The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  I stepped over to examine the loving mural with its prayer by John Donne. By this point, I knew its little characters and vignettes as I knew the figures and episodes from my life which had been haunting my dreams more often of late. This was again like visiting another man’s dreamscape, and I felt the same hushed reverence that Justine was demonstrating. More, viewing its magnificent reality confirmed Marjorie’s disclaimer, that it had not been painted with a promotion in mind, that she’d never intended for it to endure public display.

  ————————

  THE WHOLE PAINTING WAS A PRAYER, not Donne’s lines alone—a heartfelt prayer for the immortal soul of its subject. Curious though it remained that a woman of Marjorie’s sensibilities had been attracted to Willie Seabrook to begin with, the touching sincerity of her work of art, that she had believed lost, was undeniable. I was humbled and shamed by remembrance of my worldly scorn at its creator, as well as for having doubted its caretaker.

  It was with a feeling akin to fear that my fingertips lightly brushed the figure of a tiny nude spread-eagled on a doorway, face locked within a helmet of red leather. I could imagine that, rather than the expected texture of paint and wood, my touch might somehow intrude upon the trembling, sweating flesh of the masked icon within whose home I now stood. I was moved to verify what I could see of the figure’s naked chest. Whoever’s features the mask concealed, they were not those of Leah Hirsig. Upon her breast there was no Star.

  I turned quietly to see Justine kneeling by an old cedar chest under the windows, gently removing its contents. A pretty party dress from the flapper era, a couple of beautiful little beaded handbags, a box of cigarettes of a vanished brand, bundles of letters tied with faded ribbons, and other keepsakes. The precious memories of a lifetime were stored in that chest.

  She then began laying out items of the same barbaric silver as the jewelry she’d worn in the Marriott bar. One pair of bracelets was in reality manacles—with locking clasps and rings attached. When she spread out the belt, with its uncut stones and little chains, my last skepticism dissolved. By description and illustration, it could be none other than the Yezidi marriage belt acquired during Seabrook’s Arabian adventure.

  Justine handed me an African mask, one that he might have received from the very hands of Wamba, she of the Fan-Shaped Destiny. Justine stayed on her knees, hands between her thighs and looking expectantly at me, as for approval. Seeking to lighten things up, I smiled, and said, “Thank you for looking after all this. Uncle Willie would be proud.” For a moment she seemed oddly surprised, then giggled with delight.

  We gathered up the Seabrook articles by unspoken consent, Justine carefully replacing her predecessor’s other treasures in the chest, and took the memorabilia back down to her living area. She then spoke of how the estate had been picked over, in spite of its owner’s careful planning. I agreed it significant that most items explicitly named in the will had not been taken. In this situation, the theft was likely connected to someone who had been with the law firm, or an earlier executor. A quarter century having elapsed, something of this nature was to have been expected.

  In the study, she pointed out how there were no first editions of anything left on the shelves. The only works of Seabrook that remained were Asylum and White Monk, neither of which could have given her a complete picture of the man or his work. There were, however, many old books. She watched me as I browsed their titles.

  I knew my growing astonishment must have shown, for there were Charles Hinton and J.W. Dunne, books about Einstein and Minkowski, the Michelson-Morley experiment, the third volume of the Feynman lectures—all the classics that I had read in pursuit of my own quest. There were philosophical works on the ancient idea of the plurality of worlds, and more recent science magazines. I examined an old copy of Physics Today lying above the roll-top.

  “Justine,” I gasped, “do you know what this is, the edition for September of 1970?”

  “It was inside the top of her desk, and that was the month she wrote her will. As if she’d been reading it at that time?”

  “This contains the first popularization of Everett’s theory by Bryce DeWitt,” I told her. I shook my head as the old copy still readily fell open to the well-thumbed pages of the DeWitt article, its paradoxes illustrated by little drawings of the predicament of Schrödinger’s kitty-cat.

