by Paul Pipkin
The rest is history. I was still floored that Katie had encouraged him in all that, when he then moved her up to New York and did not leave for six years. Willie was my first love, my greatest love, and Katie became my best friend for life. As mad as he could sometimes make me, I had sensed early on that my debt to the both of them was colossal.
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One of the exotic denizens of the Village who frequented Tony’s studio was the infamous Aleister Crowley, who billed himself as a black magician and was suspected of being a German operative. Willie had early warned me against Crowley, which was passing strange. For one thing, I was almost sure that had been before he had in fact met Crowley himself. Also, Willie was a Republican and had no interest in the political charges against the man.
Moreover, after Frank Harris had introduced them over lunch at Mouquon’s, Willie had become quite taken with Crowley. Learning that Crowley was reputed to employ sadistic rituals in his magic, I was absolutely sizzling when Willie refused to take me around. As if Mrs. Seabrook did not socialize with Crowley? In truth, Katie was one of singularly few ladies that the “Great Beast” seemed genuinely to respect. Everyone loved and respected Katie, not least of all myself.
Another peculiarity in this puzzlement was Jimmy, Willie’s friend from his newspaper days in Atlanta. Jimmy, a pious, bespectacled man with thinning hair, would have looked right at home, as Damon Runyon described him, passing the collection plate in a Baptist congregation. Destined to head a national news syndicate, Jimmy wanted only to be regarded as a good reporter. He and Willie, the flamboyant bad boy, made quite an odd pair. They would always be friends, even after Jimmy published a weird little book based obviously on Willie. The scandal sheets, in the know as to the personalities, found it juicy and near enough to libelous for their tastes.
That book would later magnify my unease concerning the entire Crowley matter, but I enjoyed it, in large measure because Marjorie hated it. When I first met Jimmy during an autumn visit to the City, he watched me so queerly, as though here was another man who knew absolutely everything about me. He inveighed against Crowley, but only piqued my shameless, catlike curiosity with his urging that I observe Willie’s cautions.
I was young and impetuous; even my worship of Willie would side-track me for only so long. At a venture, I pestered Sarg for an introduction. Finally, in the late summer of 1918, Tony’s own nefarious purposes were served by recommending me as a “companion” to A.C., as we called Crowley, on a river trip up the Hudson. I up and went! We started upriver from Hyde Park, in a damned canoe of all things. Before long, it began to turn into one of those hideously uncomfortable, insect infested, out-of-doors “experiences.” Moreover, I found A.C. a pompous ass and physically repellent. At length, my crawling skin reduced me to spinning tales and throwing tantrums like the petulant child I probably was. I succeeded in making myself tedious enough for him to send me home.
On my way back down to the City, I was desolate enough, without having to suffer a growing terror that felt akin to deja vu. Passing through Dutchess County, I began to wonder if the Catskills really were haunted; or what if Crowley really and truly was a magician and did something unmentionable? Glimpsing the lights of the River mansions near Rhinebeck in the twilight, I was overcome with the most horrid foreboding. What if I lost him, what if I lost Willie? For no apparent reason, I was squalling up a storm. The River, twisting into its Stygian darkness, seemed bound for a hell of wailing loneliness. Then it was that I made a crucial decision.
Willie, who had something to do with financing A.C.’s excursion, was most put out. Coming from Willie, I was shocked to find him so beside himself. Persuaded how repulsive I had found A.C., he relaxed only a tad. While I idolized him and was therefore biased, I positively could not construe why he would remain so touchious. Katie had become a star of Village life, planning to open up a smart coffeehouse. She held me forth as her protegee and A.C. never would of dared antagonize her. Try as I might, he would not be gainsaid and, when he did slacken, it was the strangest thing.
