A voice at her elbow said, “Mrs. Temple! We have been looking everywhere for you!” It was General Romanovitch.
Jill looked at David. “Call me in the morning.”
Toby’s last performance in the Bolshoi Theatre was more exciting than anything that had been seen there before. The spectators threw flowers and cheered and stamped their feet and refused to leave. It was a fitting climax to Toby’s other triumphs. A large party was scheduled for after the show, but Toby said to Jill, “I’m beat, goddess. Why don’t you go? I’ll return to the hotel and get some shut-eye.”
Jill went to the party alone, but it was as through David were at her side every moment. She carried on conversations with her hosts and danced and acknowledged the tributes they were paying to her, but all the time her mind was reliving her meeting with David. I married the wrong girl. Cissy and I are divorced. I’ve never stopped loving you.
At two o’clock in the morning, Jill’s escort dropped her at her hotel suite. She went inside and found Toby lying on the floor in the middle of the room, unconscious, his right hand stretched out toward the telephone.
Toby Temple was rushed in an ambulance to the Diplomatic Polyclinic at 3 Sverchkov Prospekt. Three top specialists were summoned in the middle of the night to examine him. Everyone was sympathetic toward Jill. The chief of the hospital escorted her to a private office, where she waited for news. It’s like a rerun, Jill thought. All this had happened before. It had a vague, unreal quality.
Hours later, the door to the office opened and a short, fat Russian waddled in. He was dressed in an ill-fitting suit and looked like an unsuccessful plumber. “I am Dr. Durov,” he said. “I am in charge of your husband’s case.”
“I want to know how he is.”
“Sit down, Mrs. Temple, please.”
Jill had not even been aware that she had stood up. “Tell me!”
“Your husband has suffered a stroke—technically called a cerebral venous thrombosis.”
“How bad is it?”
“It is the most—what do you say?—hard-hitting, dangerous. If your husband lives—and it is too soon to tell—he will never walk or speak again. His mind is clear but he is completely paralyzed.”
Before Jill left Moscow, David telephoned her.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he said. “I’ll be standing by. Anytime you need me, I’ll be there. Remember that.”
It was the only thing that helped Jill keep her sanity in the nightmare that was about to begin.
The journey home was a hellish déjà vu. The hospital litter in the plane, the ambulance from the airport to the house, the sickroom.
Except that this time it was not the same. Jill had known it the moment they had allowed her to see Toby. His heart was beating, his vital organs functioning; in every respect he was a living organism. And yet he was not. He was a breathing, pulsating corpse, a dead man in an oxygen tent, with tubes and needles running into his body like antennae, feeding him the vital fluids that were necessary to keep him alive. His face was twisted in a horrifying rictus that made him look as though he were grinning, his lips pulled up so that his gums were exposed. I am afraid I can offer you no hope, the Russian doctor had said.
That had been weeks ago. Now they were back home in Bel-Air. Jill had immediately called in Dr. Kaplan, and he had sent for specialists who had summoned more specialists, and the answer always came out the same: a massive stroke that had heavily damaged or destroyed the nerve centers, with very little chance of reversing the damage that had already been done.
There were nurses around the clock and a physiotherapist to work with Toby, but they were empty gestures.
The object of all this attention was grotesque. Toby’s skin had turned yellow, and his hair was falling out in large tufts. His paralyzed limbs were shriveled and stringy. On his face was the hideous grin that he could not control. He was monstrous to look at, a death’s head.