West 47th (23 page)

About then Maddie had gone blind.

It wasn't really a going. That is, it wasn't gradual.

She awakened one morning believing she hadn't awakened, that the black she was experiencing was still the black of sleep. She often had very realistic dreams, so she lay there awaiting where this one might take her.

She touched her eyelids, caused them to blink. She felt them slipping up and down over her eyes. It was weird. How many million times before had she blinked and never felt that. The tip of her finger felt the flickings of her lashes.

As swift as her realization a volt of panic shot through her. She sat up. She cried out, an unrestrained bawl. When no one came she fell back on her pillows.

Black.

There was no reason for it. She hadn't gotten anything harmful in her eyes.

It was temporary, she assured herself, would go away in a while. Calm down, calm down.

She regretted having cried out, hoped no one had heard her. She wouldn't again no matter what. If this inability to see didn't go away, she'd stay in bed, say she felt achy, had caught a virus, was feverish. Perhaps she'd be brought some water and antihistamine capsules and a thermometer but other than that there'd be no concern.

She would be alone in the black.

It frightened her but, at the same time, its possible advantages occurred to her. What if she plunged into it, floated on it. What if this black was something she could bring on at will. How useful that could be. If it went away, as it surely would, she hoped she'd be able to get it back.

She lay there listening to herself. Her breathing was a private wind, her heartbeat a friendly, signaling drum. She scratched an itch from her cheek, clicked her teeth, sniffled, swallowed. Her insularity was amplified. With a little more concentration she might be able to hear the coursing of her blood.

Look! Weren't those angels? Angels outlined by trails of glittering effervescence, moving about against the black? If not for the black she wouldn't have been able to see them.

Her black.

She claimed it and felt suddenly serene, as though she'd been granted a wish.

On the third such day when Elise looked in on her, Maddie was up and dressed.

“How are you today?” Elise inquired dutifully.

“I'm blind,” Maddie replied matter of fact.

“What nonsense.”

The initial examination of Maddie was conducted by an elderly ophthalmologist at his office on East 72nd. He found nothing wrong with her eyes and said in Maddie's presence it was his opinion that she was malingering, faking it.

Uncle Straw took Maddie to see specialists at Johns Hopkins and Mayo and the Hermann Eye Center at Texas Medical. Many of the country's most reputable ophthalmologists, neurologists and neurobiologists had their go at her.

Her head was scanned repeatedly. Each doctor didn't seem to want to rely upon the diagnostic procedures done by the doctor who'd preceded him. Time and again Maddie was placed on a stainless steel tray and, like a torpedo, slid into a tube. Sandbags on each side of her head to keep her from moving, while not only her visual system but her entire brain could be looked at dimensionally and in slices.

Computerized axial tomography, positron-emission tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance, biomagnetic imaging. Scanning laser ophthalmoscopes mapped her retinas in three-tenths of a second.

All diseases that cause blindness were detectable, but the reason for Maddie's loss of sight eluded the specialists.

Had she ever had meningitis?

Meningoencephalitis? Birds carry it.

Cat scratch fever?

No, no and no. Of course, she'd owned a few parakeets and fed pigeons in the park countless times. She adored cats, had had several over the years. There might very well have been scratches, but fever?

Each doctor who beamed into Maddie's eyes and viewed as deep in as he could saw normal, healthy-looking retinas. Nothing wrong with those vital slivers of neural tissue located at the back of the eyeball. No degeneration or even inflammation.

Where the optic nerves stemmed from the retinas also appeared normal. Beyond that point couldn't be seen with an ophthalmoscope. The cause had to be in there, somewhere beyond.

At the optic chasm, perhaps, where the optic nerves split and ran to the left and right like an intersection of a four-lane highway. Or possibly further on in the thalamus, where the optic nerves fed into the switchboard-like geniculate bodies.

