The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  Young people of today, many so like our own “lost generation,” rebel against the sophistry of society. I ponder how sad it is that they have not been permitted the truth about us. Be on the qui vive for this, my child, because it is personally important to you: history as we know it is so often a lie. I believe that the prevarication begins at home and percolates upward, not the reverse. Your mother’s ill fortune was being reared in a place where the children were regularly lied to, about every last thing that had framed their reality. Confronting adulthood, she cannot imagine a life on terms other than copy-book twaddle.

  While I doubted that the most demented of Federal employees would regard Willie’s psychic experiments as aught but an alibi for outlandish sexual games, he was working off some disturbing facts. I was reminded of confidences gleaned from my clientele in the course of business. Something dreadful had, I knew, been swept under the rug in Philadelphia, two years past, and I was mindful of other pieces of “non-history.” The cold-blooded murder of lovely little Dresden is only now being owned up to. There are other things that will never become a part of your reality. Was it a phantasm, that hot summer night in New Orleans, when I lay awake listening to the explosions as U-boats torpedoed barges in the Mississippi? Lie would pile upon lie. In the depths of the stagnant decade that followed, Aldous and Willie’s nightmares of a universal banality would seem to have come true.

  My Lord in heaven, Justine! I meander because it is so difficult to write, even now. I agreed to take the big portfolio with the entire collection of notes, professedly for safekeeping. Then we slept in each other’s arms one last time. I remember that there was a terrible storm, and I awoke from some grisly nightmare that I could not later remember. Then I went away. It was the following week before I found convenience to look through the material and begin to impose some semblance of order upon the grotesque calendar embedded in it. Then I began to read with captivation and an increasing urgency.

  The Fan-Shaped Destiny described a world much like our own, but not; the histories and fates of people I had known so well, myself included, so distorted. Parts bore an uncanny resemblance to Jimmy’s fiction, and I recalled Willie’s frequent hospital stays in recent years. Might there have been good reason? Could he no longer separate real memory from I knew not what? His narrative gave mad, literal twists to otherwise common enough metaphors. Willie ever had trouble with time, but while he might exercise artistic license, he would always end by telling the truth. By the time I found the buried fragments that contained a personal message, making myself construe their suicidal intent as not fictional; oh dear, it was already too late.

  I was in a stew about what to do. Should I try to telephone, dash up? I did not want to have speech with Constance. I had already begun to make arrangements, though I had never been on an aeroplane and still do not much relish the idea of flying. Then Santolina came to my door. Not expecting to find me at home, she had written a note. When I looked at her face, then down to what she held in her hand, I knew, even before I read the heartbreaking little news clipping that was attached. “Rhinebeck, N.Y. Sept. 20, William B. Seabrook, 59, American author and explorer, was found dead Thursday at his Dutchess County farm home…” “Oh Willie, Willie, don’t go without me again,” my heart screamed. “Put me in your pocket and take me with you. Please, can’t you?”

  Santolina had written on the back in pencil, “This belongs in the book,” meaning Willie’s autobiography. So, I taped it inside the back cover of No Hiding Place, where it is to this day. When I closed the cover and placed it back on the bookshelf, as though admitting our story had ended, it seemed I must surely lose my mind. Sometimes, just knowing someone is there is enough, even if you cannot be together. Knowing that they are out there and happy, or even out there and miserable, but that you may someway get home and make things better… but this, this “no more forevermore forever,” as Willie used to say. The thought of the years ahead without him was unbearable.

  I had to call Marjorie, for he had been the love of her life, too. When I had to speak the unmentionable words to her, to tell her he was gone, was the first time I totally broke down. Finally I had stopped hating her for coming betwixt Willie and Katie. I took time to leave a message for Walter, begging him to go to Marjorie. Then I packed and went to be with Katie. Thank God for Katie, en or massif, as good as gold. His child would have pulled me through this utterly wrong, hateful world, in which William Seabrook did not exist. So soon was I to lose her as well, like her father, dead by her own hand. For long after that, it was Katie’s love that stayed my hand from joining me with my lost ones.