  The hard science ended, naturally, with the classics. Priestley was there, alongside Lawrence Durrell and other time-haunted writers of literature. There was Michelet in French, and other French sources that Seabrook might have perused in the library at Geneva. Also in French were Paul Morand, Anaïs Nin, and Pauline Réage.

  There were Aldous Huxley and Gertrude Stein, Hecht, Van Vechten, and others dear to the heart of a Lost Generation New Yorker. I was given pause by a little book on puppets by one Tony Sarg. More when I touched the spine of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River, written just down the road from Seabrook’s residence at Rhinebeck.

  Thunder rumbled outside, startling me back from… somewhere. It seemed the storm had caught up to us. There before me were Eleanora Deren’s Divine Horsemen, and a number of other books on Voudon in Haiti and America, as well as its African origins. I pulled down The White King of La Gonave, and pointed out to Justine its introduction by Seabrook, which she hadn’t yet noticed. So many things of my own obsessions—why, I’d just found de Sade, then Borges. Might Borges, who was close to the poet Valéry, have not also known his friend Paul Morand? Maybe he had been influenced by Seabrook more directly than by merely reading things everyone else had forgotten…

  The wind rattled old shutters. “It’s time,” Justine expressed in her same hushed tone, as if something momentous was at hand. As, oh God, it surely was. She unlocked the roll-top and turned on the Chinese lamp, motioning me to sit at the desk, and placed in front of me a document. It was a long letter on some twenty sheets of yellowed bond paper, their age implicit in the typewriting of an Underwood Standard. I discovered the old typewriter still in its desk well; maybe untouched since that other Justine had last replaced it all those years before.

  Justine merely told me that the letter had been attached to the will, then moved away to let me read. She cleared off a large table in the middle of the room. I glanced at her with sexy thoughts, once or twice at most, absorbed in her project of carefully arranging the memorabilia on the table. Thus had Seabrook displayed his trophies in the barn studio—he would have been proud. Perhaps a spirit could rest a bit easier.

  The rain had begun again, high up on the tin roof and reverberating through the empty house. I remembered my trip through the South years before with Linda, thinking how every night seemed to be a rainy night in Georgia. But there, in Justine’s library-bedroom, all was warm and cozy, and I began to read. Even when I would later read Willie’s lost manuscript and wonder at its incredible message, even that would not have the devastatingly personal impact of this first introduction to his true mystery.

  I was soon engrossed. There was additional information, clarification, and provocatively leading hints that I’d sought in vain through the resources I had available. Lighting my pipe, I was drawn into the love and pain of that other Justine, first as she’d laboriously typed her final defiance of time and death. Then, perhaps because I’d read so much of them and their world, back to early century New York, to Toulon and Avignon, and Rhinebeck. Even now, a maelstrom of emotion renders it indescribable for me. I simply include, in its entirety:

  THE TESTAMENT OF MADELEINE LEIRIS

  September 20, 1970

  My Dearest Justine,

  Having not much longer in this life, I address this personal communication to my great-granddaughter. By the time you are reading this, you have become heir to the lion’s share of the properties enumerated in my legal will, to which this document is attached. Doubtless, my act of leaving a substantial bequest to a person not as yet conceived, as of this writing, will be viewed as but another whimsy of an eccentric old woman
.

  I have the assurance of my attorney that it will stand as long as proper legal niceties are observed, to wit, securing of a pittance to other potential claimants and, my soundness of mind not be held in question. To the first issue, I have selected a firm that is old and highly respected in Atlanta, positively stodgy, with whose founding family I have maintained very close association. Other agents are prepared to ensure the process should there be any breach in my charted path, so I have complete confidence that all will go as intended.

  As our countrymen are scandalous among the great powers for their remarkable narrowness, I am constrained to circumspection regarding certain matters. At the same time, I must needs supply adequate direction that you may receive your true bequest with all deliberate haste. Some women of our bloodline have been known for particular forms of intuition and for uncommon recall. Therefore, I advise you to search your recollections for memories that may serve you in the search I know you will now undertake.

