Terence's hands fell away from the piano, leaving the third Fugue unfinished. How had he arrived at contemplation of that time-eroded grief? The subject was Callista Blake, not Elinor Mann.
Who still lived, if you could call it that, in the curiously ordered world of yellow brick and manicured lawns that was Claiborne Hospital. She was seventy-eight this year, clouded by senility along with the psychosis. She recognized Terence on his visits, listening or seeming to, usually with patiently closed eyes, as he toiled to create a conversation.
Jack, successful in his own psychiatric practice, had more difficulty when he drove or flew from Boston to see her. Thirty-one years ago the cobwebs of her delusions had wrapped themselves inextricably around the life of the elder son, four years older than Terence and at that time in his Junior year at Harvard. Her voices (many others along with that of Mary Queen of Scots) had informed her that Jack was increasingly involved with gangsters and women of ill fame. The college authorities and, for some never-explained reason, Mayor Jimmy Walker, were all in it together. When she was on the point of going up to Cambridge to deal with all that, Dr. Carl Mann, goaded at last into understanding, said no. She flung an inkwell in his face and gouged it with a pair of scissors; though he was fairly muscular and she was not, it required the help of his office nurse to restrain her. Most of that was over, the dust settling, when Terence, sixteen years old, got home from school. Now in her antiquity the sorrows, fantasies, and angers of the past were still preserved for her by the specialized, selective memory of the schizophrenic, flies in amber. A year ago, Terence and Jack visiting her together, she told Terence that she could easily have forgiven poor Jack if he had lived. Then it came out, in a natural, pleasantly quiet conversation, that the slim gray-haired man sitting over there was nothing but a body, stolen for no good purpose by the unclean spirit of Henry VIII. Later, at the airport, Jack remarked: "Psychiatrically speaking it may be a poor symptom, but don't mind it, Terry. I'll make out all right as hell-fire Harry Tudor. Less of a strain than some of my other roles."
"Beyond psychiatry, isn't it?"
"If you mean beyond effective therapy, yes, boy." "Boy" from Jack was acceptable—always had been. "It was beyond existing therapy thirty years ago." Jack also counted years. "We just don't know the score on paranoid schizophrenia. We know approximately what to expect, which is something maybe. Mental disease could be the last holdout among medical enigmas, Terry. We may be sweating out cases like Mother's when there's a pill or a shot for cancer. It's the—oh, the inaccessibility of mental action." Jack had been tired, but not remote; fatigue never dulled a shining quality of his alertness. "Wait till you get some big case in court with a borderline paranoid as a star performer."
That conversation of a year ago had been hampered, Jack waiting on the start of his plane flight back to Boston; no leisure, bustling strangers, time pressure, uproar of loudspeakers and warming engines. Was it relevant now? Callista Blake a borderline paranoid? Rather urgently and emphatically, Judge Mann thought: No, she's not.
Psychiatry more or less stood in the wings, in People vs. Blake. The State's man called her legally sane. If he hadn't, the State would have had no trouble shopping around for someone who did. Warner had had the girl examined by a Dr. Coburn, who might or might not testify; so far Warner had dropped no hint suggesting an insanity defense.
Inaccessibility of mental action: that was relevant. Dominantly. For wasn't that the very essence of the principle of "reasonable doubt"? And was there any rational formula anywhere in the law, except the principle of reasonable doubt, at all likely to save Callista Blake?
Must see Jack again, soon. He looked out on the city's darkness past a false curtain of window-glass reflection; a city of magic under a lens of illusion, as long ago in the creaky white-pillared house in Emmetville where he grew up he used to look out from the bedroom he shared with Jack, at images that would not live by day. Especially on rainy nights the vacant lot on the other side of Maple Street became for the boy transfigured, a garden of living shadows; sometimes, under the lash of wet wind, even the sea as Conrad and Melville had given the sea to him. In winter, leaves fallen, one could look past the few naked trees at the back of the lot, to a gleam of water a mile away, Walton Pond reflecting the motion and glitter of the railroad yard on its far side. Every night at 9:25, the ghostly passage of a fourteen-car express (to Terence and Jack, The Express)—one of the great trains that couldn't be imagined as stopping at Emmetville. You did not hear its thunder, only saw the silent gliding of windows; then thirty seconds after the vanishing came the desolate splendor of the whistle crying for a grade crossing, the night imperfect until that music had fulfilled its mission and died. See him again; and bring out the inner voices.
The once vacant lot was now occupied in front by a filling station, in the rear by a drive-in theater; as a passion-pit, that probably served on a mass-production basis the same purpose once served by the vacant lot, where he and Jack occasionally discovered and snickered at the discarded rubber, stained handkerchiefs, and other detritus of hasty lechery. As for the gracious white house, where Terence had once known every spot, every squeaky board and dim hideaway in closets and under the eaves, it now belonged to someone who had made it a Tourist Home with noxious plastic animals on the front lawn, and called it Tumble Inn. So perish treasures of the spirit, to be born elsewhere in other guise, perhaps.