Sins of the Flesh Read online

  “I’ve never cottoned on to the idea of using tax dollars to create a place like HI,” said Todo, enjoying himself. “I mean, isn’t it bad enough that public funds have to keep the criminally insane fed and housed, without also providing health services ordinary citizens can’t afford? I hear that HI has a modern hospital capable of treating anything from a heart attack to cirrhosis of the liver.”

  Rose piped up. “But how can it be helped?” she asked, sure of her ground. “This is a civilized country, people have to be treated for their illnesses. But what hospital can cope with violent patients who can’t be reasoned with? The Institute is a prison, and the general hospital side of it was installed to protect the community. Our psychiatric research unit is quite separate again, so is its funding.” Her rather plain and ordinary face had become flushed.

  The mother defending her young, thought Delia; she’s new to this, and resents the criticism.

  “There’s no altruism involved, Todo,” said Dr. Moira crisply. “Ours is a job that has to be done. The cost of long-term—no, life-long!—incarceration is so astronomical that we have to find some answers, or at least make the tax dollars go farther.”

  “Our work is immensely valuable to society,” said Ari Melos. “In the long run, it’s units like HI that will make the whole problem of the criminally insane a cheaper exercise.”

  I think, said Delia to herself, that I have just heard the same old arguments that come up every time these two disparate groups of people get together. Rha and Rufus invite them to please Ivy, who wants to please Jess, who wants to please her staff. And it’s all to do with music.

  Around six, while the sun was still lighting the sky brilliantly, blinds and curtains were unobtrusively drawn, plunging the big room into semi-darkness. A most alluring after-shave essence stole into her nostrils, the mark of Nicolas Greco, whom she’d met only in passing. The Rha Tanais Inc. accountant of the Savile Row suits, easily the best-dressed man Delia had ever seen, and, she suspected, as close to indispensable as people got.

  “Rufus has issued stern instructions,” said he, piloting her with a hand under her left elbow. “I am to put you in Fenella’s chair—it has the best outlook.”

  People were taking seats all over the place, no system or method to it except for this one smallish armchair, which had a footstool and, across its padded back, a sign that said RESERVED. Placed in it, she had an uninterrupted view of one large, octagonal niche wherein a grand piano, a harp, drums, and music stands were located. Even Betty Kornblum of the Siamese cat wore an excited expression, and the shrinks, clustered together, were positively animated.

  What had been an ordinary, if magnificent, party turned into what in Delia’s days at Oxford had been called a “salon.”

  Rufus began it by playing Chopin on the piano well enough to entrance a Paderewski audience—glorious! Was this what he did for a living? One of the willowy waiters picked up a violin and Rufus passed to Beethoven’s fifth sonata for violin and piano; you could have heard a pin drop, so rapt and quiet was the audience. Roger Dartmont sang, Dolores Kenny sang, and they finished with a duet. Todo danced with a group of the waiters, males for one dazzling athletic number, females for a voluptuous dance, then males and females together for something balletic and graceful.

  With pauses and intermissions it went on for five hours, and by the end of it Delia fully understood why all the badgering to obtain invitations for the shrinks went on. To be privileged to witness such first-class performances in the cozy intimacy of a salon was memorable enough to, pardon the hyperbole, kill for. The evening would, Delia knew, live in her memory forever. If anything puzzled her, it was the arrogance of the psychiatrists, who didn’t seem to grasp that they were being honored; rather, they seemed to think they were entitled. And that, she decided, had nothing to do with psychiatry. It was all to do with the mind-set of people who would, could they, ban all exclusivity from the face of the globe. A Rha and Rufus salon was exclusive, and they had managed to invade it. What did that make Jess?

  “That was utter magic,” she said to her hosts as she was leaving, “and I want you to know that I deeply appreciate your asking me to come. Truly, I don’t take the privilege for granted.”

  Rha’s eyes twinkled. “Rufus and I are greedy, darling,” he said. “Concerts are such a bore! Parking—crowds—coughs—strangers a-go-go—and never exactly the program you feel like. Salons are a total self-indulgence. No grubby money changes hands, performers who love to perform get to do their thing—terrific!”

  “Even the loonies wallowed,” she said demurely.

