The Impostor
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Synopsis
Maria Skinner recovers consciousness after a car crash to find herself in a psychiatric clinic. She remembers the crash quite clearly but she is told that she is suffering from delusions - and must not leave hospital.
She tries to contact her husband but is informed that he is unavailable. Finally, in a desperate attempt to escape, she reluctantly agrees to accompany a man who insists he is her husband - but whom she knows is an impostor. Moving from one captivity to another, she becomes a pawn in someone else's sinister game ...
Release date: March 14, 2014
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Print pages: 256
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The Impostor
Helen McCloy
Was it something in Dr. Sanders or something in Marina herself that made him hate her?
She knew that some people mistook her shyness for arrogance, but surely a psychiatrist would know the difference.
Was this just the currently fashionable love-hate paradox?
No, she would have to be obsessively vain to accept that. Common sense told her that Dr. Sanders’ behavior had no more to do with love of her than Nazi behavior had to do with love of
Jews.
A dark thought came to her, unbidden.
Was Eric Sanders one of those men who hate women just because they are women?
There were such men. Schopenhauer was one of them. Passing a woman, a total stranger, on a stair he was seized with such a sudden access of rage against “the short-legged race,” as
he called women, that he threw her down the stair, crippling her for life. The courts made him pay her a disability pension for life, which merely increased his hatred of women.
The next time Marina heard Dr. Sanders’ step outside her door she slid her hands under the bedclothes. She was not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing them tremble.
He paused in the doorway, an actor’s pause calculated to heighten the impact of his entrance.
His face was long, concave, unsmiling, like the archaic faces carved out of the rock of Easter Island. In profile, brow and jaw protruded. Between them, eyes, mouth and all but the tip of the
nose were depressed and shallow. The lips pouted. Such bizarre exaggeration may be tolerable in art, but it is disturbing in nature.
“Good morning, Marina.” His voice was deep and resonant; his articulation, crisp.
“Good morning, Dr. Sanders.”
“Won’t you call me Eric?”
“I always think of you as Dr. Sanders.”
“Do you shy away from familiarity with everyone?”
“No, just from familiarity with those who are not friends.”
“But I am your friend, Marina.” When she did not answer he went on. “How does your head feel this morning?”
“Better.” Her hand rose to adjust the dressing on her forehead. “When are you going to let me go home?”
“Not until you are entirely rational.”
He sat down. He was a big man, cramped in the skimpy hospital chair.
“Why doesn’t my husband come to see me?”
“You are not well enough for visitors.”
“Why doesn’t he telephone me?”
“I have told him that any outside influence might retard your recovery.”
“And he accepts that?”
“He understands that I must have complete control of my patients’ environment. There is a telephone outlet in this room, but no extension is plugged in.”
“So I’ve noticed. How long have I been here?”
“Several days.”
“But how many?”
“There is no need to be so precise.” Dr. Sanders opened his notebook and uncapped his old-fashioned fountain pen, a handsome trifle, gold with a monogram. “Do you wish to make
any changes in what you told me yesterday?”
“You asked me so many questions yesterday I can’t possibly remember all I said.”
“Let me refresh your memory.” He put on reading glasses to glance at his notes. “You have no family except your husband. Your parents, Leah and Ralph Jacoby, are dead. Your
only other relatives are cousins in California and Czechoslovakia whom you have never met. After your father’s death you and your mother left Ohio for New York because you had landed a job on
a magazine there called Home Exquisite. There was the usual conflict between your mother and yourself—”
“There was no conflict.”
“Oh, come now, really, Marina!” He didn’t bother to look up from his notes. “You loved your job at Home Exquisite and your mother hated it. Didn’t she say
the rooms pictured in that magazine looked as if no men, children or dogs had ever lived in them?”
“That was an office joke I had told her. She was quoting me.”
“Was she?” It was one of his most irritating tricks, to repeat a statement you had just made in the form of a question loaded with disbelief. “Wasn’t your mother dismayed
when she found that all the people who worked with you in the editorial department were other women? Didn’t she ask you how you ever expected to get married if you never met any
men?”
“That was a joke, too.”
“Wasn’t it the true word spoken in jest?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
He didn’t reply. He just looked at her as if he believed that silent skepticism would force her to admit self-deception.
