The Night Companion
by Jeffrey Greene
Two months out of college and undecided on a career, Tom Hanauer answers an ad in the classifieds seeking a “night companion.” He discovers to his pleasant surprise that he will be more of a hired conversationalist and chess opponent than a caregiver and that his employer stays up all night and sleeps during the day.
As Tom adjusts to this nocturnal existence, he finds that his employer, the lady of the house, is in a kind of cold war with her estranged husband, a disgraced mycologist who, as a result of his ongoing experiments, has forced his wife and children to devise individual strategies to protect themselves. Tom gradually learns the reasons for the strange behavior of the Morhan family.
Chapter 1: The Interview and a Belated Discovery
On October 5th, 1973, a man later identified as Patrick Morhan, Jr., twenty-four, was found dead in his car by an early-morning surfer at Vilano Beach, Florida. The body was filthy and emaciated, but there were no signs of violence. An autopsy determined that death was caused by heart failure precipitated by extreme exhaustion and amphetamine poisoning. As this result was somewhat delayed, the papers covering the story contented themselves with “apparent heart attack,” focusing on the drugs found in the car and not even mentioning the most provocative detail: the amazing quantity of trash.
Piled almost to the windows were fast-food containers, paper cups, cigarette butts, expended lighters, cassette tapes, maps of every state in the lower forty-eight, speed pills, and several milk jugs full of urine. With this last piece of evidence, the police concluded that he had not only been living out of his car for some weeks but, after a certain point, had been in constant and probably sleepless movement.
In fact, the odometer reading, compared against the one recorded by the mechanic who had changed his oil before he left, showed that he had logged over twenty-four thousand miles. It appeared that Patrick Morhan had literally driven himself to death.
The story ran for a day in the back pages of the local paper, one more climax out of context, and I quickly forgot everything but the alliterative headline: “Corpse in Car Puzzles Police.” But not completely; something remained: the idea of a man of my own generation abandoning everything, even the solace of sleep, and driving himself off the edge of the world. It wasn’t until June of 1977, the summer after my graduation from college, that I learned, through a coincidence, all I’m going to know about Patrick Morhan, Jr.
I’d been looking for a job for two months, scanning the classifieds each morning with a reluctance bordering on nausea. I had done mostly unskilled labor up to that time and was convinced that all jobs were dead ends. Long before receiving, in its cardboard mailing tube, my B.A. in English, I’d known — with the prescient flinch that anticipates the blows of Time — that I was not only as unsuited for business as I was for academia, but that I would always be one of those whose pleasure in the journey decreases in proportion to the nearness of his destination. Such people often marry a drug, but I lacked the temperament for self-destruction.
In fact, I was inordinately cautious, being possessed of an imagination that fanned in my face like a card sharp the dreadful possibilities of every situation. At the age of twenty-five — I’d taken my degree between two schools and a couple of years in the phosphate mines — I was still living in an upstairs apartment in Gainesville, Florida, well aware that my habits and associations had prepared me only for a book-lined idleness.
I was down to my last hundred dollars when I came across an ad in the Classifieds. “Night Companion” was marooned among dreary come-ons, bearing the terse description:
To provide care and company for invalid. Must be able to work nights and weekends. Experience helpful but not necessary. $5.00 per hr. Send inquiries to...
The post office address was local. I spent the afternoon concocting a new résumé, emphasizing my miserable six months as a nurse’s aide at the teaching hospital and then as a clerk in the emergency room, splicing together the gaps of unemployment with phrases like “Research sabbatical,” and mailed it the same day. A week later I received a note signed by a Mrs. Carla Morhan, asking me to come to her house on Wednesday at five p.m. for an interview.
The address was in an oak-shrouded neighborhood of faded boarding houses and student apartments, at the end of a jungly dead-end street bordering the polluted creek that wound its way through the heart of the town. The property was large and densely wooded, the house concealed from view by a high hedge of ligustrum running the length of the front yard. Over the wrought-iron gate was a limestone arch, almost hidden by a thick growth of Virginia Creeper, with the name “Morhan” inscribed in tomb-style block letters.