  “Poor babies! So ghastly earnest!”

  “Were you a concert pianist, Rufus?” she asked.

  “Never, Delicious Delia! Too much like hard work. No, I love to play and I keep my hands supple, but life’s too full of variety to lay one’s entire stock of sacrificial goats on just one single altar. I play to please me, not others.”

  “If you eat British stodge, I’d very much like to ask the pair of you to dinner at my place,” she said, a little shyly.

  “We’d love to come,” said Rha, and looked wary. “Uh—what is British stodge?”

  “Bangers and mash for the main course—I drive to a butcher outside Buffalo for the bangers—absolutely authentic! And for dessert, spotted dick and custard.”

  “How,” asked Rha seriously, “could we possibly turn down a spotted dick? Especially with custard.”

  Delia handed Rufus her card. “Decide on a night, and call me,” she said, beaming.

  SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 1969

  Jess Wainfleet kept nothing of her professional life in the small house she owned one block behind the middle reaches of Millstone Beach; it was purely a gesture at the normality of having a private address. When HI had been built in 1960 she had fought to be let have an apartment on the premises, only to find her arguments overridden on the grounds that her own mental health was best safeguarded by living off-site. Once informed of the decision, she had accepted it with grace, and immediately acquired her house in Millstone, a shortish, cross-country drive from the Asylum.

  The place did come in handy, she admitted; it was somewhere to put her enormous collection of papers, journals and books, it held her wardrobe of clothes, it had laundry facilities, and it was a mailing address. What it was not was a home: that was HI, for Jess was one of those people who literally lived for her work.

  Within six months of HI’s being finished, she had organized herself. A bathroom in close proximity to her suite of offices became exclusively hers; opening off it was a room originally intended as a rest and recuperation area for a member of the staff feeling under the weather, and this too Jess commandeered. To all extents and purposes the Director of HI was enabled to live on the premises provided neither bathroom nor rest room suggested that she was making a home there.

  Riddled with complexes and well aware of the degree of her obsessive-compulsive psychosis, Jess had managed to make an iceberg of them; what showed was the tip, the rest successfully buried. It would not have been possible were she intimately involved with another person, but since her psychic weaknesses were benign and she had no intimate friend, her colleagues accepted her failings as they did their own—as part and parcel of the profession.

  The only person who had ever broken through Jess’s defensive wall was Ivy Ramsbottom, a fellow obsessive of about the same degree—everything compulsively straightened, catalogued and tidied, without going over the top into a clinical mania.

  “The world is full of people like us,” Jess had said to Ivy on first meeting, just after noting that Ivy’s china-headed pins were stuck in their little cushion in a shaded pattern that turned them into a graduated rainbow. “It would kill you to stick a black-headed pin into that row of red ones, wouldn’t it?”

  A startled Ivy laughed, and owned that it would.

  Jess had been walking on Holloman Green to take in the beauty of its copper beeches when her eye caught a fascinating picture fram
ed by cuprous leaves: a jet-black shop window containing three unrealistically slender plastic mannequins, a bride and two bridesmaids clad in fabulous dresses. Above the black window it said in white letters Rha Tanais Bridal. Unable to resist, Jess had crossed the road and walked into the shop. It was a large premises whose changing booths were big enough to hold a client in a full crinoline, and whose dress racks were entirely devoted to wedding clothes.

  An extremely tall, attractive woman in a modish purple dress approached her, smiling.

  “You’re here out of curiosity, not custom,” the woman said as she shook hands. “I’m Ivy Ramsbottom.”

  “I’m Dr. Jess Wainfleet, a psychiatrist,” Jess said bluntly, “and your window fascinated me. The crowds it draws! Even cars passing by slow down to a crawl.”

  “There’s not a woman born doesn’t yearn to be a bride. Come into my den and have an espresso.”

  That had been eight years ago. The friendship had bloomed, mostly because of their shared obsessive tendencies—it was so good to have someone to laugh with about them! In Ivy, the type was pure, extending to meticulously straight notes on a refrigerator door and the pattern on the china facing all the same way, whereas in Jess it was joined by a manic quality that pushed her to work too hard, sometimes become impatient.

