Chapter 11

Roderick Raleigh first set out to drive his daughter insane shortly after that young lady's fifth birthday. It was not, admittedly, a course one entered upon with enthusiasm. Indeed, he had hesitated long and thought deeply before adopting it, and even then his initial efforts along these lines were half-hearted, bare, unserviceable gestures. Never could he escape feeling—if not regretful—poignant about the whole matter, for his Alice was such a bright little tyke and might have deserved so much better of him. But there had been—there was—there could be no alternative. It was certain beyond all doubt that Morgan Duquesne's will was never going to be broken.

That will had left almost the whole of the old man's estate to his grand-daughter Alice, passing over the intervening generation with scarcely a how-do-you-do—a fixed annuity of $10,000 a year. The residence in which Roderick and Delphinia were domiciled, the furniture in it, the servants who worked there: all these things were paid for out of Alice's trust fund and belonged to her. Even the food they ate was, so to speak, but the droppings from her high chair. It was degrading, it was intolerable, and it was (should such thought ever occur to one or another of her parents) impossible to murder the child. Morgan Duquesne had maliciously seen to it that in the event of Alice's death before reaching her majority, the estate (including the house, the furniture, the servants, everything but the piddling annuity) trusted to Alice was to be divided among half a dozen irreproachable charities. Though it would have been inadvisable to contest too strongly this provision of the will (one's motive might be called into question), Roderick had received the same advice from all his lawyers: that this provision would stand up as well in court as all the rest had.

A man of ordinary resources and imagination might have desisted at this point, might have settled back ignobly in a borrowed armchair in his middle-middle-class house on Gwynn River Falls Drive (his, only in the sense that he lived there), and commenced his decay. Not Roderick Raleigh, for he was no ordinary man.

He set about his self-appointed task with no more exact knowledge of the science of psychology than was to be found laying around loose in the popular novels and movies of the time (though he considered himself a cultured man, he felt a rather donnish contempt for dry-as-dust science, a field of study he regarded as suitable only for garage mechanics), but he made quick progress through a number of paperbacks by Freud and his followers. On the subject of childhood psychoses he found Bruno Bettelheim and Anna Freud to be of immense utility—but really, if he had wanted to, he could have got along with nothing more than Dr. Spock.

The important thing to keep in mind when leading a child towards psychosis is that it should not feel loved. Nor should it feel, to any large degree, hated. It should feel, in general, as little as possible. Under the circumstances, it seemed to Roderick that this could be accomplished. Delphinia's feelings towards her daughter had never—at least since Morgan Duquesne's death—been other than ambivalent. She loved her daughter dutifully—but she envied her bitterly. She had, moreover, a natural talent for selfishness that Roderick had often envied, selfishness being a cardinal virtue in Roderick's rather utilitarian ethic. Had not his favourite philosopher (Roderick really did read philosophy) written: 'Selfishness is blessed—the wholesome, healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul'? He had, and Roderick's conduct was guided by that high principle.

The important thing was for the child to feel unloved, and so Roderick accordingly had set about not to love her. There are a hundred ways not-loving can be evidenced, but the underlying principles are two: unjust and arbitrary punishments and indifference. The first principle must be exercised with restraint to allow the second, and more important, principle to operate. Also, he was ingenious in inventing little ways to keep her 'off balance'. Thus, frequently when he was alone with her, he would praise her for doing things she had not done, call her by names not her own, and in general insist that what was not so, what she knew with a certainty was not so, was so, was so, was so. He was very mean to her but never, he prided himself, out of any native meanness on his part, only programmatically. His meanness was, in a sense, altruistic.

It was slow work—he had known from the first that it would be—and set-backs were not infrequent. She showed astonishing resilience. Blood, he had thought proudly, will tell.

His hardest problem was with the servants, for in proportion as Alice felt neglected by her parents she turned to the servants for friendship and a bit of consolation. They could not be expected to realise that this was not to be allowed, and it was sometimes hard to find cause for dismissing them. But eventually a suitable staff was assembled.

