by Paul Pipkin
Justine waved interruption, reading from late in Marjorie’s account, “And one evening my telephone rang, and at the other end was a woman who had loved Willie, too. She told me he had been found in his bed…”63 She broke off and, when she looked up her eyes had moistened and her lip trembled. “We know who called her, don’t we? You feel it, too; I know you do. Don’t ask me to believe other.”
I did not ask. I knew exactly what she meant. I had felt it at least since we had entered the octagonal room, where a poignancy nothing less than tangible clung to every possession—of a woman who had worshiped the memory of a lost love. Justine, of course, was fixated on the personality of William Seabrook.
“Hey, I’m way sure he’s the only father figure I’m ever gonna have.” Well, I decided to let that one go right by, noting she could find that ancestry in the autobiography, including his contention that black magic was in the blood. He had written of his ancestor Peter Boehler, of the Moravians, associate of Count Zinzendorf and John Wesley. Upon being accused of witchcraft in his later years, the old churchman had contended that he had only been fighting fire with fire.
I also noted that Madeleine’s Lowell Thomas reference was to be found under the heading “Possibility of Precognition” in Seabrook’s book on witchcraft. I still didn’t “spoil” the two chapters on the other Justine by going too far into that material. In a bit of surly perversity, I think I was then feeling that she was falling too far behind on the shock quotient, and should get to share more impact of all this fun! There is a standing joke that the nice thing about being a guy is not having to deal in feelings. After the emotional overload of the recent days, I was perfectly happy to engage in some well-earned denial.
“What’s up with the place where my mother, and all the children, were always lied to?” she asked.
I sighed. “She couldn’t have been more right about that. A substantial percentage of the respectable matrons of postwar east Fort Worth had formerly been on staff at a fine old establishment called Top-O-The-Hill. It was near where Lake Arlington was built in 1957. ‘What did you do in the war, Mommy?’ was not a question to be countenanced on the pious east side.
“Babe, I see ‘sluts,’ like apparently your entire maternal lineage, your gens, as partisans in a revolution whose benefits you are reaping. There was a sexual revolution and the ‘bad girls’ won! Some were victims, like your mother and, evidently, her mother.” The steely armor did not reappear, so I pressed ahead. “The ‘morality’ those girls were taught was a monstrous obscenity, that they would burn in hell for loving. In reality, the only rule was not to get caught. When she did, JJ believed that, despite the ring on her finger, she was an unlucky loser—damned to control by a vicious animal she had to try to please.”
Justine looked askance. “Was there some kinda law that she had to marry him? She could’ve been with you.”
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“SHE BELIEVED HER PERSONAL LIFE ENDED RIGHT THERE. Even had she been able to make that choice, the fact that she got knocked up forced her to ally herself with some man.” I thought of the young JJ as she had been before. “She was such a good little poet. Did you know that? Maybe it helped her hold on to some semblance of self-esteem. It was as near a tragedy as her mother…” My emotions were in a horrible tangle. Reaction to the uncanny events and the hurts and regrets of the past bled into each other. Somehow, I had to draw back from all this for a while.
Justine nodded and spoke softly, “I love you for that, I really do. But you can’t go there, ’twixt Mother and me—big issues! I gotta tell you that I agree with the Testament. These big ‘differences’ are muchly a matter of one generation always lying to the next. Hey, other than JJ, please?”
“There’s something to that. I truly loved all that part about nonhistory,” I complied. “In the time and place where JJ and I were trying to grow up, no thought was allowed unless it suggested the desirable social and political conclusions. I guess that’s why I despise concepts like ‘politically correct,’ and I imagine that the old woman regarded it as a hideous little hellhole.”
I speculated that you could extend that proposition, as Seabrook had apparently begun to do. The postwar reaction had not been exclusively against political ideas—also sexual nonconformity. A largely successful campaign had been launched to convince the entire “Boomer” generation that personal liberties had never been broader than they, themselves, were experiencing. The Orwellian madness then spread like an oil slick. The most bizarre censorship had been directed at obscuring the nature and implications of scientific knowledge—especially, though not solely, as it had related to the recent war.
