The Complete Stories, Vol. 1: Final Reckonings

  "Mr. Dennis said you're thinking of leaving pictures."

  "Mr. Dennis is a cockeyed liar. I'm not thinking of leaving. I've left, period. Didn't he call the lawyers? Hasn't he phoned the studio? I told him to."

  "I wouldn't know," Dr. Prager soothed.

  "Then he's the one who's in a jam," Eve Eden announced happily. "Sure, I know why he called you. You're supposed to talk me out of it, right? Well, it's no dice, Doc. I made up my mind."

  "Why?"

  "None of your business."

  Dr. Prager leaned forward. "But it is my business, Wilma."

  "Wilma?"

  Dr. Prager nodded, his voice softening. "Wilma Kozmowski. Little Wilma Kozmowski. Have you forgotten that I know all about her? The little girl whose mother deserted her. Who ran away from home when she was twelve and lived around. I know about the waitress jobs in Pittsburgh, and the burlesque show, and the B-girl years in Calumet City. And I know about Frank, and Eddie, and Nino, and Sid, and — all the others." Dr. Prager smiled. "You told me all this yourself, Wilma. And you told me all about what happened after you became Eve Eden. When you met me you weren't Eve Eden yet, not entirely. Wilma kept interfering, didn't she? It was Wilma who drank, took the drugs, got mixed up with the men, tried to kill herself. I helped you fight Wilma, didn't I, Eve? I helped you become Eve Eden, the movie star. That's why it's my business now to see that you stay that way. Beautiful, admired, successful, happy — "

  "You're wrong, Doc. I found that out. If you want me to be happy, forget about Eve Eden. Forget about Wilma, too. From now on I'm going to be somebody else. So please, just go away."

  "Somebody else?" Dr. Prager leaped at the phrase. An instant later he leaped literally.

  "What's that?" he gasped.

  He stared down at the floor, the hairs in his goatee bristling as he caught sight of the small white furry object that scuttled across the carpet. Eve Eden reached down and scooped up the creature, smiling.

  "Just a white rabbit," she explained. "Cute, isn't he? I bought him the other day."

  "But —but —"

  Dr. Prager goggled. It was indeed a white rabbit which Eve Eden cradled in her arms, but not just a white rabbit. For this rabbit happened to be wearing a vest and a checkered waistcoat, and Dr. Prager could almost swear that the silver chain across the vest terminated in a concealed pocket watch.

  "I bought it after the dream," Eve Eden told him. "Dream?"

  "Oh, what's the use?" She sighed. "I might as well let you hear it. All you headshrinkers are queer for dreams anyway."

  "You had a dream about rabbits?" Dr. Prager began.

  "Please, Doc, let's do it my way," she answered. "This time you relax and I'll do the talking. It all started when I fell down this rabbit hole. . . ."

  3

  In her dream, Eve Eden said, she was a little girl with long golden curls. She was sitting on a riverbank when she saw this white rabbit running close by. It was wearing the waistcoat and a high collar, and then it took a watch out of its pocket, muttering, "Oh dear, I shall be too late." She ran across the field after it, and when it popped down a large rabbit hole under a hedge, she followed.

  "Oh no!" Dr. Prager muttered. "Not Alice!"

  "Alice who?" Eve Eden inquired.

  "Alice in Wonderland"

  "You mean that movie Disney made, the cartoon thing?"

  Dr. Prager nodded. "You saw it?"

  "No. I never waste time on cartoons."

  "But you know what I'm talking about, don't you?"

  "Well — " Eve Eden hesitated. Then from the depths of her professional background an answer came. "Wasn't there another movie, way back around the beginning of the Thirties? Sure, Paramount made it, with Oakie and Gallagher and Horton and Ruggles and Ned Sparks and Fields and Gary Cooper. And let's see now, who played the dame — Charlotte Henry?"

  Dr. Prager smiled. Now he was getting somewhere. "So that's the one you saw, eh?"

  Eve Eden shook her head. "Never saw that one either. Couldn't afford movies when I was a brat, remember?"

  "Then how do you know the cast and — "

  "Easy. Gal who used to work with Alison Skipworth told me. She was in it too. And Edna May Oliver. I got a good memory, Doc. You know that."

  "Yes." Dr. Prager breathed softly. "And so you must remember reading the original book, isn't that it?"

