Holland Suggestions Read online

  The buzzer. “It’s your daughter,” Sharon said coldly.

  “Put her on, please.”

  I had time for just a brief reaction: mixed surprise and apprehension. There was a click and a loud background noise; a shuffling of feet and the hollow sounds of hallway talk.

  “Judy?”

  “Hi.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No, everything’s fine.”

  “Well, then, what’s the occasion?”

  “I just wanted to apologize for running out like that.”

  “I didn’t even notice.”

  “Look, I know you’re busy and all.”

  “As a matter of fact, my whole morning’s suddenly free. What’s on your mind?”

  “Nothing really. Just what I said.”

  There was a long pause while I gathered my thoughts. Obviously she was fishing, groping for an opening to discuss whatever was bothering her. Just as obviously, she wasn’t finding it

  “Listen, I’ll be late for class,” she said.

  I pondered it. It would have to be done, but not now and certainly not by phone. “Okay, you run on then. But don’t cook anything tonight. I just might be in the mood for a night out. How about dinner at the Roadhouse?”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. Just the two of us, okay?”

  “Great.”

  That little gesture, I told myself as I hung up, was a stroke of genius. I felt confident again, and I decided to work the Vivian thing out in my mind now, as long as I had a free morning. But then Sharon came in, dropped some drawings on my desk, and went out without a word. I made a mental note to get her replaced, absolutely and irrevocably; to have her shifted into someone else’s office, even if I had to answer the goddamn phones myself. With that decided, my mind wandered and settled, strangely, on Robert Holland.

  Actually, some of the things I had learned long ago from Robert might be of help in my little family crisis. Hypnosis had always scared the hell out of me, and now, considering it half seriously, I felt like a kid about to make a wild dash through a cemetery at night. I had not done it in fifteen years, yet there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that it would be as easy now as it had been then. I fought with it for another minute, then got up and turned off the lights. My fingers tingled with the excitement of it, and I sank back in the comfort of my chair, still too nervous to try anything. Gradually I relaxed, staring at the opaque window, and I went into a light trance immediately the first time I tried. I went deeper. The room darkened around me, and the window became a point of light in the darkness. I deepened the trance again, and Vivian’s face came into focus. Or Judy’s. At first I couldn’t be sure. Then I saw the tiny black mole and knew it was Vivian. I heard her voice, though I could not yet make out the words. I had almost forgotten the soft quality of her voice. Such effective camouflage for deadly poison. One level deeper and I would have her. I would see her and hear her, and if I wanted to I could reach out and touch her. Robert Holland had said that you can relive any experience in all five senses under hypnosis, and I knew the truth of it. I’d done it.

  In the outer office I heard a filing cabinet drawer slam shut and Sharon swore, but the image of Vivian did not fade. My mind wrestled with both worlds at once and handled them with ease. I went deeper and the image sharpened; now I could see the little red lines above her green eyes, and the holes in her earlobes where the earrings went through. Behind her, the apartment where we had lived then, with the battered red sofa and the picture on the wall never hanging quite straight. She said Hello, Jim; it was letter perfect, precise, like a video-tape replay fifteen years later. I wanted to go closer, to step into the apartment with her, but instead I backed away from it. That cold, unreasonable fear forced me back, the apartment faded to an obscure black and white, and Vivian melted and became part of the blur. I came out of it very fast. The window focused in my eyes, and I saw that in the few minutes I had been under, it had started to rain. I sat there for a long time, just listening to the rain falling on the pavement outside. My mind was all a mixture of Robert and Judy and Vivian. Sharon pushed her way in by slamming another filing cabinet and saying “goddammit” just loud enough for me to hear.

  All right. Enough.

  I barked into the intercom: “Sharon.”

  “Yes.”

  “Get the hell in here.”