Two could play at that game. She looked at him just as silently, just as skeptically. The silence stretched until he had to break it.
“How did you first meet your husband?”
“Didn’t I tell you all that yesterday?”
“I want to see if you will tell it the same way today.”
“Where shall I begin?”
“With Skinner Industries.”
“It’s a multinational conglomerate. Among other properties, they own a string of magazines. One is called House and Terrace. They decided that Home Exquisite was unfair
competition for House and Terrace so they bought Home Exquisite in order to kill it. They could have given us employees time to look for new jobs, but they didn’t. So many
people were thrown out of work at two weeks’ notice, including me.
“The day we got the news, we held a protest meeting in the office. I was one of those who made speeches. I said pretty nasty things about Skinner Industries. There were some strangers in
the back of the room listening to us. One of them applauded me and I saw him again in the elevator.”
Memory was unrolling in her mind as real as a film with a sound track.
She was running to catch the elevator, breathless. He stood aside to let her enter.
“That was quite a speech,” he said.
“You liked it?”
“No. You see my name is Victor Skinner.”
“Then why did you applaud?”
“Because I liked you.”
She had looked at him more closely then.
He was a tall young man who carried his height without awkwardness. There was a smile in his dark eyes. She did not return the smile.
“I do not like you,” she told him. “How can you like yourself when you are part of Skinner Industries?”
“A very small part.”
They had reached the lobby, but he went on talking.
“I’m just a hired hand. My grandfather started a small company called Eastern Steel eighty years ago. His grandson, my cousin Cornelius Skinner, bought out the rest of the family and
collected other companies the way some men collect stamps. End product: Skinner Industries operating in thirteen countries with the head office in New York at the Skinner Building.
“I don’t own stock or control policy. I have nothing to do with the Skinner magazines. I just dropped in today to see what was going on. I work for another Skinner company: Luka,
Incorporated. Doesn’t that make me a member of the human race?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why not have dinner with me tonight and find out?”
She had known at once that this was a turning point.
If she said no, so many things could never happen.
If she said yes, anything might happen.
She said yes. . . .
“So you were married a few months later?” said Dr. Sanders.
“Yes.”
“One of those impetuous, modern courtships—a few dinners in Manhattan and a weekend in Connecticut when the forsythia was in bloom?”
“There was a little more to it than that.”
“Tell me about the wedding.”
“It was small. Victor’s cousin, Cornelius, and his wife, Anna, couldn’t come.”
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”
“I don’t know. They did send silver spoons. Skinner heirlooms. My mother gave me the only thing of value she had, her own engagement ring. There was only one bridesmaid, Lettice
King.”
“The photographers’ model?”
“Yes, she had been doing some jobs for Home Exquisite just before it folded. She brought us a jeroboam of champagne. Victor’s best man was supposed to be Cousin
Cornelius’ son, Thereon. At the last moment he couldn’t come, but he sent us some fine old brandy in a Baccarat decanter. No one else was involved. After all, Victor’s parents
were dead and most of his friends were on the West Coast where he had been brought up. Mine were in Ohio.”
“You felt isolated?”
“Oh, no. I had Victor. He was what mattered.”
“And did he feel that you were what mattered?”
“If he hadn’t I wouldn’t have felt the way I did. I was so happy I didn’t really feel married at all. I felt as if we were just playing at being married.”
If she had expected sympathy, she had miscalculated. Dr. Sanders pounced. “Didn’t it occur to you that you were taking refuge in the idea of a play marriage because you were not
happy at all at the deepest levels of the unconscious?”
“You do think of the most delightful questions, Dr. Sanders. No, it did not occur to me.”
Dr. Sanders wrote something in his notebook and went on as blandly as ever. “The Victorians had a notion that there is a reaction after every marriage. Did you feel any such
reaction?”
“No.” From now on she would answer in monosyllables whenever she could. The less she said, the fewer weapons she gave him to use against her.
“Your mother died of cancer shortly after the wedding?”
“Yes.”
“A little more detail, please.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“After your mother’s death, your husband was transferred from New York to the Boston office of Luka, Incorporated. Do you miss New York?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Boston is New York’s nicest suburb if you can afford the shuttle flight. Just thirty minutes, half the time it takes to drive in from New Canaan.”
“Why was your husband transferred?”
“I have no idea.”
“A promotion?”