I peered through the bars at high white walls bare except for tiny windows some ten feet off the ground, apparently enclosing a garden or courtyard, from the center of which grew one of the largest oaks I’d ever seen, its fern-shaggy branches splayed out and, in places, touching the roof like the legs of an enormous spider.
There was no “Beware of Dog” sign, so I pushed open the gate and walked to the front door. It was opened on my first knock, as if the maid had been standing there with her hand on the knob. She was a tall and rather worn-looking black woman in her early thirties, more skinny than slender, her red-rimmed eyes alarmed and suspicious.
“Yes?”
“I’m Tom Hanauer. I have an appointment with Mrs. Morhan. At five?”
“Well, nobody told me,” she said doubtfully. “Just a minute.” She stepped back, leaving the door open, and keeping her eyes on me, pushed an intercom button on the wall. “Mrs. Morhan?”
A voice crackled out: “What is it, Hettie?”
“A Tom Hanauer is here to see you.”
“Walk him up, please.”
I followed her down an unlit hallway into a cluttered office with a desk piled high with notebooks and scientific periodicals, every surface thick with dust, and out through sliding glass doors onto a walkway bordering a rectangular courtyard dominated by the oak tree, the prodigious trunk of which seemed to occupy the exact center of the house.
The maid led me up a dark stairway, beside which ran an electric lift for a wheelchair, to a closed door, and indicating it with a brisk nod, left me standing there. I knocked and entered a large bedroom with closed, curtained windows, lit by a single lamp and air-conditioned to the point of coldness.
Sitting in a wheelchair beside the lamp, bundled up in a shawl and smoking a cigarette, was a handsome woman in her late fifties with an open book on her lap and an aluminum walker beside the chair. A frizzy shock of graying blond hair stood up electrically from a dramatic widow’s peak and blew in the air-conditioned breeze. Her face was an almost-perfect oval, its clean lines blurred by jowls, with a straight nose and lips that had probably been very full at one time, her eyes light gray under blond brows, the broad forehead pale and clear in the lamplight. She held out her hand, and I came forward and shook it.
“Mr. Hanauer, I’m Carla Morhan. Please sit. First, let me apologize for the confusion at the front door. I didn’t tell Hettie you were coming. Her loyalties are somewhat divided, and I wanted your appointment to be a surprise to her and, therefore, to my husband.”
“Your husband didn’t know I was coming?”
“He’ll know soon enough, but by then it will be a done deal, as it were. There are reasons for this.”
I waited, smiling a little foolishly, no doubt, but she didn’t say what those reasons were.
“I’ll explain your duties. First, the hours: I sleep during the day, rarely rising before five or six p.m. I eat, take what exercise I can, and then occupy myself with a book or the television for the rest of the night. Your job is precisely described: night companion. I’m tired of talk TV. I need someone to help me pass the time, to converse with, play chess — I hope you play chess? Good — walk beside me in the courtyard, stimulate me by bringing some of the world with you. Are you a night bird?”
“Oh yes,” I replied, smiling both at her choice of words and the odd situation I’d stumbled into. “I’m rarely in bed before two.”
“Good. Your hours will be eleven p.m. to six a.m. You may take two Mondays and two three-day weekends off each month. The pay is five dollars an hour, and a meal is included. Is this satisfactory?”
“Quite satisfactory. That is — and please don’t take this the wrong way — if I won’t be the the cause of any, uh... discord?”
She laughed with a smoker’s harshness, though her smile was quite pleasant. “My husband and I are long past anything as repairable as discord, Mr. Hanauer. I’ve hardly even seen him in over a year. You should know now that I keep these odd hours in order not to see him, to be always awake when he’s asleep, asleep when he’s awake. I will continue to live in this house only under those conditions, and because this is my home, and the nights are long, you are now in my employ.” She made a palms-up gesture of finality and I stood up. “Can you start tomorrow tonight?”
“Yes.”
“One last thing. When you get here, just open the front door and come in. Don’t worry, Hettie is long gone by then and no one will hear you. Push the number two intercom button in the foyer and announce yourself, then come up.”
