“Wow,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed near her knees. “Wow, baby, am I ever glad to see you.”
“Well, me too,” she said. “Could I have one of your cigarettes, Dad?”
“Sure, here. But listen: I get the impression you haven’t been eating a hell of a lot. Right?”
“Well, I guess it’s been a little over two weeks now since I—”
“Okay. So the first thing we’ll do is feed you a good dinner somewhere; then we’ll find a hotel for the night, and tomorrow I’ll take you back to Kansas. How does that sound?”
“Oh, it sounds – okay, I guess, except that I don’t know your wife or anything.”
“Sure you do.”
“Well, but I mean I don’t know her as your wife, is all.”
“Oh, Laura, that’s dumb. You’ll get along fine. Now. Is there anything here you want to keep? And do you have a bag to pack it in?”
In policing the narrow floor he found two black, elastic-strap bow ties of the kind worn by restaurant waiters, the kind Terry Ryan used to wear on duty at the Blue Mill, and when he pulled her smudged nylon “backpack” away from the wall a third one fell out from behind it. Had three young waiters been up here and had her and left their accidental souvenirs? No; more likely it had been one waiter, three times – or five or ten times, or more.
(“Hey Eddie, where you been?”
“Been making it with the tall skinny one I told you about: top floor, all the way to the right. She comes on like Gangbusters, man.”
“Well, okay, but shit, Eddie, I wouldn’t mess around in that house if I was you; all those kids are crazy.”
“Yeah? You mean crazy like me, or crazy like you? Listen: I get my pussy where I find it, man.”)
“Are you ready, dear?” Michael asked.
“I guess so.”
But they couldn’t get a cab on this street; they had to walk many blocks before they found one that would stop for them.
“Is there someplace where we can get dinner at this time of night?” Michael asked the driver.
“Well, at this time of night,” the man told him, “the only place I can take you is Chinatown.”
And it would always strike him as a ludicrous touch that Chinese food was the best he could provide for his starving child. Egg Foo Young, Pork Fried Rice, Shrimp with Lobster Sauce – stuff that most Americans eat only once in a while, for a change, when they’re not very hungry anyway – this was what Laura took for nourishment in steadily rhythmic forkfuls, and she didn’t speak or even look up until the last empty dish had been cleared away.
“Can I have another cigarette, Dad?”
“Sure. You feeling any better?”
“I guess so.”
Another cabdriver recommended a hotel, and there, as they stood waiting in line at the front desk, Michael was afraid the room clerk might easily misinterpret everything: a nervous-looking professor type with a sweet, doped-up hippie girl.
“I need accommodations for my daughter and myself,” he began carefully, looking the man straight in the eyes, and he realized in the same breath that this was exactly the kind of thing a quivering old lecher might be expected to say. “For one night only,” he added, making it worse. “I think the best arrangement would be two connecting rooms.”
“Nope,” the clerk said with finality, and Michael steeled himself to be asked – or told – to leave the place at once. But it turned out, as his lungs began to work again, that there was nothing to fear. “Nope; can’t give you any connecting rooms tonight,” the clerk said. “Best I can do for you tonight is a double room with twin beds. Would that be suitable, sir?”
And it may have been the “sir,” as much as the rest of it, that lightened Michael’s step as they walked across the carpeted lobby and into an elevator. More than two thirds of his life was gone, but he hadn’t yet learned to take it for granted when another man called him “sir.”
Laura slept so soundly that she didn’t move or turn all night, but her father lay awake in the other twin bed. Toward morning, as he’d sometimes done on other sleepless nights, he began to whisper his way through the long final poem from his first book, the one called “Coming Clean” that Diana Maitland and Sarah Garvey had liked. His whispering was so faint that nobody could have heard it more than a few inches away from his pillow, but it was an accurate and precise recitation – getting the most out of each syllable and silence, rising and falling in just the right places, never making a mistake because he would always know that poem by heart.
Damn. Oh, Jesus God, it was the best thing he had ever written. And it wasn’t lost yet, though the book was long out of print and increasingly hard to find in public libraries. Oh, it wasn’t lost yet; somebody could still pick it up and get it published again in a classy-looking anthology that might become a standard text in all the universities.
Then he began to recite it again, taking his time, from the beginning.
“Dad?” Laura called from her bed. “You awake?”
“Yup.” And he was afraid she would say she’d heard him whispering, so he anxiously prepared a quick explanation for her: Guess I must’ve been having a nightmare or something.
“I’m a little hungry, is all,” she said. “You think we could go down and have breakfast pretty soon?”
“Sure. You go on in and use the bathroom first if you want, dear, and I’ll get dressed.”
He was relieved that she seemed not to have heard the whispering; but then it occurred to him, as he zipped up his pants, that she might have heard it and thought it “weird” or “bizarre” but decided not to mention it. Hippies were said to respect the privacy of one another’s trips. Do your own thing.
That afternoon, as their plane lay floating impossibly high over the earth, Laura turned away from her window and said “Dad? There’s a thing I guess I’d better tell you. I think I may be pregnant.”
