Stranger Than Truth

by Vera Caspary

  She turned away. I saw her small, neat, drooping back. The heat had been turned off and the air in the office had dropped to the freezing point.

  “I know your father doesn’t commit murders,” I continued. “He merely condones them. Suppose I’d died that night. Could Noble Barclay have squared that one by suggesting a frustrated love affair?”

  She whirled around. My wisecrack had hurt her. That had been the intention. I was sick and tired of the whole thing, weary of conflict, impatient of confusion.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I snapped. “I know I hurt you. I meant to. And damn it, I’ll go on hurting you until I know where you stand, and whether you’re on my side or your father’s.”

  “I came here to ask your help.” Eleanor’s voice was unsteady. She fumbled with the clasp of her pocketbook. Finally she got it open and took out a manuscript typed on yellow paper.

  “What’s that?”

  Wearily she brushed back the curls which clustered on her forehead. “I want you to read this,” she said and gave me the manuscript. After a moment she raised her hand and pushed back her hair again. It was a desolate gesture.

  Suddenly she turned and walked out, leaving me alone in the office with the yellow pages in my hands.

  Part Six

  A SHORT HISTORY OF HOMER PECK

  BY LOLA MANFRED

  “By the time I was thirty I was half blind, half deaf, half paralyzed and half alive. I had given up all hope of health and redemption, and my only interest was to find Nirvana in sodden drunkenness. And then, miraculously, I found the light! It was not the divine light of Religion nor the incandescent light of Science, but the simple homely candlelight of Truth.”

  My Life Is Truth

  NOBLE BARCLAY

  1.

  TWENTY-THREE YEARS ago in a poor sanitarium in Arizona a young man lay dying. He was loved by everyone in the place, for his courtesy made duchesses of charwomen, and he treated the seedy orderlies as respectfully as if they were members of exclusive clubs. This generosity was the product of a rich imagination. The young invalid allowed fantasy free lodging in his mind, but kept it always in guarded chambers so that there was never any doubt in himself as to the hazy borderline between fiction and reality. He had enjoyed his thirty years and viewed with unconcealed apprehension the approach of death. An ambitious man, he disliked dying without having achieved fame. His name, peculiarly ill-suited to eminence, was Homer Peck, a name for a comedy character in a bad rube play. His was the American story, woven of the conventional homespun. Its elements, the village childhood, the jerkwater college, the early struggle could have been tailored to fit the biography of millionaire or gangster. He was eighteen when he went to work as a reporter on a Chicago newspaper.

  In 1917 he was all on fire to save democracy, but Army doctors discovered that the fever of patriotism was less than his body temperature. They advised a year in bed. After sixteen impatient weeks he was at work again, this time in an advertising agency where his imagination was allowed even freer range than in the offices of a Chicago daily. In the first year of Prohibition, it was Homer Peck who ascribed to that burgundy-colored mouthwash “the tang of vintage wine.” He was the first to write of perfume as “overture to romance” and to prove his theory with solemn statements from such connoisseurs as Norma Talmadge and Theda Bara. It was none other than Peck (this achievement falls spontaneously into the “none-other” class) who discovered that fifty-six per cent of the nation’s people were, secretly, C.C.s.

  C.C. Magic initials swept the country. Citizens afflicted with halitosis, pyorrhea and b.o. were mortified at sufferings that contrasted so trivially with agony endured by the C.C. Millions dragged their fetid carcasses into the nation’s drugstores and asked for Liberia, the Fluid Freedom. Today, twenty-seven years later, the nation listens to news brought nightly through the generosity of the manufacturers of Liberia, the natural fluid essence that releases from his unendurable bondage the Colonic Cripple.

  The scientific discovery of the appalling percentage of C.C.s among our citizens was not Peck’s major contribution. He found a way to relieve mass suffering. Wrapped around each bottle of Liberia was a slender pamphlet written by Peck and named by him Handbook of Freedom. I doubt if any philosophical classic has attained wider popularity, or any political manifesto liberated more miserable slaves.

