I must have spent an hour there on the tapestry lawn that flowed into the lake, sipping my tea, wrapped in the fragrant blanket, watching the morning come. The fish began to rise for insects, dotting the sheet-glass water with rings; a tall white bird stood in the reeds near the dock, perusing for frogs. The beauty of the moment made my bones ache with pleasure, and when at last the morning’s ethereal perfection had faded and it had become just another lovely day, I felt complete and calm in a way I had not for many weeks.
I gathered up my cup, draped the now-damp rug over a bench where the sun would soon hit it, and went inside to look at my father’s hidden room.
I worked inside the room for an hour before the sound of water in the pipes betrayed a guest’s waking. I made haste to shut the secret door and went to wrestle with the tin-opener, and had the coffee finished by the time Flo came in, yawning and tousled and looking far more beautiful with her skin pink from sleep than she did with rouge and paint and immaculate hair. I poured her a cup of coffee; she mumbled something that wasn’t quite words, drifting away into the sitting room. A suspiciously brief time later, Donny came through from the sleeping wing, dressed in a white ’Varsity sweater and plus-fours. He, too, accepted coffee, although he was somewhat more communicative than Flo, dropping into a kitchen chair and, after asking my leave, sticking a cigarette into its holder and lighting it.
“This is a peach of a place,” he said. “My parents have a summer house, but since every one of their friends has a house in the same square mile, it’s just like being back in the city, only cooler.”
“Where is that?” I asked.
“In Chicago. They’re still there, in spite of the winters. I’ve tried to get them out here, but they’re sure the place’ll shimmy down around their ears.”
“Yes,” I said with a grin. “Half my friends in England assume that San Francisco collapses on a yearly basis.”
“Flo said you’re in London?”
“I do have a flat there, but we live on the south coast. I also spend a lot of time in Oxford.”
“That’s right, she said you were a, whatchamacallit, bluestocking.”
“She probably said I spent my life with my nose in a book.”
“Something like that. Can’t manage it, myself. Books, I mean. Ever since I graduated, anything but a novel brings me all out in hives.”
He had a nice laugh, pleasantly crooked white teeth, and—although he’d taken a minute to make the razor-sharp part down the middle of his hair and slick it into place—a nicely rakish blond stubble on his square cheekbones. He might not be much of a one for books, but in addition to being restful on the eyes, he was intelligent, thoughtful, and seemed to care a great deal for Flo. I was, theoretically, a member of the same “jazz generation” as the rest of Friday night’s party, but in truth I hadn’t known many of this sort of social animal with any intimacy, and hadn’t expected to find a solid foundation beneath the self-consciously blasé pleasure-seeker. Maybe it was because Donny was a little older; maybe he was just made of stronger stuff.
Hearing our voices, Flo re-appeared. “Morning,” she said, taking the chair between us. “Is there any more coffee?”
Donny reached for her cup and stood up; as he went past, he mussed her already on-end hair affectionately. “Not a morning girl, my Flossie.”
“Hell, I’m full of pep,” she protested, then yawned.
He poured her coffee, placed it in front of her, then started opening various cupboards and taking things out. “How do you like what my old man calls ‘cackle berries’?” He held up a pair of eggs.
I placed a half-hearted objection, saying that I really ought to be doing the cooking for them, but Flo said, “Donny loves to mess around in the kitchen. It’s going to drive the cook bananas, when we’re married.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Oh, we haven’t set a date or got a ring or any of that hooey,” she told me. “When we do, Mummy will take over, and it’ll be just another rotten bore. We’ll probably elope, but right now we’re having too much fun. Plenty of time to be respectable when our livers give out.”
I shot a quick glance at Donny; he was breaking the eggs into a bowl, but from the side of his face, I thought perhaps the wild boy of the Blue Tiger might be more ready for the ring than his girl-friend was.
“Well, in any case,” I said, “it’s a good thing he likes to cook, because otherwise you’d be eating burnt food chipped from the pan. I am no chef.”
