He was careful to go back the way he had come, holding the coin tight against his pocketful of loose change. There had to be more to this, and all at once the weather changed as if to confirm it. The sky darkened quickly as he walked, or stumbled; then there was a quick brilliant tree of lightning and a roll and crash of thunder of exactly the kind he’d expected on shaking Epstein’s hand. The earthbound trees flew violently in the sudden, wet wind, all their leaves turned inside out and pale, and the rain came in a cold pelting that drove him to the nearest shelter – a telephone booth set in a cement block on the grass beside the road. Now he knew the purpose of the dime, and he knew that Epstein knew it too.
When you see a fellow waiting in a phone booth
With a dime he doesn’t quite know how to use …
The overhead light came on when he shut the folding door, but he had to rest on the little bench and wait for his heart to slow down and his throbbing head to clear. Then very carefully he pressed the dime into the tinkling slot.
That’ll be the second coming
That’ll be the second coming
That’ll be the second coming of …
He was dialing, careful to stop after seven precisely measured digits, and he listened to ten rings before he hung up and let the coin fall through the machine. Wrong; but if he tried again it might be right. Wait, Epstein’s voice counseled him. Wait and have courage, John. There is time. He shut his eyes and seven vivid numerals appeared behind the closed lids; he dialed them quickly but carefully, and on the seventh ring there was a click.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.
“Hello. Is this – Are you my mother?”
“I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”
“No I don’t. Please stay on the phone. Listen. I’m doing the best I can to put all this together and I’ve only got one dime, you see.”
“Young man?”
“Yes. I’m still here but my time is running out. Please just wait.”
“Well, I’d like to help you but I’m afraid you have the wrong—”
“Please. Just wait. I know you think I’m crazy but I’m not. I’m very, very serious and this is important. Wait. I’ll get the right question in a minute.”
“Young man?”
“Yes. I’m here. Please don’t hang up.”
She did, and the dime was lost, but that didn’t matter: he had plenty of dimes. The only important thing was to keep trying, to try again and again until …
There was a rapping on the glass pane and he looked around to find a young girl standing there. The rain must have stopped because her hair and her clothes were dry; she was trying to open the door of the booth and he had to get up from the seat to help her.
“John? Do you know how long you’ve been in there?”
“No.”
“And you haven’t even been talking; just putting in money and dialing and – oh John, are you all right?”
“And who are you? Are you some kind of half-assed Mary Magdalene?”
“Am I what?”
“Wait a minute.” He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. “Who are you, then? Are you Ginny Baldwin?” Ginny Baldwin was the first girl he had ever loved; if she said yes to this it might at least mean he was seventeen again, with his whole life ahead of him and all his terrible mistakes unmade.
“John, will you stop this? You know me, for God’s sake.”
“No, I don’t. What time is it?”
“It’s almost six.”
“You mean six in the morning or six in the—”
“John, if you’re kidding I’ll never forgive you for this. You’re either kidding or you’re – oh, God. Come along with me; we’re going home.”
And he allowed himself to be led away across the grass. “Then you mean it was all a delusion,” he said, trying to keep up with her.
“What did you say?”
“I said none of it was real.”
“None of what was real?”
“Never mind.”
“John, do you know who I am now? Do you know where you are and everything?”
“No, I – no.”
“Well, listen carefully. I’m Pamela Hendricks. It’s August Nineteen Sixty-one and we’re at Marlowe College in Vermont.”
“Vermont?” That was when he started to cry, because what she said did have the ring of reality; and if this was real and all the rest was a dream, then he’d made a colossal fool of himself and everyone at Marlowe College knew it, or would know it soon. He could feel their stares on him as he walked and tried to hide his tears with his knuckles – stares of contempt and ridicule from the very people whose encouragement he’d felt on the road and in Epstein’s doorway; Epstein would be laughing at him too.
Back in the wood-smelling dormitory room she acted like an efficient nurse. First she told him to take off all his clothes and get into bed; then she came and sat beside him in a creaking bedside chair.
“John,” she said after he’d stopped crying, and it could have been noon or midnight, “are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“If I leave you alone for a few minutes, will you promise not to leave this room?”
“Yes. Now promise me something.”
“All right, dear.” She was stroking his brow with cool fingers, like a young mother trying to tell if her child has a fever.
“Whatever happens, promise you won’t let them take me away.”
“Oh, of course. I promise, baby. I won’t let anybody take you anywhere.”
Hours seemed to pass after that – was he awake or asleep? – until there was a light knock at the door and Epstein’s voice said “Mr. Wilder?”
“Wait a second.” He sprang for the closet, got his pants and pulled them around his nakedness before he let the man in. “What can I – do for you?” he said.
“Nothing at all, thanks.” Epstein sat down in a chair against the wall. “Frankly, Mr. Wilder, I only came over because I’m concerned about you.”
“Oh, you are, huh? Well that’s pretty funny, because I’m concerned about you. I mean I may be an impostor, but you’re worse. Do you know that all the kids in this college call you God? That they call you God the Father?”
