Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [281]
She tried to go to sleep, and they wouldn't let her. She lay on the floor and they woke her and she went right back to the floor and went to sleep again. Then Norton Willy's wife was shaking her. Mayvine her name was. The wife of Norton Willy who grew up right next door to her grandmother. Nicole couldn't believe that Norton had married this witch, a horrible huge ass-kisser who was now helping to run the place. They kept trying to get Nicole up and wouldn't let her sleep on the couches, but she felt three times as weak as in the other hospital. All she was interested in was being alone, and thinking about Gary
The ideal way to run a hospital was to take your chances on suicide. That was part of the risk in any innovative therapy. Here, they had to cut the risk off. Kiger's ideas were so unconventional anyway, that his program could receive an irreparable blow if they couldn't supervise Nicole. Nonetheless, it was the pits.
Schiller went out to the airport. His girl friend, Stephanie, was coming in. Since she had once been his secretary, he knew she would not be surprised when he greeted her with the announcement that they had to go right away to Pleasant Grove near Orem, a good forty miles from the airport, to visit with Kathryne Baker.
Schiller expected there'd be press outside, but, in fact, the house was hard to find. Naming the streets by compass directions didn't work in Pleasant Grove. There were too many old country roads, paved cow pastures, and dry riverbeds. 400 North was likely to twist across 900 North and 200 East intersect with 60 West. It was not the kind of address that a reporter, fighting a five o'clock deadline, was going to lose a half a day looking for.
Schiller, however, had time for a long talk with Mrs. Baker.
He thought it was a sloppy house, with old tires out in the front yard and metal skins rusting in the grass-you couldn't tell if the metal came from old jalopies or old washing machines. There were bits of jam on the table and dust and dirt and grease formed a pomade on many a surface in the kitchen, There were also an astonishing number of kids-he saw Rikki and Sue Baker's kids go through, plus some neighbors', and got them mixed up with Kathryne Baker's youngest child, Angel, who might have been six or seven and was astonishingly beautiful, looked like Brooke Shields.
With all that noise it could have been confusing, but Schiller was counting on his ability to sell a proposition in a palace or a pool hall.
He went right into a rap like the one he gave to Vern. "Whether I get the rights to your daughter's life or not, this, I think, is what you should do." And he set out to give her confidence in his understanding of the problems facing her. He told her she should change the phone and get the kids away with a relative. That way, the press wouldn't discover them. "You want to avoid having the children feel this is an indelible experience of horror." All the while, he knew what was impressing her most is that he did not sit there asking questions and writing her answers down, like he was stealing an interview, but was saying: Mrs. Baker, go get a lawyer. Kathryne said, "I don't know one." "Who do you work for?" asked Schiller. When she told him, Schiller said, "Call your boss and ask who his lawyer is." He could see it surprised her agreeably that he wanted her to obtain a representative to take care of her rights. He knew she was not used to talk like that.
Schiller had learned