“How can I tell? I don’t know anything about Luka, Incorporated. I don’t really know what Victor does there. Something to do with mathematics, I think, but he never talks about
it and I don’t pry.”
“Don’t you think such reticence a little odd?”
“No. We had so many other things to talk about.”
And yet . . . now she thought about it, there had been one odd thing about Victor’s sudden transfer to Boston. It had changed him. Ever since the move he had seemed uneasy about something.
Once or twice she had asked him if anything was wrong. Each time he had smiled and said, “No,” but the smile was unconvincing.
It was only after the move to Boston that she found herself thinking sometimes: What kind of man have I married? What do I know about him?
The questions did not bother her because she was so happy in every other way.
Victor was the only human being she had ever known who really did love life for its own sake, no matter how rough the going or tragic the end. That was what had drawn her to him when they first
met. All the small worries that used to nag a shy girl with a rather staid upbringing were blown away in his presence like cobwebs in a gust of fresh wind.
She had never expected to be loved by someone she loved. She knew such luck was rare and precarious. Death and change were always waiting in the wings. But she had learned from Victor himself to
snatch happiness while it was there and never look too far behind or too far ahead.
She was used to earning a living and felt guilty when she didn’t. Victor couldn’t understand that. Did she need more money? She had only to ask him for it.
Even after a year of marriage she could not adjust to his large and lordly attitude toward money. Though his own parents had relatively little, he had been brought up in a family where there was
a great deal, and the attitude had rubbed off on him. The founder of a fortune may be thrifty, but thrift is one thing he cannot pass on to his heirs of the second and third generation. Victor
automatically expected Scotland’s best whiskey and Virginia’s best tobacco, never a half-gallon of California “Burgundy-type” wine or the least expensive brand of cigarette.
Sometimes Marina wondered if Victor’s uneasiness could be financial, but . . .
Dr. Sanders’ incisive voice cut across the flood of memories.
“Why did you choose Lincoln as a place to live?”
“Because it’s the only place near Boston that looks more like backwoods than suburb. Lettice King found our house for us. She lives there herself between jobs.”
“So you settled down in Lincoln and after a month or so you decided to give a housewarming. Do you remember what happened the day of the party?”
“I told you all that yesterday.”
“I want to hear it again.”
“No.” Her voice throbbed. “Why do you always bear down on things that distress me?”
“For your own good, Marina.” There was a glint in Dr. Sanders’ eyes. Was he enjoying her distress?
She schooled her vo. . .
She knew that some people mistook her shyness for arrogance, but surely a psychiatrist would know the difference.
Was this just the currently fashionable love-hate paradox?
No, she would have to be obsessively vain to accept that. Common sense told her that Dr. Sanders’ behavior had no more to do with love of her than Nazi behavior had to do with love of
Jews.
A dark thought came to her, unbidden.
Was Eric Sanders one of those men who hate women just because they are women?
There were such men. Schopenhauer was one of them. Passing a woman, a total stranger, on a stair he was seized with such a sudden access of rage against “the short-legged race,” as
he called women, that he threw her down the stair, crippling her for life. The courts made him pay her a disability pension for life, which merely increased his hatred of women.
The next time Marina heard Dr. Sanders’ step outside her door she slid her hands under the bedclothes. She was not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing them tremble.
He paused in the doorway, an actor’s pause calculated to heighten the impact of his entrance.
His face was long, concave, unsmiling, like the archaic faces carved out of the rock of Easter Island. In profile, brow and jaw protruded. Between them, eyes, mouth and all but the tip of the
nose were depressed and shallow. The lips pouted. Such bizarre exaggeration may be tolerable in art, but it is disturbing in nature.
“Good morning, Marina.” His voice was deep and resonant; his articulation, crisp.
“Good morning, Dr. Sanders.”
“Won’t you call me Eric?”
“I always think of you as Dr. Sanders.”
“Do you shy away from familiarity with everyone?”
“No, just from familiarity with those who are not friends.”
“But I am your friend, Marina.” When she did not answer he went on. “How does your head feel this morning?”
“Better.” Her hand rose to adjust the dressing on her forehead. “When are you going to let me go home?”
“Not until you are entirely rational.”
He sat down. He was a big man, cramped in the skimpy hospital chair.
“Why doesn’t my husband come to see me?”