  In the advertising offices of Michigan Avenue, the name of Homer Peck was spoken with reverence. The young genius might have commanded a salary of ten thousand a year. This did not satisfy Peck. When an obscure great-aunt died and left him what is known as a tidy fortune, on which he might have lived a tidy life with all the sunshine and leisure his illness demanded, he went into business for himself.

  With Liberia he had offered freedom. In his own new business Peck offered success to the wistful thousands who, like himself, had been weaned on Horatio Alger, Jr., and dreamed each night of limousines and ocean greyhounds. Success, as a commodity, was no harder to merchandise than a cathartic. Peck knew that it was not the mild laxative Liberia which caused the testimonial letters to flow in by the thousands, but his Handbook of Freedom which, in spurious scientific language, taught the customer to overcome his fear of constipation. In his new venture Peck would expand the Handbook to a correspondence course; five dollars a month for fifteen months, a lesson every two weeks, and instead of freedom from costiveness, freedom from failure.

  Peck wrote his course in the first person and in the cozy style which made the student feel that the master was his dearest friend. But who could follow a master named Homer Peck? Thus, in July, 1920, Warren G. Wilson was born, out of two presidential campaigns by a mail-order tycoon. In his lessons, his correspondence and even his collection letters, Wilson showed himself to be, not the fishy-eyed, cold-blooded capitalist, but a bluff, warm teacher who never stinted on the advice he gave his dear students. He was strict about monthly payments only because he wanted each student to respect the principles of honest business.

  In spite of its high-sounding name and frequent allusions to a faculty, the Warren G. Wilson Foundation was a one-man institution. At the height of its life the Foundation employed six people, four of whom were typists, one an office boy, and Peck’s devoted nineteen-year-old secretary.

  After he had written twenty-two lessons the technicalities of commerce began to bore Homer Peck. He broadened Wilson’s interests, told his students that business success was not all, millionaires were often the most miserable of men, and that success meant knowing “how to live.” Lessons XXIII to XXX generously included essays on Self-Mastery; Freedom from Inhibition; Ego; the You in You; Fundamental Meaning of Truth; Looking at Yourself Frankly; and Purging the Mind, Heart and Soul.

  By the time the thirty lessons were printed and bound in an imitation-leather cover, poor Homer’s cheek was worn quite thin from the constant lodging of his tongue. This was the wrong spirit. A proper advertising man is awed by the virtues of the cold cream, the rye bread, the lubricating system he praises. But Peck had neither the piety nor patience to go on believing in the work which had cost so much of his time, his money and his health. Just when the business was about to bring a return of the money invested in printing, plates, overhead and advertising, Homer Peck quit. The office rent was paid, the furniture sold and Warren G. Wilson’s glamorous career ended. Peck did not even try to sell the copyright, plates and good will.

  His secretary was in love with him. When she was not working on Warren G. Wilson’s sales and collection literature, the ardent, slender, dark-haired girl wrote tender quatrains dedicated to H.P. With Peck she drank cocktails out of coffee cups, danced to hot bands in basement night clubs, walked hand in hand on the Lake Shore, reciting Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shakespeare and Blake. The girl offered passionately to become his mistress, but Peck was tubercular. His only kiss was aimed at her right ear on the day he left for Arizona and she, with three hundred dollars of his money in her purse, went off to pursue the full life in Greenwic
h Village.

  Peck found the Arizona sanitarium a drab place filled with hypochondriacs and sickly illiterates who enjoyed no conversation save the endless recounting of symptoms. He read. “I am interested,” he wrote the girl in Greenwich Village, “chiefly in philosophy, religion and its history, psychology and psychoanalysis. I’ve read all the popular interpretations of the Viennese analysts, but the stuff is too highbrow. What this country needs is a good five-cent philosophy mixed with a liberal dose of old-fashioned mysticism. One cannot overestimate the power of suggestion.”

  This was in 1922 when the Coué craze had begun to sweep the country. “A new patient,” Peck wrote to the girl, “has brought us the hopeful story of that Mrs. D. of Troyes who was cured of consumption in what appeared its final stages. Eight months later Coué had a letter from Mrs. D. She was not only cured but pregnant.”