  There are interesting matters for you to explore among the histories of our progenitors. The information in the formal documents attached will enable you to unearth that heritage. Such pursuits are something for which your mother, bless her heart, and my niece who reared her have little use. They summarily dismiss anything they consider to be of the “dead past.” That has come to give me a chuckle, the dead past; what an idea! The tip I can give is only that you not become unduly involved with the minutiae of genealogy. The succession of historical personages who gave you your physical being is important, but not paramount.

  A score of years and more will have elapsed. High damned time, I would say, for your mother to have seen fit to divulge your grandmother’s tragedy. My only child ended her brief life in sorrow, in illness, not long after she gave birth to your mother. I was given to great deliberation by that catastrophe. Be mindful of how very wrong it is to belittle young love, its joys and its sorrows. So many lives have been ruined. Should you ever feel yourself in like fashion loosely connected to this life, remember me. I have lived long, thanks in large measure to always finding umpteen other things that needed doing.

  Those days of the late Forties were a hellish time for a girl to bear a child out of wedlock. Her “shame” was visible to all of a foolish society bent on turning back the clock to a time that had never been. Some died, by the butcher’s hand, most in the living death of shotgun weddings. Public policy had become secret adoption, an illegal practice that should never have been countenanced. At best a racket, at worst an abominable experiment, I would not have any of it in our family. Dreading that the contingencies of my life may have had a detrimental effect on my poor child, though she had materially wanted for nothing, I would not risk a re-enactment.

  I arranged for my barren niece, together with her husband in Texas, to adopt and rear your mother. I would help from time to time, but generally kept my thousand-mile distance. I might have erred; should have kept her with me. I hope that you will not be put off when I express my certitude that your mother’s eventual marriage was a gross mistake. You may understand my reasons by and by. I would hope, by the time you are of age, that union will have ended.

  This practice, of passing on the name Justine, began as a little gesture of hope for the immortality of my lost daughter. It was I who made it a part of your mother’s name and, as the tradition has not been observed with your sister, I am confident that you will have become the latest Justine. For one thing, your mother will not jeopardize this bequest by failing to oblige me.

  Please do not misconstrue me. I love your mother dearly, but my niece proved out to be a little prig who reared a child tolerably banal, so much as to eschew her birthright and her probable destiny. Though I pity her, all is not lost. The identity of your grandfather is of no moment. The dimwit to whom your mother bound herself may or not turn out to be your sire. No matter, the maternal line alone is important to us. I, myself, have had two marriages and various lovers. One alone will I trouble to chronicle.

  ————————

  In an early fall twilight, in the twilight of my life, my heart goes back, as I suppose it does with all women, to the very first. Dark and brooding, brash, counterpoised, guilt haunted, even twisted, but so magnetic and powerful! Dear, dear Willie. I suppose I would of always loved the bad boys; and not I alone. Also my darling Katie, who kept the years after Willie’s passing from being unbearable. Even prissy little Marjorie, who would ask you to believe she was a damned saint, someway wading through all of Willie’s queer leavings without getting any of them on her.

  How Willie could make me hate him! Not for what I chose to endure willingly at his hands. I will stand by his affirmation of my role in all that. I had better ought to censor myself here pursuant to my attorney’s advice. While it appears that a broader ethic regarding personal beliefs and practices is in place, he cautions that, decades hence, prudish minds may yet again dominate psychological definitions. As I said, a stodgy firm. No, I would hate Willie for the cavalier fashion in which he treated the women who loved and adored him.

  Only after he was gone, when I read the collection of notes from the barn experiments, was it impressed upon me what he had believed himself about. So painful to embrace the solitary nightmare he had ridden all the years I had known him. I ask you though, had he fully shared his secret with any of us, would we truly have believed him? Only after close study of his books and letters could I no longer deny the bitter and yet wondrous truth. In all our incarnations, we are yet part of the human condition. For all our wit, how often has the prayer gone up in contrition, in remorse; for one last chance, one more moment to say I am sorry, or thank you, or even just good-bye?