The search for a diagnosis proceeded into the visual cortex and on into the cerebral cortex, a region of the brain that still baffled medical science when it came to the part it played in seeing and processing what was seen. All sorts of astounding things could be going on in there that the scans weren't picking up.

Despite their sizable fees the doctors were at a loss.

Maddie's visual system had just shut down, turned off, closed shop.

And Lord knows why.

Maddie vowed to kick the shins of anyone who proposed another scan.

Early on, at one of the most prestigious eye clinics, a young female neurobiologist, relegated to a third-team silent observer, had dared to speak out of turn with the suggestion that Maddie's blindness might be psychologically caused.

Her words were lost to everyone but Maddie, and she only recalled them when the rummage for a pathological reason ran out of steam.

Could the psyche block a person's ability to see? It wasn't a common occurrence but neither was it unheard of. In fact, over the past fifty years, the number of reported cases of
hysterical blindness
, as it was called, had increased considerably.

According to psychiatry, the condition was brought about by chronic emotional stress. The unconscious, overloaded with such stress and tired of putting up with it, converted it into a physical disorder, such as blindness.

It fit. The more Maddie thought about it the more comfortable she felt with it, although the
hysterical
label bothered her some. She'd never been in a state of hysteria, there'd never been any tantrums or uncontrollable anxieties. Of course, those things could have been going on in her unconscious, couldn't they?

Possibly.

Anyway, no more doctors, no more scans. She was tutored in Braille. She also learned to tap about with one of those long white canes and to trust the guidance of a specially trained dog.

It wasn't so terrible, being blind, she tried to convince herself. Consider all the ugliness she wouldn't be visually subjected to. Still, blind was blind, and she hadn't seen enough beauty to satisfy her.

Normally, a person who couldn't see couldn't do much, wasn't expected to. There were traditional limitations.

Maddie was determined to surpass those limits, stretch them as far as her black would permit, and then some, if she could. It was, she believed, much a matter of spirit. Her spirit was her ally, just as stumble and fumble were her enemies.

She exercised her functioning senses, her hearing, smell, touch. They became increasingly enhanced. Eventually she found, as she'd hoped, that she was able to consolidate them into a sort of super-perception.

See
, her spirit said,
told you so
.

The white cane stayed propped in a corner next to her dresser. The guiding dog was contributed to someone who needed it.

Elise was seldom around. Maddie's blindness would have deprived her even more.

Maddie lived with Uncle Straw.

And now, this remarkable, valiant, spirit-charged woman lives with me, Mitch thought, as there on the upper terrace of Straw's Kinderhook house, he turned and gave his attention to what she was into at the moment.

She was putting on a little show.

She had Wally blindfolded with one of Straw's neckties. The luncheon plates, glasses and all had been moved to one side so about half of the tabletop was clear. On the cleared part lay a black and white hundred-dollar baccarat chip, a keepsake from the night Straw and Wally had met at the Golden Nugget.

“Find the chip,” Maddie told Wally. “Go ahead, find it.”

Wally reached out with her right hand. She changed her mind three times before deciding where she believed the chip was located. She was way off.

“I don't think it's possible,” Wally said, “not for me, anyway.”

“You weren't seeing with your fingers,” Maddie said. “As I told you, you have to see with your fingers. Try again.”

Wally missed again. She laughed and pulled off the blindfold.

Maddie would show her it could be done. Of course, no blindfold was needed. “Place the chip anywhere,” she said.

Wally kept the chip in her fist. She winked at Straw. “Okay,” she challenged Maddie, “now, you find it.”

It was something both Straw and Mitch had seen Maddie do numerous times.
Spatial reckoning
was her label for it.

At first it had been a notion inspired from having heard all those neurologists and neurobiologists speak about the vagaries of the human brain, how one special process of it could override another special process, how it was frequently forced to be cross-worked, how impulses and signals from banks of hundreds of millions of rods and cones circuited information back and forth at the rate of a quadrillionth of a second.

Thus, Maddie visualized her brain as a tremendous tangle that might not always function as perfectly as it was supposed to. Tradeoffs of responsibilities could be going on in there, especially between the sensory cells.

