Puzzle for Fiends (2 page)

“Darling, don’t smile like that. It’s worrying. It’s such a stupid smile—like a chimpanzee. “The anxiety was in her eyes now.” Dearest, please try and remember. I’m sure you can if you try.” She paused and added abruptly: “Who am I?”

With a sinking sensation, I knew I was going to flunk that question too. I felt awkward. I wanted very much to know who she was, but I didn’t want her to think I was stupid, like a chimpanzee. Craftily, I thought, I said: “You’re not a nurse.”

“Of course I’m not a nurse. “She made a rather agitated stab at her untidy back hair. “Who do I look like, dear?”

Suddenly I knew. “A barmaid,” I said. “A glamorous English barmaid in a book.”

For a second she seemed staggered. Then her whole face flushed from a delightful smile.

“Dear, that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.” A far-away, dreamy look came into her eyes. “I serve a haunch of venison to a dark stranger in the back parlor of the tavern. He pinches my behind, turns out to be Charles the Second travelling incognito. I am installed in a small, discreet palace on the Thames.”

The conversation was hopelessly running away from me.

“I am the toast of the town, gorgeous negligées, young bucks, handpicked from the peerage, drink champagne from my slippers. But only the King can snap my garters.” She shook her head in sad return from fantasy. “No, dear, I’m not a barmaid.”

“Then who are you?” I said, too muddled to try any longer to be subtle.

“This is awfully disturbing, dear. I do hope Dr. Croft will be able to do something about it. After all, it’s not much to ask you to recognize your own mother.”

“My mother.”

“Of course. Who else could I be?” She looked slightly pained. “And a good mother I’ve been to you too—even if I do say it myself.”

The knowledge that I was convalescent and still legitimately confused in the head cushioned me from the shock. But it was still a shock to hear a perfectly unknown woman with auburn hair announce that she was my mother. Mothers were things you were supposed to recognize without having to be told. I thought about saying something rather stiff like:
Absolutely absurd. You my mother
—
nonsense!
But when I tried to cling on to the actual words to say them, they slid away from me like wet trout through your fingers. I felt weak again and my head was aching. I gave up trying to communicate with the woman and struggled with the problem in silence.

Someone was my mother. I couldn’t get around that. If this woman wasn’t my mother, who was? That’s easy, I said to myself. My mother is... Then the sentence stuck. I hadn’t any idea who my mother was. The realization seemed infinitely pathetic. So pathetic that I was able to say it out loud.

“I don’t know,” I said wistfully, “who my mother is.”

The woman had been looking at the roses. She turned sharply.

“Darling, do please try not to be too complicated. I’m supposed to be nursing you. I thought it would be nicer having your mother nurse you instead of one of those cold pillars of starch from the hospital. But I’m not very much of a nurse. I mean, I did a little in the last war and I’ve taken a Red Cross Refresher Course. But if you start having weird symptoms, I’ll have to get one of those professionals after all and she’ll keep giving you bed pans and plumping out your pillows and breathing down your neck.” She smiled and patted my hand. “You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

I didn’t know whether I would like it or not. I was lost now in self-pity. Her smooth, warm fingers had curled around my left hand again.

“Darling, tell me. Just how much do you remember?”

“I remember the hospital. I remember white…”

“No, dear. I don’t mean about the hospital. I mean the real things—the things about you.” She turned her head, indicating the second bed beyond her. “Who sleeps in that bed?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Who’s Selena? Who’s Marny?” She must have seen the blank expression on my face because she didn’t wait for me to attempt an answer. She added quickly: “What’s your name?”

“My name is...” I began, then panic wormed through me. Since my return to consciousness, I had never actually thought about my name. You don’t think about your name. I knew I was me, that my personal identity was inviolable. But what was my name? I stared at her as if her big, curving body would act as an anchor, steadying me.

“You don’t remember even that, do you?” she said.

I shook my head. “It’s crazy. When I try to think there’s nothing. There’s...”

“Don’t worry, my baby. “Her voice was rich, soothing. “It’s just the hit on the head. That often happens. I know it does. You’ll soon be well again, Gordy.”

“Gordy?”

“Yes, dear. That’s your name. Gordy Friend. Gordon Renton Friend the Third.”

