Chapter 6

“Thanks, Jimmie,” I replied. “I’m going to try to stay this way.”

My wife sat down beside me and studied me closely. “You look different,” she remarked. “To me, at any rate. You’re sort of coming to a focus. If only--. You’re so different and--strange.”

Here was my chance to recover lost ground.

“As near as I can make out,” I said, “I’ve had a kind of amnesia. I know you, of course, and my name, and that this is my house and that Ponto is my dog, even though he tried to bite me. I know the Pond Club and the Harvard Club, but that’s about all I seem able to remember. I can’t recall where I work or where I bank, or who my friends are or what kind of car I drive or what I was doing before yesterday afternoon.”

She relaxed at the holy scientific word ‘amnesia, ‘ as though to name a mystery explained it.

“But you were saying something about being on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific,” she objected.

I laughed. “That must have been part of a very vivid dream I was having in a chair in the bar at the Pond, when Ranty Tolan woke me up. It was one of those dreams which seemed so real that real life seemed like a dream. It still does a bit. That’s where my alleged mind got stalled and I’m still floundering around. Help me, won’t you?”

“You didn’t seem to need much help remembering Virginia Rutherford,” she remarked, “but I’ll try to fill in some of the gaps for you. You have your own firm--Tompkins, Wasson and Cone--at No. 1 Wall Street. It’s sort of combination brokerage office and investment counsel. You once told me that your specialty was finding nice rich old ladies and helping them re-invest their unearned millions. You bank at the National City Farmers and your car is a black ‘41 Packard coupe.”

“That helps a lot,” I thanked her. “Now how about my friends? If I go to town tomorrow, I ought to be on the look-out for them. Business isn’t so good right now that I can afford to let myself be run in as an amnesiac while my partners look after the loot.”

She frowned. “I don’t know much about your friends in town, since so many of them are in the war,” she admitted. “There’s Merry Vail, of course, who roomed with you at Harvard, but he hasn’t come out here much since Adela divorced him after that business in Bermuda. Sometimes you talk about the men you see at the Club but I’ve never been able to keep track of the Phils and Bills and Neds and Joes and Dicks and Harrys. You’ll have to find your own way there. At the office, of course, there’s Graham Wasson and Phil Cone, your partners, but you won’t have much trouble once you’re at your desk. Wasson is dark and plump and Cone is fair and plump and they’re both about five years younger than you are.”

“The office doesn’t worry me,” I agreed. “I can handle anything that develops there.”

“You know, Winnie,” Jimmie remarked, “if I were you I wouldn’t try to go to town for a few days. The office will run itself and you need a rest. I don’t know much about amnesia but I’ve always heard that rest and kind treatment--”

“Uh-uh!” I dissented emphatically. “Worst thing in the world for it. I’ve always heard that the thing to do is to go back over the ground until you come to the thing that gave you the original shock and then it all comes back to you. If I stick around Bedford Hills I’ll just get panicky over not being sure whether I remember things or not. I’ll go to town in the morning and see if I can’t find myself.”

She laughed, as wives laugh. “You may be a changed man,” she announced, “but you’re still stubborn as a mule. Tell me, to change the subject, you say that you remember me. Tell me what I seem like to you, now that you’ve changed, as you say, aside from age, sex, scars and distinguishing marks, if any, and marital status.”

I closed my eyes and thought of Dorothy as she had been that last night in Hartford before she walked out and I decided to join the Navy as a Reserve Officer.

“You are piano music on a summer night--something Scarlatti or Mozart--thin, cool, precise, gay. You are apple blossoms against a Berkshire hillside. You are the smoke of fallen leaves climbing into the cool October sky. You are surf on a sandy beach, with the gulls wheeling and the white-caps racing past the lighthouse on the point. You are bobsleds and hot coffee and dough-nuts by a roaring wood fire. And you’re a lost child, with two pennies in your fist, looking in the window of a five-cent candy-shop.”

Germaine relaxed. “Except for that last bit, Winnie, you made me sound like a year-round vacation resort or an ad for a new automobile. You’ve mentioned almost everything about me except the one thing I obviously am.”

“Which is?”

“A simple, rather stupid woman, I guess,” Germaine sighed, “who’s had everything in life except what she wants.”

“All women are simple,” I pontificated, “since what they want is simple.”

“You moron!” she blazed. “Don’t you see that no woman knows what she wants until she is made to want it. You ... you never made me want anything simple, except to crack you over the head with something.”

After she had left, I sat for a long time. There seemed to be nothing to do or say. Winnie’s domestic life was still in too much of a snarl for me to do the obvious thing and follow Germaine upstairs, and into her bedroom, lock the door, and kiss her tear-stained face and tell her that I was sorry I had hurt her ... Before it would be safe to accept her gambits I must first explore my business connections. Hadn’t my wife said something about girls in the office?

My first stop in the morning, after I had been careful to take a late commuting train in to the city in order to avoid business men who were sure to know and greet Winnie Tompkins, was the Pond Club.

Tammy was behind the bar and as soon as I entered he turned and mixed me a powerful pick-me-up. I drained it with the usual convulsive effort and then pretended to relax.

“Thanks, Tammy,” I said. “That’s what I needed.” “Good morning, Mr. Tompkins,” he remarked. “I’m glad to see you back. You were looking a trifle seedy--if you don’t mind my saying so, sir--when you were in here Monday afternoon.”

“I took a day off in the country and got rested up,” I told him. “I feel fine now. Anybody in the Club?”

“Not just now, sir. A couple of gentlemen were asking for you yesterday afternoon--that would be Tuesday. That was Commander Tolan, sir, and a friend of his, a Mr. Harcourt his name was, who hasn’t been here before. They asked me if you were at your home but I just laughed. ‘Him gone home?’ I said. ‘Not while he has a girl and a flat on Park Avenue.’ Begging your pardon, Mr. Tompkins, I knew you didn’t want to be bothered wherever you were and so I said the first thing that came to my head.”

“You’re doing fine, Tammy,” I assured him. “I don’t want to see anybody for a couple of days. Now then, I’d like you to tell me what happened here Monday afternoon. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever drawn a complete blank.”

“Well, sir,” the Club steward recited. “You came in about two o’clock and sat down in your usual chair--that one in the corner. You said something about having had lunch at the Harvard Club, sir, and had a couple of Scotch and sodas here.”