The Church of Dead Girls

by Stephen Dobyns

  In printing these stories, Franklin saw himself as doing his duty as a journalist. His job was to give information but what his readers actually got was a diminishment, a distortion of what had taken place. I may be on shaky ground, but by idealizing Sharon and by describing her disappearance in such black-and-white terms, Franklin’s articles made people think in those terms too. In the faculty lounge, I heard Frank Phelan, a history teacher, say that when ninth-century Britons caught a marauding Dane, they would skin him and nail his skin to the church door. The same, he argued, should be done to whoever abducted Sharon. That the person might be sick, mad, or crippled in some way meant nothing.

  But it was more than duty: Franklin was totally engaged by his profession. He wasn’t just the fellow who lived next door with his doubts, griefs, and ambitions. He became his job. I have felt this as a biology teacher, that I can be so engaged by work that my fallible side, my uncertain side, slides away and I become the role I have chosen. It is wrong to say that Franklin was less human, but events in our town increasingly allowed him to change himself into his definition of a journalist. Perhaps this is what I saw in Captain Percy and Dr. Malloy: they had been absorbed by their professions. It freed them from a burden of personal obligation—their professions made their choices.

  I found it queer that Franklin left Sadie alone when a girl had just disappeared, but it wasn’t him, it was his profession. And by becoming his profession, he was dealing with his fears. Even in appearance—his old sheepskin coat and Irish hat, his constant rush and clutched notebook, his untidy hair and loosened tie—even in his air of knowing the facts behind the facts, he reflected the characteristics of a small-town journalist. At such times one’s vulnerabilities and fears can seem to disappear.

  —

  By early October everyone in the county knew that Chihani and the IIR members had been questioned about Sharon’s disappearance. This created unpleasantness and, as I have said, Jason Irving’s parents thought it best to withdraw him from college and take him back to Kingston. Franklin, of course, bore some responsibility for the increased attention. But the Syracuse Post Standard had also done a story on Chihani and the IIR, and several papers had written about the vandalism at the cemetery as well as the two bombs deposited by Oscar Herbst. Newspapers have a need to establish patterns of causality and so they argued, or perhaps suggested, that these acts were premeditated and were part of a general conspiracy by the IIR. And they were able to find city officials and even police officers who felt the same way, though Ryan Tavich and Captain Percy never publicly discussed the group.

  People dislike unattached pieces of information and so they linked these bits into a conspiracy theory that began with the arrival of Chihani at the end of the previous year. The mildest proponents pointed to the IIR as a Marxist reading group that espoused Marxist theories. The more radical saw the IIR as fomenting rebellion and committing anarchist acts. They saw a clear line from Chihani’s arrival to Sharon’s disappearance. Indeed, the Friends of Sharon Malloy obtained photographs of Chihani, Aaron, Oscar, and the rest and sent them to other parts of the country where there had been abductions. They even sent a picture of the red Citroën. One fellow at Spencer’s Texaco noted a link between the color of Chihani’s Citroën and the fact that the devil wore a red suit. It was on the tip of my tongue to suggest that the same could be said of Santa Claus, but I thought it wiser not to speak. These were precarious times, and if I were seen as mocking a popular theory, then I, too, might come under suspicion.

  Paula was one of those who feared the progression of events, and she experienced an increasing dread. She knew her brother’s intransigence and his need to provoke. And she may have suspected his current behavior was related to the death of his mother, as if he held the town responsible for her murder. Given Aaron’s character, Franklin’s passionate reporting, the reaction of the townspeople, and the activities of the Friends of Sharon Malloy, Paula might have foreseen where these lines of behavior intersected, and that could have terrified her.

  She also saw how people treated her because she was Aaron’s sister. She felt a certain coldness in stores and on the street and how people who once spoke to her no longer did. She was a beautiful woman with great charm and energy. She was friendly to people and they tended to respond with warmth. Now this changed. Each night she took her dog for a two-mile walk through town. She regularly crossed paths with the same people and exchanged a few words. But people stopped speaking to her and she felt uncomfortable. She changed her routine, taking the dog out at different times and choosing other streets to walk along.

  Even as a guidance counselor in the dean’s office, she was aware of a change. The students didn’t treat her differently, but she felt a coldness or curiosity on the part of the staff and custodial people—people who were from Aurelius and for whom the town was more important than the college. Paula felt them watching her and disapproving or just pointing her out as Aaron’s sister. Pam Larkin at Fleet Bank was barely civil and Lois Schmidt, a produce manager at Wegmans, walked away when Paula asked some perfectly innocuous question about the lettuce. Paula knew that if she was receiving this sort of treatment, then her brother and the other members of the IIR were getting far worse.

  “This is a small town,” said Franklin, when she talked to him about it. “People get excited.”