For instance, occasionally, hearing cells might smell and smelling cells might hear.

Touching cells might see.

And, maybe, rather than mutually agreeable switching like that, certain more aggressive cells took over doing things they were not supposed to do on their own.

Whenever they felt the urge or were asked to emphatically enough by the landlady.

Spatial reckoning.

Seeing with the fingers.

A way for Maddie to know things were where they were.

She couldn't do it at will. It wasn't something she could absolutely depend on, as she wished it would be. Nor did she believe that her fingers could literally see. However, from all her practice at it and the many times she'd been right, she felt there was something to it. The neurobiologists would scoff at her notion, but by their own admission, they didn't know everything.

Maddie held her hand above the tabletop and concentrated. After about a minute she gave up. “No fair,” she said.

Wally was impressed that Maddie had perceived that the chip wasn't on the table. She was further impressed when she suddenly flipped the chip into the air heads or tails fashion and Maddie somehow knew she had and made a mid-air stab at it.

The sparrows were pecking at the figs.

Mitch shooed them away. Less than a minute later they were back on the railing getting set to make another foray. Like me and 47th, Mitch thought.

Maddie pinched his earlobe, as she often did when she wanted his entire attention to what she was about to say. “Be a love,” she said, “and fetch the things from the saddlebags of the Harley.”

Mitch realized almost immediately what the things would be. He knew her, what a tricker she was, the beautiful, all-time, undefeated champion rascal of the world. He did some exasperation and shook his head incredulously because it was unbelievable that he could love her so much.

“And while you're at it,” Maddie told him, “why don't you show Straw your new hog.”

Mitch and Straw went down to the Harley. Straw admired it all around, ran his hand over it in places. “Great-looking machine. I've never been on one.”

“Never too late.”

“For many things. What do you think of my Wally?”

“I think you're almost as lucky as she is.”

Straw appreciated that nice way of putting it. They traded smiles, were eyes to eyes for a suspended moment.

Mitch took a bank check from his shirt pocket, handed it to Straw.

“What's this?” Straw asked as he always did.

“The mortgage payment.”

“Don't you think it's time we did away with this nonsense?”

The apartment of the Sherry had been Straw's. He'd wanted Mitch and Maddie to have it as a wedding gift. Straw insisted, reasoned that the apartment was territory familiar to Maddie, from the go she'd be at home in it. Mitch compromised. Straw could give half the apartment to Maddie, he'd buy the other half. Thus, the monthly mortgage payments. They were sizable and with interest included.

“Really …” Straw protested.

“June and July are also in there,” Mitch told him. He'd gotten that much in arrears.

Straw didn't look at the check.

Mitch felt three months lighter.

He unbuckled the saddlebags and took out the two pistols. One was a Glock M-22, a real stopper, the pistol preferred by Secret Service and Drug Enforcement guys. The other was a Beretta 92F Centurion, a backup weapon but also one that had good take-down power.

As a jeweler Mitch had been licensed to carry. Still was but hadn't for years.

He did a little scoffing grunt. “Next,” he grumbled, “she'll be wanting to take up knife throwing.”

Chapter 17

The following morning, while Maddie helped with the breakfast dishes, Mitch went out to find a place to shoot. He wanted to be done with it so he and Maddie could devote the rest of the day to sloth and passion.

He had in mind the old barn out in the middle of what the Strawbridges had always called the West Meadow.

The undisturbed meadow made it appear as though it would be an easy half mile; however, it turned out to be more of a wade than a walk with the perennial rye grass as it was, thick and crotch high.

Good for the legs, Mitch told himself as he pushed ahead, noticing the contradictions of Queen Anne's lace, less romantically known as wild carrot, and huge hydra-headed purple clover

He, the intruder, was the cause of countless grasshoppers to bound about, for red-winged blackbirds to be flushed up. Garter snakes were running ahead of him.