  “‘A miracle, Mr. Peck!’ sighed our new patient, hoping to give a hopeless invalid a word of encouragement. Why not try auto-suggestion? The same thing might happen to you.”

  “‘Madam,’ I said, ‘it is conceivable that I may be cured of tuberculosis, but if I were to parallel the fate of Mrs. D. and also become pregnant, that would indeed be a miracle.’”

  He was nevertheless interested in Coué’s method and sent for a copy of Self-Mastery Through Auto-Suggestion. Its simplicity amazed him. As he studied the slim volume, he came to the conclusion that simplicity was the secret. Faith-healing had to be simple. The nature of the miracle rests in the nature of the man who seeks the miracle, not in the holy amulet, not in the hands of priest, witch or doctor, nor in the words of the prayer. It is by the strength of his belief that man heals himself.

  Peck had made no scientific discovery; he was merely learning for himself a set of facts which orthodox medicine had long admitted. Faith cured those pains which, existing only in the mind, caused suffering as intense and symptoms as precise as organic infirmity. Psychoanalysts were exploring the buried causes of such self-induced suffering. But these men, in contrast to the faith-healers, were pedants who had constantly to check and recheck results, who treated a sick ego like fluid in a test tube, and more often than not tortured the patient by bringing to the surface those memories which the sick soul protected with an elaborate structure of pain. Only intellectuals were able to accept such treatment and only the wealthy able to pay for it. Worst of all, the psychoanalysts explained away the miracle, which practice frightened away many of the sorest sufferers.

  Homer Peck found the seedy sanitarium a most convenient laboratory. It was not exclusively a resort for consumptives. Any patient was accepted if his relations could pay the monthly fee. Here Peck met women who preferred the invalid’s couch to the marriage bed, men who could not endure the competitive struggle in a world in which it was worse than sinful not to acquire wealth. And there were others who indulged in secret, tortured desire for gratifications considered evil by their families and neighbors.

  As he studied, Peck became sympathetic to the invalids whom he had at first snubbed. He became as intimate with their prejudices as with their pains, asked questions and received startling answers about parents, wives, husbands, bosses and sexual partners of one sort and another. All was dutifully recorded in his notebook. Had his intentions been honest, Peck might have made a solid contribution to the study of the contemporary neurotic.

  But his education had been in the flamboyant schools of advertising. No less than Warren G. Wilson’s dear students, Homer Peck was a victim of the urge-to-a-million. In this spirit he began the writing of his book. “In a way,” he wrote to Greenwich Village, “it will combine the virtues of the Liberia Handbook with Wilson’s dynamics. But it will include this added feature: the sufferer will be taught to cure himself by digging for the roots of his pain. It’s the confessional made chummy, but there’ll be no catalogue of sins, no prescribed penance. I shall call it Confession and Suggestion. There will be a formula which the patient—or novice—will repeat over and over until a sort of hypnosis is induced. I do not know whether I shall prescribe ten or twenty repetitions, although I shall probably choose some irrelevant and mystic number.”

  “Repetition of the formula will be the first step. The second is more exciting, the marriage of auto-suggestion to psychoanalysis. Having hypnotized himself with the formula, the patient lies on a couch, closes his eyes and babbles aloud. Anything that comes to his mind, uncensored, shameless, unrelated, and all leading to the core of guilt. It doesn’t matter very much whether he ever gets to the roots. He probably won’t. What matters is whether he can believe himself cured. Belief is the amulet, the touchstone, the magic.”

  “What name shall I sign to the book? Could anyone follow a Messiah called Homer Peck? Have you any suggestions? The author will have to be a mystery man for it would be fatal to reveal the fact that he has not been able to cure himself.”

  In December of 1923 the book was finished. The girl in Greenwich Village, the first to read it, could not believe that it was meant to be taken seriously. To humor the invalid she submitted it to three publishers who promptly rejected it, and then gave it for reading to a clever woman literary agent who refused to soil her hands with such trash.

