The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror Page 13

  The husband had a new, younger woman in his life, possibly. His secret was, he was in love with someone else.

  The more Audrey thought of it, the more self-evident this seemed. For she was the husband’s third wife. He was a man who had used up women, you might be led to think.

  There was something debasing in this, the wife hadn’t wanted to acknowledge when they’d first met. She had fallen in love with Henry Wheeling—naively.

  Marriage to Henry Wheeling had seemed to the wife like stepping into a large shiny vehicle, the husband’s possession. It was not jointly owned, it was his. As she had stepped trustingly into a stranger’s life, but he had not stepped into hers, she felt more or less constantly disoriented.

  Eight years before, the wife had been the new, younger woman in Henry Wheeler’s life; his wife of the time had seemed truly old. Now, there was little difference between her (she was almost fifty-one) and the predecessor-wife whom she could recall only vaguely like a figure in a film seen long ago.

  In fact, at the time of the divorce the predecessor-wife had been younger than Audrey was now. She’d felt guilt for supplanting the woman with whom (she’d thought) she might have been friends . . . But the husband had insisted—The marriage is over, dead. It has been for years. I’m deeply in love with you, darling.

  Henry had seemed so sincere, even anxious that she return his feeling for her! The effect on Audrey had been dazzling and disorienting as if a blinding light had been shone into her eyes, that had become adjusted to semidarkness.

  She had been married before, as a tremulous young woman in her twenties. She had loved her composer-husband very much and had been devastated when he’d died of a quick-acting pancreatic cancer, at the age of thirty-one. She had not married again and had ceased to think of herself as marriageable. In time, it would seem astonishing to her that her (deceased, much mourned) husband had ever loved her.

  Fortunately, she’d been able to lose herself in satisfying work—helping to manage the philanthropic affairs of her large, affluent family, who lived in residences in New York City and upstate New York, Maine, Florida, and St. Bart’s, and had established a foundation. It was through her work with the Clarendon Foundation that she’d met Henry Wheeling—unless it was Henry Wheeling who’d met her.

  She was an “heiress”—(the term was awkwardly nineteenth-century, suggestive of spinsterhood)—for her grandparents had pitied her as a young, childless widow, and had provided generously for her even before their deaths. She’d had no suspicion that Henry Wheeling might be interested in her for her money—at least, not exclusively for her money—for at the outset he’d seemed to love her, and to be delighted by her, very much.

  She’d reminded him of Audrey Hepburn, he’d said. The very name “Audrey” was fortuitous.

  As the husband’s third wife, she had learned belatedly that there was a clear pattern in her husband’s marriages. Liaisons with young(er) women overlapped with deteriorating marriages; as a liaison evolved into a marriage, eventually a new liaison was formed, overlapping with the new deteriorating marriage. So far as Audrey could determine her husband had remained married to his first wife for eighteen years, and to his second wife for eleven years. With each wife the difference in ages was increasing as well. But the third wife, married in her midforties, had to concede that the wives of earlier eras had been younger than she, of course, as Henry had been younger. In his mid- and late fifties Henry Wheeling had lost interest in women his own age, who were invisible to him as objects of sexual attraction; Audrey had been “young” to him then, and her delicate-boned pale-haired beauty, or what remained of that beauty, had continued to captivate his interest, to a degree.

  Buffeted by headache pain the wife lay very still in the darkened bedroom. In an adjoining sitting room, a phone rang. The wife could hear the husband pick up the receiver and speak quietly, and then the husband was standing over the wife, explaining that one of his colleagues from the Institute had called, and asked him to join a group for dinner. “But I won’t go, if you’d rather I didn’t. I’m happy to have room service here in the room, with you.”

  The wife felt a swirl of nausea. The wife could not have tolerated the smell of food in close quarters; it was all she could do to keep from leaning over the edge of the bed and helplessly vomiting onto the floor, for she was too weak to make her way to the bathroom.

  The wife insisted no, the husband must not stay with her, but must go out to dinner.

  “Are you sure, Audrey?”—the husband stood over her, brooding.

  She was too weak now to open her eyes, to observe him. She could barely respond to whatever it was he was saying. And after a while, when she could open her eyes, she saw that he was gone—the bedroom was empty.

  She did not want to think—He’s with her now. This has all been planned. Why did I not see this, am I so blind?

  She had no memory of a steep hill in Capri. Or any visit to Capri at all. That must have been another, earlier wife.

  A spike in her forehead. Between her eyes.

  He was pounding the spike into the bone of her skull, with a mallet.

  Don’t be ridiculous, darling. Of course I love you.

  How could there be anyone else in my life—except you?

  He was laughing at her. Not openly but with a kind of pity.

  She tried to push him away. She clutched at her own head, as if to lessen the throbbing.

  She was feeling ever more nauseated. Naively she thought—If I am sick, maybe this nightmare will end. The poison will be purged.