Roderick's hardest task had been to find the right governess for Alice, for governesses will, as a rule, show a certain interest in their charge, and even affection can creep in. This difficulty was aggravated by the fact that not Roderick but Jason, as executor of the will, hired the governesses. One after another, Roderick worked at eliminating these good women, usually by stage-managing a quarrel between the governess in question and his wife, which was settled, in the interests of family concord, by the dismissal of the former. At one time Roderick had hoped that Miss Stupp (or Stuck-Up, as Alice had nicknamed her) would work out, but alas, she tippled on such a scale and so brazenly that Delphinia, even she, had found it necessary to call her to account.

Then, with the advent of Mrs. Buckler, in 1960, Roderick knew that the search was over. Mrs. Buckler was in every sense a magnificent woman—fat, overbearing, crochety, secretly cruel, a congenital liar, a hypocrite, a snob, and a fake. She was everything that Roderick could have asked for in a governess.

Alice's response was immediate: she withdrew. But however far she might withdraw Mrs. Buckler would be there nagging at her to withdraw yet a little farther. There was no one she might turn to, no one who could listen to her little woes—and even if there had been, how was she, at age eight, to explain that for all Buckler's outward sweetness, the woman was a monster of cruelty? No one: she had no friends. When her grandfather had established the house on Gwynn River Falls Drive in her name, he had not taken into account that there would be few children in the neighbourhood. There was scarcely, this far out, any neighbourhood. The one child she had known best had been Dinah Watts, the daughter of Mrs. Watts, a former cook. Mrs. Watts had been fired shortly after Alice's fifth birthday, when it was discovered that she was stealing food from the Raleigh freezer for her own family. Mrs. Watts had denied this, but Delphinia had been able to prove it against her, and so Alice had seen no more of Dinah Watts.

Now Alice began to see Dinah Watts again. She would find her, at first, in the most unlikely places—under beds, inside closets, even, once, inside the automatic washer. Sometimes she was just the way she had always been, but sometimes she was a kitten—the kitten her Uncle Jason had given her for an unbirthday present. She was always sympathetic. She would say such things about Mrs. Buckler that Alice would be breaking into giggles over them the rest of the day—and Mrs. Buckler would never know that it was the grey kitten purring in Alice's lap that was causing the whole commotion.

Then, unaccountably (for the girl it was unaccountable; Roderick, who was torturing the kitten every night after Alice had gone to bed, could account for it very well), Dinah began to develop a mean streak. Her meanness progressed steadily until it was the equal of Buckler's, at which point Dinah bit Buckler (who had been pulling her tail), and she (Dinah) had to be sent off to the Humane Society. Her father explained to Alice what the Humane Society would do to Dinah. That was in September. From September to Christmas Roderick stepped up the pressure a little more each day. He was certain now of success. The child would spend entire hours talking to herself in corners. She had a very poor sense of what was going on around her. She grew indifferent to her lessons. She even stopped reading books. It was a matter, now that she stood at the brink of full psychosis, of waiting for the moment in which she would tip over into it and be lost from view.

Should Roderick achieve this goal, he had every reason to hope that Alice would not recover. Psychoses acquired between ages five and twelve are notoriously resistant to therapy. She would be committed to a good hospital, where her vegetable body could be kept in good health for decades. Jason was an old man and would soon die, and Roderick could then seek to be appointed trustee of his daughter's estate. Morgan Duquesne, oddly enough, had not provided explicitly against this possibility, and Roderick's lawyers had assured him that such an appointment was not without the bounds of probability. Entire fortunes have been squeezed through smaller loopholes.

He was, however, thwarted. On the Christmas before last, Jason had come snooping around, discovered his niece's condition, discharged Mrs. Buckler on the spot, and, in general, dashed Roderick's hopes. Miss Godwin was brought down from New York, and she stayed on with Alice despite Delphinia's and Roderick's most vehement protests. After eight months of therapy-cum-tutoring, Alice had wholly recovered the lost ground, and Miss Godwin recommended St. Arnobia's. From that day forth Alice was to be more than a transient guest at the house on Gwynn River Falls Drive.

Six years Roderick had laboured and planned; six years, with patient craft, he had spun his web, and then Fate, like a careless child playing in a meadow, had demolished it with a careless flick of her hand. Ah, there was no justice.

Last December, shortly before Alice had come home for the Christmas holiday, Miss Godwin had summoned her parents together to give them a few words of earnest counsel: 'I only wanted to suggest that the three of you spend as much time together as you can—talking, or playing games—whatever you think fit and will enjoy.'