  While the girl chewed her fingernails and nibbled pencil stubs, wondering how to break the sad news to Homer, she had a wire from him. It said something of this sort:

  GREAT NEWS STOP A MIRACLE HAS BEEN PASSED IN ARIZONA STOP MY METHOD SUCCESSFUL STOP INFORM PUBLISHERS I CANNOT CONSIDER LESS THAN FIFTEEN PER CENT STARTING ROYALTIES STOP WHY NO WORD FROM YOU STOP WILL SOON BE RICH MY LOVE

  HOMER

  The girl thought he had fallen victim to his imagination, that he had hypnotized himself into believing his poor lungs healed. She was a flabby-hearted creature and could not answer his ecstatic wire with the news that no decent agent or publisher would touch the book. There was a man who wanted to marry her. He was going to Paris. Twelve hours after she had got the wire she was married, and in another six hours on her way to France.

  The next morning her landlady cleaned the room. In the fireplace she found a deposit of black ash. This was all that remained of Homer Peck’s bright dream, the book that was to have made him the new Messiah.

  2.

  In believing that a confirmed materialist like Peck could perform a miracle upon his unworthy flesh, the girl had shown herself a poor judge of character. The book designed to bring health to the ailing cost the author much of his own strength. He burned with a steady fever and coughed until his lungs were a filigree of scar tissue.

  This did not shatter his faith in his method. His strength was failing, his girl had deserted him, no word of encouragement had come from the New York publishers, but Homer Peck had witnessed a miracle.

  To the sanitarium had come a twenty-seven-year-old dipsomaniac who believed the world would be a better place if he were out of it. He was a young man of great charm who, when he had a mind to, could have tempted St. Anthony to sin or wheedled the devil to saintliness. His inebriate wickedness had broken his poor mother’s heart, and had plunged his young wife into such desperate gloom that she had ended her life with a bottle of iodine.

  His name was Noble Barclay.

  In 1917, when all able-bodied young men were called to military service, Noble Barclay had been so far advanced along the road to hell that the Army would have none of him. For a while shame shocked him to sobriety. Embarrassed because he was not fighting, Noble explained that he was serving his country in a more important way. To give the lie substance and also to earn the fat money the war factories were then paying, he took a job which, otherwise, he would have considered beneath his dignity, his background and his class. Not the least of his gifts was a talent for believing whatever he heard uttered by his own voice, and it was not long before Barclay became certain that he was making greater sacrifices than the boys in khaki.

  This attitude won him a wife. She was a pretty girl but serious, idealistic and overbred. Her people approved the bridegro
om’s appearance and name, accepted his explanation of the secret war job and celebrated with a costly wedding. Champagne was served. This was Barclay’s undoing. He had been sober for half a year and he thought it would do him less harm to toast the bride than to confess his weakness. There were many toasts and Barclay, after drinking all the elderly kinsmen under the table, almost disgraced himself with a buxom bridesmaid.

  Mary Eleanor was a modest girl. The story of the bridal night was never told, but it must have been an appalling one for the change in her was immediately marked. Her wild, rapt adoration became frozen acceptance. She lied to her parents and for a time succeeded in shielding from them the information that her bridegroom was almost constantly drunk. The family came to know it was a bad job when they discovered that his mysterious war work was a lie and that Noble Barclay tended a machine beside ignorant Italians and Poles and Czechs.

  They were all relieved on that New Year’s Eve when Prohibition became a national law. Barclay saw it as salvation and celebrated at a lemonade party with his wife’s people who sacrificed their old port and their Rhine wine for his sake. He managed a year of sobriety, but when he lost his job and could not readily find another, he found solace in the speakeasy. As the liquor became worse the cost became higher. This did not keep him from drinking. Contrarily, he seemed to take perverse pleasure in spending his wife’s allowance on bad gin.

  During pregnancy Mary Eleanor had been spared her husband’s love, but one night in May, when their daughter was three months old, Barclay demanded his rights as a husband. Mary Eleanor’s submissiveness had ended. She turned on him like a wildcat. They fought. It was no quarrel, mind you, but a knockdown and drag-out fight which ended with his beating and then taking her. He left her cringing on the floor, laughing hysterically, and it seemed to him that her laughter followed him through the streets to the very door of the saloon.