  Of course by now Jess knew Ivy’s story, and had been of help to her; the insights and sensitivities of her field made her the best kind of confidante an Ivy could ask for. If there was pain and sorrow in it, that was because Ivy couldn’t reciprocate with the kind of advice Jess’s problems needed. Those, she continued to bear alone and unaided save for the act of friendship itself.

  So after the salon at Rha and Rufus’s place, Jess visited her house only long enough to change out of evening wear into an HI outfit of trousers and a plain blouse; then she went home: that is, she drove out to the Asylum.

  First step was to patrol her kingdom, its shiplike corridors of rails and unmarked, anonymous doors; sometimes she opened one and entered a particularly beloved room, such as the neuro O.R. When she had agreed to take this job in 1959, she had insisted that HI have all the appurtenances of a general hospital; it cost money, yes, but general hospitals weren’t geared for criminally insane patients in any way, especially security. So when an Asylum prisoner became ill, he was treated at HI, even including surgery or intensive care. Of course the O.R. was also used for experimental animal surgery, chiefly primates—how did one deal with the Todo Sataras of this world, with their tax dollars and inability to understand that trying to treat the violently insane in a general hospital ended up being more expensive than an HI?

  Finally, as the big clock on the wall opposite her desk said 4.47 a.m., she eased into the padded armchair behind her desk and opened the cupboard door that occupied her desk’s right side. A safe with a combination lock came into view. Cupping her hand around the striated and sparsely numbered disc, she performed the necessary twirls back and forth until, with a faint “thunk” the last tumbler disengaged. Her hand dropped. A stupid thing to do—anyone trying to see her manipulate the disc would have to have eyes in the end of the chair arm, yet still she did it every single time. That was the obsession, of course. Like knowing no one’s back was going to break because you trod on a crack—but what if someone’s back did break? Therefore you stepped over the crack just to make sure. Rituals were so powerful, so stuffed with meanings that went all the way back to the apes.

  “Language,” she said as she lifted bundle after bundle of files out of the safe, “is an expression of the complexity in a brain. Like the verb ‘want.’ An animal can indicate want by making some physical movement or gesture of vocalization aimed at want fulfilment. ‘I want it!’ Only a human can actually say it, including indications of the degree of want, the specific kind of want, the niche want occupies. Without moving any muscles except those of the lips and tongue and upper airway. How do the pathways open up between an infant’s saying ‘I want!’ and a mature adult’s saying ‘I want, but I can’t have my want because to take it would destroy someone else’s superior entitlement to it?’”

  Her voice died to a mutter. “What, in the pathways to maturation, can possibly overcome the most primal urge of all—want? Oh, Jess, there is an answer, and you’re the one will find that answer, you are, you are!”

  It was a big office, and well furnished, but she hadn’t lit the overhead fluorescents, just flicked on the green-shaded lamp goosenecked to her desk; the room’s far corners were plunged into utter darkness, and unexpected shadows lurked, shook, trembled whenever the worker at the desk changed position. Something in Jess loved this encroaching blackness—as if she, and she alone, held it at bay; it was a harmless demonstration of power, and, being harmless, could be condoned. Mindless power—now that was something else again, never to be condoned.

  Perhaps a hundred files lay on her desk, divided into smaller stacks cross-tied with differently colored, striped ribbons. Each ribbon was actually a code only she knew, nor was it written down anywhere. Inside her brain, the safest safe of them all … Her gradations were concerned with behavior, and progressed from most primitive to most sophisticated in reasoning ability. For other people, the trouble was that Jess’s gradations followed the lines of her theories, which were unorthodox and highly individual. In that respect she was a poor colleague, a non-sharer. But this project, as she was at pains to point out, was extraneous to her work as Director, funded by a separate grant to her alone, and too contentious to be aired until she had more results.

  “It goes on much deeper than language,” she said aloud, her eyes on the coded stacks, “but it surfaces in language, and I must find the key words. The trigger words.”

  A head came around the door.

  “Come in, Walter,” she said, not glancing up.

  “I’ll bring you fresh coffee first, Jess.”