  I was surprised at the toughguy sound of my own voice, but the scene itself was carried through without emotion, as I knew it would be. We had come to a point where we could no longer communicate, and I wanted another secretary as soon as possible. She could handle it any way she liked: with a request to Al Harper for a transfer or with a resignation. I didn’t care what she did. She took it without a word and left me alone. Finished, and it felt like scratching a sore that had itched for a long time. Done. After simmering for a year, the matter of Sharon Welles was settled and disposed of in thirty seconds. Vivian might be as easy, once the preliminaries were out of the way. My eyes fell on the mountain photograph, and in a quick flush of impatience I swept it lightly, wrappings and all, off the desk and into the wastebasket. Then I picked up my coat and walked out, asking Sharon to please cancel my afternoon appointments.

  I did a lot of driving and thinking that day. When I got home Judy was already dressed for the Roadhouse. She waited for me in the living room, reading her new Seventeen while I showered and changed. Then we were off. The restaurant was an old favorite, located ten miles out of town on a hill overlooking the valley. We sat at a window table with a view of the patio. I was calm and confident right up to the moment when I had to face it. A bad case of nerves set in, and I ordered a strong Scotch to help get me started. I was halfway through my second drink before I decided to bite the bullet and do it.

  “I know you’ve been wondering about your…mother…for a long time.” My voice cracked and the words seemed to stick. I looked at her, but she was staring down at her water glass and would not meet my eyes. “Look at me, Judy,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can.”

  With that she did look up, and I saw that her eyes were filling with tears.

  “Isn’t this what you want?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’ll do it together. I’ll tell you about Vivian, anything you want to know.”

  “When?”

  “Soon. I want to go through some papers first. I’ve got some stuff filed away that might help. Sometime in the next few days we’ll get it all out and go through it together, okay?”

  She nodded. Both of us were relieved to have that initial thrust behind us, and we looked for a new topic of conversation. We unwound slowly through the night and got home sometime before midnight. It was after two when I went up to bed; I fell asleep immediately.

  I awoke in a panic. I jumped up and ran to the bedroom door, stumbling over a chair that blocked my way. The hallway was dark. Judy’s door was closed, and there were no sounds or lights from the lower part of the house. I went back and sat down on the bed. Now what the hell? I looked at my bedside clock; the luminous dials said three-thirty. I had not slept two hours. The dream. I had been dreaming, not about Judy or Vivian, but about Robert Holland and that mountain trail in the photograph. A strange, screwy dream, but coming with it was one of the strongest impulses of my life, an overpowering need to save that picture from the janitor’s fire. Morning would be too late; the janitor would have come and gone by the time I got there. I dressed, crept quietly downstairs, opened the garage, started the car, and drove to the office. I let myself in with my side-door key and went straight to my desk. The picture and all its wrappings were still in my basket, just as I had left them. I gathered up everything, cardboard, envelope, even the rubber band. By the time I got home it was almost five o’clock. I went into my den, unlocked the filing cabinet, and filed the photograph in the drawer marked ROBERT HOLLAND. Then I pulled the drawer handle to be sure it was locked and retired to my room for what lit
tle remained of the sleepless night.

  2

  THE HOLLAND FILE WAS my personal Pandora’s box. I had avoided it for fifteen years; now I devoured the contents in one sitting. Thanksgiving came and went, and Judy left with a girlfriend for two days in the mountains. I had the house to myself all day Friday and Saturday, and I intended to use the whole time reading the Holland file. Only after a careful screening would I throw it open to Judy’s inspection. Call that censorship if you want to; under the circumstances, I still believe I did the right thing. As it turned out, I censored nothing. The screening process was not nearly so painful as I had feared, and I found nothing that anyone could possibly object to showing his teenage daughter. The deeper I read into the Holland material, the more aware I became that the basic problem was mine.

