Wonderland (73 page)

For half an hour Jesse listened in misery, to this, unable to hang up.

Once, in March, he telephoned home to check on Shelley, and Helene explained to him that she had given Shelley permission to stay after school for a meeting of some club—the journalism club, she thought, or the drama club. Jesse hid his irritation. He called back in an hour and this time Shelley was home. He asked his wife to put her on the telephone. “How are you, Shelley?” he asked. For a few seconds she was silent. He had the idea that she was about to scream at him. Then she said in her light, rapid voice, the voice of any high school girl, “I’m just fine, Father. When will you be home tonight?”

He put the receiver back slowly, knowing that he was going to lose her.

But he had to be certain of her. He had to prevent her from being misused by strangers, by men. The world could get at his daughter through the orifices of her body, pushing into the willing elastic streams of her blood, and she would smile dumbly, enticingly. Yet at
the same time he had to think about the clinic. It could not handle all the patients who were referred for tests and treatment. It must be expanded. More money. A new wing, a new group of doctors. A further extension of Jesse’s brain, his energy. And his own field was expanding all the time; he could hardly keep up with the journals and papers that came to him. He spent an extra night trying to make sense of a long monograph on isotope encephalography, “brain-scanning,” by means of a radioactive isotope injected into the blood, but he could not concentrate because he kept thinking of Shelley upstairs, sleeping; or, rather, not thinking of her but envisioning her. Yet he did not really envision her, not the girl Shelley, but rather the ghostly “scan” of his own brain, Dr. Vogel’s brain, a photograph of a grainy oblong in which a certain area was heavily shaded by the radioactive isotope in the form of his daughter’s face, like a tumor … located in the frontal region of his brain. A posterior frontal tumor in Dr. Vogel’s brain.

He forced himself to read:
Abnormal tissues show abnormal scans
.

The first Saturday in April, Shelley was allowed to spend an afternoon at a girl friend’s house about a mile away. She left the address and the telephone number. Jesse went down to the clinic to check on some patients of his; then, on an impulse, he called the number. A girl answered. He asked to speak to Shelley and, with a breathless little laugh, the girl said that she was Shelley: didn’t he recognize her voice?

Jesse hesitated. Yes, it was her voice. Of course. His daughter. He felt as if his head were slowly being squeezed out of shape.

He stayed at the clinic for another hour, but the other Dr. Vogel was eager, anxious to get going, to do something, to get out from behind that desk. No operations scheduled for the next day. Nothing until Monday at nine-thirty. Nervously, he opened two or three letters and glanced at their contents, let them fall back onto his desk.… Finally he could stand it no longer. He drove back to Winnetka, to the address Shelley had given him. The house was handsome, large, a fake English Tudor with a garage big enough for four cars. The lawn was oddly raw, torn up, as if repair work had been done on it last fall and had never been completed. There was a large shallow pit near the front steps where a pipe lay exposed, partly covered with leaves and debris and dirty patches of snow. When Jesse rang the bell he heard nothing inside—the bell must be out of order.

Fighting his panic, he waited quietly. The material of the front
porch had begun to crumble. The mailbox was an ordinary dime-store mailbox, rusty and bent, and in it were stuck shopping circulars, their colors run together.

Finally he knocked on the door.

And now … now … someone was coming. He heard a voice.

But the door was not opened. Jesse rapped again, gently. He did not want to frighten this person away. He heard someone speaking, asking a question. But he could not hear what it was.
My God
, Jesse thought in misery, wanting to bring his head forward and smash it against the door.

He knocked again. Gently. Courteous. And, after another long wait, he heard the lock being undone.

A woman his own age stood there, staring at him. She wore a bathrobe of some violet quilted material.

“Yes? Who is it? What do you want?” she said.

Her face was pale, her eyebrows and eyelashes pale, undefined. Messy hair. A smell of disuse about her.

“Mrs. Baird?”

“My name is Nancy.”

“I’m Jesse Vogel.…”

She stared boldly at him and said nothing.

“I think my daughter is visiting your daughter …?”

“Oh. Your daughter. Somebody with Babs. Oh, wait. Do you want to step inside?”

