The Horses of the Night (19 page)

“I'm going to make lots of money,” I reassured him. “Big commissions. We'll pay your debts.”

“It's not a matter of money. The DeVere people will want us dead.”

“I'll arrange things,” I said.

“How?”

I didn't know how, but my silence seemed to express confidence.

“I don't want to think about it,” he said. It was his way of expressing gratitude for what he interpreted as my easy attitude. “Look at this scenery. This kind of place makes me happy. It makes me believe in things. I can't
believe
the kind of people I've ended up dealing with.”

It was characteristic of my brother that when he did deal with philosophical matters he used bold, unmixed colors—mortality, faith. He had the stout, simple diction of many people I knew, the sort of man who has such conversations only while driving fast, or while drinking.

When we approached the Place he began to slow, downshifting, delaying.

It made both of us quiet, the sight of the iron gate swinging inward after a videocam had observed us for awhile. The road was well tended, hills and oaks, and new blue-gray gravel spread on the verge of the road.

My brother and I called it “the Place,” but it was a private hospital for a few patients, the most distinguished being Mother, widow of the man who had served for years on the board of directors. Los Cerritos Sanitarium never displayed its name, nor did it have any of the outward trappings of either a hospital or a prison, except that after a long drive there was a chain-link fence surmounted by a long spiral of barbed wire and then, at the distance of a stone's throw, another, parallel fence.

It had been part of the deal: we had paid to have the Place made maximum security, or at least as secure as the state hospital for the criminally insane at Atascadero, where the prosecution had been eager to deposit her.

There was a no-man's land of bare dirt, raked weedless. The fences were tall, perhaps thirty feet high. A security guard waved his clipboard at us. We parked, and sat for too long in the Alfa.

“Dad would like the wisteria,” said Rick, indicating a late winter vine on an arbor, and redwood benches. The cement walks were still new-looking, and the grass had that recently mowed look that left the lawn in a pattern of parallel stripes.

“Do you think Dad would be proud of the two of us?” I asked. “Do you think he would make the point of saying so, if he met us?”

“He'd be proud of you, no question.”

“He wouldn't try to talk us into something …” The word did not come easily. “Evil, do you think?”

Rick did not answer at once. When he spoke there was a hint of tension in his voice. “Dad made mistakes. But ask anyone and they'll tell you that he tried to do the right thing.”

“If you saw him—his ghost, an illusion, perhaps, what would you ask him to test him? To see if he was real?”

Rick was thoughtful. “I would never believe that he was real. I just wouldn't believe it. It can't happen.”

We both sat silent for what seemed like a long time. Then Rick said, “By the time I reach the parking lot and turn off the engine, I'm always nervous.”

We shook hands with a row of nurses and orderlies. The doctors were at a meeting in Napa, although this was not bad news. For once I wanted to see my mother unencumbered with professional commentary regarding maintenance doses and bedsores.

The new head nurse was Mrs. Lamb. She welcomed us, told us about the new Jacuzzi. She showed us into the library, the patio, the view overlooking the lawn. There were other patients here, in addition to my mother, but I was aware that they had been whisked out of the way. We had phoned ahead, and we were like royalty, people who go through life convinced that the world smells of fresh paint.

“You both look exactly like your pictures,” she said. “I'm so happy to be able to say I saw you at last.”

“How is she doing?” I asked.

“She's doing just fine.” Mrs. Lamb beamed at Rick, and then at me. She was a plump, pleasant-looking woman, with white teeth. “I think it wouldn't cause any trouble at all if we let you peek in at her.”

“We want to see her.”

“That's what I mean—”

“We want to talk to her.”

Her smile brightened. Her teeth, I realized, were false. “That's going to be a problem.”

I gave her my best tea-party smile. “We insist.”

Mrs. Lamb looked at Rick, as though for support. Rick gave her a smile of his own, and winked.

“It's a very bad idea,” she said, solemn, subdued. “It might cause complications.”

“Has she been making progress?” I asked.

“Of course she has,” said Mrs. Lamb. “Of course she has been making excellent progress.”

