For Love of Audrey Rose (14 page)

“This may be the last time the Temple will be open to you,” he said.

“What? Why? Have I done something wrong?”

He smiled sadly. “Of course not. But the rent here, Mrs. Templeton. Do you have any idea what it costs to be in Greenwich Village? And now, with almost nobody left, our revenues…”

“I’m sorry, Sri Parutha. I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

The water boiled. Using an aged towel, the Master cautiously lifted the pot and with deft, long-practiced motions, filled two delicate ceramic cups.

“We will be talking about it this afternoon,” he said. “I think we shall disband the Temple.”

“I don’t know how to express my sympathy,” Janice said. “I feel very bad for you.”

The Master smiled again, an enigmatic expression in his eyes. He handed Janice a cup of tea. The aroma twirled upward with the steam; a jasmine scent that, like the gentle light coming in from the frosted windows, obscured all terror, soothed all doubt, and brought a subtle tranquility down to the marrow of the bones.

“There is a phrase by one of the English poets,” the Master said. “The ‘inconstant lover.’ Let us just say that the Americans are inconstant lovers.”

Janice drank slowly, waiting for the brew to cool. She knew the Master had not forgotten why she had come, but she also knew that the realities of what he called the external world had inexplicably intruded and even destroyed his beloved sanctuary.

“Well, then, your husband needs to know the signs of reincarnation?”

The Master removed several books, fat with bookmarkers in them, and several broken brass candleholders. They sat down.

“Basically, the signs can be categorized according to the physical, the psychological, or the religious. Physical signs include birthmarks, wounds—which can reappear in modified forms—or certain congenital abnormalities. A clubfoot, for example, is repeated. Or a claw hand comes back as unexplained scars on a healthy hand. These are really so common that nobody in India would be particularly astonished if you showed up with, let us say, a dead uncle’s deformity of toes, or his laughter, or his manner of expression. Is all this clear, Mrs. Templeton?”

“Perfectly,” she answered, writing quickly onto a spiral-bound notebook.

“Psychologically, if a child has peculiar memories of a place, of people, of events that he or she has never seen. If suddenly, his mood and behavior change, with no warning but in a consistent manner. Like your own daughter, Mrs. Templeton.”

“Yes.”

“Quite often a person feels a sudden desire to travel to a part of the world he has never been to before. And when he goes, he finds that he knows how to get around, he never gets lost, and he knows the names of people he meets. Quite often there is an aspect of violence involved.”

“Violence?”

“Yes. For example, a man is compelled to travel into Madras, and there, not knowing why, he is compelled to wield an axe and he murders a distantly related uncle. It is because, several generations before, he was robbed of his inheritance by the previous incarnation of that uncle. In fact, I know of several cases in which the accused were exonerated on just such grounds.”

Janice nodded quickly, trying to cram her handwriting into the narrow-ruled pages.

“I see. And is it the same in Tibet?”

The Master paused, suddenly uncomfortable. He temporized by pouring fresh hot water into their cups.

“Tibet,” he said softly, “is a very old form of Buddhism. They do things very differently in the mountains. I realize that your husband is particularly interested in these forms of religion?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it is much more elaborate. The Dalai Lama, for example, the highest of the priests, is the latest in a long line of reincarnated men, and often it takes many months of searching the caves and farms to find the infant with the proper markings. I find, quite frankly, that there is something too intense about this form. The divinations, for example, take weeks in the bitter cold, and the mandalas are extremely sexual and violent.”

“Are they really?” Janice asked, perturbed.

The Master waved a vague hand, as though to dismiss them, evil thoughts, back into the cold air.

“Copulating skeletons. Drifting among death. Fire that eats out the body and films the eyelids. You see, it goes back to a very, very ancient time. Long before the Indo-Europeans came down to the plains of India.”

Janice finished with her notes, and the Master sighed, rubbed his eyes, and shivered.

“Before I go,” Janice said gently, “I must ask you one more thing.”

“I will answer it if I can.”

“If there is a reincarnation—I mean,
when
there is a reincarnation—is it possible to know where the soul will return?”

The Master smiled gently. “The physical location?”

Janice nodded.

“The soul seeks the locus of its growth and its greatest happiness. That normally means very close to where it left the previous body.”

