Besides, Petra was interested on her own account in this McCloud now. Very much so! Any one would be.... His tormented impatient look.... The way his very black brows met in a straight line over his straight high nose. She had never seen brows like that. It gave a look of dominance, of strength.... His hands were the hands of a workman, stained with oil or grease, and the fingernails were cut very short where they were not broken. Yet strangely, those hands were as expressive and impatient as his face.... And the upside-down sentence—well—that was a touch of mere deviltry. His eyes had mocked, as he pushed the envelope toward her—and was gone!
The heat in the reception office was stifling. Holding your wrists under water really didn’t help, except for the minute you were doing it. As for getting out the shorthand textbook in this lull between the morning and afternoon appointments, Petra simply couldn’t. She was smothered, dismayed by the heat. It was really a kind of drowning, this airlessness. Janet had looked so cool and superior to it. She had said, “It’s torrid, isn’t it!” but she hadn’t minded it really. She had created the effect, even as she mentioned it, of brushing mere physical discomfort from her clear, cool self as if it were a fly.
There was, however, a slight breeze coming through from Doctor Pryne’s big windows. A paper on his desk rustled intermittently. It might blow off. Petra decided to go in there and put a book or an inkwell, some solid object, on it. But when she had secured the object—a package of Luckies, as it happened—she turned away from the desk to the steel filing case across the room and stood looking at it curiously. She could read the letters on the faces of the boxes from where she stood.
Chapter Twelve
Petra was pulling out the drawer marked in small black letters Mc. She pulled it slowly, as one might open a door onto an unknown landscape. She herself thought of Alice. “It might be the rabbit hole and here am I on the verge of tumbling down it.” Indeed, she felt herself a second Alice and as if this deep drawer held a wonderland into which she was about to escape from the stifling hot afternoon of the upper world. Could she have known what it held for her, how different her hesitation in going on pulling out the drawer would have been, how much faster her heart would have beat!
She ran her fingers over the tops of the stiff white cards and came to those marked at the upper right-hand corners, “Neil McCloud.” There were dozens of them in McCloud’s own handwriting—the handwriting, at least, of that one last sentence of his which she had read upside down. Petra lifted them out, removing first the metal clip that held them together. Leaving the Mc drawer open, she leaned against other closed drawers and started to read.
Neil McCloud. Age twenty-six. Irish-American. Catholic. No known insanity in family.
It read as if it had been written in answer to questions put to him by Doctor Pryne. Ordinarily the patient would have answered vocally, and Janet, or Doctor Pryne, taken it all down; but in this case, since McCloud could not speak, the answers were written by the patient himself. It seemed that the small, scrupulous script of the upside-down sentence was his ordinary writing when he was not furious....
Petra turned the card over and read on: “Oldest of five. Father a garage proprietor in Springfield, Mass. I graduated from High School tenth in class of ninety. My mother wanted me to go to college but I wouldn’t. Went to work for my father as a stop-gap. Wanted to get with airplanes. Father paid me a skilled mechanic’s wages because I was by that time a skilled mechanic,—grew up with the engines, so to speak. Machinery interested me more than books. Except aeronautics books. Read all of those the library had and bought all I could find. I got in with the fellow who runs the Ocean Road Airport. Spent all my spare time there. Took flying lessons by moonlight. Bought a second-hand plane on savings and credit and began taking people up for hire. Father against it. Wouldn’t let me live at home unless I worked for him.... One day my kid brother turned up at the field. He was the baby. Eleven years old. I knew the folks had forbidden him to go up with me. All the kids were forbidden. But he had hooked a ride out, skipped school, and said he would tell father when he got home, and take his licking. He hated lickings as much as anybody, but it would be worth it to fly. I agreed with him it would. He was captain of his grade football team, a great little kid. After my mother, I guess he meant more to me than anybody living. Anyway, I took him up. We had a grand ride, all afternoon, over four States. Then, making the landing in the field, the propeller broke and we hit the ground wrong. The kid was killed. Broken neck. He died in my arms without the sacraments. I never saw my mother again. They wouldn’t let me into the house. Dad wouldn’t. I don’t think mother ever knew I came. She died that fall. She had been poorly ever since Stephen was born, the kid—that was killed.