Holland Suggestions (3 page)

T
HE HOLLAND FILE WAS
my personal Pandora’s box. I had avoided it for fifteen years; now I devoured the contents in one sitting. Thanksgiving came and went, and Judy left with a girlfriend for two days in the mountains. I had the house to myself all day Friday and Saturday, and I intended to use the whole time reading the Holland file. Only after a careful screening would I throw it open to Judy’s inspection. Call that censorship if you want to; under the circumstances, I still believe I did the right thing. As it turned out, I censored nothing. The screening process was not nearly so painful as I had feared, and I found nothing that anyone could possibly object to showing his teenage daughter. The deeper I read into the Holland material, the more aware I became that the basic problem was mine.

First, there was Robert’s unfinished manuscript on hypnosis. Even in its incomplete state it was thick and cumbersome. Reading it took half the morning, but it refreshed my memory on many of the small technical details that had gone into the Holland theories. Then there were three handwritten journals of our experiments, all very subjective, containing Robert’s impressions of the Jake Walters project as well as his straight descriptions of each session. Supplementing the journals were ten lengthy tapes, verbatim transcripts of each session. The tapes took all day and most of the night to hear; I played them while I read through the journals. When I was finished I noticed that the last journal contained reference to a
fourth
book, though the journals and the tapes finished at precisely the same point. I searched through the file but found no other books anywhere, and I assumed that Robert had died before beginning the fourth journal.

There were some old photographs showing Robert and an incredibly young me, and another set of pictures showing Robert and his old pals from college. I found a small package of newspaper clippings; I knew at once what they contained and tried to push them away until later. I realized then that there was no later, that I had been doing just that for fifteen years, and I forced myself to go through them now. There was a series on the experiments and a small story telling of Robert’s dismissal from the university. I read them through quickly but thoroughly. Done at last. I was through the worst of it. A few more papers; a letter; some photocopied articles on hypnotic trance. The life story of Robert Holland, tied together in five fat manila folders and ten reels of recorded tape.

Only one more folder—the Vivian folder—remained in the file. This one was dismally thin; indeed, there were only a couple of documents filed there. I removed the folder and opened it, feeling a little sadness as the dust spread into the air. It was almost appalling how little material was there. Stupid of me to feel that way, when all along I had known I would not find much. Vivian didn’t write letters, never allowed her picture to be taken, and had an inherent distrust of tape machines. I remembered the time she’d gone into a rage when I recorded a conversation on the sly. She had sought out the tape while I was at work and burned it, then smashed Robert Holland’s tape recorder and called it an accident. As far as I knew there was only one picture of her—the one I was holding in my hand—and it was a poor one. Judy had never seen it, but now I would show it to her. In the picture Vivian was sitting alone in the living room of our apartment, just as I had seen her this week in my little regression experiment. A vase of flowers was on the mantel behind her; another was on the table. Her love of flowers was another facet of her character that I had forgotten. She was not looking at the camera, because she never knew I had taken the picture. Had she known, she would have found it and destroyed it, just like the tape. Even after all these years Vivian would have been uneasy if she had suspected that I had her photograph. Beyond this, I was willing to risk good money that there was no record anywhere of her voice, no fingerprint on file, no evidence in public or private folders that she had lived. Marriage license—yes, I found that—and possibly a social-security card under some phony name. I have never met anyone so private as Vivian. She should have married Howard Hughes; undoubtedly their offspring would have been born invisible.

The Vivian folder took less than ten minutes, most of which was spent staring at her picture and thinking about it. At midnight I put it all away, locked the filing cabinet, and went to bed. Again I spent a restless night and was up before dawn. I was having a hell of a time sleeping these days, but that probably wouldn’t be remedied until I got the whole mess over with. I decided to talk with Judy Sunday night, and that left me all day Saturday to think it through.