“Even today, we only get tidbits on such anomalies as the occasional V-One rocket bomb found unexploded on American soil. Back when JJ and I were in grade school, the public-school buildings still had the residue of blackout paint on the windows. Suppose that wasn’t an unnecessary precaution?”
“Back in the day, there was this totally weird buzz on, about an explosion at Medina Base.” Justine named the San Antonio depot where nukes were still stored.
I confirmed her childhood memory of a dark rumor, “Except that it was long before you were born, back in the fifties. There was damage throughout the city, and it’s still classified. Babe, if you could visit the past, I think you’d find it a very different place than we assume, almost an alternate world in itself, just due to the lies that have become ‘common knowledge.’
“Mark Twain was only a bit more fanciful when he visualized a time traveler initiating an industrial society centuries before a social and economic base existed to sustain it. He was realistic to have it disappear, except for tiny ‘anomalies,’ not dissimilar to the sorts of things archaeologists really find.”
“What are we thinking here? Please, where are you trying to go?” I was aware that I’d been bouncing off the walls, using peripheral conjectures to avoid the troubling central revelations. My implausibly “happenstance” involvement with no less than two previous generations of her family had been revealed as only the beginning. My quest to reconcile my personal issues had culminated in both an “inadvertent” return to the presumed source of that line and, “coincidentally,” an open-ended involvement with yet a third generation! I wasn’t ready to deal with it all, and she’d been willing to tolerate my digressions.
“Visualize this, as if you were reading a science fiction novel. American scientific magazines become embroiled in the burning question of communication with the dead, while a decadent intelligentsia waffles among fascinations from sentimental belief in guardian angels to embrace of sexual sadomasochism. In the heartland, fascistic movements obsessed with ancestral heritage battle with working-class communists. A dread of alien invaders provokes panic while the real powers arm for Armageddon with everything from high technology to black magic, and virtual secret societies seize control of national security and communications. An alternate world?”
“Hate rhetorical questions, hate them!” She slurped at her étouffé. “What? A near-future scenario?”
“The autumn of 1938. My only point with this is that we are not, in any sense, highly knowledgeable about a ‘real’ past. For argument’s sake, postulate an alternate past in which the ‘problem-solving group’ at the Philadelphia Naval Yards was very high-powered.64 They and their colleagues had written science fiction in much the same way as former intelligence personnel have written spy fiction.
“Assume further that the so-called Philadelphia Experiment did involve tinkering with space-time, as has been represented in some fiction. There would have been heavy security on this, to be sure, just as around the Manhattan Project.” I was reminded of the story of the 1944 raid on the office of Astounding Science Fiction. “Greg Benford wrote that the Manhattan Project was so afraid of imagination, disciplined with facts and numbers, that it feared science fiction itself.
“Willie could, with at least a marginal interest in ‘scientific romance,’ have been aware of s
ome of this. Other science fiction writers, in particular Murray Leinster, who, you’ll remember, had written the first branching-worlds story in 1934, were picking up on things. Maybe Willie knew Leinster. Continue this chain of remote associations to the physicists he knew, like Bayard Rodman. Or his friend Robert Wood, who, having written some of the earliest science fiction, was part of that community.
“Willie’s published work in the forties leaves no doubt of his obsession with space-time. The barn experiments were about seeing across time and realities, as well as tickling his pickled libido. But all that aside, I must believe Seabrook’s alleged late obsession with government was not much more than that. While the Feds may have cast a wide net for anything they paranoically imagined a threat to U.S. scientific hegemony, Willie was not engaged in anything that remotely approached hard science.
“I think it’s safe to assume that, nearing the end, he was not the most stable personality of whom you’ve ever read,” I concluded. “I relate to him too well for that! I’m only stressing that in the ‘real’ era of the Second World War, as opposed to the conventional assumptions we hold about those times, it was probably easy enough to imagine anything.