He never broached the subject to A.C., but I was not tempted to regard that as weakness or hypocrisy. I think he fathomed A.C. as the sort of dog who would only be encouraged by marked territory. The Seabrooks socialized with A.C. till he left the country the following year, but I had no desire ever again to go near him. Whatever had occasioned all that hellblackness in the Catskills, I would do nothing that might invite the dreadful thing to return. Some months after the river trip, A.C. invited Willie to his rooms on Washington Square. Willie met and, I would presume, played with A.C.’s new protegee, a woman called Leah, who became a fixture of A.C.’s career. Willie would later write of A.C. and Leah with awe and intrigue, but what I remember is this:
Later that night, he came to my apartment with a bottle of gin as if to celebrate. Then things turned strange, nice, but strange. He made love to me with a tenderness unlike I would of expected from Willie. Then he held me in his arms painfully tight, as tightly as he had ever fettered me. Then he cried till he went to sleep.
Not for decades, till the end of another great war, when I myself wept over the revelations of his last written words, would I understand that his tears had been of the most infinite relief. Neither could I have known, nor would I have believed, what Willie had at last convinced himself that he had spared me. I would check onto this strangeness again, at Avignon, and in Paris, and anytime Paul Morand’s friend was around. This “Pauline” was somebody among the French literati, who looked at me in a disturbing way that reminded me of Jimmy. I learned little, as Willie tended to run me around France like a naif tourist, while I was more fluent in the language than he. That would peeve me doubly, as my distant cousin was a well-known French poet and a friend of Willie’s.
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The years went by and with them came change, as is the way of things. It was the spring of 1931, when Willie had wintered in New York for the publication of his African book, introducing Wamba and The Fan-Shaped Destiny. By that time, he was totally involved with Marjorie Worthington, and I was livid. The very idea that he could throw Katie up was an abomination! Though she had been seeing Marjorie’s future former husband, I knew that in her secret heart, the dreadful word “nevermore” beat darkly as the wings of Poe’s raven. It was as if the dark shadows of my ride through the Catskills were being visited on darling Katie, who deserved them least of all. There was going to be some kind of accounting, for I resolved to execute my long standing decision. I had gone that winter, with Katie and Lyman Worthington, to greet their arrival from Europe on the old Berengaria. When I saw Willie grandly helloing us from the deck, with Marjorie and some pretty little Russian countess, where I used to stand beside Katie, I knew what I had to do.
From that day, I inveigled Willie into bed at every opportunity. While I was over thirty, late for a woman in those days, I succeeded in becoming pregnant. Oh, I was seeing other men. Already, seeing the carnage of youthful lives had turned me someway sexually predacious. I saw myself as taking revenge, for those who should have been free, for other times when they would have been appreciated.
I had no interest in establishing paternity. When Willie returned to France, Katie and I went to the stateroom party. That little frump Marjorie was bawling her eyes out across the corridor because we were even there, when it was she who would be leaving with him! The mutual antipathy that had grown betwixt her and me was a personal matter, and everything I tell about her will be, of course, prejudiced. I hugged my belly and gloated with sadistic glee, at owning a part of him that I suspicioned she would never know. It was only being wise, cruelly saying I hoped the ship would sink. He would always be my dashing, dominating hero, however much a little boy he was. And I am his Justine forever.
Dearest child, I am not able to tell who your grandfather was, nor foresee who your father may be. You may pour the two together and I will warrant that they could not add up to one William Buehler Seabrook. Tho
se who have belittled him are loathsome hypocrites who, hiding the skeletons in their own closets, attack with his own honesty a man big enough to tell the truth about himself. Critics in the main, social and literary, are full of hooey. If any of those “defenders of womanhood,” who savaged his sexual practices, gave a hoot for the opinions of the real women who lived and loved with him, you could not have proven it by me. I am here to testify that it was so, so sweet. After he was dead, they erased him, instead of having to own up to his effects, his power. I have got to collect myself, for I have yet to get through the awfulest part of the story, its ending.