“Oh?” And Michael smiled to prove he wasn’t stunned by the news.
“Well, I mean it could be just that I’ve missed a couple of my periods because I haven’t been – you know – haven’t been feeling well and everything, but I’m not sure. And I don’t know who it – you know – who the boy was. My memory’s sort of blurred on a lot of the stuff that’s happened this summer.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, dear, I don’t think you need to worry about that anymore. We’ll take you to the university hospital and have them do a test; then if it’s true we’ll get it taken care of right away. Okay?” And he felt wanned by his own kindness. He told her he knew a doctor at the hospital who could make unofficial referrals to a certain clinic in Missouri where “D. and C.’s” were quickly arranged and performed; he promised her she would be all right.
But once the need for reassurance was past, after Laura had turned back to the window again, Michael sat riding the sky with a look of desolation. His daughter might be pregnant at nineteen, and would never know the father of her child.
When Sarah met them at the airport she gave Laura a hug and a little kiss to show she wasn’t a guidance counselor anymore, and the three of them drove home in a mood of uncertain camaraderie.
Laura said the landscape here looked “funny, if you’re used to a city.” Then she said “We didn’t come through Kansas at all on our way out; we went across Nebraska instead.”
And now that she’d said “we” and “our,” Michael could barely suppress a question that had nagged him ever since he’d found her alone in that wretched house last night: what the hell had happened to her friends? With all their bleating about “love,” weren’t hippies supposed to stick together and look after their own? How could those kids have abandoned a girl in a harsh and alien place?
He didn’t say anything, but he knew he would urgently need to talk to Sarah tonight, once they were alone.
Like an infant, Laura was ready for sleep again as soon as she’d been fed. Sarah took her down the hall to the spare room, and Michael brought a freshly made drink to the mante
lpiece because that seemed a good place to stand while he tried to sort things out.
When Sarah came back into the living room she sat on the sofa, facing him, and listened with no apparent surprise to the news of what Laura had told him on the plane.
“Well, we can take her over to the hospital tomorrow for a rabbit test,” she said. “It may be nothing, and until we find out I don’t see any point in worrying about it.”
“I know, I know,” he said quickly. “That’s what I told her. And I told her I could arrange for an abortion, too. Still, it hit me pretty hard – and the worst of it is her not having any idea who the boy was. Isn’t that the God damndest thing?”
Sarah lit a cigarette. She smoked only four or five cigarettes a week, during peaceful interludes, and he had long come to interpret it as a sign that she was trying to understand him.
“Oh, well,” she said, “I imagine that’s in keeping with the general hippie way of life, don’t you? And I imagine the girls have found it useful as a sort of shock-your-father tactic, too.”
He went out to get another drink, and he barely made it back to the mantelpiece before he was crying. He turned quickly away and tried to hide it from her – no young wife should ever see an aging husband in tears – but it was too late.
“Michael? Are you crying?”
“Well, I didn’t get any sleep last night,” he said, covering his face with his fingers, “but the main thing is I’m proud of myself for the first time in – first time in years. Oh, Jesus, baby, she was all alone out there and she was lost – she was lost – and maybe I’ve never done anything right in my whole life, but son of a bitch I went out there and found her and got her and brought her home and now I’m fucking proud of myself, that’s all.” But he suspected even then that it wasn’t quite all, and that the rest of it couldn’t be told.
When he’d pulled himself together, apologizing, artificially laughing to prove he hadn’t really cried, allowing Sarah to lead him to their bedroom, he knew he had been reduced to tears by the final lines of “Coming Clean” – lines that had thrummed in the pressurized cabin of the plane today and now continued to roll and ring in his head – and by the knowledge that he’d written that poem when Laura was five years old.
The rabbit test was negative – Laura might never be pregnant now until after she’d married some young man who would take as keen an interest in rabbit tests as she did – and so the worst of the pressure was off.
But the next thing, which Michael might have tried to avoid if it hadn’t been Sarah’s idea, was to take Laura in to see one of the university-hospital psychiatrists.
For an hour, fighting his nerves, he sat alone in a waiting area full of orange plastic chairs; then the doctor brought Laura back from his consulting room so she could wait here while he conferred with her father. And Michael was grateful at least that they hadn’t gotten some young smart-ass; this one was courteous and dignified and fifty or more, and he looked very settled, very much the family man in his conservative suit and highly polished brown shoes. His name was McHale.
“Well, Mr. Davenport,” he said as soon as they were seated, with the door closed on their privacy, “I think we can consider this a clear psychotic break.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Michael said. “Where do you get ‘psychotic’? She’s been taking a lot of drugs, that’s all. Don’t you think ‘psychotic’ is kind of an ugly word to throw around?”
“I think it’s the most accurate word we have. Some of these drugs do induce psychosis, you see. There’s a severe disorientation; there are ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ and hallucinations, so ultimately the pattern is that of a conventional psychotic episode.”
“Well, okay, but look, Doctor. She’s stopped taking all that stuff now. She’s living very quietly with her stepmother and me. Can’t we just give her a chance to get well on her own?”