There was an unpleasant smell in the hallway that I’d noticed before: the odor of confined animals. There were two rooms past Mrs. Morhan’s, and from the last one came the sequential gaiety of a television. The husband’s room? I wondered, descending with groping steps the ill-lit staircase.
The maid was nowhere in sight and, in trying to find my own way out, I missed a turn, went through a door on the far end of the courtyard and came out into a cluttered garage. I followed the gravel drive out to the cul-de-sac, and walked around the side of the house to my car.
That evening I met my friend Peter Fleming at a local pub and told him about my new job. He became thoughtful when I mentioned the name Morhan.
“It must be the same one,” he said.
“Which one is that?”
“Patrick Morhan. Professor of mycology. One of the stars of the department until a few years ago. Had an affair with one of his students and was denied tenure. Fired, in plain English. At least that’s what I heard.”
“And this happened how many years ago?”
“Five or six. Why?”
Not without a sense of betraying my new employer’s confidence, I told him about the interview, and of Carla Morhan’s estrangement from her husband.
“An affair could explain her avoiding him like the plague,” I said. “I guess five years isn’t too long to nurse a grudge, especially if the girl in question was half her age. And she’s disabled, too — another twist of the knife.”
“You’d better watch yourself,” said Fleming with a smile. “The job description may include comforting the wronged woman in other ways. As you mentioned, she didn’t question you too closely about your qualifications. The interview was probably just to get a look at you, see if you were appetizing enough for her. ‘Night companion.’ You’re gonna get shot, boy. How does she look, by the way?”
“For someone wheelchair-bound and twice my age, not bad.”
“I would be careful, though,” Fleming said. “They’re a family that things happen to.”
“Like what things?”
“Like the professor’s eldest son committing suicide. If that’s what it was. Happened about four years ago. Patrick Jr. had graduated from medical school, with plans to become a neurosurgeon. He was all set to begin his internship, but after graduation he went home and, to the dismay of his teachers, did nothing for three years. Then, in the summer of ’73, he went on a road trip, alone. His stated intention was to go west, see the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, the Rockies. He sent one post card, from Tucumcari, New Mexico; after that, nothing. A month later his parents reported him missing. Two months almost to the day after he’d left, he was found dead in his car on Vilano Beach.”
“You’re kidding. That was Patrick Morhan?”
He nodded, pleased at my reaction. “My ex-girlfriend’s ex-husband covered the story for the Gainesville Sun,” he said, and proceeded to catalogue in detail the condition of the dead man’s car. “I’m describing the scene as he saw it. Of course, they’d taken the body away by then. It fascinated me, the notion of a man driving all over the country, speeding his brains out, becoming more and more isolated and paranoid, a creature of pure movement, finally unwilling to leave his car at all.
“So he doesn’t; he buys his gas in full service lanes, orders food from drive-throughs, pisses into milk jugs, his speed and sleep-deprived psychosis causing all kinds of hallucinations. It was talked about for some time, but nothing came of the police investigation. They decided Patrick had a drug problem.”
I was still bowled over by the coincidence. “You have to wonder what made him do that.”
“If only he’d had the simple courtesy to leave a note. But you might ask his mother during one of your midnight chats.”
The bar closed at two a.m., and we parted after Fleming had exacted a promise from me to be kept “abreast of developments in the Morhan case.” To prepare myself for the new schedule, I went to a twenty-four-hour breakfast house and drank some coffee, hoping to stave off sleep until just before dawn.
I got home around three, enervated and twitchy with caffeine, and went for a walk in my neighborhood. It was a hot, still night. A humped, bovine shape of diaphanous cloud grazed the sky, its luminous eye the almost-full moon. I petted friendly cats and watched others slink away and thought of the Morhan house, with its dark stairs and dusty smells, the prison-like concrete walls enclosing the great tree, and the face of my new employer.
Until talking to Peter, I’d had no reason to suppose that my new job would be any different from all the others. But now my thoughts circled around the image of a starved and bearded Patrick Morhan, lying dead in a car filled with garbage.
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