  ————————

  The task of assembling the scattered fragments of The Fan-Shaped Destiny became another salve to my grief. As I read the narrative woven serpentine through Willie’s last effort, the proposal that he had hoped the barn experiments would support was revealed to me, and my sadness was diluted with wonder. Could such things be? Again, I must be circumspect, but I studied for myself the queer reckoning of time in Willie’s books. I have first editions of them all; I leave them to you as well. I had taken these peculiarities to represent artistic liberty and, though rarely, self-serving distortion. Then his explanation led me to compare them with Jimmy’s story; and later, with Marjorie’s book as well.

  Instead of the ravings of a madman, I began to perceive a weave. To Santolina alone was I comfortable voicing my suspicions. She took me to meet more friends and cousins from the darker side of her family, not referring to the color of their skin, in Mississippi and Louisiana. They taught me of ideas undreamed-of and produced facts to back them up. I learned how the lives we think we know, in the words of a greater writer than my darling Willie, “fork and swirl and run parallel, unaware of each other for long, and may eventually converge.” Also I learned a discipline, largely from the manuscript, but partially from those ladies, mambos, as they called themselves. In that they may no longer be there in your time, I will not further direct your attention to them.

  What is required of you, my child, is to journey to Rhinebeck, for which I am so sorry, but it must be done. The manuscript and its allied material are being held for you by a law firm in Kingston, across the River from Rhinebeck. It came there during my efforts to have it published. Despite the assistance of the Montagues and other influential friends of Willie’s, I could never overcome legal difficulties with his estate. Conceivably, there were larger reasons as well. After Marjorie’s attempt to revive interest in his work failed, something else happened, which inspired my determination to oblige you to go and collect it.

  My Willie had left me a map that I have been resolved to one day follow. Last year, something else occurred that showed me how scantily we appreciate the rich tapestry of our existences. I had opened up a private club, out toward Stone Mountain. That property will also come to you, though I am doubtful that the club itself will much survive me. Santolina is gone now, as well, and naught but we could maintain the always tenuous relations with authority.

  We had booked in a young dancer whose husband was traveling with her. I talked long with them both, about which I will say little, lest you think me mad as my favorite author. Only that in his early youth, the young man had loved your mother. What I learned from them made me mindful of how lifelines destined to converge may not do so to our liking, but tentatively approach each other, then draw apart. This may go on, like a teasing mating dance, till they finally intersect. Should you cross his path again, remember me to him, the strange old woman from another lost generation whose destiny touched his for a brief interval.

  At last, an old lady is very tired. Yet there burns a spark as bright as the constellations of those magical nights betwixt the wars. Perchance it will flame up again. So I will to bed and you, soon to Rhinebeck, to “time and the River.” There you will read The Fan-Shaped Destiny and remember me. Should you, in that dark place, feel something so very close to your heart, dread not, for I will be with you. We are separated only by tim
e; and believe me when I tell you that love is not diminished by death.

  Madeleine Leiris, “Justine”

  ————————

  THE GODS LAUGHED as my mind recoiled from the brief horror revealed on the final page of the old woman’s Testament. It left me no more shaken than did her account of the news of Willie’s death, and the little news clipping that had broken her heart. The clipping that had now returned to its home in my black-leather lawyer’s case. The proof was inside a book cover, written in pencil in the hand of another woman. I had not even questioned that “Santolina” was other than a pure work of fiction contrived by Ward, or “Jimmy” Greene. That page had so many typos and strikeovers, mute testimony that she could barely see to write it. It still bore evidence of having been moistened, and I knew that she had wept again when she read it over, twenty-five years after his death.