'I don't think I need you to tell me how to raise my own child,' Delphinia said loftily.

'Of course not, Mrs. Raleigh. I'm sure that such a course of action is the one you had intended in any case. No doubt, I have been over-explicit, not to say over-obvious. Please accept my apologies.'

'I hope,' Roderick inquired delicately, 'there is no reason to fear ... a relapse? She is no longer, I trust... in danger?'

'Unfortunately, Mr Raleigh, recovery from a mental breakdown does not provide immunity against a recurrence. There will always be some danger; there are scars, and though they have healed they are still tender. We should never forget, should we, that it has happened?'

'Oh, never,' Roderick agreed heartily.

So, following Miss Godwin's advice, a series of 'family evenings' were inaugurated. Conversation was ruled out by tacit agreement from the first, for the arts of speech as they were employed by Delphinia were not peaceful arts. Various games were tried, but Delphinia seldom had the patience to see them through to the end, and it was evident that both she and Roderick moved their counters about the board lackadaisically, with no very zestful sense of competition. Television was their usual recourse, for it demanded the least of them. Roderick, Delphinia, and Alice—the family—would sit whole hours before the television screen watching what purported to be comedies. (Delphinia had ruled out mysteries and westerns as being too violent.) Roderick tried hardest to have fun; he would say, 'Hey, will you look at that,' Or, 'Say, isn't that a crazy idea.' Delphinia was only moved to break the silence at the sight of opulence. A fur coat, appeals to come to Jamaica or buy a new Lincoln, swank interiors: any of these could move her to grudging approval—or to tears. Alice said nothing, and she was usually first to abandon these little soirees, pleading homework as an excuse. The only evening that was something of a success was the one that the family spent watching the servants decorate the giant Christmas tree; that, they all agreed, was a lot of fun.

It was on that evening, the 23rd of December, after the trimming of the tree, after both Alice and her mother had been put to bed, that Roderick went down town for a drink. He avoided the more central bars where he might meet acquaintances preferring, tonight, something dingier, where he might become maudlin if he chose. The holidays always set his Weltschmertz to aching. He found just the thing he needed on Willingly Street—a bar neither too shabby to be perilous or so tidy as to make him feel he needed to keep his collar buttoned, a bar he could condescend to, a bar he could be adequately miserable in. He ordered one of what the bartender was having, tossed it off neat, sipped the chaser, ordered a second. He regarded, with benevolent irony, the message soaped on the mirror—Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men.

'Good Will to you too,' Roderick toasted, raising the shot-glass.

'Thanks,' said the bartender, 'I could use some.' He made a woeful gesture with his towel, encompassing the whole bar. With the exception of a man slouched over a whiskey at the other end, Roderick was the only customer.

'Christmas!' Roderick thought to himself, as the tides of whiskey and rhetoric began conjointly to swell about him. 'Season of renewed hope! Season of glad tidings! Where do you find me? In the stews of the city, alone, no longer young, illusions shattered ...' The soliloquy broke down at this point, as Roderick groped for other misfortunes to enter on his debit. He might have mentioned the very real grievance of having an income of a bare ten thousand per annum, but he couldn't find any way to give this the metaphysical ring of the rest of it.

Infinite sadness! Roderick was overwhelmed by an infinite sadness. Everything around him was sad: the bald, paunchy bartender; the nondescript customer (who raised his glass to Roderick now in a pathetic parody of good cheer); the fly-specked mirror with its ironic message soaped on; the grained surface of the bar; the whiskey glass; the whiskey; the chaser. Sad, sad, infinitely sad!

Before Roderick had finished his second drink, the bartender had placed a third beside it. 'That's from him, if it's okay with you.'

Roderick lifted the drink and made a toast to his benefactor's health. His benefactor came sidling down the bar, a few stools at a time, and the first part of his address to Roderick was thus conducted across a gap of several barstools.

'Forget it, forget it! It's nothing. Hell, you may not believe this, but there was a time when I bought drinks all around for twenty, thirty people. Hell yes. "Bottoms up", I'd say and twenty, thirty glasses would go bottoms up.' He demonstrated this principle on a reduced scale. 'Another one,' he said. The bartender measured it out.

'That one's on me,' Roderick insisted.