“So if a person died in New York City—”

“One must assume that it will reappear in the area. You see, it is like a gravitational field. The soul drifts and, faster and faster, as it approaches life again, it falls toward its previous origin.”

Janice paled, but said nothing. For a while, she thought of not writing down that answer. Then she put her pencil to paper. Then, confused, she put the pencil and paper away, discouraged.

“Perhaps I should go now,” she said.

“As you wish.”

The Master, in the Western manner, rose from his orange crate and escorted her to the door. Feeling lonely, or disturbed about something, he accompanied her down the dark stairwell, into the white garden. The snow was falling, smaller, colder, a bitter screen of textured dots over the fat stone walls where old basins of stained wood had been brought from temples in India.

“If you could impress upon your husband,” he said delicately, “not to dwell too rashly in these ideas….”

“Why not? Is it dangerous?”

“Not dangerous, exactly. But I have seen too many young people who also suffered mentally as does your husband. They seized upon Hinduism and Buddhism, like drowning men clutch at the air. And in the end they misunderstood everything, and were no better off than before.”

“Yes. I’ll tell him. Perhaps, in time, his enthusiasm will die down.”

“Clarity of mind,” the Master said, leading her back through the empty Temple, where only one disciple looked up from sorting a few prayer books along the wall, jealous of Janice’s proximity to the Master. “If the mind is unclear… like a distorting pool… the doctrine becomes warped.”

Janice left the Temple. As usual, the visits to Sri Parutha left her strangely energized, eager to face the rest of the day, yet with a lingering sensation of doubt. And as the day wore on, the doubt always grew stronger. Until, finally, when the tranquility of the old Brahmin had faded sufficiently, a kind of bleak terror invaded her very body, and she took to mixing Scotch with soda as a more durable, if less spiritual, antidote to the conflicts within her.

Back at Des Artistes, the telephone rang. Janice tried to ignore it, wielding the ink brush as quickly as she could manage. But the ringing never stopped. She conceded, and picked it up.

“Janice,” Bill exclaimed. “Where the hell were you?”

“I just came in as the phone was ringing.”

“Did you see the priest at the Temple?”

“Yes. We had a very nice talk.”

“Good. Very good. Listen, I’ve got something I want you to do.”

“No, Bill.”

“Janice, you have to go downtown to the—”

“We agreed this was the last time.”

“Janice,” he pleaded. “I’m begging you!”

“No. I’ve got work of my own, Bill. Be reasonable.”

“But we’re running out of time.”

“We’ve got plenty of time, darling. Now I have to jot down some ideas Elaine gave me, and—”

“Then I’ll do it myself.”

Janice decided Bill was not fooling.

“I’m telling you, Janice,” he said darkly. “If I have to, I’ll bust out of this place and do it myself.”

“Don’t talk like that, Bill. It frightens me.”

“It has to be done and it doesn’t matter who does it.”

“What, Bill? What has to be done?”

“Somebody has to go down to the Hall of Records. And see who was born the same minute Ivy died.”

“Bill, this is all nonsense. Sri Parutha said not to be rash, and here you are—”

“Screw Sri Parutha. Listen to me, God damn it, Janice! Somebody has to go down and look at those records!”

“This is crazy! I won’t do it! It’s one thing to bring you books, and—and go visit the Temple, but this is impossible!”

Bill said nothing for a while, yet she heard him breathing at the other end.

“All right,” he said angrily. “At least I know where you stand.”

He hung up. Janice clicked the receiver button again and again, but the line was irretrievably dead. Miserable, she resumed her work at her table, where the designs lay in sketched form under the lamp by the windows. After ten minutes, an uneasy feeling grew to where she could no longer think straight.

She called the clinic back.

“Mr. William Templeton, please,” she said.

After ten minutes, during which Janice was afraid they would not find him, Bill came to the telephone.

“Yes?” he said.

“All right. You win. I’ll go. But please, that’s got to be all. You’re chasing crazy will-o’-the-wisps.”

“Let me be the judge of that. You know what you’re looking for?”

“I think so.”

“Tell me.”

“February 3, 1975. 10:53 in the morning.”

“10:43!”
Bill shrieked. “10:43 in the morning—a mistake like that could be fatal!”