  Maybe I was practicing my own avoidance as I touched the little depressions and smudges and thought, this is the real reason that suicide is wrong. He might have lived less than another decade, but he had made her grieve for him the rest of her life. So many extraordinary women had loved Seabrook. Why wasn’t that alone enough to make him want to stay alive? I stared at the corner of the ceiling, much as I had stared at the treetops outside my home long years before, trying to send my mind into the infinite. Had the infinite now come for me? As at several times in my reading, a wintry sharpness prickled over me.

  Justine was standing in the doorway, returned from the kitchen with a bottle of gin, tonic water, and two glasses. Smart girl to bring the bottle, I thought. Though a Scotch drinker, I accepted a strong pour gratefully. At that point I wouldn’t even have declined a snort of that powder in her little box.

  I was thinking of a tragedy in the sixties, when my friend George was the victim of a political killing. It was the worst thing that had yet happened in the young lives of most of his friends, but paradoxically, seemed also the confirmation of all we believed about the malevolence of the state. Conversely, the words just read, which I might take as confirmation or at least strong suggestion of a paranormal dimension to our existence, could and did scare the shit out of me.

  “So there was something else you had forgotten to mention,” I stated the fact without rancor.

  “Identify, much?” she raised her eyebrow.

  “She’s not descriptive about the young couple, but I have the horrible feeling that it can’t be anyone else.” I looked at my leather case and dreaded the further revelation. “And you waited until now to tell me because… ?”

  “Do you get it now—why I was so wigged?” she pressed. “Believe me when I say it was not even the extreme coincidence of you and my mother? Hey, I really thought you had to live it for yourself, I really did.”

  I gestured my understanding. No, I could not have believed it until I’d seen it for myself. I went to my case, screwing up my courage for grudging admission to the still less plausible, and handed her the book where she perched on the edge of the tall bed. “It doesn’t end there, Justine. Here is Seabrook…” I recalled another stunning disclosure that might go far to explain her empathy with my obsession. At least a few things were becoming clearer! “Here is your, your great-grandfather’s autobiography.” I turned away and stood at the window, watching the lightning bursts above the dark hills. I wanted to cry, and couldn’t keep my voice steady, “Look inside the back cover.”

  Behind me, there was an indeterminate silence, then an incredulous “Get outta here!” When I turned back to her, she hardly seemed frightened like me. Rather, her eyes were wide like a child’s on Christmas morning, and she held the book clasped against her breasts with both hands, as if it were the most wonderful gift.

  “I think it’s time we left off talking about ‘coincidence.’ This feels more as though we’ve fallen into the hands of the living God! That book”—I pointed an unsteady finger—”lay on these shelves for thirty years, then disappeared after the old woman was gone. It spent other decades in a library, of all things. The clipping stayed taped right there, Santolina’s note to Madeleine identifying it.

  “It’s the very book she wrote of to you, Justine, intended for you. It passed from hand to hand, until it was sold again to my San Antonio book dealer. It’s like it went out looking for you, babe—finally coming to me, shortly before I was to meet you and bring it back here! What is this thing, what is my connection, and how long has it been going on, for God’s sake?” This had all gotten too heavy to put up any kind of a front.

  “What Carl Jung said? An event is not, like ‘synchronicity,’ till it’s consciously perceived as meaningful. Delaying that recognition by twenty, thirty years, is pushing the envelope!”

  I looked at her earnestly, “For two years, I agonized over every revelation of possible close encounters with your mother, when, arguably, I still might have been able to alter our history. Those thoughts would make me want to scream every time another instance was revealed.” I shook my head. “Had I known what’s in your letter, that I was so close to her grandmother only five years after I’d lost JJ, I think I most certainly would have gone mad!”

  “What-ev-er. Coinkydinks, then.” At my look, she playfully expanded. “Co-ink-ee-deenks—like, synchronicity?” I expressed dismay if the future of psychology was being represented, and she smiled just a bit sadly, “Better oughta drop a chill pill, dearest. If you had known… hey, then you could’ve been my father. Au contraire, I might’ve never been born.”

