American Gothic

by Michael Romkey

  The gown had pushed up over her pelvis during the first treatment, revealing the patch of dirty-blond hair between her thighs. Dr. Glass had a vision of Candy nailed to a cross, which he quickly shook off. The psychiatrist made sure the white doctor’s jacket was arranged to hide his reaction before turning to the nurse.

  “Do you have anything fun planned for the weekend, Emerlinda?” he asked. “Some gardening perhaps? The weather has been lovely.”

  “My mother is coming over, and we’re going to plan the reception,” she replied. Candy Priddle was forgotten as soon as she began to update Dr. Glass on her wedding plans.

  Dr. Glass returned to his office with plenty of time to fix a nice cup of tea before his one o’clock appointment. He was a punctual man and demanded the same of others, including his patients, as a simple matter of courtesy and respect. The exact moment the numbers on his digital clock clicked over at the top of the hour, his receptionist phoned to say his next patient was ready; the clocks in his office were synchronized with the one in the waiting room.

  “It is good to meet you, Miss Warring,” the psychiatrist said, standing up to meet the girl. “I am Dr. Glass.”

  The young woman nodded briskly but did not extend her hand. Dr. Glass never made the first move with his patients. Not in the beginning, anyway.

  “Please make yourself comfortable.”

  The oddly dressed young woman did a quick survey of the office, which was decorated with the same spare modern elegance as a psychiatrist’s office in Copenhagen that Dr. Glass had seen pictures of in Architectural Digest.

  “Should I sit on the chair or the couch?”

  “Whichever makes you feel more comfortable, Miss Warring.”

  “Ah.” Her eyes flicked in his direction, the gesture made more dramatic by the almost theatrical use of eye shadow applied in the manner of a princess from ancient Egypt. “The first test.”

  Dr. Glass smiled back at her. “The second, actually.” There was no point denying it. The school counselor said she was an exceptionally intelligent young lady.

  “And what was the first? Something about the way I walked into the room, or was it that I didn’t offer to shake hands.”

  “Very good, Miss Warring. But please do be seated.”

  She went to the couch, which was shaped like a lazy S perched on four narrow chrome posts. Though she didn’t look in his direction, Dr. Glass was aware that she was monitoring how he was watching her as she lay back and draped her legs—hidden in a long black skirt and spike-heel boots—upon the couch. The many silver bracelets on her wrists clinked softly as she made herself comfortable.

  “Do you mind if I call you Mary Beth?”

  Dr. Glass heard her suck in the breath between her teeth. “Yes, I would mind. I would mind it very much. My name is Ophelia.”

  Dr. Glass nodded pleasantly and leaned back. The chair he was in was larger and more authoritarian looking than the one the patients used, if they were too insecure to indulge in the soft, Freudian comfort of the couch. Dr. Glass adjusted his half-moon reading glasses and read the tab on folder. His receptionist had dutifully labeled it Warring, Mary Beth. Which was as it should be. Mary Beth was Ophelia’s birth name, and her legal name, as far as that went. But what was a name if not a label that could be changed whenever it suited you? The thought that he could get up one day and simply decide to be someone else had a certain appeal to Dr. Glass. He opened the folder and scanned the school psychologist’s evaluation. The report, which was laughably facile, was also sadly typical.

  “Are you waiting for me to explain about my name?”

  “Hmm?” Dr. Glass looked up from his reading. The girl was lying there with her eyes closed, her body language telling him that she was perfectly at ease, which was certainly not what he usually encountered with new patients. “No, not particularly.”

  “Good. I find it boring to talk about. Most people don’t ask me about it anymore, though it was of obvious interest to the school shrink. I suppose that’s all in the paperwork you’ve been reading.”

  Dr. Glass smiled, closed the folder. He leaned back and crossed his legs. A minute went by in silence. Then two. Then three.

  “Are you awake, Ophelia?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was just checking. I thought that maybe you’d drifted off.”

  “I’m perfectly content to lie here quietly until my half hour is up, Dr. Glass.”

  “My time is rather expensive for that, but if that’s what pleases you.”

  A smile flickered over her lips, which were painted in lipstick of such a deep purple that they seemed almost black.

  “Why did you decide to call yourself Ophelia?”

  The girl sighed.

  “You’re a fan of Shakespeare, I suspect, though I doubt you would have been any more happy with Hamlet than the Ophelia in the play.”

  “Very good, Dr. Glass. One point for you.”

  “Ultimately we all invent ourselves, though most people aren’t as cognizant of the fact as you. Or as bold about the persona they create to inhabit.”

  “There is no need to be condescending, Doctor.”

  “I meant it. Your manner of dress—it’s very striking, if I may say so.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What do the others your age at the high school think of it?”

  “Who gives a fuck?”

  Dr. Glass nodded.

  “How long have you been a Goth?”

  The question displeased her.That got her attention, Dr. Glass noted with satisfaction, seeing her posture stiffen.

  “And I would guess that your name, Ophelia, has as much to do with the vampire role-playing game you’re involved in as it does with your interest in Shakespeare and poetry in general.”

  “It’s not a game.”

  The psychiatrist gave her anger a full minute to subside.

  “What is it about vampires that fascinates you most, Ophelia?”

  “The darkness. They’re all about darkness. Darkness and blood.”