“You are not well enough for visitors.”
“Why doesn’t he telephone me?”
“I have told him that any outside influence might retard your recovery.”
“And he accepts that?”
“He understands that I must have complete control of my patients’ environment. There is a telephone outlet in this room, but no extension is plugged in.”
“So I’ve noticed. How long have I been here?”
“Several days.”
“But how many?”
“There is no need to be so precise.” Dr. Sanders opened his notebook and uncapped his old-fashioned fountain pen, a handsome trifle, gold with a monogram. “Do you wish to make
any changes in what you told me yesterday?”
“You asked me so many questions yesterday I can’t possibly remember all I said.”
“Let me refresh your memory.” He put on reading glasses to glance at his notes. “You have no family except your husband. Your parents, Leah and Ralph Jacoby, are dead. Your
only other relatives are cousins in California and Czechoslovakia whom you have never met. After your father’s death you and your mother left Ohio for New York because you had landed a job on
a magazine there called Home Exquisite. There was the usual conflict between your mother and yourself—”
“There was no conflict.”
“Oh, come now, really, Marina!” He didn’t bother to look up from his notes. “You loved your job at Home Exquisite and your mother hated it. Didn’t she say
the rooms pictured in that magazine looked as if no men, children or dogs had ever lived in them?”
“That was an office joke I had told her. She was quoting me.”
“Was she?” It was one of his most irritating tricks, to repeat a statement you had just made in the form of a question loaded with disbelief. “Wasn’t your mother dismayed
when she found that all the people who worked with you in the editorial department were other women? Didn’t she ask you how you ever expected to get married if you never met any
men?”
“That was a joke, too.”
“Wasn’t it the true word spoken in jest?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
He didn’t reply. He just looked at her as if he believed that silent skepticism would force her to admit self-deception.
Two could play at that game. She looked at him just as silently, just as skeptically. The silence stretched until he had to break it.
“How did you first meet your husband?”
“Didn’t I tell you all that yesterday?”
“I want to see if you will tell it the same way today.”
“Where shall I begin?”
“With Skinner Industries.”
“It’s a multinational conglomerate. Among other properties, they own a string of magazines. One is called House and Terrace. They decided that Home Exquisite was unfair
competition for House and Terrace so they bought Home Exquisite in order to kill it. They could have given us employees time to look for new jobs, but they didn’t. So many
people were thrown out of work at two weeks’ notice, including me.
“The day we got the news, we held a protest meeting in the office. I was one of those who made speeches. I said pretty nasty things about Skinner Industries. There were some strangers in
the back of the room listening to us. One of them applauded me and I saw him again in the elevator.”
Memory was unrolling in her mind as real as a film with a sound track.
She was running to catch the elevator, breathless. He stood aside to let her enter.
“That was quite a speech,” he said.
“You liked it?”
“No. You see my name is Victor Skinner.”
“Then why did you applaud?”
“Because I liked you.”
She had looked at him more closely then.
He was a tall young man who carried his height without awkwardness. There was a smile in his dark eyes. She did not return the smile.
“I do not like you,” she told him. “How can you like yourself when you are part of Skinner Industries?”
“A very small part.”
They had reached the lobby, but he went on talking.
“I’m just a hired hand. My grandfather started a small company called Eastern Steel eighty years ago. His grandson, my cousin Cornelius Skinner, bought out the rest of the family and
collected other companies the way some men collect stamps. End product: Skinner Industries operating in thirteen countries with the head office in New York at the Skinner Building.
“I don’t own stock or control policy. I have nothing to do with the Skinner magazines. I just dropped in today to see what was going on. I work for another Skinner company: Luka,
Incorporated. Doesn’t that make me a member of the human race?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why not have dinner with me tonight and find out?”
She had known at once that this was a turning point.
If she said no, so many things could never happen.
If she said yes, anything might happen.
She said yes. . . .
“So you were married a few months later?” said Dr. Sanders.
“Yes.”
“One of those impetuous, modern courtships—a few dinners in Manhattan and a weekend in Connecticut when the forsythia was in bloom?”
“There was a little more to it than that.”
“Tell me about the wedding.”
“It was small. Victor’s cousin, Cornelius, and his wife, Anna, couldn’t come.”