  ————————

  RICHARD, I THOUGHT, I’M STILL NOT LAUGHING! After a while, the rain was slowing, and I assured her that the last thing I could sanely want was a world with no Justine. We concluded that, in spite of everything, we were hungry. She hadn’t much food in the house, and Buford was a predictable redneck heaven as regards cuisine. Justine was thinking more like French or Greek, so we drove into Atlanta.

  She filled me in on the elder Justine’s business history, as she’d gathered it from lawyers and locals. The old woman had owned what sounded to have been the classic brothel with exclusive clientele. It had flourished through the Depression, the war years, and well into the fifties, fine old decadent Atlanta being what it was. Around 1957, she’d made all the money she wanted and retired, but amused herself in her late years with the burlesque club and The Château. Its bizarre sidelines were evidently a product of having the money and influence to do as she wanted, profitable or no.

  I couldn’t complain about the meal. Justine’s choices were excellent though often strange—but my steak au poivre cost a small fortune. Among the things about the girl that I rarely saw change, even in four-star restaurants, were her eating habits. Maybe a slightly hyperactive twenty-six-year-old metabolism was involved, but Justine ate like a pig at the trough.

  Let me clarify this as a comment more on manners than quantity. They were less pronounced against her punker slouch than amidst the moments of weirdly poised elegance. Her command of the correct forks came off as a virtual abuse of etiquette. Watching her almost literally wading through her plate of escargot was an appalling sight. I asked if she were enjoying the blue sauce, which looked like it might be effervescing radon gas.

  “Scrumptious,” she grinned, the expression leaving me a bit bemused. I wondered if that, like “big eyes” for ambition, was something else that Gen-X imagined they’d invented. With our wine, we pored over the questions raised by the surviving library, and dissected various aspects of the Testament.

  “While I was looking for more data on Willie’s relations with Aleister Crowley, I was scanning the index of Crowley’s Confessions for Seabrook’s name. Back up the list, I spied Tony Sarg, whom I recognized from No Hiding Place as having employed ‘Deborah Luris.’ The reference took me to a detailed description of the tantrums and general fussiness of a woman named ‘Madeleine,’ procured by Sarg as a companion for Crowley’s trip. Crowley remembered her like this:”

  … wonderful hair—orange-red curls, calculated to pr
oduce delirium tremens at a moment’s notice… a short sturdy figure trimly tailored, with a round smiling face, and an ivory complexion framed in that pyrotechnic display of hair. Sarg’s eloquence failed to do her justice.61

  “Later, I noticed that Marjorie had referred to a Madeleine, supposedly their Gypsy cook at Les Roseaux.” I handed her Worthington’s book, which I’d brought along with us. “On page 150, she also describes a visit with Willie at a hospital, in the fall of 1933 when he was trying to detox. Seems like there was often a red-haired woman about.”

  Justine found the place where Marjorie had walked in to find Willie talking with Ward Greene, and another friend, an unidentified attractive redhead. The joking and laughing had ended in a sudden awkward silence, as if Marjorie were someone who had arrived late at a cocktail party. She had reflected that these people had been part of Willie’s life before she had known him, sharing old jokes, secrets, and adventures.

  “For a moment she felt a strange relief,” I pointed out. “She imagined that Willie could somehow slide back in time, become well again. Then the eerie mood broke. Almost as though to convince herself, she then asserts that none of them could be the same as they were a minute or years before.”

  “That sounds like a twisted sister. You s’pose Marjorie was all—about a french fry short of a Happy Meal? Ooh, look here…” Justine continued reading, “‘Ward Greene, whom everyone called Jimmy, said something funny…’ That’s dead on!”

  I nodded. “There’s not the slightest question of the people Madeleine wrote about.” I told her of a photo section in the back of Jungle Ways, depicting Seabrook and Wamba heading up their party, also a rare photo of Katie Seabrook in Africa. Justine continued to leaf through the book as I talked. “The lesser-known legend about dead drummer boys and suicided girls sounds like something I read in a piece called ‘Gregory’s Drum’…”62