“Then perhaps she will be able to withstand the strain.”

“It was a staff decision. One person can't alter policy.”

I used my most gentle voice. “We certainly wouldn't think of asking you to alter policy. That's out of the question. Perhaps, in this one instance, you could happen to be looking the other way …”

Mrs. Lamb's face was set, with a lingering smile that now looked spiteful. “It's families,” said Mrs. Lamb.

I must have looked mystified, because Mrs. Lamb added, “Please forgive me, Mr. Fields. But I've seen it so many times. Some people think government is bad. Some people think the police have to be watched all the time. People ought to take a look at the family—the harm
it
does.”

I softened. “Maybe it's not such a good idea.”

Mrs. Lamb's manner was brisk. “No, I think you're right after all. I'm sorry to have seemed so rude. Let's all go have a nice long talk with Mrs. Fields.”

“We don't really have to—”

“Besides, you always get what you want, don't you?” She was walking away from us, and reached a door. She held it open.

“What does
that
mean?” I asked.

“That's what someone said on one of the talk shows. The Fieldses get what they want. A lot of people even admire you for it. Nobody stands in your way.”

27

In Irving Penn's portrait of my mother she has a hand to her head to press down the crown of a broad-brimmed hat. The photograph is in black and white, but it is plain that her glove is black, her hat some dark color, red or blue, and that her lipstick is probably deepest scarlet. She is smiling, and is both charmed by the camera and shy in its presence.

My mother was not shy, particularly, but she did dislike unnecessary spectacle. I have often wondered what remark, what passing mood, might have inspired her smile. The photograph was taken during my early childhood. My mother looks like a stranger, someone connected to reality, someone enjoying life.

The woman sitting in the hospital had white hair, and a fine profile. She looked out through the glass door, at the lawn, and at the trees in the distance. Her hair had been brushed, and her lipstick was a muted rose-pink.

She did not glance our way. She said, “The horse pavilion is getting wet. Isn't it?”

Rick and I exchanged looks. Her choice of words was often vaguely outdated. She spoke for people long-vanished, men who lived for their horses, for golf, for sleek yachts.

She looked my way.

“I don't think it's raining,” I said.

We kissed, formally, like diplomats. She was shivering, the result of the drug she took to keep from hallucinating.

“Stratton,” she said. “However did you find your way here?”

I told her how well she looked. It was true, and yet, as so often when seeing someone after a year or more, there is the strangest sensation that someone has fussed with the sketch. It was simply not that there were new wrinkles, or a more age-bleakened look to her eyes. Her hair had grown fuller and her face had a too-pale look that I associated with a drawing imperfectly erased. There was something missing in her, a glow, that had been present as recently as a year ago.

“Rick drove me,” I said, clumsily literal.

“That was kind.” She made a gesture with something like her old graciousness. “It's very pleasant here,” said my mother. “I can sit and watch deer feed off the aspens, or whatever they are. Those trees out there which have, alas, no leaves on them now.”

I enjoyed the way she expressed herself, phrasing out of another time, a time well before her own birth. “Birches,” I said. “And they're getting some leaves. Quite a few of them.”

“Birches poison deer,” she answered.

I did not want to discuss poison. “It's a very pleasant view,” I said.

“Ah, ‘pleasant.' Yes,” she said, “that is precisely the word I would use. It is constantly on the tip of my tongue. I am always saying to myself, ‘Look out at all that and enjoy it. It's so pleasant.'” She had a slight tremor in her voice, too.

I picked my words with care. “Sometimes we think we shouldn't come see you. That it upsets you too much.”

She regarded me. “You could help me get out of this shithole.”

The word hurt. She had been so reserved that a society columnist actually retreated to his thesaurus, he confessed to me once, to conjure “ethereal.”

“I'm sorry you're unhappy,” I said.

I felt myself growing edgy already. Edgy, and sad. She had always had that effect on me. Her tone was imperious, her mind jumping back, always, to the prime question: why we kept her caged.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Forgive my tongue.”

“There isn't,” I said, “much we can do.” I did not want to mention that she had been sentenced here by Judge Bieglitter, the very man she had admired when he ran for lieutenant governor.