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He and Marjorie took the place at Rhinebeck in the fall of 1934, after his first bout with dipsomania. When I first saw the house, I feared that I had experienced there, a long time past, a vision not unlike Lowell Thomas’s friend in those same haunted hills. I knew that Willie’s best years were behind him. However long it might take, I dreaded that he never would leave there alive. As his trusted friend, I truthfully wished him contentment, of which Willie had ever known so little. I felt then that he was lost to me, the chapter ended, the book closed. I had a child to rear and the Great Depression to get through. Quite practical, commonsensical. Later, I could only torture myself over how things might have gone, had I taken another view.
You will have learned about the business I established in Atlanta, with the help of old friends of Willie’s who remembered me fondly, especially the lady Jimmy had called Santolina. You will not have trouble identifying her; prominent in the Social Register, even as she was unmistakably, to the naked eye, a mulatta. In the way of the old Southerners, the country-club set around her simply failed to notice. Her family had been, still are, twentieth century barons, with irons in every fire, from banking and politics to the symphony. It was positively not permitted that money as old as hers should be tainted with color! In the neighborhood, she was known as “pure Creole,” whatever the hell that was suppose to mean. Expending vast amounts of energy on a myriad of tangled activities, it was as little surprising when society overlooked her patronage and protection of me.
During the next decade, she would introduce me to some “witchy women” from the Southern bayous who would help me keep my sanity through what was coming. For my money, she was very muchly a witch in her own right. She always regarded Willie with something like amusement but, with the familiarity of years, I learned that it was not contemptuous and not at all mean.
The craft of the likes of Santolina was an advantage you will likely have to do without. M. Mitchell’s winds of change are now blowing with ferocity across the old Southland, as across the world. The pains taken to hold back histories are again, as always, to no avail. With the inevitability of entropy, the value of our time fades, together with its evil. The first cold Mistral seemed churned up by a hot cloud over Hiroshima. Willie’s telegram arrived the next week, only hours after the radio had announced the surrender of Imperial Japan, and sounded like he had that on his mind. When he wired me to come be with him, there was a phrase I took as a typographical error, whose depths I would only later begin to suspect, “… it seems we live in yet an otherworld.” Even as a by-the-by, those words conveyed such a strange presentiment that I was to remember them.
Riding the trains up to Rhinebeck, I had no inkling that I was on a mission to collect our legacy. With the South receding behind the curved windows of the observation car, I twitted salesmen in flashy suits and lolly-gagged about in utterly girlish fantasies. Might the dark shadows not close over us; might my hour come ’round at last? I knew little or nothing about Willie’s third wife. She had served as a war correspondent during the early Nazi onslaught and looked a bit like Katharine Hepburn. The guess-gossip held her as what, today, they are calling a dominatrix. I was unsurprised that Marjorie had left him. Little regard as I had held for her, I knew that Willie had been her masterful hero as well. No more than I, would she have wanted to see him brought to his knees. It may be I was a product of my times, but had Willie wanted or needed to explore the other side… no, wait. Betwixt us, child, there can only be the strictest truth! I will not pretend I was glad that someone else was there for him. I would of done anything at all, even that.
As hell would have it, I arrived in the evening. The lone cab driver, Bob, was waiting for me at the station. Even so, I knew we must pass those malignant, squatting River mansions in the twilight. With Bob making leading conversation, openly titillated that I was back again in the presumed role of a “research girl,” I watched the mansions as though they were monsters that might leap on us. In truth, they were gracious old homes, and it was the loveliest time of the day to me—anywhere but there.
Which were the more horrid, darkened windows like the eye sockets of skulls, as if the dreadful thing might enter by them, or the lighted ones that called out to dead drummer boys and suicided girls, to the dead crewmen of Henry Hudson, to all the forlorn spirits and lost souls of the Catskills? I was tempted to invite Bob into the back seat to exorcise the ghosts, but I was glad I was there for Willie. The thought of him needful and alone was so hateful to me.