There was a gentle tap on the door. The woman called: “Who is it?” The door opened a crack and the head of a uniformed maid peered around it. I noticed that her eyes, greedy with curiosity, flashed instantly to my bed.

“What is it, Netti?”

“Dr. Croft, Mrs. Friend. He’s just arrived. Shall I send him up?”

“Thank heavens. No, Netti. I’ll come down.” The woman rose. She stared down at me and then bent over me, kissing me on the forehead. Loose strands of the auburn hair tickled my cheek. The perfume wreathed into my nostrils. “Just lie there calmly while I’m away, dear. Don’t be frightened. Don’t try to force yourself. Just say it over and over again. Say “I’m Gordy Friend’. Do that—for me.”

She moved out of the room, large and majestically voluptuous in spite of the drab widow’s weeds. After she had gone, I did what she said, I lay in that luxurious bed in that great sunsplashed room, marshalling my pathetically small array of facts. I had been in an accident; I had broken my left leg and my right arm. I had been hit on the head. I was home in my own room in my own house in Lona Beach, South California. My name was Gordy Friend. I said that over and over:

I am Gordy Friend. I am Gordy Friend. I am Gordon Renton Friend the Third.

But the words just remained words. I presumed that was my name. After all, my mother had told me it was.

My mother? My name?

The propellers started to whir again. And, although I hated them and feared them, somehow they had more reality than everything that had happened or been said in this room.

If only I could remember what the propellers meant.

Propellers—a plane... seeing someone off on a plane...

Was that it?

Had I seen someone off on a plane?

Seeing someone
off on a plane
. Those few words, linked together, seemed to have terrific significance. For a moment I felt I was teetering on the brink of an ultimate revelation. Then the words and the image they almost conjured up blurred and dissipated in my mind. I felt spent from the effort of concentration. Like a torpedoed sailor clinging to a floating board, I clung for security to the one established fact of my life.

I am Gordy Friend.

Curiosity, without much motive behind it, made me raise my bandaged head so that I could survey the whole room. It was as luxurious as I had imagined it to be from the part of it that had already come into my field of vision. Beyond the fantastic, rococo vanity, stood a chaise longue upholstered in pale green satin. On it, thrown in a careless tumble, was a shimmering white negligée. There was sunlight everywhere and the colors of the room brought their own sunlight too. The pink roses by the bed were only partly responsible for the perfume. There were vases of flowers everywhere—more roses, massed yellow tulips, tall irises and spikes of white stock.

Slowly my gaze moved from object to object and returned to the white negligée on the chaise longue. I stared at it as if it had some secret which had to be puzzled out. A woman’s negligée. The whole feeling of the room was feminine too—frivolous, vivid, individual. Was that the secret? That my room was disguised as a woman’s room?

I couldn’t make much headway with this thought. The harder I struggled with it the more elusive it became.

“Gordy Friend,” I said out loud. “Gordon Renton Friend the Third.”

The door opened. My mother came in. I could feel her without even turning my head—feel that presence, mellow as ripened wheat, intrude upon the spring freshness of the room.

She was at my bed. Her tranquil hand was on my forehead.

“I’ve brought Dr. Croft, dear. He says we’re not to worry. It’s the result of the concussion. It’s something he expected.”

A man moved into my field of vision. He was in the early thirties, very dark. He was dressed in tweeds that were expensive and casual. He was standing casually too, his hands in his pockets. My sensibilities, as unnaturally sharpened in some particulars as they were dulled in others felt that it was more important to him than anything else in the world to look like any one of a hundred impeccable young members of the most exclusive country club of his neighborhood.

I’ve just dropped in after a round of golf, his stance said. Quite a good workout today.

But in spite of the conforming camouflage, he didn’t look average at all. His dusky face was far too handsome to be unobtrusive, and his black eyes, beautiful and long-lashed as a Turkish dancing girl’s, gave the lie to the successful-broker tweeds.

“Hi, Gordy,” he said. “How d’you feel?”

I looked up into his white smile, feeling faintly hostile.

I said: “Are you someone I’m supposed to know too?”

His hands still in his pockets, he rocked gently back and forth on his heels, studying me. “You honestly don’t recognize your mother?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, well. What a state of affairs. We must fix this up.”

