut off but not too much. And it better be sort of flexible, because once I start having kids, I might like it well enough to have scads."

"How about materials?"

"Oh, nice things to touch and look at. Rough, hairy textures. Wood and stone and stuff. I want to be able to hang a pot in the fireplace and sit on the floor. That's what I don't like about a lot of these glossy, new houses, made of miracle plastics and things. They're not sit-on-the-floor houses. See? I'm a difficult client."

"Difficult? You're impossible."

"You're the bright architect. Whip me up a dream, boy."

Ever since they had talked, he had been working out the problems in the back of his mind. He decided that a hillside house would be best. The hill should be abrupt, but not necessarily high, and overlooking an emptiness of vista where nothing could suddenly rise up and stare in at them. Then, with glass, he could give her all the hght and sun and space she craved, and with a big cantilevered deck in front of it, nobody could stare up into the house.

After he had left Dunnigan's temporary office, he had gone home and started to work, sketching front and side elevations, balling them up and discarding them until he was close to what he wanted. He had secretly located a two-acre hillside tract south of the city and had paid thirty per cent down and signed a mortgage deed for the balance. It was to be his wedding present to her.

Now he was working on the floor plan. The house would be on three levels. He knew it was good. When he worked on something good he got a special feeling in the pit of his stomach. This could be a gem. This could be the best thing he had ever done.

He worked with a special dedication, a unique intensity. Without bothering to clarify it in his mind, he felt that it was an affirmation. If he worked well enough, and hard enough, then they would one day live together in love in this place taking shape and form on his drawing board. If he did not do it well, she was lost forever. It was his incantation, his offering. It was the only thing he could do which would bring her back. She would have to come back to a place so special. Any other outcome was inconceivable.