  "Was it a book?"

  "Now look here, don't tell me you've never read ALICE IN WONDERLAND, by Lewis Carroll. It's a classic."

  "I'm no reader, Doc. You know that too."

  "But surely as a child you must have come across it. Or had somebody tell you the story."

  The blonde curls tossed. "Nope. I'd remember if I had. I remember everything I read. That's why I'm always up on my lines. Best sight reader in the business. I not only haven't read ALICE IN WONDERLAND, I didn't even know there was such a story, except in a screenplay."

  Dr. Prager gave an irritable tug at his goatee. "All right. You do have a remarkable memory, I know. So let's think back now. Let's think back very carefully to your earliest childhood. Somebody must have taken you on their lap, told you stories."

  The star's eyes brightened. "Why, sure!" she exclaimed. "That's right! Aunt Emma was always telling me stories."

  "Excellent." Dr. Prager smiled. "And can you recall now the first story she ever told you? The very first?"

  Eve Eden closed her eyes, concentrating with effort. When her voice came it was from far away. "Yes," she whispered. "I remember now. I was only four. Aunt Emma took me on her lap and she told me my first story. It was the one about the drunk who goes in this bar, and he can't find the john, see, so the bartender tells him to go upstairs and — "

  "No," said Dr. Prager. "No, no! Didn't she ever tell you any fairy tales?"

  "Aunt Emma?" Eve Eden laughed. "I'll say she didn't. But stories — she had a million of 'em! Did you ever hear the one about the young married couple who wanted to — "

  "Never mind." The psychiatrist leaned back. "You are quite positive you have never read or heard or seen ALICE IN WONDERLAND ?"

  "I told you so in the first place, didn't I? Now, do you want to hear my dream or not?"

  "I want to very much," Dr. Prager answered, and he did. He took out his notebook and uncapped his fountain pen. In his own mind he was quite certain that she had heard or read ALICE, and he was interested in the reasons for the mental block which prevented her from recalling the fact. He was also interested in the possible symbolism behind her account. This promised to be quite an enjoyable session. "You went down the rabbit hole," he prompted.

  "Into a tunnel," Eve continued. "I was falling, falling very slowly." Dr. Prager wrote down tunnel — womb fixation? And he wrote down falling dream.

  "I fell into a well," Eve said. "Lined with cupboards and bookshelves. There were maps and pictures on pegs."

  Forbidden sex knowledge. Dr. Prager wrote.

  "I reached out while I was still falling and took a jar from a shelf. The jar was labeled 'Orange Marmalade.' "

  Marmalade — Mama? Dr. Prager wrote.

  Eve said something about "Do cats eat bats?" and "Do bats eat cats?" but Dr. Prager missed it. He was too busy writing. It was amazing, now that he thought of it, just how much Freudian symbolism was packed into ALICE IN WONDERLAND. Amazing, too, how well her subconscious recalled it.

  Eve was now telling how she had landed in the long hall with the doors all around and how the rabbit disappeared, muttering, "Oh, my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting." She told about approaching the three-legged solid-glass table with the tiny golden key on it, and Dr. Prager quickly scribbled phallic symbol. Then she described looking through a fifteen-inch door into a garden beyond and wishing she could get through it by shutting up like a telescope. So Dr. Prager wrote phallic envy.

  "Then," Eve continued, "I saw this little bottle on the table, labeled 'Drink Me.' And so I drank, and do you know something? I did shut up like a telescope. I got smaller and smaller,
and if I hadn't stopped drinking I'd have disappeared! So of course I couldn't reach the key, but then I saw this glass box under the table labeled 'Eat Me,' and I ate and got bigger right away."

  She paused. "I know it sounds silly, Doc, but it was real interesting."

  "Yes indeed," Dr. Prager said. "Go on. Tell everything you remember."

  "Then the rabbit came back, mumbling something about a Duchess. And it dropped a pair of white gloves and a fan."

  Fetishism, the psychiatrist noted.

  "After that it got real crazy." Eve giggled. Then she told about the crying and forming a pool on the floor composed of her own tears. And how she held the fan and shrank again, then swam in the pool.

  Grief fantasy, Dr. Prager decided.