Someone once said that the secret of life is that it gets harder as it goes along. My childish moonings turned into dust. The wife was away for a few days with their little son, and Willie wanted me in and out before she returned. He always inquired after my daughter whom, at that moment, I believed doing quite nicely. Why, I was actually proud that I had managed to rear such a lovely innocent. It did not occur to me that I had in no way readied her for the world. Neither had we discussed her paternity. Willie did not ask, and I had never said. He knew. I think he was ashamed that he could not bring himself to ask.
When Willie took me up to the barn, I vainly hoped that he would ravish me, or chain and whip me, anything. Just let me have him back again! I should explain that the “barn” was a much larger habitation than the cottage in which he had lived with Marjorie, then Constance. He had remodeled it with bedrooms, kitchen, and banquet hall on the ground floor and his studio “dungeon” above. Up there he kept the cages and some altogether nasty gadgets, illumined in the ruby glow from leaded stained glass windows.
I was well versed in his experiments at the barn, having supplied him with a number of his “research girls” during the foregoing seven or eight years. I, myself, had been a participant in several episodes, once for the edification of the Aldous Huxleys, no less. I would so love to have been with Willie on the Riviera, sharing a beach and mysterious adventures with the Huxleys and other exotic friends!
As I saw it then, ignorant as to why he never would permit me to tarry long in France, all that had been wasted on Marjorie. During the sessions in the barn, she had always hidden in the cottage and fretted. I would choose the girls for their sexual bent. On that basis, they enjoyed themselves thoroughly, the rough stuff included. While I had no doubt that Willie thought he was gaining insight into mysteries, nothing I saw there held the sensation of destiny. Nothing as when Willie had taken me to the little circus in Avignon, the one that I had “previewed” while hanging naked in a trance for hours.
Over the later years, Willie had compiled notes detailing the results of the barn experiments. They were a hodgepodge of typed sheets, handwritten pages, some loose notes on napkins, and other scraps of paper. I would discover the fragments called The Fan-Shaped Destiny scattered among them, their narrative thread weaving like a serpent throughout. He expressed his desire that I take it with me when I left.
He had also prepared for shipping the mural Marjorie had painted, which he knew I loved, irrespective of its source. In its case, Marjorie’s guilty obsessions paralleled Willie’s own, so it was very forceful. We were all there: heroic “Willie of Arabia,” drunk Willie, Piny, his girl-mother Myra, our darling Katie, Marjorie, and even little me, dangling from a doorway wearing only my red leather mask. I was not even dismayed that I came off looking incongruously cute!
He also had me select what I wanted fr
om among the memorabilia. I chose the Yezidee bridal belt from Mount Lalesh, to go and stay with the Arabian bracelets and chains he had given me twenty years beforehand; also some of the African demon masks from Wamba’s tribe. Another of my regrets was not meeting her, about whom Katie had spoken much.
It must have been the most unadulterated denial that blinded me from seeing him disposing of his affairs. Willie could scarcely be accused of having been a quiet man, and I had assuredly learned enough of psychology to appreciate what his rare peaceful demeanor might portend. Did a similar blindness prevent me from being helpful to my daughter, or could that have been as Willie hinted in the manuscript? When you read it, you must determine the measure of my guilt, which I cannot escape bequeathing to you as well.
Whatever the case, I chose instead to credit some notions that I would have dismissed at another time. Even as I wonder today at the broad sweep of Willie’s imaginative brush, I would not be inclined to test it. Willie did have some prominent friends, numbering among them some of the leading scientists of the day. More recently he had struck up acquaintance with some of those writers of scientific romance, as he called it, after the English fashion. They had been privy to government projects during the war years. He fumed that those contacts had been severed because he had been deemed, for no apparent reason, a security risk.
It never would have occurred to Willie that they might have merely taken him as a loon! If his ramblings about a past, not even as ever popularly perceived to have been, sounded impracticable, his transitional elements were natural enough. When he spoke of Walter Duranty’s intimations of a blanket of secrecy and a frightening passion for control coming down over our country, it sounded not so far-fetched, even less so in retrospect.