Innsmouth Nightmares

  Here were snapshot annals of forebears from cradle to coffin, literally in some cases. Citizens of Gilded Age, Roaring ‘20s, New Deal, Greatest Generation wore boaters or cloche hats, lace collars or celluloid, pince-nez or aviator shades, ball gowns or bomber jackets, in regal stances or equally stagey horseplay, against backdrops of picnic grounds, picket fences, snowdrifts, carny midways, yachting marinas. Too late to learn who and where these people were; all of that was forever sealed away in the skull of the sole surviving informant.

  In her spritely prime, Fiona had cut a modish figure, sporting a mid-length black sheepskin coat on an autumn holiday in a squalid, decrepit townscape. Where the devil was she, and why did she seem okay about it? Her smile partook of Mona Lisa ambiguity, shading toward tolerant in more guarded poses, mischievous as if putting one over on somebody, or conspiratorial, in cahoots with the shutterbug or others out of frame.

  She stood with hands in pockets or arm draped along a rusty wrought-iron fence, in classy counterpoint to façades of shabby Georgian mansions with rags stuffed in broken fanlight panes, or of a rickety gingerbread hotel where only “Gilm” remained of gilt letters above the portico.

  In one shot, Fiona, with her most reserved smile, accompanied a presumptive native in front of a dingy lunchroom window peppered with flyspecks. No brainteaser to see why she’d be leery; his sentiments were unreadable. His eyes goggled, blubbery lips gaped open. Whatever his connection with her, I had to hope this slump-shouldered, bloated specimen in baggy overalls wasn’t typical of his hardscrabble environs. Maybe he was a destitute victim of the Depression or of chromosomal defects.

  Humoring our optimism, we liberated these photos from a copper-clad firewood box for Fiona to comment upon. She was nodding the afternoon away like a hothouse orchid in the solarium, where a health aide jotted down vital signs. “She’s doing great!” was the professional assessment. Heaven help anyone doing poorly! Grandma, conveniently for us, was in high-functioning fettle, berating the departed nurse’s bossy attitude. I promised with the usual bad faith to discuss it with the agency, and Millie had her leaf through the pictures, and winced as Grandma plastered fingerprints all over them.

  She was seemingly on autopilot, unmindful of the images she pawed at, and after she’d stared vacantly past the last, Millie, a conservator at heart, snatched them off the fleece blanket on Fiona’s lap.

  Fiona recited, “The frog’s plug-ugly to the tadpole, and they’re both plug-ugly to the devilfish!”

  The oracle had spoken and favored us with no more. Back to the geriatric deeps! However, the photo tour of the New England bidonville must have registered on some psychic level because her erratic behavior immediately escalated. When she demanded her “rightful tiara” at dinner, Millie cleverly prevented a scene by plucking a silver cardboard coronet from around a candlestick holder on the buffet. The Party Store trinket had “Birthday Babe” emblazoned across it and had sat there since Fiona’s eightieth. It did the trick, thank God, and henceforth adorned Fiona’s wondrously luxurious hair, morning till night.

  The amateur shrink in me diagnosed ensuing quirks as a reversion to childhood, and squinting between the lines, I gathered she’d spent that childhood in the derelict setting of those Kodak moments. From out of the blue she channeled preteen trauma, histrionic adolescence. Won’t Grandpa ever come out of the water again? I don’t wanna go to school, they’re mean on the bus to Rowley! Those goddamned G-men, I hate ‘em, they burnt down Uncle Eb’s cannery! Daddy, will Grandpa be okay? They said they’re gonna torpedo the reef! Jesus, I grimaced, were these flashbacks to a real and ghastly upbringing, or to highlights of radio dramas?

  Either way, plain English was rare amidst pure gabbling. She often regressed to baby talk or a facsimile thereof, except that she repeated nonsense syllables with increasing vexation, till she clamped her dentures together and glared in disgust at our stupid lack of comprehension. Or during cheerier spells, the gibberish better resembled uncouth language because it supplied the lyrics to quavery, keyless songs.

  Once, in the kitchen, a girl from social services removed Fiona’s coronet to brush her hair, then recrowned her and held up a mirror for Fiona’s approval. She promptly broke into a sort of jaunty revival-tent hymn in articulate English, which made it no more intelligible. Offhand I recall the couplet, “We’ll all wear the gold tiara by and by, in the kingdom hidden from the sky.” The helper found this performance “cute.” I refrained from disagreeing, as I had no handier term for it.