“In some cases I might agree with that, yes; but your daughter is very troubled and confused. I’m not suggesting she be hospitalized, at least not for the present, but I’ll want to see her here twice a week. Three times might be preferable, but we can begin with two.”
“Jesus,” Michael said. “She must’ve acted an awful lot crazier in here with you than she does at home.” But he could tell he was losing the argument: he had always lost arguments with these slippery bastards before, and probably always would. “I mean she doesn’t act quite right at home yet,” he said, “but it’s mostly just that she’s kind of lazy and sluggish all the time.”
“And not very talkative?”
“No; not at all.”
“Well, then,” the doctor said with a sly look that contained the distressing suggestion of a wink, “I don’t suppose you’ve had occasion to hear about the ‘Outer Limits,’ and that kind of thing.”
One morning a crisply typed letter arrived from Warrington College, forwarded in Lucy’s handwriting; its message was that Laura would be permitted to return there for her sophomore year “on a probationary basis.”
“Well, big fucking deal,” Michael said. “Listen, baby, I don’t ever want you going anywhere on a probationary basis. Fuck Warrington College, right? Let ’em take their leotards and stuff ’em up their ass.”
And not until then did he remember that Sarah, now quietly eating her breakfast, was the calm and thoughtful young counselor who had recommended Warrington College in the first place.
“Well, okay, I’m sorry, dear,” he said. The words “dear” and “baby” and “sweetheart” had flown around this house in such profusion lately that he would sometimes lose track of which girl he was talking to, but this time he knew he meant Sarah. “And listen, it was a nice try. But I never did think Warrington was right for her: she could probably get a better education here at Billings than in that little flower factory. Besides, if she goes to Billings she can go on seeing Dr. Whaddyacallit for as long as that takes; then if she wants to transfer to some classier school she can do that later.”
And Sarah agreed, after thinking it over, that this sounded like a reasonable plan.
“It’s funny, you know?” Laura said from across the breakfast table, and her eyes and voice had taken on a dreamy quality. “I really don’t remember much of anything about Warrington now – it’s all kind of a blur. I remember afternoons when a bunch of us would go walking out across the fields to the highway, and we’d wait there for a certain car to come along. Then the car would pull up and stop, and the guy would roll down his window so we could give him our money, and then he’d hand over these little brown paper bags. Tabs of acid, different kinds of amphetamines, coke and hash and even plain old marijuana; then we’d walk back to school – oh, and sometimes there’d be beautiful sunsets over those fields – and we’d all feel rich and wonderful because we knew we’d be able to make it through another week.”
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Well, that’s very nostalgic and very bucolic and all that, sweetheart, but I want to tell you something. You’re not a hippie anymore, do you understand me? You’ve had all the irresponsibility and all the self-indulgence you’re ever going to get. You’re a psychiatric patient now, and your stepmother and I are doing the best we can to help you put your brains back together. So listen: if you’ve finished eating, why don’t you go in and take one of your four-hour naps or something useful like that?”
“Don’t you think that was a little excessive?” Sarah asked him after the girl had gone.
And he could only stare down grimly at the yolk of a cold fried egg. It wasn’t yet nine o’clock in the morning, and already he had lost his temper twice.
That day the registrar’s office at Billings State University told him it was now too late for Laura to enroll for the fall semester; the best that could be done was to have her fill out application forms for admission in February. And so all three of them, in a house that had come to seem much too small, would be stuck with one another for five months.
“Well, I imagine we’ll survive,” Sarah said. “And I don’t thi
nk she’s ready for college work yet anyway, do you? I don’t think she has the concentration.”
Soon there was a letter from Lucy. It was very short and neatly centered on the page, and the care taken over its form and content suggested she had written it several times before finding the right tone.
Dear Michael:
I am extremely grateful for the way you stepped in and took responsibility for Laura this summer. You were there when she needed you, and you seem to have done everything wisely and well.
My regards to Sarah, and my thanks for her help too.
All best, as always,
L.
P.S. – I’ll be moving to the Boston area soon; Cambridge, I think. Will let you know the details.
“Well, of course I only met her that one time,” Sarah said, “but she did impress me as being a very – decent woman.”
“Oh, very decent, sure,” he said. “All three of us in my little family are very decent people; it’s just that two of us are crazy.”
“Oh, Michael. Are you going to start this nonsense about being ‘crazy’?”
“How is it nonsense? Would you prefer the kind of words the shrinks use? ‘Psychotic’? ‘Manic-depressive’? ‘Paranoid schizophrenic’? Listen. Try to understand this. Way back when I was a kid, before anybody in Morristown had ever heard of Sigmund Freud, we recognized three basic categories: there was sorta crazy; there was crazy; and there was crazier’n hell. Those are the terms I trust. And I’ve often thought I wouldn’t at all mind being sorta crazy, because that can make a man terribly attractive to girls, but I’d be a liar if I tried to squeeze myself into that category for you. I’m crazy, and there are documents to prove it. Laura’s crazy too, at least for the time being, and unless she and I play our cards right we’re both gonna be crazier’n hell. Simple as that.”