“No one is grateful for being made an invalid,” Ming O’Brien explained. “You can’t carry the responsibility for another person forever; a moment comes when you grow weary and you let them fall; they feel betrayed and, naturally, detest you. That’s what happened with your wives, with some of your friends, some of your clients, and nearly all your employees, and you’re on the way to letting it happen with David.”
The first changes were the most difficult, because as soon as the foundation of the twisted edifice of my life began to crumble, the entire structure was compromised and everything came tumbling down.
Tina Faibich took the call that Thursday afternoon; her employer was in conference with two of the lawyers representing the insurance company in the King Benedict case and did not want to be interrupted, but there was such urgency in the stranger’s voice that she felt she could not handle the call herself. She made a wise decision, and she saved Margaret’s life—at least for a time. Come quick, the man said; he gave the address of a motel in Richmond and hung up without identifying himself. King Benedict was reading a comic book in the waiting room when he saw Gregory Reeves rush out, and while Reeves was waiting for the elevator, was able to ask him where he was going in such a hurry.
“That’s not a place you should go alone, especially in a car like the one you drive,” Benedict assured him, and without waiting for a response followed closely on his heels. Forty-five minutes later they were parking in front of a row of shabby motel rooms in a garbage-strewn alley. As they had driven deeper and deeper into the poorest neighborhoods in the city, it was clear that Benedict was right; there wasn’t a white man to be seen. In open doorways, in front of bars, on corners, stood groups of idle youths who made threatening gestures and shouted obscenities as they drove past. Some streets had no identifying signs, and Reeves began to circle aimlessly, not wanting to roll down the window and ask for directions for fear of being spit on, or stoned, but King Benedict had no such problem. He made Reeves stop, calmly got out of the car, asked a couple of people directions, and returned, giving a slow wave to the crowd of young boys who had flocked around the car, jeering and kicking the fenders. They found Margaret. They knocked on the door of room number 9 of a wretched motel, and a huge black man opened the door; his head was shaved, and five safety pins were fastened through one ear. He was the last person Reeves would have wished to find with his daughter, but he had little time to think about that because the man seized his arm with a hand like a ham and led him toward the bed, where the girl lay.
“Looks to me like she’s dying,” he said.
He was just a chance client, her first of the day, who for a few dollars had bought some time with the unkempt girl everyone in the neighborhood knew and left alone despite her color because she was immune to ordinary aggression, she had crossed to the farthest shore of affliction. As he had stripped off her dress and pushed her back onto the bed, he found he was holding a broken puppet, a shocking skeleton burning with fever. He shook her a little, with the idea of rousing her from her drugged stupor, but her head lolled heavily on her thin neck; her eyes were turned back, and a string of yellowish saliva dribbled from her mouth. Shit! the man muttered. His first impulse was to leave her lying there and get the hell out before someone saw him and later accused him of killing her, but when he let go she seemed so pathetic lying there that pity had got the better of him, and in a surge of generosity carved from the violence of his own life he bent over her, calling her, trying to get her to swallow some water, feeling her everywhere to see if she was injured, but finding only that her body was in flames. Margaret was temporarily living in that grimy room; empty bottles were scattered around the floor, cigarette butts, syringes, remnants of a stale pizza, and more filth than can be imagined. On the table, beside open containers of makeup, was a plastic handbag; he turned it upside down, not knowing what he was looking for, and found a key, a pack of cigarettes, heroin, and a billfold containing three dollars and a lawyer’s business card. It never crossed his mind to call the police, but he thought that she must have a reason for carrying the card in her purse; he ran to the public telephone on the corner and called Reeves, not dreaming he was talking to the father of a miserable prostitute lying near death on a bare mattress. Once he sounded the alarm, he walked to a liquor store to buy a beer, ready to forget the whole incident and make a fast exit if the police showed up, but in some deep corner of his heart he felt the girl calling him; no one wanted to die alone, he didn’t have anything to lose by staying with her a few more minutes and maybe in the process pocketing the money and the drugs—she wasn’t going to need them anymore. He went back to room number 9 carrying another beer and a paper cup filled with ice, and between trying to get her to drink something, rubbing the ice on her forehead, and keeping a T-shirt wet to cool her body, he forgot, during the time it had taken Reeves to find the motel, to empty her wallet.
“OK,” he said, “I’m out of here,” uneasy at the sight of the white man wearing a gray suit and tie—a kind of joke in that place—but out of curiosity he lingered in the doorway.
“What happened? Where’s a telephone? Who are you?” Reeves asked as he removed his jacket to cover his naked daughter.
“I don’t have nothing to do with this; I don’t even know the girl. And hey, who are you?”
“Her father. Thanks for calling me—” And Reeves’s voice broke.
“Shit. . . . Holy shit . . . Let me help you.”