  It was a shortcoming in their relationship—however fond they were of each other—that he, as a reporter, tended to state the obvious while she, as a psychologist, distrusted the obvious. They were sitting on the couch in the living room of Paula’s house, the house she rented from her father. The couch was rather threadbare, with a design of blue and purple flowers. It was a couch that Patrick and Janice had bought shortly after their marriage twenty-five years ago.

  “It’s the fact that people jump to conclusions that bothers me,” Paula said. “And each day with no news of Sharon makes it worse.”

  “Aaron has to say where he was,” said Franklin.

  “He claims it has nothing to do with Sharon.”

  “He can say that all he wants,” said Franklin, “but people won’t believe him.”

  “Talk to him some more. I’m afraid of what could happen.”

  Franklin made a soothing noise. “Sharon will turn up or they’ll find the person who abducted her and the whole thing will be over. People will forget about the IIR.”

  “That’s what you want to believe,” said Paula. “Did they ever find the person who murdered Janice? People are upset and as each day passes the pressure gets worse. Look at us—we hardly see each other anymore.”

  Franklin took her hand. “I’ve been a lot busier and then there’s Sadie. I can’t leave her by herself.”

  “Sadie,” said Paula, as if she was going to say something else. And then she didn’t.

  Twenty

  Franklin and Aaron sat in Aaron’s living room. It was a Wednesday morning over two weeks after Sharon’s disappearance, the fourth of October. Aaron wound an elastic around his ponytail. “None of this is for publication,” he said.

  Franklin stopped leafing through the pages of his notebook and set it on the table. “I understand that.”

  “You speak about cause and effect. There’s not a cause that isn’t also an effect.”

  “Going back to the big bang, I assume.”

  “And what caused that?” asked Aaron, half seriously. “What I’m saying is that Houari Chihani’s coming to Aurelius didn’t cause anything. At most he was a catalyst for a few students.”

  Franklin sneezed, then took a handkerchief from the side pocket of his sport coat. He had developed a cold during the past few days that included a headache and an itchy feeling in his chest. “So where were you when Sharon disappeared?”

  “We agreed not to talk about that,” said Aaron.

  Aaron was in the armchair by the window and the sun came in over his shoulder. Franklin sat o
n the couch, which was lumpy and too low to the floor. On the wall across from him was the red poster of Zapata. Beneath it was a bookcase jammed with books but no novels other than The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle.

  “You’re trying to understand what happened,” said Aaron, “by studying the traces of what happened. That’s like learning about an elephant by studying its footsteps.”

  “You’d have me go back to the birth of the elephant? That sounds like Chihani.”

  “I’ve learned a lot from him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Imagine two landscapes,” said Aaron. As he spoke he freed his ponytail, then bound it up again. “The first is a field in late spring: flowers, everything growing. Rabbits are running around. Butterflies flutter from blossom to blossom. And lots of birds: robins, chickadees, red-winged black birds, perhaps several pheasants. A woodchuck wanders by. The apple trees are in blossom and birds make their nests in the branches.”

  “It sounds like Walt Disney,” said Franklin.

  “Exactly right.”

  “So what’s the other landscape?”

  “Just like the first but now we add the cat, the fox, the snake, the hawk.”

  “What’s your point?” asked Franklin. Aaron had given him a glass of orange juice and he took a sip.

  “The first is the landscape people hope is there, the one they like to think they live in. The second is the landscape that exists. No Sharon Malloy disappears in the first landscape. It’s a landscape in which my mother wouldn’t have been murdered. The trouble is it’s false. Only the second landscape is true. And there’s nothing wrong with it. That’s how the world is: change and violent change, creatures eating each other, nothing secure. Its radical instability is a natural instability.”

  “This is what Chihani has taught you to see?”

  “He’s taught me not to yearn for the other, not to look at the world through what I desire to see.”

  “What does this have to do with Marxism?” asked Franklin.

  “There’re always imperfections, but some can be dealt with and others can’t. There’s nothing I can do about aging; there’s something I can do about inequality and the abuse of power.”

  Franklin took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. He knew that an effect of being a journalist was he asked questions not for knowledge but for information and that he wanted the information not for his own life but often for something he would write and forget. Did he care one way or another about what Aaron was saying or why Aaron wanted to see a world in which the fox and the cat and the snake and the hawk were pursuing their necessary pleasures?

  “Why’d you come back to Aurelius?”

  “Why do you think I came back?”

  “To find out who killed your mother.”

  “You said it, I didn’t.”

  “And you think Chihani can help you with that?”

  “He can help me see things more clearly.”

  “What ideas do you have about your mother’s death?”

  Aaron cocked his head in a way that reminded Franklin of a bird listening for something underground. “I believe she was killed by a man who lives in Aurelius. But how does this connect to what we were saying?”

  “I was wondering to what degree your ideas about the world were influenced by your mother’s death. Perhaps her death is the window through which you view the world.”

  “So if I argue for greater equality, then it’s simply because my mother was murdered?”

  “That’s an oversimplification.”

