A Creed for the Third Millennium (14 page)

And what was the significance of the
woman? Such a very unusual woman, Judith Carriol. Mysterious. Her eyes were like
lustrous but opaque pearls, layer upon ultrathin layer that a man would have to
keep peeling off forever to come at the kernel of truth in their centres. Still
and lissome, elegant and remote. Leonardo da Vinci would have used her instead
of La Gioconda to produce his most memorable painting. Though indeed she was a
painting. A self-portrait. The question he should be asking himself was, How
cunning was her hand as artist? She had been wearing violet, a colour exactly
opposite to the colour of her eyes, a colour that shaded her thick white white
skin with exquisite opalescent subtlety, and made her hair seem
blue-black.

When she had touched his hand with her
hand, he had undergone a presentiment. Not a thrill of the flesh; more the
opposite, a thrill of the unflesh. And in the throes of the moment he knew she
possessed meaning for him. So he became instantly hideously afraid, and recoiled
from her. Now he lay without sleeping, thinking of all the things he least
wanted to remember. He had his niche, he was happy and content in it. But why
had she come
this
winter, the winter of his discontent, and made his
vague restlessness more lonely and acute? Why had she come now? Patterns. Of
course there was God. How else could a single thread make so much sense out of
so much randomness?

She was not young. Forty, at least. He
was good at delving beneath a well-preserved exterior to guess at real age. It
would have been better had she been young. Youth was easier to spurn, youth was
insecure and could be brought to blame itself without questioning why it was
spurned. She was psychically perceptive, she was a knowing one. Not one to be
turned away without a valid and intelligent reason. He didn't know why he should
feel so incredibly strongly that he must succeed in turning her away, that he
must go back to Holloman and the predictable tenor of his days. Could a man read his future in a woman's face?
Could a future be so great, so awful?

Mama. I want my mother! I want my family!
Why did I refuse to let James come with me? Even Mary would be better than this
isolation. Why did I congratulate myself on slipping their delicate loving and
serving leash?

And as the night wore on his eyes grew
sloppier, their lids more willing to be flaccid. O sleep, great healer, take
this pain from me! Give me peace! And sleep did. The last conscious vestige of
thought he remembered when he was awake again was a steadfast resolution. That
he would not let her steal his soul. That somehow, no matter what, he would
remain his own man.

They both slept in, so neither of them
went to the trial of Eddie Marcus the following morning. And they met quite
accidentally at the street corner beyond the motel, he coming back from a walk,
she starting out.

They stopped to look at one another, her
eyes eager and bright and young, his eyes apprehensive and tired and
old.

Then he turned and began to pace
alongside her.

'Part of you,' she said, her breath
spreading as white as the snowy world, 'is very happy in Holloman.'

His heart lurched as his mind recognized
the beginning of the fulfilment of a presentiment.
'All
of me is very
happy in Holloman, Dr Carriol.'

'After listening to you through lunch
yesterday, there's no way I can believe that. There's at least one part of you
which cares too much about the whole world to be happy living and working in
Holloman.'

'No! I have no wish to be anywhere else
or do anything else!' he cried loudly.

She nodded. In violet she had been
enigmatic; this fine, agonizingly cold morning she was triumphant in scarlet. 'That is undoubtedly true. Just
the same, I want you to come to Washington with me. Today.'

'Washington?'

'I work in Washington, Joshua. The
Department of the Environment. I am the head of Section Four, but I suppose that
news doesn't tell you a thing.'

'No, it doesn't.'

'Section Four is the Environment think
tank.'

'Then you have a very responsible
position,' he said, not knowing what else to say.

'Yes, indeed I do. I care about my job,
Dr Christian.' She seemed unaware that a moment before she had called him
Joshua. 'I care enough to risk a rebuff, enough even to persist in the face of a
rebuff. Because you are trying to rebuff me, aren't you?'

'Yes.'

'I know you're a loner. I know what a
brilliant little clinic you have in Holloman. I know you're completely dedicated
to the individual approach. And I am not trying to wean you away from your
chosen life and work, believe me. I'm certainly not about to offer you a job in
Washington, if that's what's worrying you.'

Her voice was beautiful, deep and lazy
and tranquil; it washed over those who heard it like a fall of silk, and it
could if it wanted mitigate the effect of the words it uttered. As it did now.
Listening to it, Dr Christian began to relax, to think of his fears if not as
baseless at least as too morbid. She wasn't trying to persuade him to leave
Holloman for good!

'I want you to come with me to Washington
to meet one of my very dear colleagues. Moshe Chasen. You won't know the name,
because he's not in our field. Moshe is a purely statistical analyst working in
Section Four. On relocation. Since lunch yesterday I have done nothing but think
about what you were saying, and I am very concerned that you and Moshe should
meet before he gets into stride. You see, I have just given him the task of
completely reorganizing relocation, and he's groping for the right direction
to head. Come with me today! If he could talk to you, it would be a godsend for
him.'

He sighed. 'I have too much work in
Holloman.'

'Nothing that can't wait a week, or you
wouldn't have come to Hartford to sit in on a trial,' she countered.

'A week?'

'Just a week.'

'All right, Dr Carriol, you can have your
week. But not one minute longer.'

'Oh, thank you! My name is Judith, if I
didn't tell you that already. Please call me Judith! Because I intend to call
you Joshua.'

They turned back towards the motel. 'I'll
have to go home first,' he said, thinking that might shake her.

But she had no intention of letting him
shake her. 'All right, I may as well come with you,' she said, linking her arm
through his cosily. 'We can catch the night train from Holloman straight through
to Washington. It isn't even out of our way.'

'I'm not booked on the train.'

She laughed. 'No problem! I have priority
status.'

Dr Christian had no choice save to give
in.