  With apologies, the husband had left the hotel. You could see that Henry Wheeling was a gentleman, and very solicitous of his wife. She supposed that he was with colleagues at the Spanish restaurant in the Old Quarter. She wondered if there was a young, female employee with them—one of the research scientists.

  Eighteen years, the first marriage. Eleven years, the second.

  How humiliating, the third marriage might end abruptly, after so many fewer years . . .

  She was haunted by the memory of her fear on the stone steps: her husband’s impatience, the way he’d nudged the backs of her shoes. The way he’d laughed at her (silly, baseless) fears. The way he’d finally gripped her upper arm as if he’d had to restrain himself from throwing her down . . .

  There had been other occasions, more frequent in the past year, when it was difficult for the wife, a woman of above-average intelligence, not to suspect that the husband no longer loved her. There’d been a singular incident about six weeks ago—of which, at the present time, she didn’t want to think.

  Her family, relatives, friends had all seemed to like Henry Wheeling, for it was very easy to like Henry Wheeling. Yet, they’d suggested that Audrey and her husband-to-be might draw up a prenuptial agreement.

  And one of her cousins had murmured You might want to look into his background, Audrey. Just to be sure.

  She’d resented such suggestions. She had not dared bring up the possibility of a prenuptial agreement, for fear that Henry would be insulted, and not want to marry her; it was something of an affront, and Henry Wheeling himself earned a high salary at his Institute. Impulsively she broke off relations with some of her family members, as with some of her oldest friends who’d known her young husband many years before. What did they know of Henry Wheeling! He’d been a professor (neurobiology), a research scientist, a consultant, and now he was the director of one of the most prestigious research institutes in the country. They were jealous, envious. They did not wish her well. She’d been thrilled at the prospect of remarrying after so long and of being again loved, like a person who has been misdiagnosed as permanently paralyzed, told now that she can walk after all . . .

  I love you very much, Audrey.

  . . . deeply in love with you.

  Now she had to wonder: did the husband want to kill her, or—did he simply hope t
hat she might die?

  There was a profound difference, she thought. Tried to think.

  If the second, she was not in immediate danger. If the first, she was in immediate danger.

  In her will most of her estate would go to the husband, whose will was more complicated since Henry had children by previous wives, and wanted to provide for them as for other family members. So far as Audrey knew, she might not even be in Henry’s will.

  Because Audrey had always been relatively well-to-do, finances had never been a problem for her. But she could understand how, for Henry Wheeling, who had, as he frequently said, made his way solely by his own effort, first in the academic world and then in the research/corporate world, the issue of money was not so simple.

  Audrey had only the vaguest idea how much her estate was worth, in its entirety. She could not have guessed within—several million dollars? More?

  She wondered if Henry thought of this. If Henry actually knew, more than she did, what her estate was worth.

  What a blunder it had been, to come to this remote foreign place with Henry! When he hadn’t really wanted her with him, and had been honest enough to hint at his feelings, which she’d managed to ignore.

  Can’t you realize, my dear wife, that I am in love with someone else? Haven’t you noticed that I have not made love to you, I have scarcely glanced at you, in a very long time?

  She could think of nothing else. Lying suffused with pain, her head positioned on the pillows like an explosive liquid that must not be jolted, she was mesmerized by the situation in which, in this foreign country below the equator, she found herself.

  At the Institute there were a number of young women scientists. Some were very young—post-docs. Henry Wheeling was proud of the Institute’s efforts at hiring women and minorities as he called it. He’d been involved personally, as he often said, in interviewing prospective candidates . . .

  He was a very charismatic man, the husband. She had fallen in love with him within an hour of meeting him—which had seemed romantic at the time, but now less so.

  She could not risk being sick to her stomach in their elegant bedroom, still less in their bed, and so shakily she made her way into the bathroom, just in time to vomit helplessly into the toilet, gasping and sobbing; the violent heaves shook her slender body, as a giant hand might have shaken her; within seconds, her mouth stung with acid. She flushed the toilet, and flushed it again. She was very warm, and still her headache raged. Another spasm of vomiting, though very little remained inside her. She was being punished for her vanity—was she? Imagining that a man of the stature of Henry Wheeling would have wished to marry her?

  So sick! This was her punishment.

  The vomiting had not seemed to help, as ordinary vomiting might have. She located the husband’s toiletry bag, and fumbled inside for his medications. Barely able to see for the tears in her eyes, she found the little plastic bottle of Diamox, but when she managed to open it she saw to her surprise that the medication wasn’t in yellow capsules but in chunky white pills.

  For a moment she couldn’t understand. Then, she realized that Henry must have substituted another medication for the altitude sickness preventative, when he’d given her the capsules.

  But why would Henry have done that? Such an act of cruelty, and duplicity . . .

  In another plastic bottle in the husband’s bag she found the yellow capsules. These were non-prescription “lutein” vitamins.

  He wants me to be sick. Deathly sick.

  . . . wants me to die.

  She was stunned, she could not believe this. Henry must have made a mistake with the pills . . . In her physical distress she could not think clearly.