The black man lifted Margaret as if she were a baby and carried her to the car, where King Benedict was waiting to prevent its being stolen. Reeves sped off in the direction of a hospital, weaving through traffic and a mist of tears; his daughter, scarcely breathing, was curled into a little ball on King’s lap, and he was crooning one of the timeless spirituals his mother had sung when she rocked him to sleep. Reeves strode into the emergency room, carrying Margaret in his arms. Two hours later they allowed him to see her for a few minutes in one corner of the intensive care unit, where she lay spread-eagled on a bed, connected to a respirator and various monitors. The resident gave him a preliminary assessment: a generalized infection had attacked her heart. The prognosis was grim, he said; they might be able to save her with massive doses of antibiotics, but she would have to change her life radically. Subsequent examinations revealed that Margaret’s body was that of an old woman: her internal organs were wasted from drugs, her veins were collapsed from shooting up, her teeth were loose in her gums, her skin was like scales, and her hair was falling out by the handful. She was bleeding badly because of successive abortions and venereal infections. Even with that list of afflictions, the prostrate girl lying unconscious in the shadowy room looked like a sleeping angel, with no outward sign of shame, her innocence intact. The illusion was short-lived, however, and her father soon learned just how deep was the cesspool she had fallen into. The hospital staff tried to cut off her drugs, but she was shaken by spasms of agony. They prescribed methadone and gave her nicotine chewing gum, but had to place her in restraints to keep her from drinking the rubbing alcohol or stealing barbiturates. During all this, Gregory Reeves could not locate Samantha, who was somewhere in India, following her guru. Desperate, he went to Ming O’Brien, pleading for her help, although in truth he had lost any hope of wresting Margaret from the claws of damnation. As soon as the sick girl had emerged from the worst crisis, Dr. O’Brien visited her regularly, staying to talk for hours. Gregory Reeves came in the afternoons, where he found his daughter torn with self-pity, with the face of a madwoman and an uncontrollable trembling in her hands. He would sit by the bed, wanting to hug her but not daring to touch her, silently listening to an endless string of accusations and bloodcurdling confessions. It was then that he learned the extent of the black martyrdom his daughter had borne. He tried to ascertain what had led to her Golgotha, what unshakable rage and what dark loneliness had warped her life to that degree, but she herself did not know. At times she told him, sobbing, I love you, Papa, but an instant lat
er she railed against him, howling with visceral loathing, blaming him for all her misery.
“Look at me, you goddam sonofabitch, look at me,” and with one sweep of her hand she threw back the sheets and spread her legs, pointing to her sex, weeping and laughing with the ferocity of madness. “You want to know how I earn my living while you go gallivanting around Europe buying jewels for your lovers and while my mother sits meditating in the lotus position? Do you want to know exactly what the drunks and beggars and addicts do to me? Oh, but I don’t need to tell you, because you’re an expert in whores; you pay us to do all the shit no woman would do without being paid. . . .”
Ming O’Brien tried to help Margaret confront her reality, to help her accept the fact that she could not save herself on her own, that her treatment would take a very long time, but it was a game of illusions played before a fun-house mirror. The girl pretended to listen and said she was sick of her life of excess but, as soon as she could walk, slipped down the hall to the telephone to ask her contacts to bring heroin to her in the hospital. Other times she was totally dispirited, horrified by her own condition; she would begin telling the details of her long descent into depravity and then silently sink into a slough of remorse. Her father offered to pay for her rehabilitation in a private clinic, and finally she accepted, apparently resigned. Ming spent the morning pulling strings to have her admitted, and Gregory left to buy tickets for a flight to southern California the next morning. That night Margaret stole another patient’s clothes and escaped without a trace.
“Her infection isn’t cured; we merely contained the most alarming symptoms. If she doesn’t continue the antibiotics, she will obviously die,” the doctor said in an unemotional voice. He was hardened to every kind of emergency and had little sympathy for drug addicts.
“Don’t look for her, Gregory,” Ming O’Brien advised the stricken father. “At some moment you must accept the fact that there’s nothing more you can do for your daughter. You have to let go. It’s her life.”