They caught the noon bus from Hartford to
Holloman with ten seconds to spare, Dr Carriol sitting carefully hugging her
glow of victory within her, Dr Christian sitting silently wondering what he had
let himself in for.

He didn't like being away from the
clinic, though there was really no reason why he couldn't absent himself more
often than he did; and she was inarguably right when she contended that he could
spare the time to come to Washington if he could spare the same space of time to
sit in a court. How to explain to her that the Eddie Marcus trial had been in
the nature of a small vacation? And that a trip to the federal capital complete
with serious conferences would be anything but a vacation? She was pushy, not the
sort to take no for an answer once she had made up her mind to get a yes. He
detested the feeling that he had been and was still being manipulated by her,
yet on the surface he had no grounds for calling her conduct manipulatory.
However, gut instincts were feelings he respected deeply; and his gut instinct
about this trip to Washington was to get out of it at all costs.

She elected to walk the mile from the
Holloman bus depot to 1047 Oak Street, declining to let him carry her
suitcase.

'I travel light,' she said, 'on purpose,
so I don't have to stand around looking weak and helpless, waiting for a nice
man to rescue me. Such a waste of time!'

Outside his twin dwellings he lost his
courage, a typical bachelor son unable to face his mother's inevitable
curiosity. So he took Dr Carriol into 1045 instead, put both their suitcases
down in the back stairwell, and ushered her soberly through the inner door. What
had originally been the kitchen of the bottom apartment was now a reception and
waiting room. Empty. Thank God! They tiptoed through into the hall.

Just as they approached his office,
Andrew came out of it and stood stock-still, astonished.

'Back so soon? What happened?' But his
eyes were on the woman behind his brother, too smartly clad in her scarlet to be
a Holloman woman. She smacked of a big prosperous city.

'Judith, this is my youngest brother,
Andrew. Drew, I'd like you to meet Dr Judith Carriol. We were at the Marcus
trial together, but Dr Carriol thinks it's more important that I go to
Washington than kibitz in Hartford. It seems she's got a week's work for me to
do.'

'Dr Carriol! What a pleasure!' said
Andrew. A startlingly handsome young man who looked not a scrap like his
brother, he stepped up to her with hand extended. 'Of course I know who you are,
I've read your papers. James! James!' he called.

And then there were flurries of
greetings, all that family she had read about in Dr Christian's dossier and
mentally catalogued as X or Y or Z. Much as she had expected. Yet she had
greatly underestimated the quality of the relationship between Joshua Christian
and the rest of them. They —
reverenced
him. He voiced a wish, and they
were at once galvanized. He moved his hand, and they sprang to attention. How
then had he managed to escape the taint of egocentricity? He
had
escaped
it! But after a while she decided he simply didn't notice. To him, his family's
behaviour was absolutely normal. It was the way his world worked, had always
worked. So he didn't attribute it to any personal power or authority; he just
assumed he was filling the role his mother must have assigned him upon his
father's death. His mother. Dr Carriol was dying to meet his mother, about whom
the file was quite informative.

She did meet his mother, but only after
several hours had elapsed with patients and discussions and a general tour of
1045, from its waiting room at the bottom back to the occupational therapy rooms
which filled the entire top floor. What a coup to have collared Miriam
Carruthers! So this was where she vanished when she suddenly gave up her massive
teaching job at Columbia!

The clinic was, Dr Carriol decided, the
neatest and most self-sufficient setup of its kind she had ever seen. You
couldn't beat a family business when the members of that family loved working
together and regarded one member as undisputed leader. And after watching Dr
Christian deal with a new patient, she could appreciate better the disclosures
in his file about a cult following. He had no professional mannerisms, because
what most others in his line of work had to be taught, he knew by instinct. And
his patients sensed that. They also drew enormous spiritual
strength from him. No wonder the old patients she talked to had never really
lost their closeness to him, or their sense of belonging to an inner sanctum.
The difference between a superlative clinical psychologist and the rest of the
breed lay in a combination of personality and insight into the workings of minds
other than his own. Dr Christian knew how people ticked, he felt the depth of
people's pain, and he loved people far more than he loved himself. Or his
family. Poor family. He gave and he gave, but obviously always to
strangers.

Given the world to deal with, she thought
as she walked with him across the bridge from 1045 to 1047, he would bend the
world. Only he must never suspect the world was given to him; he must always
think he found it for himself.

Mama gushed and cloyed and simpered out
of pure quietly frenzied nervousness; Mary had warned her of Dr Carriol's advent
hours earlier, and with considerable enjoyment — and a little embroidering of
the truth. So Mama, tickled pink that her son had finally brought home the woman
of his choice, and a fitting one at that, brilliant, sophisticated, in his own
field — Mama gushed and cloyed and simpered. No fool, Dr Carriol guessed why his
mother was so flustered; during a lull which occurred just after Mama had
persuaded them to remain long enough to eat dinner, Dr Carriol found her eyes
resting on Mary. Joshua Christian's only sister was standing well back from the
group, and she was watching her mother's antics with dour — contempt? shame?
Fair of face was Mary, but dark of soul; not evilly dark, not even maliciously
dark, just dark because probably no one had ever kindled her light. In any
family there always had to be one member less remarkable, less noticed than the
rest; in the Christian family, that member was Mary.

His dossier had said nothing about the
rest of the family's spectacular frost-fair good looks. Dr Carriol made a mental note to circularize all the
members of Section Four's investigative staff with a tart reminder that files
were about human beings and therefore interesting comments on human physical
characteristics were not only permissible, but mandatory. However, a large
photograph of Joshua's father in a pale-green, gold-speckled Murano glass frame
on a lacquer side table in the living room set Dr Carriol's unspoken doubts to
rest. He was the image of his father. The offspring had all thrown purely to one
or the other parent, an interesting fact in itself.