  I also had to admit my poor grasp of the aging process. Physical and cognitive signs had been advancing in tandem, but were bulging eyes, hoarse mouth-breathing, and wattles spreading from under her chin to encompass her carotids “normal,” no big deal? A spot check by an R.N. ruled out circulatory, ocular, or respiratory degeneration, though I’d say she was a tad glib dismissing my concerns as nothing that couldn’t wait till a regular office visit.

  Supposing Fiona were technically “fine,” she could linger indefinitely, a strong heartbeat in a soulless vessel. And supposing she outlasted her trust fund? The house and assets would be forfeit, she’d vegetate in “assisted living,” and we’d be out on our ears. The lesser evil, our best option, boiled down to strengthening our joint bank account with Fiona via our family friend Mr. Crocker, an antiques dealer who’d been after Fiona’s heirlooms for decades. A stop-gap measure, but an extra month or two of solvency might prove key in deciding where Fiona died, in whether we’d be homeless or not.

  Granted, in selling Fiona’s valuables, we’d be going over her unsound head, and it was in Mr. Crocker’s interests not to question she was in no condition to receive guests. He let us sell him Civil War swords, Bakelite radios, and first editions of Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant from rooms off Fiona’s beaten path, and then the tic possessed him, as it did at fraught moments, of flexing his Adam’s apple as if his turtleneck collar constricted it.

  “You know, I was just curious,” he hemmed, “about your grandmother’s jewelry, specifically some artifacts in white gold with designs of marine animals. I saw a necklace, a brooch, and a bracelet once upon a time, but she never wanted to discuss them again.” The corners of his mouth flicked up and down, as if smiling might be inappropriate.

  I, meanwhile, could scarcely mask my amazement at his want-list duplicating ours, singling out the moray pendant among countless items. It was the jackpot whenever Millie and I went ferreting, but had evaded us in Fiona’s bedroom bureau, nightstand, and vanity, every logical nook where she might have switched it with her lifeline necklace. Ergo, it had to be somewhere illogical, and our search widened till nowhere indoors was too far-fetched. Except now, our singular treasure had become part of a trove.

  “You can see what it’s like here,” Millie leapt in. “We’ve no idea where to hunt for anything.” She shot me a cautionary glance, and I scowled right back. Like I’d blab about the pendant before he volunteered why it was so special! “We’ll be on the lookout, though I’m not sure we have enough to go on,” she hinted.

  “Well, if any of it comes to light, I’d be interested,” parried Mr. Crocker, who perhaps had no more to say on the subject simply because we wanted him to say more. The subtle old hustler would’ve been delighted at steering us into redoubling our search efforts. Amidst mounting frustration, I entertained possibilities rejected as harebrained days ago, such as inspecting the musty stack of books and magazines in a corner of Fiona’s bedroom for cavities carved out of pages.

  Not halfway through Edwardian bodice-rippers and flaking Harper’s Bazaars, the cover of a quarto-sized scrapbook was repulsively tacky, but within its frame of tooled-leather cherubs and garlands a square of cardboard had been pasted, containing in graceful calligraphy, “My Cape Ann Atlantis.” The yellow clippings on black cardstock paper were from Newburyport, Gloucester, and Salem dailies of the 1930s and surrounded Fiona with a wealth of context, as priceless in its own right, and as baffling, as her elusive jewelry. />
  Above the first articles, a heading in glittery silver ink was cribbed from racially insensitive lyrics, revealing not only that Fiona was a child of a less enlightened era, but that she no longer dwelt “Way Down on de Manuxet Ribber, Far, Far Away.” Had teenage Fiona been collating news to remind her why, or make her grateful, the folks had pulled up stakes from their native turf? A recent Highway Department map of Massachusetts confirmed my lifelong perception of no towns whatsoever on the Manuxet, which we crossed on drives between Ipswich and Gloucester.