Donny scrambled the eggs with some herbs that I hadn’t noticed growing along the outer wall of the cabin—at least I assumed they were herbs and not some poisonous weed. The eggs tasted good, whatever the herbs’ Latin names, eaten with sausages from the ice-box and toast heaped with Mrs Gordimer’s jam. We ate on the terrace, which gathered the morning sun nicely. When our plates were polished and the toast basket was empty (Flo having pressed the last pieces on me) I cleared the table and made more coffee, returning to find Flo stretched out on one of the deck-chairs with her face to the sun, eyes closed like a cat.
“I’m gonna bake in the sun all day,” she declared.
“You’ll get horribly red and sore,” Donny warned her.
“Oh, don’t be wet, Donny. I don’t care. I think I’ll just move down here to the sticks and turn into a turnip.”
“A red turnip,” he commented.
“There should be a couple of beach umbrellas in the boat shed,” I offered. “If they haven’t fallen to pieces. And canoes, a badminton net, and lawn bowls, if you’re interested.”
The umbrellas hadn’t fallen to pieces, not quite, and when Donny came across the lawn with a pair of them across his shoulder, he said that the shed’s other forms of entertainment seemed in decent shape as well. He drove the pole of the most promising umbrella into a place in the lawn chosen by Flo, raising its ribs gingerly. The fabric had a few holes in it, but it held, and Flo spread a rug underneath it and settled down with a sigh of satisfaction. He installed the other one nearby. We all lay down, and lethargy descended.
Thirty-five minutes later, the lack of stimulation drove all three of us into motion. I was the first to tire of watching the humming-birds in the fuchsias.
“I’m going to see if I can find something to read. Can I bring either of you anything from the house?”
Donny leapt up with an eagerness that betrayed his own growing need for action. “I’ll take a stroll into the village and see if I can find a paper,” he declared.
“Mrs Gordimer will be happy to get you one,” I offered.
“Nope, I’ll stretch my legs and then I can be a sloth the rest of the day. And I want to know how the baseball went.” But before I could comment on how unlikely and wholesome an interest in baseball was in a jazz-baby like him, he added, “I’ve got some money riding on it.”
Flo, too, was on her feet. “I’m going to put on my bathing suit.”
Donny left in the direction of the village, Flo disappeared into the house and came out in a skimpy bathing costume, settling onto her rug, and I returned to the hidden storage room. I searched every inch of its walls, examined every object on the shelves, pushed and manipulated every shelf and hook, but nothing gave way, no concealed entrance or trap door came to light, to lead me into the locked rooms of my dream.
There was nothing here.
When Donny came back, the bounce in his step proclaiming how the scores had gone, he too changed into his costume and persuaded Flo to bathe in the rather murky waters. After a while, I scrubbed my hands and went down to the umbrellas, where I found Donny had arranged three of the deck-chairs from the now sun-drenched terrace. He and Flo lay sleeping, hair damp from their swim, chairs three decorous feet apart, faces turned towards each other in slumber.
I smiled, and sat down in my own chair, remembering only as my backside hit the wood that I had neglected to bring a book from the house.
But I stayed where I was, effectively alone on the lawn,
nothing to distract me but the sound of two men in indistinct conversation from the other side of the lake.
What had the hidden-room dream meant, if not an actual, physical place?
Dreams, I knew, were not some mythic message from Beyond. Dreams are speech from the unconscious mind, messages couched not in the logical terms of daylight consciousness, but in a twilight narrative of glimpsed images and impressions. Repeated dreams, worked over and over, generally had a purpose: In my case, the flying-objects image had taken me by the hand and eventually led me to the realisation that I had been in San Francisco during the earthquake, thus opening up an entire segment of my childhood that I had closed away. The second dream, that of the faceless man, was rooted in a specific incident that clearly had terrified my six-year-old self, an event that had rested unquiet over the intervening years until I could finally bring it to light and put it to rest—I felt certain, thanks to Holmes’ discovery of the old woman’s reminiscences, that that particular nocturnal visitor would trouble me no more.