  With water, she took one of the authentic Diamox pills. Then, she took a second.

  Desperately too she took two sleeping pills, ten-milligram Ambien, out of her own toiletry bag. She must sleep! She could not bear to remain conscious any longer.

  She staggered back to the bed and lapsed into a tortuous nightmare-sleep and did not wake until late morning of the following day when above her, as above an opened grave, a figure stood haloed in bright sunshine and a male voice came as if from a distance uplifted, concerned—Audrey? Darling? Please open your eyes, I’m very worried about you.

  2. Galapagos

  “We don’t help animals here.”

  It was a flat blunt statement. It was not meant to sound cruel or provocative but only matter-of-fact. Help was such a friendly word, in the human/social world the wife inhabited, that help might be spoken with a kind of disdain was startling to her.

  The sixteen passengers in the wave-buffeted dinghy, each wearing a bright orange safety vest, and most in shorts and hiking sandals, stared. The straight-backed Ecuadoran guide Eduardo in his National Parks khaki uniform, a dark-skinned individual of about fifty, of Indian descent, was pointing to the skeletal remains of a pelican trapped in prickly underbrush only a few yards away, at eye level, as the open boat passed. The exotic bird’s wings were widespread as if it had struggled terribly and its distinctive hooked bill was open as in a desperate appeal. Help me! Help me!

  The unlucky pelican, the guide explained, had probably been a juvenile, unaccustomed to flying, that had fallen into the underbrush and failed to free itself. It had “thrashed and thrashed” before growing exhausted and giving up.

  Some of the passengers took photographs. The several children in the boat stared glumly. They had not yet seen a live pelican—but here was a pelican corpse!

  In lightly accented English the guide continued, as if rebuking objections he’d heard many times in the past:

  “It is not our role in the Galapagos Park to ‘help’—to interfere with the animals. We never touch them, we never feed or protect them. We allow the animals to live as naturally as they would live if human beings had never existed—that is the mandate of the park.”

  Slowly the dinghy passed by the pelican remains. The husband was frowning into his camera. The wife shivered, and looked away from the mummified bird.

  She thought—But if Eduardo required help, he would be very grateful for whatever he could get. All of us, desperately grateful.

  Since their arrival in the Galapagos the point had been made repeatedly that no one must interfere with the animal or plant species in their pristine habitat, neither to hinder nor to help. How hostile its overseers were to notions of mercy! The previous evening, in a session on the cruise ship intended to prepare visitors for their first full day in the islands, they’d heard a lecture on a history of the Galapagos and watched a PBS documentary that dealt, in part, with the phenomenon of mass starvation of Galapagos creatures on an average of every four to seven years.

  As many as 60 percent of the animals died at these times. But the 40 percent that survived “strengthened” their species—it was the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest by natural selection.

  Why this happened, no one seemed to know. Ordinarily this part of the Pacific Ocean constituted the richest, most nutrient-saturated waters on earth, but there was a cycle of some indeterminate kind that brought mass starvation and death.

  The more familiar you were with deaths en masse, and rocky shores strewn with the decaying carcasses of sea lions, fur seals, sea turtles, shorebirds, iguanas and every sort of lizard, the more “natural” it was, the wife supposed; of course she understood that trying to alleviate conditions on such a scale was futile. Even if you wanted to help the animals survive, you could not. Yet, human famine in Africa and other devastated regions of the world was meant to be confronted, and combated; we are not supposed to give up on our fellow man, even in the interests of natural selection.

  “It’s very painful to see so much death”—in the ship’s lounge the wife had spoken hesitantly. Often her remarks, though seemingly objective to her, only just statements of fact, were interpreted by the husband as whining, compla
ining.

  “Well, darling—there is death literally everywhere. Each creature that is born, each plant—has to die. Isn’t that self-evident?”

  It was! Of course.

  Since the wife’s terrible illness in Quito, the husband had been kindly with her. He had not been impatient even when she’d had a bout of faintness walking slowly through the airport at Guayiquil, to the small plane that took them to Baltra Island in the Galapagos, approximately seven hundred miles from the Ecuadoran coast. He’d carried one of her bags, and had not tried to hurry her.

  It had been a miracle, how the wife’s altitude sickness had vanished as soon as they’d left Quito. The coastal city of Guayiquil was at sea level; once there the wife could breathe deeply again, and the raging headache subsided.

  Her hours of misery in Quito had begun to blur in her memory. The husband had scheduled two days in the capital city, for there were many sights he’d wanted to see including a rain forest two hours’ drive from the city, as well as local shrines and markets, to which he went (the wife assumed) with some of his colleagues; the wife had been too ill to accompany him, and had stayed behind in the hotel room with the shades drawn, near-comatose with pain and nausea. She had been able to eat virtually nothing, and must have lost nearly ten pounds. But the illness had ended, it was better now to forget.

  A misunderstanding. My mistake.

  He hadn’t wanted me to come with him, and I’d insisted . . .