“All right—10:43—I’ll look it up for you.”

“Okay. And bring me notes on what the priest told you today. Okay? Will you do that?”

“Bill.”

“What?”

“Why New York? Why not Baltimore? Or Chicago? Or even Pittsburgh or Hong Kong? Why would she come back to New York? She could be any place at all!”

“Because the soul seeks the locus of its greatest happiness. It’s like a gravitational field, Janice. Picture a meteor falling through space. Suddenly it gets caught up in a force field and it starts to accelerate downward. Well, it’s like that. Back to where the soul developed.”

Janice bit her lip. Bill had answered, almost word for word, as the Master had. Evidently Bill’s expertise was reaching startling proportions. Janice began to be afraid of him in the way that she had once been afraid of Hoover. There was too much knowledge at the other end of the line.

8

T
he Hall of Records stood recessed from the streets, its upper reaches in the slanted sunlight, but off the ledges of the first floor icicles melted slowly in shadow. Long windows, crisscrossed with a protective wire inside, gave off no light. The steps to the main doors were unscraped, covered with sprinkles of salt and brown dirt. Around the building rose higher structures, sleek, expressive of the supernational organization of the twentieth century, while the massive Hall, like a throwback to gray stone and marble, huddled in their shadows, a monument to weight and ornamented facade.

Janice walked the long hall, past voices behind doors, electric typewriters, obscure silences, and she looked around at the blank, dirty white ceilings, the old scrollwork nearly obliterated with curls of dust.

A young woman with short blond hair looked up.

“May I help you?”

“Am I in the birth registration department?”

“Sure are, ma’am.”

“Could you… That is, are these open to the public?”

The girl nodded. “Sign the register,” she said, turning a massive book around and handing Janice a black pen attached to the book by a beaded chain.

Janice quickly scrawled her name and the date and the girl swiveled the book back, squinting at the penmanship.

“What’s the name?”

“Templeton. Mrs. Janice Templeton.”

“Not you. The infant.”

“That’s the problem. I don’t know the infant’s name. Just the moment of birth.”

The girl raised an eyebrow, sighed, and came out from behind her tiny desk.

“That doesn’t make it easy, you know,” she said.

“I’m prepared to do all the work myself,” Janice said quickly. “If you could just show me how—”

“What year?”

“Nineteen Seventy-five.”

“You’re in luck. Anything before Nineteen Seventy-three and you’d have had to go down to the crypts. That’s the storage facility underground.”

“You mean this whole room is just for—?”

“That’s right. These are the births since January, Nineteen Seventy-three. New York is a very fertile place. Follow me. Nineteen Seventy-five is at the end of the hall.”

As they passed into the far end of the corridor, a wing opened up to view, and along the entire wall were ceiling-high metal cabinets, gray and green, with stepladders available in front. Janice paused. The vista was depressing, even overwhelming. If each cabinet was full, Janice reasoned, then the accumulated total of births would have to exceed a hundred thousand.

“Well, grab yourself a bunch of patience. This is Nineteen Seventy-five. What month was the infant born?”

“February.”

The girl strolled to the western bank of cabinets, where the front labels read “February.”

“What day?”

“The 3rd.”

“Okay, that’s your drawer up there. Get yourself a ladder. What it is, is a cross-index to registration number; you can go to the main bank behind my desk and look up the infant.”

Janice stared upward at the huge files, the dusty metal still showing where old tape had been affixed, torn away, and never washed. “How many numbers are in one drawer?”

“Never counted. I would imagine quite a few thousand. Like I said. New York must be a busy place at night. Good luck.”

The girl walked slowly back up the corridor, leaving Janice to wonder whether she was supposed to remove the drawer or take a note pad up to it. The answer was solved for her when it became clear that the drawer was permanently attached to its runners. Janice climbed back down, retrieved a pen and note pad from her purse, and climbed back up the stepladder. Perusing through the cards to find the beginning of the February 3 entries, she discovered to her dismay that each card was coated with scores of registrations, all entered in the most minuscule type she had ever seen. Worse, the entries had been accumulated in order of registration number and not time of birth, so that she would have to go through what conservatively looked like at least four thousand different numbers.