Impulsively I drove over to Wyllis, the little Blue Ridge town where I had first seen Vivian. It was only a three-hour drive, but I hadn’t been back since I had taken her away from all that in 1955. I packed a lunch and took my Vivian file with me, though there wasn’t anything in it. At the last minute I also threw in the photograph of the mountain trail, and I didn’t know why I was doing that either. The drive was dull until I got within twenty miles of Wyllis and began looking for old signs. I remembered absolutely nothing of the town. The drugstore where Vivian had worked was gone; that whole block had been ripped out and a shopping center was going up. I made a halfhearted attempt to locate the druggist who might have remembered her, but that was a lost cause from the beginning. Probably he was dead. I left Wyllis with mixed feelings of sadness and relief.

To my surprise I didn’t go straight home but drove along the Blue Ridge Trail, then turned west into West Virginia. In the late afternoon I parked the car and climbed high into the mountains, but nothing here even remotely resembled the mountain in the picture. For a long time after that I sat in my car and studied the picture and its wrappings. The only new factor I found was that the address on the envelope seemed fresh, while the envelope itself looked old and faded. The word
PERSONAL
apparently had been stamped there a long time ago, and there was a dark dust line at the top, as though it had lain under other parcels—perhaps for years—before being mailed. The rubber band that held the picture and the cardboard panels together was old too; its outer surface had dried and hardened, and it broke easily before it was stretched out to its old limit.

None of this helped me, except to reinforce my growing conviction that the picture had a tie to Robert, or at least to the era when I had known Robert, and that something new was happening in the matter. It was disturbing, but too much for my tired mind to cope with. I drove through the night and got home in the early morning. Again, I could not sleep more than a few hours. After tossing restlessly for a time, I got up and made a big breakfast. Then I went into the den, opened the Holland file, and sat at my desk with the mountain photograph before me.

I was doodling, thinking about it in that shallow trancelike state that is familiar to anyone who has ever been hypnotized. I don’t know how long I sat there, pencil in hand; it might have been half an hour or just a few minutes. I was in that twilight state that comes just before a deep trance when the sound of an ambulance passing a block away brought me out of it. I looked down at the pad and was surprised to see that my doodles formed symbols and numbers. I had drawn a Maltese cross and had written beneath it the numbers 50, 96,12.

Automatic writing?

I hadn’t done anything like that since the days of the Holland experiments.

But it was automatic writing beyond any doubt I had drawn the Maltese cross without looking at the pad—in fact, without any awareness of my finger movements—and the numbers were strongly written and perfect. The cross was about the size of a marble. I rummaged in my desk for a magnifying glass and studied the cross for a minute. The cross was encased in a perfect circle, and the only imperfection I found anywhere in the drawing was a spot in the lower arm where perhaps a quarter of that arm was missing. It was as though a faulty ballpoint pen had run out of ink at precisely that spot, but I had been using a pencil with a finely sharpened point, and the point was not broken.

I began to examine the photograph under the magnifying glass. I looked closely at each rock on that treacherous trail, letting my glass meander along to the base of the cave. For a long time I examined the gloom of the cave, as though the glass would help me penetrate that darkness and would thus reveal the who and why of this picture’s sudden intrusion into my life. As I moved the glass along the rocks lining the cave, I felt a cold sensation creep along my spine. Clearly imprinted in the rock was the Maltese cross.

Holy Christ! I sat back and rubbed my eyes, which by now were watering badly. When I could see clearly I looked at the picture again. The cross was still there, an exact replica of the one I had just drawn. Obviously it was very old; part of the lower arm had worn away with time; but the circle and the upper arms were complete and in good condition. Had I subconsciously “seen” and stored it with my earlier examinations of the picture? Was that possible? Without the glass, the cross appeared as nothing more than a blur. Even with the glass it might seem just a peculiar rock characteristic, had I not drawn that precise image less than five minutes before. The matter of the cross bothered me more than anything I had yet encountered, and I had to fight down an urge to destroy the picture and the rest of the Holland file as well. Instead, I filed everything away, pulled the drawer handle to be sure it was locked, and went out along the lake for a long walk.