“Fun conjecture somewhere has to run up against bedrock science, and some of the more colorful propositions of science fiction must be discounted. None of the rationales that may have affected Willie’s thinking do a thing to increase the probability of fantasies such as, say, security considerations of secret government projects to alter history.”
“So like, not incredible to direct a far-reaching paranoia?”
I nodded. “Regarding Duranty, I would have thought that it would have taken some more years’ decay of his career before he lapsed into paranoia.65 But it’s likely that any speculations from his nefarious buddy might have set Willie off.” Of course, I was prepared to pontificate further, to edify this babe with an area wherein I could at least pretend to be in command of what was going on.
“At the same time, you’re way sure his work was suppressed? For why, because of the S ’n M?” Before I could answer, she shifted gears and her speech changed even more perceptibly. “What about choosing among futures? Did my great-grandmother manipulate things that have happened to you now? As if some kinda witchy thing?”
“Maybe the old woman cast a spell, that’s still working itself out? If not manipulated, I must believe that it has been something in the nature of her precognition. The ‘coinkydinks’ are just too weird. But what else does it insinuate if I take her at her word that Linda and I only happened to book into her club?”
Justine gazed into her wine. “Dearest, she had only then become aware of you, years after you broke off with JJ,” she reminded me softly. “How not take her word? Oliver Stone couldn’t write the conspiracy theory that has your entire life manipulated!”
“It’s true, babe. Even as I talk, I hear myself spiraling into the same paranoia wherein I classified Willie. Indulge an old man. Before Oliver Stone, we had Ian Fleming.” I instructed her as to the old James Bond epigram, “One time is happenstance, two times is circumstance—three times is enemy action.” I threw up my hands. “And what of the goddamned book that seems to have always been waiting for me to bring it back to you, which sought me out as though it was sentient?”
There was a smaller point that was troubling me more and more. “By her admission, she hints at as least as much as she says. So, what are we to do with, ‘Should you cross his path again,’ rather than ‘as well’? Did I meet you before now, and she had foreseen it? I did live in the same city with you for ten years. Or did she just mean… oh hell, I don’t know!”
A thousand other questions plagued my mind as avoidance of the central issues began to break down. I poured the last of the wine to slow the wheels in my head. I then began to confess my misapprehensions that I might be solely a vehicle for the realization of her destiny, or recovery of her heritage.
She grinned impishly, “Disturbing, much, male egoist?” “I guess not,” I conceded, “only if it did not mean that I ultimately lose you.” Now I was giving up the commitment she’d sought on the pier, and I felt my mortality heavier than ever before. “I mean, one day you will have to go on alone, but until then…” I looked up and realized I’d blundered as the green eyes clouded and she bit down hard on a knuckle. God, I thought, she can’t cope with that at all, and rushed to banish the dark cloud.
“Look, babe. Priestley believed Dunne’s theory as applied to personal survival. Once freed from the linear time we know, you may build up any sort of heaven or hell from the figures in your experience. He wrote that it would be a hell of loneliness if they were merely chimeras for your own gratification, that you have to learn to build to please others.66 Maybe a good idea to do that in this life?” Did I believe that, I wondered? Another notion in which I’d lost faith years before—that unselfish conduct might constitute survival behavior?
“Kewl, I win!” Justine exulted. “If you really wanna build to please me, I want you to take me to the Wild Orchid.”
VII
The Châteaux
WILD ORCHID WAS THE PRESENT-DAY NAME OF WHAT had been the elder Justine’s Peachtree Street burlesque club. Though still freaked, I was intrigued with the prospect of verifying that I had been there before, “in another life,” so to speak. Coming on it cold, I would never have been able to recognize it. The classy, if campy, place I’d remembered on a seedy street had become, thirty years later, a rather shabby place on a restored street. A modest lounge, which featured a band, had attached to an oyster bar on the street floor. The burlesque showroom with its small theatrical stage had been upstairs.