Meanwhile, the date for King Benedict’s trial was approaching. The insurance company had stood firm in refusing to pay compensation for the accident, arguing that the alleged amnesia was a hoax. They had subjected Benedict to humiliating medical and psychiatric examinations to prove that no physical injury was attributable to the fall. For weeks they questioned him about every insignificant event that happened between the time he was a teenager and the current year. They wanted him to identify old baseball teams, they asked him what dances people were dancing in 1941 and what day war broke out in Europe. They also hired detectives, who followed him for months hoping to catch him out in some deception. Benedict tried with good faith to answer their interminable questioning, because he did not want to be considered ignorant; except for some facts he remembered from his daily stint in the library, however, everything else lay hidden in the serene haze of things yet to come. We don’t know anything about the future, whether it even exists, all we can see in our mind is the past, his mother had told him many times, but he could not get a grasp on his past; it was a slippery shadow that had eaten up forty years of his time on earth. Gregory Reeves, who lived tormented by a too perfect memory, found his client’s tragedy fascinating. He, too, questioned him, not to trap him in a lie but to learn how a man feels when he has the chance to wipe out his life and begin all over again. He had known King four years and during that time listened to his boyish fantasies and dreams of greatness, but he had also watched him retrace, step by step, the road already traveled, like a somnambulist trapped in a recurrent dream. King did nothing significantly different; it was as if he were placing each foot in tracks from an earlier time: he went to night classes to finish high school, received the same bad grades he had as a boy, and finally dropped out; a couple of years later, about the time he would have been sixteen, he presented himself at several recruiting offices to try to sign up with a branch of the armed forces but was rejected at each. He had seen a lot of movies about the war, and his head was filled with military glory; as consolation, he bought himself a uniform.
“In a couple of years now, he’ll marry a no-good like his former wife and father two kids like my useless grandchildren,” Bel Benedict complained bitterly.
“It’s hard for me to believe you can trip twice over the same exact stone,” replied Gregory Reeves, who had begun his silent journey into his past and often wondered what would have happened had he made different choices along the way.
“You can’t live two lives or two different fates. Life doesn’t come with an eraser,” Bel said.
“Surely we can, Mrs. Benedict; I’m certainly trying. You can alter your story and correct the rough draft.”
“No. What’s been lived can’t be changed. We can do better in what lies before us, but the past is the past.”
“You mean we can’t undo our mistakes? Isn’t there any hope, for instance, for my daughter, Margaret? She’s not even twenty yet.”
“There’s hope, but the twenty years she lost she can never get back.”
“That’s a terrifying idea. It means that with every step we cement a piece of our history; we carry all our desires and thoughts and actions with us forever. If that’s true, we are our past. My father used to preach about the consequences of every act we commit and our responsibilities within the spiritual order of the universe; he said that everything we do comes back to us, and that sooner or later we pay for the evil and benefit from the good.”
“He was a wise man.”
“He was out of his mind, mad as a hatter when he died. His theories were a lot of tangled threads I could never unravel.”
“Well, he had his values right, it seems.”
“He didn’t preach by example, though, Bel. My sister tells me he was an alcoholic and a pervert, that he was obsessive about controlling things and ruined our lives—at least hers. But he was a strong man, and I felt good when I was with him; my memories of him are happy ones.”
“Seems like he taught you to walk a straight path.”
“He tried, but he died before he could finish. My road hasn’t been too straight.”
Later, when he was discussing this conversation with Ming O’Brien, Reeves started telling her about his client, and Ming, who usually listened attentively and rarely opened her mouth to offer an opinion, now interrupted to ask more details. Had King Benedict been subject to unusual pressure? What kind of childhood had he had? Was he a calm and balanced person, or would Reeves say he was unstable? Her final comment was that his type of amnesia was rare, but there were documented cases. She pulled a book from a shelf and handed it to Gregory.
“You might want to look at this. It’s probable that in his adolescence your client suffered a severe emotional shock or a blow similar to the one he received in the accident. When the experience was repeated, the impact of the past was intolerable, and he blocked out the memory.”
“I don’t think there was anything like that.”
“But there must have been something very painful or threatening that he doesn’t want to remember. Ask his mother.”
Gregory Reeves spent the night reading, and by breakfast time he had a clear idea of what Ming O’Brien had suggested. He remembered the time King Benedict had fainted in his office while being asked to identify photographs from a magazine, and he remembered Bel’s strange reaction. She was waiting outside during the deposition and when she heard the uproar had run into the library, seen her son on the floor, and bent over to help him; at that moment the open magazine on the table had caught her eye, and impulsively she had put her hand over King’s mouth. She had refused to let the questioning continue, had taken King home in a taxi, and from that day had insisted on being present at all the interviews. Reeves attributed her behavior to concern for her son’s health, but now he had doubts. Excited about this chink through which he could glimpse a glimmer of light, Reeves drove directly to Timothy Duane’s parents’ house to talk with King’s mother. Bel was in the kitchen cleaning silver whe
n the butler announced Reeves’s visit, but before she could come to meet him, Gregory burst into the kitchen. We have to talk, he said, taking her by the arm, not giving her time to remove her apron or wash her hands. Alone with her in his office, he explained that very soon he would be staking her son’s future on the turn of a card, and winning depended on his ability to convince the jury that King was not feigning amnesia. Until yesterday he hadn’t seen how that was possible, but with her help today they might change the outcome of the case. He repeated Ming O’Brien’s theory and begged her to tell him what had happened to King Benedict when he was young.