  She went on to describe her meeting with the mouse and with the other animals, the caucus race, and the recital of the curious poem about the cur, Fury, which ended, "I'll prosecute you, I'll be judge, I'll be jury — I'll try the whole cause and condemn you to death."

  Superego, wrote Dr. Prager and asked, "What are you afraid of, Eve?"

  "Nothing," she answered. "And I wasn't afraid in the dream either. I liked it. But I haven't told you anything yet."

  "Go on."

  She went on, describing her trip to the rabbit's house to fetch his gloves and fan and finding the bottle labeled "Drink Me" in the bedroom. Then followed the episode of growth, and being stuck inside the house (Claustrophobia, the notebook dutifully recorded), and her escape from the animals who pelted her with pebbles as she ran into the forest.

  It was ALICE all right, word for word, image for image. Father image for the caterpillar, who might (Dr. Prager reasoned wisely) stand for himself as the psychiatrist, with his stern approach and enigmatic answers. The Father William poem which followed seemed to validate this conclusion.

  Then came the episode of eating the side of the mushroom, growing and shrinking. Did this disguise her drug addiction? Perhaps. And there was a moment when she had a long serpentine neck and a pigeon mistook her for a serpent. A viper was a serpent. And weren't drug addicts called "vipers"? Of course. Dr. Prager was beginning to understand now. It was all symbolic. She was telling about her own life. Running away and finding the key to success — alternating between being very "small" and insignificant and trying every method of becoming "big" and important. Until she entered the garden — her Garden of Eden here — and became a star and consulted him and took drugs. It all made sense now.

  He could understand as she told of the visit to the house of the Duchess (mother image) with her cruel "Chop off her head." He anticipated the baby who turned into a pig and wrote down rejection fantasy quickly.

  Then he listened to the interview with the Cheshire cat, inwardly marveling at Eve Eden's perfect memory for dialogue.

  " 'But I don't want to go among mad people,' I said. And the crazy cat came back with, 'Oh, you can't help that. We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' And I said, 'How do you know I'm mad?' and the cat said, 'You must be — or you wouldn't have come here.' Well, I felt plenty crazy when the cat started to vanish. Believe it or not, Doc, there was nothing left but a big grin."

  "I believe it," Dr. Prager assured her.

  He was hot on the trail of another scent now. The talk of madness had set him off. And sure enough, now came the tea party. With the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, of course — the Mad Hatter. Sitting in front of their house (asylum, no doubt) with the sleeping dormouse between them. Dormouse — dormant sanity. She was afraid of going insane, Dr. Prager decided. So much so did he believe it that when she quoted the line, "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" he found himself writing down, Why is a raving like a Rorschach test? and had to cross it out.

  Then came the sadistic treatment of the poor dormouse and another drug fantasy with mushrooms for the symbol, leading her again into a beautiful garden. Dr. Prager heard it all: the story of the playing-card people (club soldiers and diamond courtiers and heart children were perfectly fascinating symbols too!).

  And when Eve said, "Why, they're only a pack of cards after all — I needn't be afraid of them," Dr. Prager triumphantly wrote paranoid fantasies: people are unreal.

  "Now I must tell you about the croquet game," Eve went on, and so she told him about the croquet game and Dr. Prager filled two whole pages with notes.

  He was particularly delighted with Alice-Eves account of the conversation with the ugly Duchess, who said among other things, "Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves," and "Be what you seem to be — or more simply, never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been who have appeared to them to be otherwise."

  Eve Eden rattled it off, apparently verbatim. "It didn't seem to make sense at the time," she admitted. "But it does now, don't you think?"

  Dr. Prager refused to commit himself. It made sense all right. A dreadful sort of sense. This poor child was struggling to retain her identity. Everything pointed to that. She was adrift in a sea of illusion, peopled with Mock Turtles— Mock Turtle, very significant, that — and distorted imagery.

  Now the story of the Turtle and the Gryphon and the Lobster Quadrille began to take on a dreadful meaning. All the twisted words and phrases symbolized growing mental disturbance. Schools taught "reeling and writhing" and arithmetic consisted of "ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision." Obviously fantasies of inferiority. And Alice-Eve growing more and more confused with twisted, inverted logic in which "blacking" became "whiting" — it was merely an inner cry signifying she could no longer tell the difference between black and white. In other words, she was losing all contact with reality. She was going through an ordeal — a trial.