Both dreams had their origin in frightening incidents, two events that had been wrapped about and reshaped by my unconscious mind to soften their sharp edges—until, triggered by the realisation that I was heading to the place where both had occurred, like bits of psychic shrapnel they worked their way to the surface.
But the third dream appeared to be without antecedent. I could find no concealed rooms, either here or in Pacific Heights; moreover, the dream had always been very specific: I knew about the rooms, and needed only to put the key to the door and step inside. Yet in both houses I had actively searched, and although memories awakened as I went along—freely and comprehensively in the Lodge, piecemeal and grudgingly in San Francisco—in neither place had I felt that throb of recognition that told me I was getting close to the door.
Perhaps Tom Long had been right. When I’d heard those precise Chinese accents telling me of Matteo Ricci’s memory palace, I’d been frankly indignant, that this stranger might presume to see into my mind. But maybe I’d been too quick to dismiss his suggestion that the hidden rooms were not of stone and wood, but were located in the recesses of my mind.
Like an object so familiar to the eyes it goes unseen, I had habitually walked past my own history, freely displaying the rest of the house to all and sundry, knowing yet not knowing what lay behind its surfaces. My entire childhood had become a self-inflicted blind spot—I had complacently passed by the locked rooms of my past for so long, fingering the key in my pocket, that I no longer knew where to find the door.
I sat where I was for a long time, staring unseeing at the lake. The sun crept its way onto my toes and up my ankles. Eventually, Flo and Donny stirred, bantered, rose. They raced down the lawn and down the dock to dive into the lake, which looked so lovely and cool that I changed into my own very conservative bathing costume and joined them. Afterwards, we took some lunch, and when a breeze came up we experimented with the little boat, ending up using the oars more than the sail. Sunburnt and replete with the pleasures of childhood, we returned to a house that was fragrant with beef and onions, a rustic casserole left in the oven for us by Mrs Gordimer. We hurriedly rinsed the lake water from our skin and changed into our dinner wear, then threw ourselves on the food as if we had not eaten in days.
Later, when the dishes were virtuously dried and put away, we lit the citronella candles on the terrace and took our coffee out there.
Flo eventually broke the long silence, crossing the legs of her heavy silk lounging pyjamas and giving a sigh of contentment. “Golly, what a swell day this has been, Mary, just the tops. Thanks for letting us crash your party.”
“It’s been a pleasure,” I told her in all honesty. An unexpected pleasure, I could have said, but did not. “Thank you both for coming with me.”
“You did look pretty down. On Friday, I mean. I don’t know what was wrong, but you looked like a real flat tire before you got some bubbly into you.”
She was too polite to ask, but I could see no real reason not to tell her why I’d been troubled—after all, I’d told a relative stranger that same night. “I had some bad news, Friday morning. An old friend of the family died.”
“Criminy, Mary, why didn’t you say—”
“Oh, she died a long time ago, it’s just that I only found out on Friday.” Flo’s expressions of distress faded to a more appropriate level—after all, how close a friend could this have been, if it took me so long to hear about it? A question, indeed, that I had been asking myself. “She was the doctor who helped me, after the accident. A, well, a psychiatrist. I was in pretty bad shape then, mentally as well as physically, and she helped a lot. I’d hoped to see her, but I discovered she actually died within a few weeks of the time I went back to England in the winter of 1914. She was murdered.”
“Murdered! How absolutely dire! What was her name?”
“Ginzberg. Leah Ginzberg.”
“But—wait a tick. That sounds familiar.”
“She was famous, wasn’t she?” Donny asked. “That was just after I came out from Chicago, and I remember a buzz about it. She was killed in her office, wasn’t she?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I wouldn’t have said she was famous, but your friend Jerry knew of her. Or was it Terry? Terry, right. He and I were talking while I was resting my feet at the dance, and it came up.”
“Gosh, yes!” Flo exclaimed. “I remember now, she was famous—the Lady Mesmerist, they called her.”