The entryway was dim. A flagstone floor, a low-hanging chandelier of wrought iron. The woman was saying, “Somebody is with Babs, yes. I heard them come in. Now, let’s see. Let’s see,” she said, confused. She stumbled back against something—a piece of heavy ornate furniture, a Spanish chest that was very dusty. “I was taking a nap. I have my room now in the study, right up close to the front door. So I can answer the doorbell. Otherwise I wouldn’t hear it. I can’t get anyone to come fix the doorbell. Repairmen just laugh at me, they never pay any attention to a woman by herself.… Which one is your daughter, is she the blond? They have a place in the Bahamas?”

“Shelley has red hair.”

“
Shelley
. Oh, yes. Shelley. She’s very sweet. She’s Babs’s best friend. They went to St. Ursula’s together before Babs transferred …?”

“You must be thinking of someone else,” Jesse said nervously.

The woman was leading him into a long, dark living room, where the furniture was not quite in place, the sofas and chairs moved about into odd arrangements. A table was overturned in front of the fireplace. Most of the shades were drawn, but not evenly. “This room is a dungeon. I hate it. I want to do it all over in off-white, you know, oyster. But I can’t get started. This place has a curse on it,” the woman said rapidly. “First of all, I hate this style of house. It wasn’t my choice of a house.… Oh, I know where they are. They’re swimming,” she said, shaking her head as if to clear it.

She led him through the living room into a corridor, where the carpet was coming loose. It looked as if children had been running and skidding on it. “There’s a curse on this house, believe me,” the woman said peevishly. She led Jesse into a huge room of domed glass. The pool was empty, drained out, the air was very chilly. “Oh, they’re not here after all. Where are they? I thought they went swimming … I thought I heard them in here.…”

Jesse walked to the edge of the pool and stared down. At this end it was cluttered with cans and bottles, debris from ashtrays, old newspapers, waxed milk cartons, bright yellow cereal boxes.

Jesse could not speak.

“Well, maybe they went out. To the roller rink maybe. They all wear these cute little skirts and colored panties and high-topped white roller skates. Aren’t they cute, those outfits? That’s where they are, probably.”

“She isn’t here?”

“Why don’t you relax? Are you new in the neighborhood or something? You look like you’re new. Why don’t you sit down somewhere, I’ll make us a drink.…”

“They’re not here? My daughter isn’t here …?”

“Why don’t you relax, please. I’ll make us both a drink and we can talk this over.…”

Jesse stared at her. His head pounded with revulsion. That pale, out-of-focus face, her squinting eyes, her odor—It was so hard to keep a family, Jesse thought suddenly, that maybe it was better to give up. Better to give up, erase them all, destroy them, obliterate them and the memory of them, wipe everything out. A father could wipe out everything he had ever done and be free. A clean, pure, empty being, a void.…

“You sure you’re not new in the neighborhood?” the woman asked, following him to the front door.

Jesse went home. Seeing his face, Helene asked what had happened. He said nothing. “You didn’t check on Shelley, did you? You didn’t go to the house and embarrass her in front of her friends?” Helene asked anxiously.

“No,” Jesse said.

When Shelley came home, it was nearly dark. She let herself in the back door and he heard her speaking to Helene—the two of them speaking ordinarily, lightly, loud enough for Jesse to hear if he wished, so that he could know there were no secrets in this house.

She appeared in the doorway. Jesse was sitting in the living room without the lights on.

She stared at him. “Are you … is it … am I late?” Shelley asked.

“No.”

She was unbuttoning her jacket. It was made of some coarse beige material, lined with fake fur, an imitation of a farmer’s or a laborer’s jacket. She wore jeans and boots. Her face itself looked a little coarse, as if from hurrying, breathing hard.

“What’s wrong …?” she whispered.

“Is anything wrong?” Jesse asked ironically.

They stared at each other. It was nearly dark. Light from the hallway fell past Shelley and into the living room, all the way to Jesse’s legs. He stood. He was not going to do anything.

“Did you go there?” Shelley said faintly.

“Go where?”

“To the Bairds’.”

Jesse said nothing.

“You … you want to kill me.…” Shelley whispered.

She turned and ran upstairs.

That was on Saturday. The next morning she did not get out of bed; she complained of a cold, a sore throat. She looked feverish. Jesse went up to her room and she was sitting propped up in bed, the Sunday papers scattered about her, a few pages fallen onto the floor. She wiped her nose with a tissue that was already crumpled and damp.