'Thanks. And Merry Christmas to you, goddammit.' He was near enough now for Roderick to size him up, which was, at the moment, exactly what he stood in need of. A tall man, beginning to spread in his middle-age, he was wearing a sagging suit, short in the legs and tight about the middle, that he could only have obtained at the back door of a funeral parlour—or at the gate of a prison. His black, axle-greased hair was long as the veriest teenager's, a glaring anachronism above his seamed, anxious face. His eyes were green, disconcertingly green.

'You wouldn't believe it to look at me now, the man said, 'but I was once worth half a million. Five hundred thousand dollars. Almost.'

No, I wouldn't believe it, Roderick thought. He smiled and said, 'As much as that! You must have been rolling in it.'

'Yeah. For all the good it did me.' He stared moodily into the empty shotglass.

'I see,' Roderick said, pointing to the black ring on his companion's right hand, 'that we are brothers.' He brought forward his own right hand for the man to see the identical ring there, and they exchanged the secret Masonic handclasp. 'My name is Roderick Raleigh,' Roderick volunteered.

'Mine's Harry Dorman. You ever heard of me before?' Roderick shook his head, but Harry seemed not to believe this. 'I'm not ashamed of anything I've done,' he insisted aggressively. 'I'd do it again, if I thought I'd stand a chance.'

'I don't doubt that you would—but I really haven't heard of you.'

Harry Dorman seemed, if anything, rather aggrieved than cheered by this. 'It was in all the papers, as far as New York. It made the headlines for a whole week. I can't even go into a restaurant around here without some crumb comes up to me and asks, "Aren't you Harry Dorman?" You'd think they could forget in sixteen years.' That long?'

'I got life, but it was commuted for good behaviour.' 'Did you murder somebody?'

'Hell no—I was the guy that engineered the Larpenter snatch. You mean to say you never heard of that?'

'I'm sorry to confess my ignorance—but I would be most interested—yes, really most interested in hearing about it now. Bartender—two more, and can't you turn the radio up so we can all hear Adeste Fidelis?'

'...and that,' Harry concluded, 'is how I got sent up, and that's where I've been for the last sixteen years—the pen.'

'Stone walls,' Roderick began, after a judicious pause, 'do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. That is to say, they do, but the essentials of prison life can be found elsewhere as well. A family, for instance, can be every bit as confining as a prison. A stupid wife can be as stultifying to the intellect, and a child's hands can grasp your wrists as firmly as manacles. You were sentenced to life imprisonment, but your sentence was commuted and now you are free. I,' Roderick said, assuming as best the barstool would permit the attitude of a king enchained, 'can never be free. There is no power on earth that can commute my life sentence to Gwynn River Falls Drive!'

Nicely done! he told himself, nicely done indeed!

But Harry was no connoisseur. He went on worrying his own meatless bone after the barest assenting nod to the Prisoner of the Suburbs. 'My mistake,' he said morosely, 'was not rubbing out that son of a bitch stool pigeon before he went to the police.'

'Yes, that was a mistake too.'

'A half million dollars,' Harry said, shaking his head. 'I had it in my hands. These hands,' he said, specifying the two that he now raised several inches above the bar, a dangerous manoeuvre in his condition. It made Roderick dizzy even to witness it.

'But what,' Roderick asked, 'determines the amount in these cases? The Lindberg's kidnapper only asked for $50,000 as I recall. You asked for ten times that much—and you say you got it. Why didn't you shoot the limit? What is the limit? Won't they be desperate enough to pay anything?' Before Harry could assemble answers for these questions, a young woman stopped into the bar long enough to ask if either of the two gentlemen would like to buy her a drink.

You should have been here an hour ago, beautiful,' Harry said regretfully.

'A cup of coffee will fix that, baby,' the young woman insured him.

'It's money I'm talking about—there ain't but a couple bucks left;

The young lady left them.

Damn it,' Harry said. 'It's been sixteen years, and I could use a piece. When I lived down in Norfolk it used to be I could knock off some any time I wanted to. I scouted up business there for this nigger madam, name of Bessy ..

'Bessy who?'

'Bessy McKay. You know of her?' 'Curiouser and curiouser,' said Roderick. 'I do.' She's a good ol' girl, but I hear she's come down in the world since then.'