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”
“I don’t know. They did send silver spoons. Skinner heirlooms. My mother gave me the only thing of value she had, her own engagement ring. There was only one bridesmaid, Lettice
King.”
“The photographers’ model?”
“Yes, she had been doing some jobs for Home Exquisite just before it folded. She brought us a jeroboam of champagne. Victor’s best man was supposed to be Cousin
Cornelius’ son, Thereon. At the last moment he couldn’t come, but he sent us some fine old brandy in a Baccarat decanter. No one else was involved. After all, Victor’s parents
were dead and most of his friends were on the West Coast where he had been brought up. Mine were in Ohio.”
“You felt isolated?”
“Oh, no. I had Victor. He was what mattered.”
“And did he feel that you were what mattered?”
“If he hadn’t I wouldn’t have felt the way I did. I was so happy I didn’t really feel married at all. I felt as if we were just playing at being married.”
If she had expected sympathy, she had miscalculated. Dr. Sanders pounced. “Didn’t it occur to you that you were taking refuge in the idea of a play marriage because you were not
happy at all at the deepest levels of the unconscious?”
“You do think of the most delightful questions, Dr. Sanders. No, it did not occur to me.”
Dr. Sanders wrote something in his notebook and went on as blandly as ever. “The Victorians had a notion that there is a reaction after every marriage. Did you feel any such
reaction?”
“No.” From now on she would answer in monosyllables whenever she could. The less she said, the fewer weapons she gave him to use against her.
“Your mother died of cancer shortly after the wedding?”
“Yes.”
“A little more detail, please.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“After your mother’s death, your husband was transferred from New York to the Boston office of Luka, Incorporated. Do you miss New York?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Boston is New York’s nicest suburb if you can afford the shuttle flight. Just thirty minutes, half the time it takes to drive in from New Canaan.”
“Why was your husband transferred?”
“I have no idea.”
“A promotion?”
“How can I tell? I don’t know anything about Luka, Incorporated. I don’t really know what Victor does there. Something to do with mathematics, I think, but he never talks about
it and I don’t pry.”
“Don’t you think such reticence a little odd?”
“No. We had so many other things to talk about.”
And yet . . . now she thought about it, there had been one odd thing about Victor’s sudden transfer to Boston. It had changed him. Ever since the move he had seemed uneasy about something.
Once or twice she had asked him if anything was wrong. Each time he had smiled and said, “No,” but the smile was unconvincing.
It was only after the move to Boston that she found herself thinking sometimes: What kind of man have I married? What do I know about him?
The questions did not bother her because she was so happy in every other way.
Victor was the only human being she had ever known who really did love life for its own sake, no matter how rough the going or tragic the end. That was what had drawn her to him when they first
met. All the small worries that used to nag a shy girl with a rather staid upbringing were blown away in his presence like cobwebs in a gust of fresh wind.
She had never expected to be loved by someone she loved. She knew such luck was rare and precarious. Death and change were always waiting in the wings. But she had learned from Victor himself to
snatch happiness while it was there and never look too far behind or too far ahead.
She was used to earning a living and felt guilty when she didn’t. Victor couldn’t understand that. Did she need more money? She had only to ask him for it.
Even after a year of marriage she could not adjust to his large and lordly attitude toward money. Though his own parents had relatively little, he had been brought up in a family where there was
a great deal, and the attitude had rubbed off on him. The founder of a fortune may be thrifty, but thrift is one thing he cannot pass on to his heirs of the second and third generation. Victor
automatically expected Scotland’s best whiskey and Virginia’s best tobacco, never a half-gallon of California “Burgundy-type” wine or the least expensive brand of cigarette.
Sometimes Marina wondered if Victor’s uneasiness could be financial, but . . .
Dr. Sanders’ incisive voice cut across the flood of memories.
“Why did you choose Lincoln as a place to live?”
“Because it’s the only place near Boston that looks more like backwoods than suburb. Lettice King found our house for us. She lives there herself between jobs.”
“So you settled down in Lincoln and after a month or so you decided to give a housewarming. Do you remember what happened the day of the party?”
“I told you all that yesterday.”
“I want to hear it again.”
“No.” Her voice throbbed. “Why do you always bear down on things that distress me?”
“For your own good, Marina.” There was a glint in Dr. Sanders’ eyes. Was he enjoying her distress?
She schooled her vo. . .
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