“She did use hypnosis sometimes,” I agreed.
“There was some trial, wasn’t there?” Donny’s voice went thoughtful as he searched his memory. “She’d helped some girl come up with a memory, and the cops were making a stink, saying she was turning the courtroom into a vaudeville stage.”
“Really?” I said doubtfully. Flo chimed in.
“Wasn’t that the girl claiming she had been assaulted? Mummy wouldn’t let me see the papers, but I snuck them out of the trash. Yeah, they were saying the only reason she was making the charge was because she wanted to be an actress and thought it would get her noticed. Like the Fatty Arbuckle case, only that was later. And this girl didn’t die.”
“She was a dancer—chorus line, not ballet,” Donny added, for my sake, “and told everyone she’d been knocked cold during the attack, and forgot the details. And your doctor friend helped her remember them—only the police said it was all hooey, that she’d just helped the girl come up with a story for why she hadn’t made the charges when the attack happened instead of waiting nearly a year.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” I told them. “Dr Ginzberg used hypnosis to help me put together what happened during the accident—I’d sort of . . .” My voice trailed off as I was hit hard by what I was about to say. With an effort, I finished the thought: “I’d pushed it away, even the parts I could eventually remember. So yes, she was probably accustomed to working with helping people retrieve their repressed memories.”
I found myself smiling, a little sadly, at this last. A patient invariably feels that the intense relationship she forms with her psychiatrist is entirely unique and essentially personal; it is always a jolt to realise that it is also one of a score such relationships the psychiatrist holds simultaneously: a part of the job.
Donny lit a match, his handsome face coming brightly into view then fading into a mere outline in the glow of the cigarette. “Didn’t they think one of her loonies went nuts in the office and killed her? I don’t remember ever hearing who it was—the papers are never as good in following up a story as they are in telling you in the first place, are they?”
“It was never solved,” I said. Both of them went quiet at this reminder that we were speaking of a friend, not an anonymous victim. Then Flo stirred.
“What happened with the girl’s case?”
“I think it was dropped,” Donny answered. “Yes, there was some hokum about the man having the doctor killed, but wouldn’t he have knocked off the girl instead?”
“Wonder what happened to her?”
“She went back to work. Used to be one of the dancers at the Tiger, in fact.”
“The Blue Tiger, where we were Friday? Is she still there?”
“She wouldn’t be, no—she’d be too old even for the chorus now.”
“Billy’s no spring chicken,” Flo commented, in what sounded like an objection.
Billy? I thought, then: Ah. Belinda Birdsong, the saucy chanteuse.
Donny gave a snort, and said, “Billy was old when he was in short pants.”
Hmm. Another Billy, then. Unless this was another of the slang turns my American contemporaries used, where a girl was “old man” and a man “young thing.”
Flo giggled. “Don’t be absurd, Donny. Billy never wore short pants; he was born in a skirt.”
“Wait a minute,” I broke in. “Are you saying that Belinda Birdsong is a man?”
My two companions flew into gales of laughter, making me realise that I’d sounded like someone too ancient, or too naïve, to have imagined such a thing as a man acting as a woman. “No, honestly,” I protested, “I’ve seen men impersonating women before, but a person can usually tell. Are you sure?”
This set them off again, into the sort of choking noises that can only come from a risqué joke. “Oh, yes,” Donny got out at last. “No mistake.”
“Do you care to tell me why?”
The cool edge to my question reminded him of his manners. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to . . . That is to say, yes, I’m sure Belinda’s a man, ’cause I saw his, er, fittings one evening. I was walking by his dressing-room when someone threw open the door at a . . . revealing moment.”
“I see.”
“As did I. Gave me quite a trauma, I tell you, seeing the, er, lengths the boy would go to to conceal—” A slapping noise came out of the darkness as Flo chastised him, and I made haste to move the subject on a step.
“I’m impressed. Their throat usually gives them away, the Adam’s apple, you know, and a degree of exaggeration in their manners. He’s very natural.”