We've all come down in the world, brother,' Roderick insured Harry. 'But the question is—can they keep us down?' Hell no!'

'O my unconquerable soul!' Said Roderick. 

'What's that?'

'Nothing—just a tag from Virgil. A question, my dear brother, a question: when you said earlier—correct me if I misquote you—that you would do it again (I need not, I hope, Mention what), did you speak ... in earnest?'

You're goddam right!'

'How does a million dollars sound to you, brother? Shouldn't that about make up for the cost of living rise in the past sixteen years?'

Harry's expression was one of scornful incredulity.

'I am as serious,' Roderick assured him, 'as it is possible for a man in my present condition to be—which is rather more serious than I am at any other time. Consider, Harry, consider —a million dollars, and you will risk not sixteen years this time but five at the limit. I shall have to check that at the law library of course, but I think a conspiracy to commit fraud will involve not much more than that.'

'You're out of your head, mister.'

Truly, if we are to continue this discussion, it were best we switched to coffee. Come, Harry, put your arm around my shoulder. To the cafeteria! Oh, Harry, if you only knew what divine ferment my mind is in now, the creative energies your tale has released within me! Do you know Nietzsche?'

'Who?' Harry asked tolerantly. They had left the bar and were stumbling arm in arm through the grimy midnight streets

'The greatest of the philosophers, a profound man. He wrote: "Whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative." '

'Sounds like Communism to me.'

Roderick took a deep breath of the sharp-edged wintry air. The stars, palely shining through the incandescent nimbus overspreading the metropolis, seemed to waver and spin like the stars of van Gogh, and Roderick began to laugh. 'Harry,' he shouted loudly, 'I'm an artist! I'm a goddam creative artist! I'm a genius!'

'You're some kind of nut, seems more like it.'

Roderick stopped laughing. He pulled Harry close to him so that their noses almost touched in an Eskimo kiss. Staring into those green eyes, Roderick whispered, 'Harry, how would you like to help me kidnap my own daughter?'

The morning of Monday, the 2nd of July, found Roderick on a bench in Baltimore's Carrol Park, where he was benignly feeding crumbs to pigeons. Roderick liked pigeons, they were so manipulable, and the noise of their squabbling provided a comfortable background for serious thought, a sort of environmental static.

Roderick's masterpiece was nearing its consummation. The ransom money was being assembled in banks all about the city; the police were keeping themselves busy with futile examinations of the Raleigh's servants; Roderick's only task for the day was to sit tight and to evidence just that degree of anxiety that a loving father should, under the circumstances, evidence, no more and no less.

There was no need to worry: the plan was thorough, the plan had foreseen all contingencies, the plan was working. It had all the scrupulous definition of a Flemish altarpiece, but the details were present without in any way obscuring its bold outlines. And it was bold! Its central feature, the notion of hiding Alice behind the colour of her own, metamorphosed skin, had come to Roderick in such a moment of ecstatic vision as Paul must have experienced going towards Damascus. Roderick had been passing by a movie theatre at the time, caught up in his planning, and the marquee of the theatre had announced as one of its features 'Black Like Me', the true story of a journalist who, to learn what it was like to be a Negro, had used chemicals to change his skin, colouring. From that little mustard seed the whole great oak—or, in this case, mustard tree—had grown.

There was justice of a sort in it too. The money he was appropriating from Alice's trust was, in the larger view that Roderick took, his by right. A $10,000 annuity was not fair recompense for the labour of being married to such a woman as Delphinia; the million he was coming into now could, in this sense, be looked upon as back wages. Whether he would stay on with Delphinia in the future depended upon the outcome of his auxiliary plan—or, as he had dubbed it in a mment of whimsy, 'Operation Schizo'. If Operation Schizo were a success—that is to say, if Alice returned from her kidnapping in a very discomposed state—then Roderick might very well hang on, at least until Jason's death, when he would have a chance to be appointed executor of the poor mad girl's estate. But very likely Alice would not be given enough time to crack up, in which case—Good-bye, Baltimore! "Good-bye, very probably, U.S.A.!

There was no need to worry: the plan would work, and it was working. Yet he was uneasy, distinctly uneasy. Perhaps all artists go through a similar period of misdoubting in the creation of their masterpieces. Small comfort, that!