The present-day outfit also operated lounge style, with an occasional go-go girl, but their real business was a nude joint on the second floor. At first, I wondered to Justine if it indeed was the same place. While the lounge room looked familiar, there was no oyster bar, nor did it seem there was any space for one. The upstairs seemed smaller, as well, despite being absent the stage where Linda had performed with the magician. I doubted that the enclosure in the center, which had the character more of a pit than a stage, would occupy equivalent space.
Only when we were passed by the door charge did I recall that I was accompanying this property’s landlady. The operator would have been naturally solicitous anyway, even had the weeknight business not been slow. With some amusement, I found it relaxing to be back in an arena where having a woman half my age on my arm was worth no extra looks! The operator confirmed that the building had once been larger. Fire had wasted the oyster bar, long before, and that entire half of the building had been sold.
“Where did you first meet her?” Justine had become quite taken with the recognition that I possessed some small living memory of her predecessor. “You said she was sitting back in the dark.”
“Gone.” I gestured to the wall beyond which the other half of the room had been lost to fire. “The office as well.” Since hearing about Linda’s desire to work at the roadhouse, the setting of the “interview” had fascinated her.
After witnessing the activities out there, Linda had so wanted those experiences for herself that she could taste them. Another featured dancer had been obtained from the agency, to the magician’s distress, and Linda had been “interviewed” in the office late on a Friday night. In an effective ritual, she had been stripped and probed with questions about her sexuality. She’d then been driven, still naked, out to The Château to assume the position in which we’d observed the young blonde. It occurred to me that the girls hanging from the balcony had been reminiscent of the “living decor” that had edified visitors to Seabrook’s apartments in Paris and New York.
I’d described to Justine the way her great-grandmother had appraised me when she handed me the bundle of Linda’s clothing, declaring offhandedly that it was a good night for an initiation, the patrons more aggressive. She had told me that we would go out and watch. I could have helped do the honors if I’d wished, but, in that the
other girls tended to be more implacable, she recommended that I leave Linda to them. The high erotic charge of the situation, as thus described, had not been lost on one such as Justine.
I was reviewing these memories while Justine, maybe just a bit aroused, blatantly flirted with the operator. “The studly says they do hot-oil wrestling on Thursdays,” she whispered with a giggle. I glanced at “studly.” No slimier than he ought to be, I concluded. What-ev-er. She then began regaling us with tales of an adventure in mud wrestling during her college days. I reflected on how big an ass I might have sounded the previous night—declaiming, as though to an innocent, on the history of the skin trade!
Watching the operation, a typical nude joint running a drink hustle, amused her. A tall girl, who reminded me of Linda in her younger days, was working a customer in a booth. Their backs to us, her gown straps were loose on her bare shoulders, hinting that it was unfastened down the front. Their postures in the dim light, plus her sporadic twitches and small sounds, insinuated that mutual masturbation was in progress.
I studied Justine, her eyes shining and nostrils a bit flared. Indubitably the progeny of old Justine, I thought, and a girl after my own heart.
“In the technical jargon of your professional staff, ‘heavy mix,’” I joked.
I’ve had it supposed that, because my general politics are far to the left, I somehow forfeit the right to enjoy such crass “exploitation.” Allow me to clarify: I did not spend a life fighting the system, at great personal cost, to further advance institutional intrusiveness. I believe the right of individuals to “exploit” themselves and their endowments, inclusive of the sale of sex, to be undeniable. Finally, I resist any cadre presuming to monitor public morals, whether self-appointed or state-sponsored. Any questions? Told you I’m a cranky old man.
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“DUDE, I WANNA DANCE.” Justine grinned mischievously. “Gimme tunes!” The operator registered surprise, then started looking for opportunity. He was thirtysomething, clean-shaven with ponytail and earring, in a good suit with dark shirt buttoned to collar without tie; official hard-guy uniform of the nineties. A kind of younger version of me, in fact, and could grow a better tail. Should I be concerned? I cautioned under my breath that she had a business relationship to consider.