by Anna Journey
Avoid giving your animal a smile, Tim advised, as we began doing a “skin tuck” with our lip tools, jamming the rough and scabby mouth edges into the carved ditch of the lip line. As the hide dries, Tim warned us, a smile will often shift into a grimace.
Recently I taught Jack Gilbert’s poem “Trying to Have Something Left Over” to a group of creative writing students in my introductory-level poetry course. In the poem, Gilbert evokes the end of an affair between a married American speaker and his Danish lover, who has a young son:
There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.
As I launched into my spiel about how Gilbert’s poem explores a nuanced, ambivalent, and very grown-up perception of love (its ebbs and flows, its contradictions and betrayals), I noticed several students making skeptical faces. “It’s both compassionate and complicated,” I continued, referring to Gilbert’s vision of the tender yet doomed affair. A contingent of the class couldn’t believe that the speaker would cheat on his wife if he loved her. The wife had to be dead, one woman argued. He wouldn’t have had an affair. No way. I glanced around the room to see other students nodding. Gently, I pointed out that several other poems in Gilbert’s collection reinforce the circumstance of the affair, including the poem “Infidelity,” in which a man promises his wife he’ll end his affair with a married woman who has a child. “The speaker’s affair with the Danish woman doesn’t necessarily mean he no longer loves his wife,” I suggested. “Sometimes we become different versions of ourselves, different people, depending on the company.” Surprisingly, within the sadness of this fraught time, Gilbert’s speaker makes a final gesture toward happiness as he whispers, “Pittsburgh,” like a shibboleth, into the ear of his lover’s baby. “So that all his life her son would feel gladness / unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined / city of steel in America,” Gilbert writes, imagining strange waves of joyous déjà vu for the child, a lifelong Pavlovian response: “Each time almost / remembering something maybe important that got lost.”
Tim told me the story of his piecemeal polar bear as I tucked the edges of my raccoon’s eyelids to form a clean border between the skin and glass eyes. Tim had needed a polar bear for the new exhibit he was to create for the Natural History Museum, which was scheduled to open in two years. He’d submitted requests to several zoos around the country for a specimen (if a captive polar bear died, he’d receive the corpse), but he couldn’t secure one in time. After digging around the museum’s storage facility, however, he managed to find several old polar bear rugs from the 1960s and decided to create from the multiple furs a single, composite animal. Because the hides had been acid tanned, making the skins tight and inflexible, and due to their blunt, square “rug” shapes, he and Madison cut the furs into hundreds of intricate pieces, arranged them over a handmade bear form they’d constructed, and glued down the mosaicked hide. No one could tell the museum’s new polar bear was an improvised patchwork.
As I banged out the rounded triangular shapes I’d cut from sheet lead with a hammer and anvil to make the inner scaffolding for my raccoon’s ears, Tim told me a story he referred to as the “live pig tattoo.” During the sixties Tim knew a pot-smoking pig farmer, who, as a joke, tattooed wings on the back of one of his own prize hogs, in honor of the cliché, “When pigs fly.” The figure of speech is considered an adynaton, a type of hyperbole so exaggerated and ridiculous that it shifts into an impossibility.
Rilke conjures the impossible unicorn—“the creature that doesn’t exist”—in his fourth poem in the second series of The Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by A. Poulin, Jr. The unicorn can become a living animal, Rilke suggests, if people love it, if their imaginations are bold enough, if they nourish the mythical beast with the power of their belief. “They didn’t feed it with corn,” Rilke writes, “but always with the chance that it might / be.”
While raccoons have a reputation for ferocity and brashness, I’ve learned that they’re also surprisingly delicate: they can hear earthworms shimmy beneath the soil and their paw skin prickles and becomes more sensitive when slick with rain. The reason for raccoons’ distinctive black “masks” on their salt-and-pepper coats may be an evolutionary improvement meant to reduce glare and boost night vision, making it easier for the mammals to locate foes in the dark. Most raccoons, whose scientific name lotor means, in Latin, “the washer,” instinctively dip their food in water before eating it. The meanest trick you can play on a raccoon, a friend and science writer once told me, is to give it a sugar cube. The creature will eagerly scurry to a river or creek to rinse the treat, only to find, as it raises its fingers to its face, that the sugar cube has dissolved, leaving its paws empty.