  First, there was Robert’s unfinished manuscript on hypnosis. Even in its incomplete state it was thick and cumbersome. Reading it took half the morning, but it refreshed my memory on many of the small technical details that had gone into the Holland theories. Then there were three handwritten journals of our experiments, all very subjective, containing Robert’s impressions of the Jake Walters project as well as his straight descriptions of each session. Supplementing the journals were ten lengthy tapes, verbatim transcripts of each session. The tapes took all day and most of the night to hear; I played them while I read through the journals. When I was finished I noticed that the last journal contained reference to a fourth book, though the journals and the tapes finished at precisely the same point. I searched through the file but found no other books anywhere, and I assumed that Robert had died before beginning the fourth journal.

  There were some old photographs showing Robert and an incredibly young me, and another set of pictures showing Robert and his old pals from college. I found a small package of newspaper clippings; I knew at once what they contained and tried to push them away until later. I realized then that there was no later, that I had been doing just that for fifteen years, and I forced myself to go through them now. There was a series on the experiments and a small story telling of Robert’s dismissal from the university. I read them through quickly but thoroughly. Done at last. I was through the worst of it. A few more papers; a letter; some photocopied articles on hypnotic trance. The life story of Robert Holland, tied together in five fat manila folders and ten reels of recorded tape.

  Only one more folder—the Vivian folder—remained in the file. This one was dismally thin; indeed, there were only a couple of documents filed there. I removed the folder and opened it, feeling a little sadness as the dust spread into the air. It was almost appalling how little material was there. Stupid of me to feel that way, when all along I had known I would not find much. Vivian didn’t write letters, never allowed her picture to be taken, and had an inherent distrust of tape machines. I remembered the time she’d gone into a rage when I recorded a conversation on the sly. She had sought out the tape while I was at work and burned it, then smashed Robert Holland’s tape recorder and called it an accident. As far as I knew there was only one picture of her—the one I was holding in my hand—and it was a poor one. Judy had never seen it, but now I would show it to her. In the picture Vivian was sitting alone in the living room of our apartment, just as I had seen her this week in my little regression experiment. A vase of flowers was on the mantel behind her; another was on the table. Her love of flowers was another facet of her character that I had forgotten. She was not looking at the camera, because she never knew I had taken the picture. Had she known, she would have found it and destroyed it, just like the tape. Even after all these years Vivian would have been uneasy if she had suspected that I had her photograph. Beyond this, I was willing to risk good money that there was no record anywhere of her voice, no fingerprint on file, no evidence in public or private folders that she had lived. Marriage license—yes, I found that—and possibly a social-security card under some phony name. I have never met anyone so private as Vivian. She should have married Howard Hughes; undoubtedly their offspring would have been born invisible.

  The Vivian folder took less than ten minutes, most of which was spent staring at her picture and thinking about it. At midnight I put it all away, locked the filing cabinet, and went to bed. Again I spent a restless night and was up before dawn. I was having a hell of a time sleeping these days, but that probably wouldn’t be remedied until I got the whole mess over with. I decided to talk with Judy Sunday night, and that left me all day Saturday to think it through.

  Impulsively I drove over to Wyllis, the little Blue Ridge town where I had first seen Vivian. It was only a three-hour drive, but I hadn’t been back since I had taken her away from all that in 1955. I packed a lunch and took my Vivian file with me, though there wasn’t anything in it. At the last minute I also threw in the photograph of the mountain trail, and I didn’t know why I was doing that either. The drive was dull until I got within twenty miles of Wyllis and began looking for old signs. I remembered absolutely nothing of the town. The drugstore where Vivian had worked was gone; that whole block had been ripped out and a shopping center was going up. I made a halfhearted attempt to locate the druggist who might have remembered her, but that was a lost cause from the beginning. Probably he was dead. I left Wyllis with mixed feelings of sadness and relief.