  Your true inheritance, my child, is that which he called The Fan-Shaped Destiny. Of imponderably greater value than the material bequest, you must find the reasons that I have obliged you to come to Atlanta to collect it, and will send you farther yet down time’s dark river. You are wondering, I will warrant, if something uncanny is not afoot. This is a deliberate puzzlement for you to solve. Trace our lifelines, my child, and find yourself in the course of it. In this epistle, I will treat only with singular moments of my enduring life with Willie Seabrook. With these missing pieces, you will find the rest for yourself.

  If you have been told that I was the first Justine, you may be surprised to learn that I was not born with the name. It was my dearest Willie who christened my sojourn in this life with the character of the divine Marquis. My birth name was Madeleine and I was born around the turn of the century in New York City. Back in my day, ladies had the luxury of obscuring our exact dates.

  I well recall that first meeting, early in the year of 1917. I was working in the studio of Tony Sarg, the former German Army officer who had decamped and eventually immigrated to the United States. His popular marionette theater brought him instant celebrity in Greenwich Village. Ten years later, Tony would design the first giant balloons for the Macy’s Parade. Like my Willie, he is not muchly remembered, either.

  I was too young and green to understand Tony’s politics, though back in that day, most of the avant-garde were Socialists of some denomination. In the studio girls’ eyes, he was well schooled in Prussian authoritarianism, but he had some kind of conflict with the growing might of High Germany. One day he had attended a luncheon given by the proprietor of the Brevoort, a man named Orteig, who was a sponsor of the Lafayette Escadrille and the Field Service. He had brought some of the returned veterans back to show off the studio where we made the puppets.

  Willie was then thirtyish, a tad older than his comrades. He cut a someway sinister appearance with his dark tousled hair and mustache. He was big and brooding and scary-looking as he stalked about the studio with his shoulders hunched. He made a splendid figure in his Field Service uniform, his Croix de Guerre on its red and green ribbon adding a Napoleonic touch. Should history anymore be taught when you are educated, remember that the German ambassador had just then been expelled. It was no longer the sophisticate
s alone who understood that American entry into the “War to End All Wars” was imminent. By then, those early volunteers were cast as visionaries and heroes, to have tasted the horrors of war before being called.

  Near the end of his life, he would hurt my feelings for a while by maintaining that I had made as little impression on him as I had dreaded. I could not construe his claim that he had scarcely spoken to me, as I had so wanted to entice him in my tiresome studio smock. After all, I would chide myself for months; this hero was married to the incredible Katie, who had become a nurse to follow him off to war.

  Her family was, reputedly, from big Southern money. I was but a callow dilettante, whereas she was a belle. My parents had means sufficient to keep me comfortable, though they wished I would marry. With the changes being wrought by the Great War in the offing, I could have become part of the new elite of educated professional ladies. I was more taken with the arts and the bewitching characters who hung about with the likes of Tony Sarg.

  Willie had talked with me and, to my bewilderment, flirted. He had then bowled me over with uncanny knowledge of my life and personality. He knew how I so loved to wear weighty bracelets and chains and toc like that, back before “costume jewelry” became fashionable. More dreadful was his hint that he knew what that affectation signified for me. Never, in all my enduring life, had I told anyone about being “kidnapped” and tied to trees by the little boys, or how delightfully far those childhood games had gone!

  Willie wrote that he had dreamed about me and wanted to visit. When he taxed me with a harrowingly explicit vision of what he wanted, there was positively no question about it. I went to meet him wearing so much leather and metal that climbing the stairs, to the studio I had borrowed for our play, I must of looked a scream. Wishing that he would be less solemn about it all, I did as best my shaking knees would allow to play the blasee connaisseuse of everything we were about to do. I soon discovered that Willie was as nervous as I.