To my dismay, my raccoon’s softly alert expression had dried into a droopy, demented snarl. His snout sagged and one of his eyelids peeled back, giving him a rabid, snaggletoothed countenance. He looked like the demonic villain in some sort of dark, adult puppet theater or a piece of resurrected roadkill in a bad horror movie. Madison helped me pry the glued-on hide from the modified badger form so I could re-create some of the missing flesh beneath the animal’s muzzle and under the eyelids by sticking coils of clay to the polyurethane. Once the skin was re-secured, Tim bent over to scrutinize my raccoon’s newly supple expression. “The Old Boar,” he said, nodding. Because boar raccoons are so vicious and prone to fights, he told me, their hides are often scarred from scuffles, and sometimes they even bite off one another’s tails: “They look like they’ve been through the wars.”
A few weeks later I returned to Prey for additional finishing work on my shoulder mount. My raccoon still wore an old wound in the middle of his forehead—a golf ball–sized patch of bald skin between his eyes. After I shampooed and conditioned his coarse fur in the studio’s sink (I felt like a hairdresser in a salon for discerning wildlife), I removed the bald patch of hide on his forehead with an X-Acto blade, leaving a clean, diamond-shaped hole. I cut a matching scrap from a different raccoon hide—another grizzled old boar streaked with yellow and white—and patched the hole by gluing down the piece of new hide with epoxy. I painted my raccoon’s dried nose and clay “tear ducts” with black acrylic, adding a layer of clear gloss to make the nose appear moist and placing a single drop of gloss at the edge of his lips to mimic a spot of saliva. I combed the bristles of the old and new hides together, blending the borders of the patch to disguise the seams, and added streaks of white and black paint to align the mismatched patterns.
“Why taxidermy?” a friend of mine asked me during a dinner out. I was visiting her university to give a poetry reading. “Anna,” she said, leaning over the white tablecloth while clutching her glass of Chardonnay, “isn’t taxidermy for creepy dudes who still live in their mothers’ basements?” I laughed and told her she had a point, then described the young women who worked at Prey like Allis and Madison, how our specimens were “ethically sourced,” and how I thought the bodies of animals were beautiful. My friend looked unconvinced.
I’ve asked myself the same
question. Why taxidermy? I’ve taken two classes: an avian workshop and a mammal course. I’ve taxidermied a European starling and a scrappy Utah raccoon, but I don’t plan on continuing in the craft. I won’t be taxidermying my cat Jellybean when she goes or my friend’s aging Chihuahua. Bringing a dead animal back to “life” through taxidermy—by shaping confident details and lines, by conjuring a fantastic world in which this impossible form might exist—is similar to writing a poem, I think, and, significantly, both modes of art are acutely linked to loss. The lyric moment, frozen in an arrangement of raccoon hide or bird skin or within the precise imagery and syntax of a poem, creates an illusion for the viewer or reader that moves beyond reality: we’re offered a moment that testifies to the beauty, bittersweetness, and gravity of impermanence, and yet, paradoxically, that moment and its inhabitants are no longer mortal. They stand with the other shapeshifters, defiant, outside of time. Like Tim’s piecemeal polar bear, my patched boar raccoon, or Rilke’s summoned unicorn, the lyric moment becomes immortal. Who wouldn’t want to reach out and capture that?
BLUEBEARD’S CLOSET
I visited the Museum of Death to see the preserved head of Henri Désiré Landru, the serial killer known as “the Bluebeard of Paris.” In 1922 Landru was guillotined for murdering ten of his fiancées, as well as one woman’s teenage son. Although no bodies were ever recovered, the prosecuting attorney argued that Landru dismembered his victims and incinerated their body parts in his coal-fired stove. The vanished women, most of them war widows, had responded to the fraudulent personal ads Landru had placed in Parisian newspapers, in which he’d posed as a wealthy widower. Beneath the Museum of Death’s glass display dome, Landru’s gaunt face recalled the color and texture of charcoal, and his fibrous lips looked like the edges of a dried mango slice. The murderer’s facial hair—a black Van Dyke beard and waxed mustache—had been shaved in preparation for the guillotine. As my husband inspected the adjacent exhibit (a full-size replica of Florida’s electric chair), I stood to one side of Landru’s mummified head so other visitors could lean in.