  To my surprise I didn’t go straight home but drove along the Blue Ridge Trail, then turned west into West Virginia. In the late afternoon I parked the car and climbed high into the mountains, but nothing here even remotely resembled the mountain in the picture. For a long time after that I sat in my car and studied the picture and its wrappings. The only new factor I found was that the address on the envelope seemed fresh, while the envelope itself looked old and faded. The word PERSONAL apparently had been stamped there a long time ago, and there was a dark dust line at the top, as though it had lain under other parcels—perhaps for years—before being mailed. The rubber band that held the picture and the cardboard panels together was old too; its outer surface had dried and hardened, and it broke easily before it was stretched out to its old limit.

  None of this helped me, except to reinforce my growing conviction that the picture had a tie to Robert, or at least to the era when I had known Robert, and that something new was happening in the matter. It was disturbing, but too much for my tired mind to cope with. I drove through the night and got home in the early morning. Again, I could not sleep more than a few hours. After tossing restlessly for a time, I got up and made a big breakfast. Then I went into the den, opened the Holland file, and sat at my desk with the mountain photograph before me.

  I was doodling, thinking about it in that shallow trancelike state that is familiar to anyone who has ever been hypnotized. I don’t know how long I sat there, pencil in hand; it might have been half an hour or just a few minutes. I was in that twilight state that comes just before a deep trance when the sound of an ambulance passing a block away brought me out of it. I looked down at the pad and was surprised to see that my doodles formed symbols and numbers. I had drawn a Maltese cross and had written beneath it the numbers 50, 96,12.

  Automatic writing?

  I hadn’t done anything like that since the days of the Holland experiments.

  But it was automatic writing beyond any doubt I had drawn the Maltese cross without looking at the pad—in fact, without any awareness of my finger movements—and the numbers were strongly written and perfect. The cross was about the size of a marble. I rummaged in my desk for a magnifying glass and studied the cross for a minute. The cross was encased in a perfect circle, and the only imperfection I found anywhere in the drawing was a spot in the lower arm where perhaps a quarter of that arm was missing. It was as though a faulty ballpoint pen had run out of ink at precisely that spot, but I had been using a pencil with a finely sharpened point, and the point was not broken.

  I began to examine the photograph under the magnifying glass. I looked closely at each rock on that treacherous trail, letting my glass meander along to the base of
the cave. For a long time I examined the gloom of the cave, as though the glass would help me penetrate that darkness and would thus reveal the who and why of this picture’s sudden intrusion into my life. As I moved the glass along the rocks lining the cave, I felt a cold sensation creep along my spine. Clearly imprinted in the rock was the Maltese cross.

  Holy Christ! I sat back and rubbed my eyes, which by now were watering badly. When I could see clearly I looked at the picture again. The cross was still there, an exact replica of the one I had just drawn. Obviously it was very old; part of the lower arm had worn away with time; but the circle and the upper arms were complete and in good condition. Had I subconsciously “seen” and stored it with my earlier examinations of the picture? Was that possible? Without the glass, the cross appeared as nothing more than a blur. Even with the glass it might seem just a peculiar rock characteristic, had I not drawn that precise image less than five minutes before. The matter of the cross bothered me more than anything I had yet encountered, and I had to fight down an urge to destroy the picture and the rest of the Holland file as well. Instead, I filed everything away, pulled the drawer handle to be sure it was locked, and went out along the lake for a long walk.

  When I got back Judy was home. I saw her coat on the cedar chest and I heard vaguely the sounds of the shower water running upstairs. I went into the den and unlocked the filing cabinet, then went to the kitchen and poured myself a stiff drink. I looked at the clock; it wasn’t yet one o’clock, a bit early to start boozing, but today, I told myself, I had an excuse. A sense of urgency had come over me and I knew that our little talk would not wait until tonight. Judy came down in about fifteen minutes; she smiled and said hi and kissed my cheek; I said how was your weekend and she said fine how about yours. Small talk, but I guessed that she had been through the same indecision that was now my constant companion. There was no time for any more guessing games in handling the problem; I had a strong need to get it all out at once, to have it behind me before I could find another excuse to put it off for one more day.