“He thought I was a barmaid.” My mother smiled a shy, girl’s smile that brought rose pink to her cheeks. “I never realized it before but that’s always been my secret desire. A pint o’ bitter,” she called in a hoarse, cockney voice. “’Urry up with that ’alf and ’alf.”

A certain rigidity in the young man indicated that this vulgar pleasantry made him uncomfortable. A new personality was forming in him. He was the serious young doctor getting down to business.

“Well, let’s see what we can do, shall we?” He turned a professional brisk look on my mother. “Perhaps I should be left alone with the patient for a while, Mrs. Friend.”

“Why, of course.” My mother threw me a coaxing smile. “Do try to be good and helpful, Gordy. Dr. Croft’s such a sweet man and I know you’ll be remembering everything if you just do what he says.”

She started for the door, turned, came back for the be-ribboned box of candy and, rather guiltily, carried it away with her.

As soon as we were alone, the young man became affable efficiency personified. He brought a chair to the bedside, swung it around and sat on it back to front. I was feeling clearer in the head now and something in me, without conscious identity, was putting me on my guard.

“Okay, Gordy.” I got a head-on smile. “In the first place, I’m Nate Croft. You’ll remember that soon. You’ll also remember that I’m quite a pal of yours and Selena’s and Marny’s.”

Adrift as I was, I was stubbornly sure that I could never have been ‘quite a pal’ of this man with the soft, dusky skin and the vamping, dancing girl eyes. I didn’t tell him that, though, I just lay there, waiting.

He lit a cigarette from an expensive case with a “Sorry I can’t offer you one, old man.” Then, watching me brightly through smoke, he asked: “Tell me, Gordy, just how much can you remember?”

“I can remember whirring propellers,” I said. “I think I can remember an airfield, and a plane, and seeing someone off on a plane.”

“Anyone in particular?”

I strained to recapture some vanished half image. “No. Not exactly. Except that it seems terribly important.”

“The propellers come first?”

“Yes. They always seem to be almost there, if you see what I mean. Even if I can’t hear them, I...”

“Yes, yes,” he broke in, very much the professional interpreter of amateur information. “I’m afraid that isn’t going to be very helpful to us.”

I felt inexplicably depressed. “You mean there wasn’t anyone going away on a plane?”

“A common ether reaction.” Dr. Nate Croft held his cigarette poised between us. “The loss of consciousness visualizing itself as a whirring propeller. This person you imagine you were seeing off, was it a man or a woman?”

Suddenly I knew, and I felt a rush of excitement. “A woman.”

Dr. Croft nodded. “The nurse in the operating room. We get that frequently. A patient clings to the nurse’s image in exact proportion to his reluctance to lose consciousness. She is the image of reality that the patient feels he is saying goodbye to before the journey into unconsciousness.”

I couldn’t understand why that rather pompous medical explanation brought a strange despair. He went on:

“Forget the propellers, Gordy. Anything else?”

I said listlessly: “There’s a hospital, various snatches of things in a hospital.”

“Of course.” Dr. Nate Croft studied his clean hands. “You recovered consciousness several times in the hospital. Is that all?”

I nodded: “All except what happened after I woke up here.”

“Well, well, we won’t let it worry us, will we?” The teeth flashed again. “How about I bring you up to date a bit, Gordy. Your mother’s told you about the accident?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It happened down the Coast Boulevard. In the evening. You know, that deserted stretch on the way to San Diego.”

“San Diego?” I tried to sit up.

“Yes. Why? Does San Diego mean anything to you?”

“San Diego. “I added uncertainly: “Am I in the Navy?”

“The Navy?” Nate Croft laughed. “What strange little things cling on in the mind. A couple of months ago, you went to San Diego, tried to enlist. They turned you down. Remember?”

The bed was very comfortable and the effort to remain suspicious was becoming too taxing. Dr. Croft seemed quite a nice guy now, kind, considerate. Too pretty but quite a nice guy.

“Funny,” I said, wanting to confide in him. “I don’t remember it that way. But San Diego means something. And the Navy. I feel as if I’d been in the Navy a long time. Isn’t that dopey?”