Epstein’s little chuckle was infuriating. “Oh, now; in the first place I don’t believe that for a minute, and secondly I don’t see what it has to do with—”
“Oh, you don’t, huh? It has everything to do with everything. Listen. Listen to me. Don’t philosophy professors ever listen, or do they just talk? First of all, there’ve been altogether too many religious jokes flying around this campus these past – however long it’s been. ‘God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Terror’ – stuff like that. Tell me you haven’t heard ’em and I’ll call you a liar. I’ll call you a few other things while I’m at it, Epstein. I’ll call you a sanctimonious old fraud and I don’t care how many books you have in your famous library; if I knew you better I think I’d be able to call you a dirty old man too. Kind of like it up here, don’tcha? Oh, ‘Marlowe casts a spell,’ all right – all these sweet little girls coming back every fall just dying to impress the old teacher any way they can – Ah, I’ve got your number, Epstein. Wait. Let me finish….”
And he did finish, though it took him a long time. At one point Epstein said “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave now,” and the door clicked shut behind him, but Wilder went on talking to the empty room – first smoking all the available cigarettes and trying in vain to find the liquor, then going to the sink and cupping up many handfuls of cold water to his mouth like a man dying of thirst. He called Epstein every ugly name he could think of, he blamed Epstein for everything that had gone wrong in his own life and asked Epstein to defend himself against these charges, and he went on talking until he collapsed in bed again.
Sometime later there were voices outside the door. He heard Epstein talking and Pamela’s voice in tears, and the low, courteous voices of two or thre
e men he didn’t recognize.
When a pair of strong arms helped him to stand at last it seemed an act of great kindness; so did the hypodermic needle sunk into one buttock. After that he was somehow fully dressed again and a number of people were helping him into the back seat of a big automobile, and after that there was nothing but silence as the car bore him away. He wept a little as he rode; then he gave in to heavy waves of sleep as deep as drowning.
The first thing he knew, on waking, was that he wasn’t at Marlowe College any more. All the smells were different here, and the woman who sat beside him wasn’t Pamela. She was old, with blue-white hair, wearing a nurse’s uniform and reading a paperback novel.
“Miss?”
She laid her book aside and inspected her watch before answering. “Yes, sir?”
“Can you tell me where I am?”
“Elizabeth Fanning Hospital.”
“Where’s that?”
“Middlebury, Vermont. How’re you feeling today, Mr. Wilder?”
“I feel – I can’t move my—”
“Don’t move that arm, sir, you’ll upset the I.V.” And she got up quickly to make sure he didn’t move it again. His hand was taped to a gauze-wrapped board from which a length of clear plastic tubing rose to what must have been an intravenous feeding bottle above his head. The aluminum crib-sides of the bed were up, as if someone had been afraid he might fall out.
“What happened to me?”
“I really don’t know, sir; I’m only the morning shift, you see. Try and relax now: I just want to make a note of when you woke up. Then I’ll check your temp and your blood pressure and whatnot, do a few little things like that. I don’t think we’re going to need that old I.V. much longer; we’ll see what Doctor has to say about that. I think we’re well past the worst of it, anyway, Mr. Wilder; I have a feeling you’ll be up and around in no time.”
“What’s that stack of papers?”
“Oh, those are just your nursing bills. You’ve been on twenty-four-hour nursing care, you see, private nursing, and the bills do mount up, but I wouldn’t worry about that now. You have Blue Cross, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, then, you see? I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Wilder: far as I’m concerned you’ve been a model patient. Course I’m only on mornings and I can’t speak for the other girls, but what little I’ve seen you’ve been grand. Just grand. Not a speck of trouble, morning after morning. You talked quite a lot, but that made it interesting.”
“I did? What did I talk about?”
“Oh, all kinds of things. I couldn’t always follow it, but it was interesting….”
He must have fallen asleep to the sound of her voice, because when he opened his eyes another nurse – much younger and wearing glasses – was standing in the room.
“You have a visitor, Mr. Wilder.”
And there she was, as fresh and beautiful as ever, wearing a bright summer dress and so eager to clasp his hand as she sat down that some of the private nursing bills spilled from the bedstand.
“Oh, you look so much better,” she said, and then she did her best to bring him up to date. First of all, the shooting was finished – wasn’t that wonderful? All that remained was for Julian to get a little exterior footage of Bellevue back in town, and then to edit the film – that would take time, of course – and make arrangements to have it scored (personally, she thought it would be more effective without music, but Julian wanted recorders and guitars), and they’d have an honest-to-God movie “in the can.” “But everybody’s been terribly concerned about you,” she concluded. “It was all I could do to keep them all from coming over here.”
“Tell me something. I mean I still haven’t put it all straight in my head.” He knew better than to ask the next question but he asked it anyway, to test her. “Why am I here? What exactly did happen to me?”
“You really don’t know?” She lowered her voice. “You had a nervous breakdown, baby. A whopper.” And he listened very closely while she gave her version of it, to find out how much she knew about the Christ delusion. Apparently she knew nothing at all, nor had she guessed anything.
“… and the last thing you said when I left to try and find Jerry or Julian or somebody, the last thing you said was ‘Don’t let them take me away.’ Do you remember that?”