Roderick crumpled the emptied bag of crumbs, tossed it at the pigeons, who scattered with an indignant protest, and walked out of the park along Baltimore-Washington Boulevard. Though he walked, as he thought, aimlessly, it was curious how quickly he arrived at the post office.

It could not hurt, he reasoned, if he just went in the door. He could buy a book of stamps at the stamp window. There was nothing unusual in that.

On the way to the stamp window he glanced at Box 445. There was, though this was quite unthinkable, a letter within the box. He stopped in his tracks to assure himself that this was not a trick of light on the window of the box. There was a letter there.

He bought a book of stamps and left the post office. He dared not open the box, because he had every reason to suppose the police were trailing him. He had to suppose that they were. If they were to discover the postal box in which he had been receiving his mail from Dorman and Bessy ... no, it had been unwise even to go into the post office; he dare not open the box.

He had told them, a week before the kidnapping, to stop writing to him. And there was no one else who knew of the existence of that box. Only Dorman and Bessy. One of them had needlessly jeopardised an infallible plan—and for what reason?

Roderick went into a bar to consider this with greater care. If he were being followed, it would not be thought improbable for him to ease the tension with a whiskey or two.

The letter had to be from Harry Dorman. As he drank, Roderick became more and more convinced of it. Bessy could be trusted to obey orders, but Dorman had a rebellious streak. It was like him to risk the whole enterprise for a piece of foolishness. Assuming, always, that it was foolishness. What did the letter say? What could Harry Dorman possibly have to tell him that could not wait until tomorrow? Nothing. Unless ...

'He wouldn't dare,' Roderick said aloud.

Unless the bastard was planning a double-cross. Unless he was asking for more money. Roderick could just imagine what the letter would be like. 'Dear Roderick,' it would begin— though Harry, who hadn't graduated grade school, would probably find some way to misspell his name. 'Dear Rodorik, I don't like getting only $150,000 for my share of the work, when it's me and Bessy and Bittle who do all the work. I think we should get haff. Yours truly, Harry.'

That son of a bitch! That greedy bastard! He thought he had Roderick in a position where he couldn't refuse. He knew that he couldn't go to the police. It was the same as blackmail. It was blackmail.

'Damn,' Roderick said aloud. 'Damn!'

'Watch it, mister,' the bartender said. 'That's how you get heart attacks.'

His hands trembled as he lifted the water glass to his lips. He felt almost dizzy with the effort of repressing his righteous indignation.

Blackmail: the word brought back visions of pimply-faced Donald Bogan, that other son of a bitch, the king of them all.

Christ, how Roderick would have liked to get hold of him again! So long ago, so many years, and yet the hatred he bore him was still as tangible and immediately as a band of hot iron about his brow. Bogan had never been one to be satisfied with his share either. He had squeezed Roderick until he was bloodless: first, the bribe he'd demanded before he could get into Kappa Kappa Kappa; then the little rake-offs from Roderick's commissions from the bootleggers and cathouses he worked with; eventually Bogan even demanded a cut of his meagre allowance. In dollars and cents Bogan's squeeze had never amounted to much, not the way Roderick looked at things today, but then it had been the world.

And it had been Bogan, he must not forget that he would never forget, nobody but Bogan, who had ended Roderick's law career before it had had a proper chance to begin.

Yes, Bogan and Harry Dorman were two of a kind, but this time Roderick had his past experience to profit from. If Harry was now allowed a chance to double-cross him, if he were to meet an untimely end... (Though whose end; really, could be timelier?) He had pronounced the words himself that sentenced him now: 'My mistake was not rubbing out that sonofabitch stool pigeon before he went to the police.' Or, Roderick might amend, before he was caught by them.

There was, in the bottom of Roderick's dresser drawer, a gun, an unregistered war souvenir he'd bought as a young man. He had never had occasion to use it, though a few rounds of ammunition had come with it. Thinking about that gun helped to ease the tense muscles of his neck and shoulders, and his face assumed a more usual hue—a transformation that the bartender, observing it from the other end of the bar, regarded with approval.

Back at the post office on that same Monday, 2nd of July, the clerk was still busy filling out notices to box renters, reminding them that the rent for the third quarter of the year had come due. Box rental was something nobody seemed to remember—probably because it only came up four times a year. By noon almost every box in the building had a notice in it.