The museum, founded in 1995, with branches in Los Angeles and New Orleans, aims to “fill the void of death education in the USA.” Certain exhibits I avoided entirely. Others I encountered by accident (like John Wayne Gacy’s eerie paintings of Pogo the Clown) and hurried past. The California Death Room—which I glimpsed from the hallway but refused to enter—offered a gruesome wallpaper: an ensemble of crime scene photographs from the Charles Manson murders. I turned down one corridor decorated with enlarged color photographs of American soldiers sprawled on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, then pivoted toward another hall. As I turned to the broad left wall, I realized I stood nose level with a spread of black-and-white photographs of 1950s automobile accidents, with decapitated or maimed bodies slumped over seats and steering wheels. I looked away, hoping no one had noticed, and escaped to a side room.
Other exhibits at the Museum of Death captivated me. I lingered over the collection of logo-engraved pocketknives from 1970s funeral homes. I admired the tender mementos of Victorian mourning jewelry: the silver pins and lockets that held intimate wisps of a dead beloved’s now mouse-colored hair. I paused in front of a case of formidable prison shivs from Alabama. My favorite display was the small room packed to its ceiling with taxidermy. In the hallway entrance to the room sat two celebrity-owned pets: Liberace’s grizzled blond cat, Candy, and an apprehensive-looking Chihuahua that had expired alongside Jayne Mansfield in the actress’s 1967 car accident. Inside the room, I squatted to examine the contents of a lower shelf: a black-humored barbecue tool-set in which the legs of deer formed the trophy handles of the grilling utensils—fork, brush, knife, spatula, two skewers—each one tipped in a hoof.
I spent the longest amount of time standing in front of an entire wall of albino animals: a white muskrat, squirrel, possum, skunk, fox, fawn, and nearly impossible to recognize flaxen raccoon striped in faint amber. What are the chances that this uniquely phosphorescent herd might meet and decide to travel together through a forest? The only suitable vista in which they could survive and seek camouflage would be an arctic one: pure white. The animals—red-eyed, platinum-bristled—crouched in a Siberian pastoral, that winter fable that never got told, or translated, in time.
In 1964 my mother joined a social club during her freshman year at Mississippi State College for Women, in Columbus, and as part of her pledge duties, the Lancers asked her to tell a story to the group. She picked “Bluebeard” and performed the tale in a brooding, theatrical voice. Her selection of a story in which a deranged serial killer slaughters multiple women and tosses them into a secret chamber may seem at first a perverse choice for an audience of students who attended a small women’s college in the Deep South. But the horror story must’ve had a special resonance among women at the cusp of looking toward their future lives, many of them as young wives. In 1964, only a year since the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the students at Mississippi State College for Women had to reckon with the lingering conventions of 1950s domesticity (as well as the particular regional tradition of the Southern belle) and the beginnings of the second-wave feminist movement. My mother wore embroidered peasant blouses, grew out her hair, and sang in a folk trio, the Guineveres, but she also practiced walking with a book balanced on top of her head during her required college course Personal Appearance. In the class, the male teacher would inspect his students’ nude pantyhose and subtract a point for each white run. The women had a midnight dorm curfew on the weekends, with a male dean in charge of its enforcement. On weekdays, men were forbidden on campus. What must “Bluebeard” have said, in this context, about sexual power dynamics? What must it have meant to my mother?