  He came back with a fine china mug of hot, excellent coffee and put it down in front of her, then sat in the visitor’s chair with one bare leg draped over its padded arm. A tall man, he was in perfect physical shape, with wide shoulders, a flat belly, narrow hips and powerful legs; he wore a T-shirt and short shorts of a drab grey with no identifying marks. His blond hair was all there, said his frosted scalp, but he wore it in a Marine cut too short to let it have any character; all it really did was emphasize his bull’s neck. Smooth and clean-shaven, his regular-featured face was as soldierly in its expression as his bearing was. A striking man, of the kind that a stranger, on meeting, would deem sterling. His name was Walter Jenkins, he was an inmate whose records were marked never to be released, and he was Jess Wainfleet’s greatest triumph. Every member of the HI psychiatric unit knew he was cured, but they also knew that not their must eloquent arguments would ever give Walter his freedom. No one was prepared to take the risk of releasing him, even for an afternoon. Walter himself was well aware of this, and accepted his lot with equanimity. Prison was almost the only life he had ever known, and he knew when he was well off. Here at HI they had cured him, that was first and foremost, and here at HI he led an interesting life, was of use.

  “Good party?” he asked, lighting a cigarette and passing it to her before lighting another for himself.

  “Superb entertainment. Rufus played Chopin—you would have loved it. Roger Dartmont was there and sang—too much vibrato in his voice these days, of course, but still wonderful. Rha is hard to take, but his salons are worth the agony, even Ari admits it. Fred and Moira rather bleed—so much talent under one roof.”

  Walter’s face betrayed no humor, but that was normal for him. His eyes, a clear and lambent aquamarine, dwelled upon her with undisguised—could it be affection? This woman had freed him from the horrors of a padded cell just a building away, and he was hers to command.

  “Jess, you’re too tired to deal with this tonight,” he said, a hint of authority in his tone. “Have a nice long soak in the tub, and go to bed. I’ll put these away for you.”

  “I must work!” she s
aid fretfully. “Life is too short, I’ll die before I decode it. I’m still looking for the trigger words.”

  “Shoo!” he said, getting up.

  “Why are you always right?”

  “Because you showed me how to be right. Go on, go!”

  She plodded toward the door. “Has the bath overflowed?”

  “Not yet, but it will if you dawdle.”

  “Good night, Walter. And thank you.”

  As she closed the door behind her he slid into her chair and checked that all the stacks were cross-tied in her inimitable style; those that were not, he cross-tied himself. Then he stared at one hugely fat file bound in a plain indigo ribbon: his file. Tomorrow she’d enter his actions of tonight in it—more pathways coming into existence.

  Safe door wide open, he began to put the files away exactly as she had; the last one to join them was his own. Then he shut the safe door and spun the disc crazily. What would Ari Melos say if he knew that Walter Jenkins, the most dangerous prisoner in the Asylum, knew the combination to Dr. Wainfleet’s safe, as well as having access to every code that opened every lock in the place?

  On his way out, the green gooseneck lamp extinguished, Walter opened the door to Jess’s illicit domicile: an empty bed. Yes, there she was, sound asleep in the tub! Flipping the water outlet, he took a big bath sheet from a rack, shook it out, and wrapped the naked body of his protectress in it. Carrying her without effort, he then toweled her dry on her bed, slid her cotton nightgown on, and finally tucked her up comfortably. She would wake in the morning having no memory of his timely intervention.

  He didn’t think of it as love. Walter Jenkins didn’t feel as other people felt, nor have names for what he did feel. His was not a fantasy world, for Walter Jenkins didn’t even know such a thing as fantasy existed. In fact, Walter’s world was the distance of a universe away from the worlds of all other people, though he had no idea that this was so. What Jess had done for him was to teach a complete force of nature that inside his head there also lived an entity she called Reason, and, not knowing she had done so, provoked an emotion he called Pleasure. Pleasure was not the animal caged or the animal tamed; it was the enormous sense of wellbeing he experienced at realizing that people thought the animal caged or the animal tamed. His world had mushroomed in size, in feeling, in complexity. And he had discovered the exquisite pleasure of secrecy. Jess thought him cured. Walter had never felt sick. Jess thought him a miracle she had worked. Walter knew no miracle had been involved. For their worlds did not collide; they passed each other a universe apart.