  Nonetheless, area journalists used to situate benighted Innsmouth on the river’s estuary, and Fiona’s snapshots of Swamp Yankee slums fit verbal descriptions to a T. An undertone of bluenose disapproval united all the reportage, along with mention of a 1927 bootlegging raid by the Feds implicating virtually every resident. The stories, to me, smacked of kicking the populace while it was down, all but gloating at labor-law violations, gold smuggling, “miscegenation,” vice-squad raids, and barbaric occultism among a skid-row minority who hadn’t joined the exodus with Fiona’s people.

  The last block of column inches, followed by a slew of blank sheets, explained Fiona’s reference to Atlantis and the town’s absence from modern records. The severest mayhem from the infamous Hurricane of ‘38 rated only tardy, indifferent shrift, almost as an afterthought, buried next to the funnies, as slapdash scissoring attested. Just up the coast from Gloucester, which had withstood an unprecedented 50-foot wave, corrupt, fading Innsmouth had been annihilated, swallowed whole by the storm surge, muck and shallows in its stead. The authorities, busy in more respectable locales, hadn’t noticed, or chosen to notice, for weeks.

  In the same silver penmanship, the remark “Alas!” below the write-up may or may not have been ironic. Regardless, it was probably the most sympathy Innsmouth ever garnered. Fiona must have disavowed her unsavory roots successfully enough to marry into Brahmins, yet kept tabs on her former co-citizens. She’d also retained black-and-white proof of at least one excursion to her ancestral seat. To whatever purpose, Fiona had done her bit, ambivalent as it was, to commemorate Innsmouth, when everyone else was gleefully consigning it to oblivion.

  As if merely pronouncing “Innsmouth” in Fiona’s house had worked grotesque magic, come suppertime she bore unnerving new resemblance to her companion in the photo. Beyond the scaly inflammation and bug eyes they already shared, her lips mimicked the rubbery swelling of excess Botox, and she acted unused to them, making us cringe at half-chewed calf ‘s liver and Brussels sprouts that plopped from her clumsy mouth. And the Innsmouth yokel’s bloat was manifest in Fiona’s cheeks and hands, rendering her hamfisted with the cutlery. Millie discerned hypoxic blue finger above Fiona’s gold wedding band, screeched, and ran for the hacksaw.

  For once, inspiration blossomed in a timely fashion versus hours later. I fetched the hand mirror and held it for Fiona to admire herself, while Millie pinned down one flaccid wrist, and with gliding, precise strokes, notched the ring deep enough to snap it off with pliers. Fiona’s reflection distracted her throughout the procedure, and in rhythm with the sawteeth she warbled, “Fare thee well to the tadpole tail, soon you’ll change your skin for scales.”

  The tune would have been more at home in a log cabin than a saltbox, and the lyrics more with Moondog than Grandma. Then predictably, the notes went minor-key haywire, and folksy vernacular lapsed into drivel. The performance continued as long as the mirror confronted her, and she was blithely unaware of the severed ring snatched from her finger, and then of her finger sluggishly reverting to its normal pallor.

  Afterward, she cussed out whoever had just been around for stealing the unwearable ring, till we risked making it one more object to confuse with the emergency pendant by attaching it to a chain around her neck. There it was in plain view and constant contact, but not even that curbed the accusations.

  For all our piecemeal insights into Fiona’s ill-starred birthplace and its obliteration, we had yet to get a cogent handle on the reality of Innsmouth. Metamorphosis and marine allusions figured in its arcane creed, conceivably grounded in a genetic disorder bequeathing froglike features, as extrapolated from a single snapshot. And into what overall vision could we connect these few dots? As young Fiona might have sighed, Alas! Potential revelations about my family, about this region, maybe about mermaids and mythic seaside ilk sank as irretrievably in A.D. 1938 as they would have in 1,000,000 B.C.

  At best we can deduce and speculate and grasp at straws spewed from grudging fathoms, at taunting glimpses of submerged eons. What vexing gaps in human evolution, in cultural milestones, might be bridged if the ocean bed that had been coastlands in the past two million years were accessible? Before my stint as a librarian was defunded, examples to this effect in Scientific American captivated me for no explicit reason.

  I daydreamed of touring Doggerland, prime real estate between England and Denmark for millennia after the Ice Age, that is, until the rising oceans put it under 400 feet of North Sea. A few flint tools and butchered soupbones caught in trawler nets couldn’t begin to flesh out the impact that Doggerland had made on modern societies, technologies, and bloodlines. Cruelly, sixty-odd fathoms blot out any credit Doggerland deserves for paving the way toward civilization.