“How do you feel?” he asked carefully.

“It’s just a cold. I’m all right.”

Her hair had been brushed away from her face; near the hairline there was a row of small dull pimples.

The next morning she did not go to school. At the clinic, preparing for an operation, Jesse thought of her red-rimmed eyes and he froze, he could not move. He had been washing, scrubbing for the operating room. A minute before he had been eager to get in there, to peel out some poisonous little beads of flesh he knew he would find … in just a short while he would find them, he’d peel them out and destroy them … but now he froze, he heard someone talking to him but he could not bring himself to make the effort to listen—

He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t take the risk. Someone else would have to do the operation.

That afternoon at two the telephone rang and he knew it would be his wife. He listened to her careful, calm voice like a man in a dream, his eyes closed. “I only went out for half an hour. She was gone when I came back. There’s no note, nothing. Nothing. It’s just like the last time.…”

Jesse drove down into Chicago, on the lookout for girls of a certain age, a certain height. He seemed to see them all over. He saw them walking along the street or waiting for buses or lingering in doorways. His eye jumped onto them. Occasionally they noticed him, his cruising automobile, and stepped out to see him better, to give him a better look at them—some of the girls even younger than Shelley, some of them black, with that same hip-rocking sardonic flirtatiousness he had noticed in the high school girls. It meant nothing, he thought. Nothing. Or it meant everything.

He stopped from time to time to telephone his wife, but there was no news at home, no good news. The police hadn’t found her. The police were sympathetic but busy; they were on the trails of a thousand girls like Shelley, so they said.

At her high school he tried to talk to her teachers, her friends, tried to learn something about her. Her teachers didn’t seem to know her well. Yes, a pretty girl, a redheaded girl, not very responsive … day-dreaming.…
Their pity for Jesse embarrassed him. Shelley’s “friends” were no more helpful. They were embarrassed and a little sullen. Babs Baird said coolly, “Shell had a mind of her own, she didn’t really run with us. She did what she wanted to do. Nobody could boss her around.”

“Who wanted to boss her around?” Jesse asked.

“Oh, you know. Guys.”

“Who?”

“People. Just people. They always want to boss you around,” Babs said.

She was a lean, round-shouldered girl, insolent in an impersonal, weary way. Jesse would have liked to shake her by the shoulders, but he spoke to her politely.
Where did she think Shelley had gone?

“Look, I didn’t know her that well. She sort of used me, you know? She used my name. She had more on me than I had on her. She’ll probably be back.”

“Why do you say that? When will she be back?”

“Who knows?” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

Jesse drove around other high schools in the city, cruising slowly. His eyes had begun to ache. He saw crowds of high school students, boys and girls, a tide of them, the sexes confused, mixed together, surging across school lawns and intersections. He saw a hundred girls who might have been his daughter. He strolled along the sidewalk, letting the girls overtake him, pass him, his heart lurching at their shadows, which skidded past and touched him deftly, boldly.… Snatches of their conversations: “Oh, Louise told me that already. What else? Who’s kidding who?” A mysterious, fluid jumble of words that seemed sacred to him. If he turned to glance at these girls he saw how vacuous they were, how easy with one another, not guessing at the sacred quality of their words, their faces.… Girls with colored stockings, ornamental stockings stitched into diamond shapes, even into shapes of tiny hearts, some legs so tight with flesh that the black stitching was uneven in places, starting to unravel. Their voices were occasionally flat and harsh, even the voices of the prettiest girls. But Jesse had faith in their inner music, which paused and stalled and rushed onward, mocking and derisive, while their long hair flicked with the wind, their heads snapping like horses’ heads to get the hair out of their eyes. Any one of them could have been his daughter.

He kept calling the police station. Yes, they were looking for her. So they said. They had a thousand girls to catch up with, so they said.

On April 15, Jesse drove downtown again to watch the crowds gathering for an antiwar demonstration. He got there early in the afternoon so that he would miss nothing. It was a fairly cold spring day, but the crowd grew rapidly. Thousands of people. Most of them were young, kids in their twenties, teenagers in groups, the girls with their usual long straight listless hair, the boys with greasy hair in shoulder-length strands, their faces pasty and wild and set for excitement. A slow surging march along the street. Policemen lined the sidewalks to hold back the spectators.