He said he did, very dimly, and he continued to listen as carefully as any police investigator, as carefully as any psychiatrist, as her light, pretty voice hurried on.
“… and when I got back I found Mr. Epstein sitting on the steps outside our door, smoking his pipe and looking as calm as an old – I don’t know, an old priest or something. He said he’d called Elizabeth Fanning here and asked them to send over some people to get you. I said ‘But that’s the one thing I promised him—’ and he put his arm around me and said ‘Pamela, my responsibility is more important than your promise.’ Wasn’t that sweet?”
“Very sweet.”
“And he said he knew you were a good, sensitive man but that these things just happened sometimes, to the best of us, and the older I grew the better I’d understand.”
“You sure that’s all he said about me? ‘Good’ and ‘sensitive’?”
“Oh, I guess he used a few other words too – all very complimentary. He really likes you a lot, John; you mustn’t worry about that. Oh, and one funny thing: when the hospital people were taking you out to the car you pulled yourself up very straight as if you were going to make a speech, and you said ‘I have never depended on the kindness of strangers.’ ”
“Did I really say that?”
“Yes; why?”
“Because it’s from a play. It was a woman’s last line in A Streetcar Named Desire, only it’s a whaddyacallit – a paraphrase. In the play the woman says it when the people from the asylum come to get her, only she says ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’”
“You really are something, John. That’s exactly what Mr. Epstein said he thought it was, only he wasn’t sure – and he’s the most learned, well-read person I know.”
By dinnertime that night he was sitting up and eating from a tray; the next day they gave him slippers and let him sit in a chair when Pamela came; and at the end of visiting hour they let him walk her slowly down the hall.
“Just a moment, Mr. Wilder! You can’t go any farther than that. I’m sorry, but this is a locked ward, you see.”
It must have been the next morning when the psychiatrist came to his room – a very young man whose striped boxer shorts showed plainly through the translucent white nylon of his uniform. “How’re you doing?” he asked.
“Okay, I guess; but listen, doctor. I have more questions than you can possibly answer all at once. Have you ever dealt with a man who thought he was Christ? Because that’s – that’s what happened to me. At the peak of my – you know, my breakdown – I thought I was turning into some kind of messiah, a second coming of Christ.”
“Mm.” The doctor eased one haunch onto the windowsill and began playing with the cord of the Venetian blind.
“And I mean I know that’s pretty bad – that’s crazy – and I know you’re going to recommend I see a psychiatrist back in New York, but that’s out.” He was short of breath, his mouth was dry, and he felt his features contorting into a tight, pugnacious grimace, as if his lifelong combination of Mickey Rooney and Alan Ladd had become a death-bed James Cagney. “The thing is, I can’t be psychoanalyzed, doctor. I’ve tried it and I know. It just doesn’t take with me. Oh, maybe it’s my fault, but whether it’s my fault or not isn’t the point. The point is it simply doesn’t work. Can you understand that?”
“I think so.” The doctor was examining the Venetian blind cord as if it were an uncommonly interesting piece of string. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Wilder, I don’t put too much stock in that kind of treatment myself, but that’s because I’m prejudiced. I was trained by one of the pioneers in a new school of psychiatry. Drug therapy. Chemicals. P
ills. Oh, our common tranquilizers were only the beginning, back in the fifties. Now we have a wide range of medications – antidepressants, psychic energizers, antipsychotics – drugs to take you up or bring you down in any number of subtle, medically controlled ways; and the field is getting more sophisticated every day….”
Had Wilder ever heard of Myron T. Brink? Well, he certainly might have if he paid attention to Time magazine, on whose cover Dr. Brink’s picture had recently appeared. This was the man he had mentioned earlier, the drug-therapy man who’d been such an inspiration to him as a student. Brink now spent much of his time as a world traveler, taking his new kind of psychiatry to foreign nations – just last month he’d been decorated by the Republic of South Africa for his work in greatly reducing that country’s mental-patient population, and that was only the latest in many such honors – but he still maintained a small private practice in New York, on the Upper East Side. When he was away his patients were served by one or another of his three-man staff, all competent men. And one minor advantage in working with Dr. Brink was that his fees were very reasonable. Was Wilder interested?
“… Of course I can’t promise that he’ll take your case,” the doctor concluded, “but we can try. I’ll write to him today. Now. You want to tell me something about yourself, Mr. Wilder? Apart from the fact that you thought you were Christ, I mean?”
Could this amiable youth really be a psychiatrist, of whatever school? That was what Wilder kept asking himself as his voice gained strength and confidence in answering the simple questions. It was all a little too good to be true, like coming up to Marlowe with Pamela, and like Pamela herself. Maybe, after all these years, his luck really had begun to change. And why not? Wasn’t it about time? Hadn’t he served a long enough apprenticeship among the losers of the world?
“Guess what?” Pamela said breathlessly one morning. “You’re being discharged this afternoon. Good thing I brought all your stuff, isn’t it? I’ve been bringing all our luggage every day, just in case.”
“How we going home? In the car?”