Multiple versions of the “Bluebeard” story exist. Since Charles Perrault’s original tale, writers and artists as various as the Brothers Grimm, Béla Bartók, Sylvia Plath, and Margaret Atwood have added their visions to that enduring horror story of sexual politics. Nothing supernatural happens in Perrault’s version—unless you count the key’s indelible bloodstain as supernaturally obstinate—thus “Bluebeard” is technically a cautionary tale rather than a fairy tale. Perrault, the seventeenth-century French author, published his influential Stories or Tales of Past Times with Morals (subtitled Tales of Mother Goose), in 1697, when he was nearly seventy. The slim yet celebrated book includes only eight tales. My copy of his “La Barbe Bleue,” which bears the Americanized title “The Whimsical History of Bluebeard,” first belonged to my maternal grandparents. The oversized yellow volume is part of their handsome collector’s set titled The Evergreen Tales; or Tales for the Ageless (1952), translated by the British writer and critic Arthur Quiller-Couch and illustrated by the Danish painter Hans Bendix. My grandfather subscribed to the Limited Editions Club, based in New York, and filled the shelves of his home library with rare, leather-bound books in shades of ruby, topaz, sandalwood, and plum. I especially loved the sinister wood-block prints in Dante’s Divine Comedy and the special edition of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The two volumes of Swift’s work came with their own upholstered carrying case that had a vast slot for the cutting-board–sized hardcover A Voyage to Brobdingnag and a narrow groove for the miniature volume A Voyage to Lilliput. My grandfather’s limited edition of “Bluebeard” is number 1052, out of two thousand copies, and the general editor, Jean Hersholt, signed its final page in faint lapis ink. As a child, I used to touch the embossed spines of my grandparents’ books, believing their gilt titles were inlaid with real gold. As a child, my mother sat on the red Turkish rug in her parents’ library and turned the pages of the story, fascinated by Bendix’s gestural watercolors, particularly his illustration of the villain’s forbidden room.
In Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” a repulsively ugly widower, who lives in a castle and belongs to the vulgar nouveau riche, marries the young aristocratic woman Fatima, who resolves to overlook her suitor’s hideous blue beard. Before l
eaving town on business, Bluebeard gives his new bride the keys to the castle, including one that unlocks the door of the chamber he’s forbidden her to enter. Predictably, Fatima can’t suppress her curiosity and unlocks the door to reveal the corpses of Bluebeard’s former wives. In her horror she drops the key, staining the metal with blood. Bluebeard returns early, discovers the bloody key, then threatens to decapitate Fatima. She begs for a few minutes to say her prayers, which gives her time to enlist her older sister Anne’s help. Anne stands on the roof and waves a kerchief as a distress signal to their brothers, who approach the castle on horseback. The brothers speed up as they notice Anne, burst through the castle doors, and stab Bluebeard to death with their swords, rescuing Fatima.
As baffling as Perrault’s cautionary tale may be (what drives Bluebeard’s perverse demands and reactionary violence?), it remains one of the most widely known stories in the folk tale canon. Bluebeard refuses to explain or repent his violence; we never understand what mysterious circumstances drive him toward serial murder. In his classic Freudian exploration of the meaning and significance of fairy tales The Uses of Enchantment (1976), the Austrian-born American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that “Bluebeard” advocates a “humane morality which understands and forgives sexual transgressions.” “Marital infidelity,” Bettelheim suggests, “symbolically expressed by the blood . . . on the key, is something to be forgiven.”
But “[i]s this tale truly about marital discord?” asks Jack Zipes in Why Fairy Tales Stick (2006). Neither partner marries for love, Zipes notes. Bluebeard weds for status and Fatima for money. Fatima profits from Bluebeard’s death, remarries, and forgets her past. Bluebeard remains opaque and unknowable. We discover alongside Fatima his murderous secret but we never understand his reasoning or intents. He veers from laughing amiably at a prank (Fatima and her sister chop off the stem of Bluebeard’s rare aloe that blooms only once per century) to brutally attempting to decapitate his bride. Zipes doesn’t believe readers seek out “Bluebeard” for the wise insights into marriage it provides; he thinks we’re drawn to the story for its puzzling, provocative explorations of “the instinctual drive for power that misfires.” I suspect my mother didn’t tell “Bluebeard” to the Southern belles pledging the Lancers to help them become more obedient wives. I suspect she told the Lancers—those women named after lance-wielding soldiers—as an act of celebratory defiance. Who hasn’t wanted to pry open a secret?