  Even more fascinating for its novel perspective on human origins was the infamous “aquatic ape theory,” which posited a water-dwelling phase among our precursors to account for otherwise pointless adaptations in Homo sapiens, such as distribution of body hair, a layer of buoyant fat, the ability of newborns to swim. Anthropologists were content to ignore rather than confute the theory, partly because lowly amateurs had propounded it, partly because it lacked fossil proof. And this in a discipline with the caveat, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!”

  That evidence might well be entombed off East Africa, India, China. Of course, science stands a better chance of discovering archaic germs on Mars than of ever unlocking secrets in offshore silt. But to play out schismatic implications, how profoundly could aquatic apes have acclimated to high seas? Could some have swum out past the tidal zone, never to return except in legendary encounters with earthbound cousins? And to brainstorm recklessly, could recessive genes from the pre-human epoch still regroup in especially inbred backwaters like Innsmouth?

  Not that mapping the genes behind ostensible Innsmouth Syndrome would help identify the artisans of Fiona’s marine-themed jewelry or her hideyhole for it. And the pressure was on, as her voluble phase of senility was already proving a false bottom. Despite spillage from uncooperative lips, that supper of calf ‘s liver had been the last she’d attacked with robust appetite. Every meal thereafter, however much we harangued or enticed her with surefire favorites, met with a few halfhearted bites, and she pushed the rest around with her fork.

  What’s more, no matter the menu, the dining room or anywhere she occupied for a minute smelled of acrid fish, killing our appetites, too. Chalk it up to undermanaged hygiene or progressive disease or the increasingly protean face of “normal aging,” the reek served as a miserable reminder of how ill-equipped we were for dealing with, bluntly expressed, a basket case, maybe for a week, maybe months. Who could tell, when we hadn’t a clue why she’d survived this long?

  Up to now we only thought we’d felt trapped and desperate, and going forward, our meager plan amounted to begging social services for more expert, full-time reinforcements. True to bureaucratic stereotype, they hedged and stalled, but at least we’d made such conscientious noises they couldn’t charge us outright with elder neglect, could they? Meanwhile, the party unlikeliest to denounce us was Fiona, who spoke more seldom than she ate.

  She had turned yet further inward, circling the eleventh-hour wagons, as if showing mortality her disdainful back. Hers, for all I knew, was an enviably rich and happy dream state, wishes fulfilled, absent friends resurrected. Or recalling the daftness she’d been wont to spout, was she a crazed Alice confined to a looking-glass realm of distorted, harrowing
memories? None of it was readable in her slack jaw, lolling neck, and palsied shuffle.

  At odd intervals, Millie gaped into nowhere or perhaps into a boundless gulf of more intimate caregiving than she’d signed on for, potentially a marital deal-breaker, or so I parsed from nonstop petulance, one-word answers to my attempts at reaching out. I resented Fiona no less on musing that, with my luck, she’d die the same day Millie procured a divorce decree.

  I guess neither of us could clamp a lid forever on seething resentment by badmouthing Fiona in the privacy of the carriage house. And I don’t fault Millie for her role in the greater good, really, of hastening the inevitable. She’d been lobbying to cut down on one expense anyway by canceling the lifeline contract, since Fiona, we agreed, no longer realized she had the pendant. It’s only that if Millie had maybe set a less imperious tone, I’d have behaved differently too.

  Fiona had performed the daily miracle of inching her walker into the breakfast nook, and then she went through the autopilot motions of downing a spoonful of oatmeal, a sip of coffee. I was thoroughly convinced that Fiona’s hands and wattled neck on her starvation diet were contrarily fatter and not just swollen, though Millie was incredulous. She can be so blinkered by preconceptions, and worse, harbors no faith that seeing is believing.

  Fiona had already subsided into a morose, wilting stupor, and the contrast with her vibrant girlhood, with everyone’s halcyon mood, feigned or not, in olden photos, sent a pang through my heart, a lump to my throat. Could none of that sunny outlook withstand the decades, nary a mote of happiness once in a blue moon to alleviate the bitterness, the lethargy? Today’s Fiona was like a betrayal, an affront to the youth in black sheepskin, a morbid shadow of doubt marring my confidence in aging gracefully.