When I got back Judy was home. I saw her coat on the cedar chest and I heard vaguely the sounds of the shower water running upstairs. I went into the den and unlocked the filing cabinet, then went to the kitchen and poured myself a stiff drink. I looked at the clock; it wasn’t yet one o’clock, a bit early to start boozing, but today, I told myself, I had an excuse. A sense of urgency had come over me and I knew that our little talk would not wait until tonight. Judy came down in about fifteen minutes; she smiled and said hi and kissed my cheek; I said how was your weekend and she said fine how about yours. Small talk, but I guessed that she had been through the same indecision that was now my constant companion. There was no time for any more guessing games in handling the problem; I had a strong need to get it all out at once, to have it behind me before I could find another excuse to put it off for one more day.

“Let’s go in the den and talk,” I said. She followed me through the French doors and took a seat in the chair facing my desk. I sat at the desk, stared out of the window in a last desperate grasp for an excuse to delay, then got up and took the folders out of the filing cabinet. When I turned and looked at her I saw that she was tense; her jaw had tightened and her hands gripped the leather arms of the chair. She had been looking at the top drawer of the filing cabinet, the one she had never seen open, and now she was staring at the files I held in my hands.

“Relax,” I said, trying to put us both at ease. “There’s nothing in here to be nervous about.” I placed the folders on the edge of the desk and sat in the chair beside them. “There are some tapes in here too; we can play them sometime if you want to hear them. Right now I’m not sure the tapes will add anything to the questions you have about your mother. We’ll see, okay?”

She nodded nervously.

First things first. I opened the Vivian file and took out the photograph. “Your mother.”

She looked at it for a long time. “She’s pretty,” she said at last.

“You look just like her.”

“I’m not nearly…”

“Not yet, but you will be soon. Yeah, Vivian was a damn fine-looking woman. How did you know you two looked so much alike?”

“I didn’t know. Your expressions, I guess, more than anything.”

“How’d you know about the mole on her cheek?” I asked, realizing that I wasn’t supposed to know that she knew that.

She didn’t bat an eye. “You told me once, remember? When I was just a kid you told me. It’s the only time you’ve ever said anything about her.”

I didn’t remember, but I passed over it. “Except for that, you could be her double.”

She looked again at the snapshot. “I’m not nearly…”

“Modesty’s always been one of your finest traits, but you look just like her and you know it, okay? Let’s get on with it; we’ve got a lot to cover.”

My words excited her. They excited me too, in a different way. “Any questions?”

“A few.”

“Yes?”

“Why is she looking away like that? It’s really a pretty bad picture. Do you have anything showing her full face?”

“She didn’t like pictures; I had to shoot this one with Robert’s camera on the sly. It might have come out better if I’d been able to use flash. But as far as I know there are no other pictures of her anywhere.”

“Was that a superstition or what?”

“I don’t know what it was. Probably a superstition. Yes, I guess that must have been it; a superstition.”

“Where were you living then?”

“In a little town not far from Richmond. I was a student at William Schuster U; that’s a small college for kids who can’t make it at William and Mary for one reason or another. In fact, I think it’s closed now. I used to get propositioned all the time for money, but I haven’t had anything from them now in five or six years. Anyway, your mother and I, we took this place because it was cheap and we were broke. My parents were trying to help me through school, but they didn’t have much money either. That year I had to drop out. Vivian was working in a department store and it was near Christmas, like now—yes, it was this same time of year. I dropped out at midterm because we just couldn’t make it. She was making forty dollars a week.”

I stopped there, lost in some irrelevancy, and it might have been several minutes later when I looked up and saw Judy waiting expectantly. “You want to hear all of this?”

“As much of it as you want to tell me.”

“A lot of it’s just junk. It doesn’t matter to anyone now.”

“Why not…get it all out?…see what matters?”

I swallowed some Scotch, said, “Good idea,” and forced my mind back to that Christmas. “She was making forty dollars a week. I remember she was very bitter about that. Let me tell you, your mother had a fine mind, like yours; she really resented making forty dollars a week. She hated her work, thought it was demeaning; but jobs were tight then and we had to take what we could get. I took a job in a gas station. That’s almost a cliché today—everyone who’s poor goes to work in a gas station—but I really did. So we were making eighty dollars between us.”