  “If someone reads philosophy and history, then comes to a conclusion as to the nature of the world, that conclusion was in fact formed by his psychology, which was formed by the events in his life and by his heredity, which was in fact formed before he did any reading. Is that what you believe?”

  Franklin thought how he could use none of this in a news story and how the next day’s paper still had to be finished. In his mind’s eye he could see the holes on page one and on the editorial page, which he would have to fill that afternoon.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Well,” said Aaron, “let’s think about your point of view and what it says about responsibility. If events occur and how you react is fated by your psychology, then that’s liberating, isn’t it? It means that any particular event is not your fault.”

  “What sort of event?”

  “Your wife’s death, for example.”

  “She died of cancer.”

  “So it was fated and you couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “I couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “Perhaps if she had been diagnosed earlier?”

  “There was no sign that anything was wrong.”

  “But if she’d had a checkup?”

  “She’d had one a year earlier.”

  “What if she’d had one six months or even three months earlier?”

  Franklin didn’t say anything. He was surprised at his discomfort. “Let’s go back to my earlier question. What ideas do you have about your mother’s murder?”

  Aaron again assumed the expression that reminded Franklin of a bird. It had an irony that Franklin disliked, as if Aaron felt he now knew something about Franklin that he hadn’t known before.

  “What kind of ideas should I have?” asked Aaron.

  “Like who might have killed her.”

  “Did you ever have sex with her?”

  Franklin was surprised. “Of course not.”

  “Why ‘of course not’? Your friend Ryan Tavich did.”

  “He’s single.”

  “Do you think my mother only had sex with single men?”

  “I’ve no idea. Do you think a married man killed her?”

  “A man killed her, a man who had been having sex with her. That’s all I know right now. In your frame of reference, she was fated to die because of a promiscuity that was determined by her psychology. Wait,” said Aaron as Franklin began to speak. “I know I’m exaggerating, but her promiscuity and desire for men, whom she might know nothing about, raised the odds that she would chance upon someone who might kill her. My position is that her belief in a good world blinded her to the possibility that anything might happen. If she had taught herself to see the real world, the world of the snake and the fox, then she would have been more cautious and she might still be alive.”

  “What about Sharon Malloy?” asked Franklin.

  “I don’t blame children for seeing the landscape they hope is there,” said Aaron. “That’s what I like about them—their sweetness. And that’s why they need adults to shield them. Are you suggesting that Sharon was fated to disappear?”

  Franklin didn’t want to think that was true. “She rode all over town on her bike; maybe that was a mistake. It put her at greater risk and so perhaps it was fated that something would happen.”

  “Is that her parents’ fault?”

  “It’s nobody’s fault.”

  “Do you think this argument could be used to justify how little time you spend with Sadie?”

  Franklin found himself staring at the L-shaped scar on Aaron’s cheek. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he said.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it,” said Aaron, “when the journalist has to answer questions, he doesn’t like it either.”

  —

  On the evening of the sixth of October the members of Inquiries into the Right, except for Aaron, Jason, and Oscar, met at Houari Chihani’s house. According to Barry, they told stories about things that had happened to them in town. “Some woman had started shouting at Harriet in Wegmans, calling her a whore. Jesse and Shannon had been shouted at on the street. Professor Chihani wanted to discuss the incidents. He said they provided a commentary on the capitalist system and its need for scapegoats. Only this time we were the scapegoats. The whole e
vening was frightening and I’m sorry I went.”

  Chihani saw a problem and tried to deal with it by translating it into philosophy. That evening he supplied two dozen doughnuts and a gallon of cider, which was touching because he never offered the students anything except tea and crackers. The very presence of the doughnuts was an admission that something was wrong. The students were scattered around the living room, mostly sitting on the floor. Because of Jesse and Shannon’s mistreatment of Barry, he sat as far from them as possible. He sat near Leon, the person to whom he had the least objection. Leon’s stomach growled and he smelled of sweat.

  “What is a scapegoat?” asked Chihani.

  “It’s someone who gets blamed for what someone else has done,” said Bob Jenks.

  “It comes from the Old Testament,” said Leon. He sat on the floor with three doughnuts in front of him on a square of paper towel. A quarter of one of the doughnuts was missing and Leon’s mouth was full. “Leviticus,” he said, “the third book of Moses.”

  Chihani turned to Harriet. “What are the attributes of the scapegoat?”

  “He has to be different from the rest,” said Harriet, “even if that difference is purely the result of chance, like Barry’s being albino. He looks different and he’s seen as an outsider. Because he’s an outsider he becomes a suitable scapegoat.”

  “Very good.” Chihani looked at the students. “By forming Inquiries into the Right you became different. By becoming different you attracted attention. By attracting attention you put yourself in the position to receive blame when the community needed someone to blame. In a community of true equality there’d be no need for a scapegoat. People would see themselves as being responsible for their own failings. They wouldn’t need to put the blame on others.”