were here, they came out only in unformed modulations of sound. But there were seven of
them, seven distinct sounds, just as there are seven syllables in that phrase, Thank you,
Doctor McCarron.
‘You’re welcome, Miss Stansfield,’ I said. ‘It’s a boy.’ Her lips moved again, and from
behind me, thin, ghostly, came the sound hoyyyyyy –
Her eyes lost their focus and their determination. They seemed now to look at
something beyond me, perhaps in that black, sleety sky. Then they closed. She began to
locomotive again … and then she simply stopped. Whatever had happened was now over.
The nurse had seen some of it, the ambulance driver had perhaps seen some of it before
he fainted. But it was over now, over for sure. There was only the remains of an ugly
accident out here … and a new baby in there.
I looked up at the statue of Harriet White and there she still stood, looking stonily
away towards the Garden across the way, as if nothing of any particular note had
happened, as if such determination in a world as hard and as senseless as this one meant
nothing … or worse still, that it was perhaps the only thing which meant anything, the only thing that made any difference at all.
As I recall, I knelt there in the slush before her severed head and began to weep. As I
recall, I was still weeping when an intern and two nurses helped me to my feet and inside.
McCarron’s pipe had gone out
He relit it with his bolt-lighter while we sat in perfect, breathless silence. Outside, the
wind howled and moaned. He snapped his lighter closed and looked up. He seemed
mildly surprised to find us still there.
‘That’s all,’ he said. That’s the end! What are you waiting for? Chariots of fire?’ He
snorted, then seemed to debate for a moment ‘I paid her burial expenses out of my own
pocket She had no one else, you see.’ He smiled a little. ‘Well … there was Ella Davidson,
my nurse. She insisted on chipping in twenty-five dollars, which she could ill afford. But
when Davidson insisted on a thing-‘ He shrugged, and then laughed a little.
‘You’re quite sure it wasn’t a reflex?’ I heard myself demanding suddenly. ‘Are you
quite sure -‘
‘Quite sure,’ McCarron said imperturbably. ‘The first contraction, perhaps. But the
completion of her labour was not a matter of seconds but of minutes. And I sometimes think she might have held on even longer, if it had been necessary. Thank God it was not.’
‘What about the baby?’ Johanssen asked.
McCarron puffed at his pipe. ‘Adopted,’ he said. ‘And you’ll understand that, even in
those days, adoption records were kept as secret as possible.’
‘Yes, but what about the baby?’ Johanssen asked again, and McCarron laughed in a
cross way.
‘You never let go of a thing, do you?’ he asked Johanssen.
Johanssen shook his head. ‘Some people have learned it to their sorrow. What about
the baby?’
‘Well, if you’ve come with me this far perhaps you’ll also understand that I had a
certain vested interest in knowing how it all came out for that child. Or I felt that I did.
There was a young man and his wife – their name was not Harrison, but that is close
enough. They lived in Maine. They could have no children of their own. They adopted the
child and named him … well, John’s good enough, isn’t it? John will do you fellows, won’t
it?’
He puffed at his pipe but it had gone out again. I was faintly aware of Stevens hovering
behind me, and knew that somewhere our coats would be at the ready. Soon we would
slip back into them … and back into our lives. As McCarron had said, the tales were done
for another year.
The child I delivered that night is now head of the English Department at one of the
two or three most respected private colleges in the country,’ McCarron said. ‘He’s not
forty-five yet. A young man. It’s early for him, but the day may well come when he will
be President of that school. I shouldn’t doubt it a bit. He is handsome, intelligent, and
charming.
‘Once, on a pretext, I was able to dine with him in the private faculty club. We were
four that evening. I said little and so was able to watch him. He has his mother’s
determination, gentlemen …
‘… and his mother’s hazel eyes.’
3: The Club
Stevens saw us out as he always did, holding coats, wishing men the happiest of happy
Christmases, thanking them for their generosity. I contrived to be the last, and Stevens
looked at me with no surprise when I said:
‘I have a question I’d like to ask, if you don’t mind.’
He smiled a little. ‘I suppose you should,’ he said, ‘Christmas is a fine time for
questions.’
Somewhere down the hallway to our left – a hall I had never been down – a grandfather
clock ticked sonorously, the sound of the age passing away. I could smell old leather and
oiled wood and, much more faintly than either of these, the smell of Stevens’s aftershave.
‘But I should warn you,’ Stevens added as the wind rose in a gust outside, ‘it’s better not
to ask too much. Not if you want to keep coming here.’
‘People have been closed out for asking too much?’ Closed out was not really the
phrase I wanted, but it was as close as I could come.
‘No,’ Stevens said, his voice as low and polite as ever. They simply choose to stay
away.’
I returned his gaze, feeling a chill prickle its way up my back – it was as if a large, cold,
invisible hand had been laid on my spine. I found myself remembering that strangely liquid thump I had heard upstairs one night and wondered (as I had more than once
before) exactly how many rooms there really were here.
‘If you still have a question, Mr Adley, perhaps you’d better ask it. The evening’s
almost over -‘
‘And you have a long train-ride ahead of you?’ I asked, but Stevens only looked at me
impassively. ‘All right,’ I said. There are books in this library that I can’t find anywhere
else – not in the New York Public Library, not in the catalogues of any of the antiquarian
book-dealers I’ve checked with, and certainly not in Books in Print. The billiard table in the Small Room is a Nord. I’d never heard of such a brand, and so I called the
International Trademark Commission. They have two Nords – one makes crosscountry
skis and the other makes wooden kitchen accessories. There’s a Seafront jukebox in the
Long Room. The ITC has a Seeburg listed, but no Sea front.’
‘What is your question, Mr Adley?’
His voice was as mild as ever, but there was something terrible in his eyes suddenly …
no; if I am to be truthful, it was not just in his eyes; the terror I felt had infused the
atmosphere all around me. The steady tock-tock from down the lefthand hall was no
longer the pendulum of a grandfather clock; it was the tapping foot of the executioner as
he watches the condemned led to the scaffold. The smells of oil and leather turned bitter
and menacing, and when the wind rose in another wild whoop, I felt momentarily sure
that the front door would blow open, revealing not 35th Street but an insane Clark Ashton
Smith landscape where the bitter shapes of twisted trees stood silhouetted on a sterile
horizon below . which double suns were setting in a gruesome red glare.
Oh, he knew what I had meant to ask; I saw it in his grey eyes.
Where do all these things come from? I had meant to ask. Oh, I know well enough
where you come from, Stevens; that accent isn’t Dimension X, it’s pure Brooklyn. But where do you go? What has put that timeless look in your eyes and stamped it on your
face? And, Stevens –
– where are we RIGHT THIS SECOND?
But he was waiting for my question.
I opened my mouth. And the question that came out was: ‘Are there many more rooms
upstairs?’
‘Oh, yes, sir,’ he said, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘A great many. A man could become
lost In fact, men have become lost Sometimes it seems to me that they go on for miles.
Rooms and corridors.’
‘And entrances and exits?’
His eyebrows went up slightly. ‘Oh yes. Entrances and
exits.’ He waited, but I had asked enough, I thought -1 had come to the very edge of
something that would, perhaps, drive me mad.
“Thank you, Stevens.’
‘Of course, sir.’ He held out my coat and I slipped into it.
There will be more tales?’
‘Here, sir, there are always more tales.’