  Of course it was a trial! Now Eve was telling about the trial of the Knave of Hearts, who stole the tarts (Hadn't Eve once been a "tart" herself?) and Alice-Eve noted all the animals on the jury (another paranoid delusion: people are animals) and she kept growing (delusions of grandeur) and then came the white rabbit reading the anonymous letter.

  Dr. Prager picked up his own ears, rabbit fashion, when he heard the contents of the letter.

  "My notion was that you had been

  (before she had this fit)

  An obstacle that came between

  Him, and ourselves, and it.

  Don't let him know she liked them best

  For this must ever be

  A secret kept from all the rest

  Between yourself and me."

  Of course. A secret, Dr. Prager decided. Eve Eden had been afraid of madness for a long time. That was the root of all her perverse behavior patterns, and he'd never probed sufficiently to uncover it. But the dream, welling up from the subconscious, provided the answer.

  "I said I didn't believe there was an atom of meaning in it." Eve told him. "And the Queen cried, 'Off with her head,' but I said, 'Who cares for you? You're nothing but a pack of cards.' And they all rose up and flew at me, but I beat them off, and then I woke up fighting the covers."

  She sat up. "You've been taking an awful lot of notes," she said. "Mind telling me what you think?"

  Dr. Prager hesitated. It was a delicate question. Still, the dream content indicated that she was perfectly well aware of her problem on the subliminal level. A plain exposition of the facts might come as a shock but not a dangerous one. Actually a shock could be just the thing now to lead her back and resolve the initial trauma, whatever it was.

  "All right," Dr. Prager said. "Here's what I think it means." And in plain language he explained his interpretation of her dream, pulling no punches but, occasionally, his goatee.

  "So there you have it," he concluded. "The symbolic story of your life — and the dramatized and disguised conflict over your mental status which you've always tried to hide. But the subconscious is wise, my dear. It always knows and tries to warn. No wonder you had this dream at this particular time. There's nothing accidental abou
t it. Freud says — "

  But Eve was laughing. "Freud says? What does he know about it? Come to think of it, Doc, what do you know about it either? You see, I forgot to tell you something when I started. I didn't just have this dream." She stared at him, and her laughter ceased. "I bought it," Eve Eden said. "I bought it for ten thousand dollars."

  4

  Dr. Prager wasn't getting anywhere. His fountain pen ceased to function and his goatee wouldn't respond properly to even the most severe tugging. He heard Eve Eden out and waved his arms helplessly, like a bird about to take off. He felt like taking off, but on the other hand he couldn't leave this chick in her nest. Not with a big nest egg involved. But why did it have to be so involved?

  "Go over that again," he begged finally. "Just the highlights. I can't seem to get it."

  "But it's really so simple," Eve answered. "Like I already told you. I was getting all restless and keyed up, you know, like I've been before. Dying for a ball, some new kind of kick. And then I ran into Wally Redmond and he told me about this Professor Laroc."

  "The charlatan," Dr. Prager murmured.

  "I don't know what nationality he is," Eve answered. "He's just a little old guy who goes around selling these dreams."

  "Now wait a minute — "

  "Sure, it sounds screwy. I thought so, too, when Wally told me. He'd met him at a party somewhere and got to talking. And pretty soon he was spilling his — you'll pardon the expression—guts about the sad story of his life and how fed up he was with everything, including his sixth wife. And how he wanted to get away from it all and find a new caper.

  "So this Professor Laroc asked him if he'd ever been on the stuff, and Wally said no, he had a weak heart. And he asked him if he'd tried psychiatry, and Wally said sure, but it didn't help him any."

  "Your friend went to the wrong analyst," Dr. Prager snapped in some heat. "He should have come to a Freudian. How could he expect to get results from a Jungian — "

  "Like you say, Doc, relax. It doesn't matter. What matters is that Professor Laroc sold him this dream. It was a real scary one, to hear him tell it, all about being a burglar over in England someplace and getting into a big estate run by a little dwarf with a head like a baboon. But he liked it; liked it fine. Said he was really relaxed after he had it: made him feel like a different person. And so he bought another, about a guy who was a pawnbroker, only a long time ago in some real gone country. And this pawnbroker ran around having himself all kinds of women who — "