“It's all right, Stratton,” she said. “Really.”

I could not look at Rick.

She wrenched her wheelchair to renew her appraisal of me. I backed away, quite without thinking.

Her shoulders rose and fell. She would begin to weep, now, or collapse into a stoic rage. She fought the straps that held her, and Rick put a hand on her shoulder.

He looked hard at me for a moment. “We hope,” he said, brave enough to persist, “that you can get out of here someday.”

It had been a bewildering and agonizing series of episodes when it had all transpired, but looking back it seemed simple. My father's death had unstrung her so completely that she had suffered the delusion that he was still alive, residing in Montreux, beside Lake Geneva, with a mistress. The servants, she had been convinced,
looked
like the familiar servants, but they were jailers, paid to spy on her and keep her trapped.

She had used less ingenuity than I might have expected in poisoning the staff, employing oleander tea, boiled to a concentrate, in the Christmas fruitcake. She had never been original, or imaginative, only caring and proud. Two people had died, although Collie, who herself had spent time in the medical center as a result, had reassured me that “old help like ourselves don't mind dying in the line of duty, as it were.” I had discerned in this attitude perhaps a bit too much wartime ethic.

It was true that both of the staff who had succumbed to the poison had suffered from weak hearts, and both had already been taking digitalis. The addition of the toxin in
nerium oleander
was just enough, as the coroner put it, attempting to ascend from his usual medical prose, “to dramatically and irrevocably eclipse cardiac function.” The law could not overlook Mother's behavior as eccentric, and the family attorney, to his credit, had salvaged this simple future for her.

My mother ran her hands along the wheels, approaching me. There was something like honest doubt in her voice. “I used to count on you, Stratton. You.” She uttered the pronoun with heavy emphasis. “I used to feel so close to you. You, who only cared about your pencil drawings.”

“You always call them that. ‘Pencil drawings.' I draw in all kinds of media …” I faltered.

“Stratton won a prize,” said Rick. “He's going to redesign everything.”

“Help your mother, Stratton. Help me!” She was weeping.

I had, in the backwaters of my intentions, planned to ask her about my father. What had he been wearing that day? One of his old hunting shirts? I had almost wanted to say: I have seen him. He is alive in the Other World. It had been a ridiculous plan, one of those hopes that dissolve under full awareness. One thing was certain: seeing the phantom of my father had made me aware that one of my parents was still alive, still with us. “We are your sons,” I said, the words bringing me to a point of great sadness. “We love you.”

I could see it in her eyes. She did not believe me.

I took her head in my hands and I kissed her. She was rigid, a woman enduring a passing agony.

“What can I tell you that would make you trust us?”

Her voice was sad when she said, “Nothing. I can no longer tell what to believe, Stratton. I don't know what's real. And you—you men. You think you know.”

“We don't mean any harm,” I said.

“‘Harm!'” she echoed, scornful but affectionate for a moment. She regarded me. “I lost my daughter. My little girl.”

We never mentioned this. I could not meet Rick's eyes. Before my birth there had been another pregnancy. It had ended in a miscarriage, and unspoken family tradition understood that the baby would have been a girl.

“In the days before your father, I used to go riding,” she continued. “In the canyon, to see the palm trees. Some young man or other would offer to ride with me in their creaking new riding clothes, but I wanted to see the palms and I wanted to be alone.”

As so often before, I realized how little we knew about her life as a young woman. We had a smattering of images, photographs, impressions. Her father, a man I barely remembered, had been a “Virginia planter,” an archaic description I had always taken to be a shorthand for “wealthy enough to do nothing.” Tobacco, I had always assumed, and racehorses. Her widowed father had lived for awhile in Palm Springs, the old money side-by-side with people like Jimmy Cagney and the young Peter Renman, already a major producer. Why Palm Springs, I had sometimes wondered? Why not Beverly Hills itself, or, for that matter, London, Paris, or one of those Mediterranean enclaves created to keep the well-tailored quietly out of sight? Still, Palm Springs must have been charming. The old and new money had enjoyed each other.