  “Most people are repelled by blood.”

  “Not me.” She smiled, her eyes still closed. “Blood is power.”

  “Did you start dressing like a Goth and become interested in vampires about the time your mother died last year?”

  The girl laughed, but without joy, and looked across at him. “That is such a pathetically obvious question, Dr. Glass. But I have a question for you: Why were you staring at my breasts?”

  “I wasn’t,” Dr. Glass replied smoothly. “I was, however, admiring the collection of crosses you have around your neck. The ankh is the ancient Egyptian symbol for eternal life, but then I’m sure you know that. But the crosses—I thought vampires had an aversion to crosses.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale, like the idea vampires can’t go out in the sunlight and have to sleep in coffins. Vampires don’t sleep in coffins because they have to, Dr. Glass. They sleep in coffins because they like it.”

  “You don’t look as if you get a lot of sun, Ophelia.”

  “I’m a night person.”

  She was actually rather attractive, despite the bizarre getup, Dr. Glass noted. Her body was better suited to the ballet, or even modeling, than to slouching around with a bunch of punked-out losers. But there was something about the whole package—her looks, her clothing, her intelligence, her defiance. She seemed plugged into something primal—dark, but primal.

  “Have you ever heard of the Shadow, Ophelia?”

  “I’m not stupid, Dr. Glass. I know about Jung. Not a lot, but some.”

  “Of course.”

  She looked over at him again, interested in spite of herself. “Do you believe in the collective unconscious, the animus, the Shadow, and all of that?”

  “Jung certainly has an interesting way of looking at the human psyche. I don’t know if myth has as much power over our lives as he argues, but it’s certainly possible. What do you think about it?”

  “I think that I have decide
d to become my own Shadow.”

  Dr. Glass leaned forward slightly. “Really?”

  “There’s no point denying our darkness. The only way to be truly free is to cross to the Shadowside and take responsibility for the pain, the decay, the death. Others deny these ultimate realities. We celebrate them.”

  The Shadowside, Dr. Glass thought, smiling to himself. The term was from the vampire game Ophelia was wrapped up in, reality and illusion blurred in her depressed late-adolescent mind. The young woman would benefit from medication, perhaps even from a course of electroconvulsive therapy.

  But still, Dr. Glass thought, there was a certain primitive aspect—even archetypal, on a Jungian level—to what she said. He was interested in learning more about the Ravening, this decadent children’s supernatural playacting game. But most of all, Dr. Glass was interested in learning more about Ophelia, queen of the local undead.

  29

  Hauntings

  OPHELIA WAS THE fifth generation of her family to live in the big Victorian house on Mulberry Street. Her great-grandfather Jonas Warring bought the house in 1919. He had been a lawyer whose expertise was water rights. Jonas Warring made a fortune arguing on behalf of railroad interests and against ranchers and small towns in the West, where everything depended upon water access.

  The rambling three-story manse was perched at a seemingly precarious angle on a steep hill, like the houses built along the street rising sharply up from the waterfront. The house had a view of the San Francisco Bay, Alcatraz Island, and Oakland at the other end of the Bay Bridge, when fog didn’t obscure the view. Ophelia’s grandfather had been born in the house on Mulberry Street, though Ophelia’s father had come into the world the modern way, in a hospital delivery room. In one of those reversals of convention that seem odd in some places but not in California, Ophelia was born at home, with the help of a midwife. Ophelia’s mother had always disliked hospitals, perhaps because she psychically intuited the horrible end she would suffer, hooked up to all those hoses and machines during her last tortured weeks of life.

  The Warring residence had fallen into disrepair. Old homes require constant attention, and it had been several years since Stephen Warring, Ophelia’s father, had stopped caring about that sort of thing. The windows were streaked with grime, and paint was starting to peel on the eaves. The decorative planters along the front of the house, where Ophelia’s mother had planted colorful annuals each spring while she was still alive, were a tangle of dead vegetation and scraps of windblown trash.

  Like flies to spilled soda pop, houses showing distress in fashionable San Francisco neighborhoods attract a steady stream of realtors, developers, speculators, and young professionals searching for a bargain. Ophelia had learned to spot them from her bedroom window as they stood on the porch, looking earnest and hopeful; she no longer bothered to answer the door when they rang the bell. The business cards and notes they left stuck in the doorjamb contributed to the litter that collected around the foundation.

  The problem wasn’t financial. Though Stephen Warring no longer kept office hours at the law firm his grandfather founded, he still had plenty of money. The explanation was that he had stopped caring. The condition of the house was the outward sign of a collapse not of the financial kind, but rather one of the will—a withdrawal from the world of appearances and everyday concerns. The disease Stephen Warring suffered from was not one of the body, like the cancer that had claimed the life of his wife and knocked him from his position as one of the town’s prominent citizens, but rather a sickness of the soul.

  Ophelia suffered from the same affliction, although the symptoms were entirely different from her father’s.

  Dusk was gathering as Ophelia turned up the sidewalk to her house. She was dressed in her usual Goth attire. She had attracted a lot of stares—and derisive comments—when she changed her name and became a child of the night, but the people in her neighborhood and at the exclusive private school she attended had grown used to it and now barely gave her a sidelong glance.

  There was a Prada backpack slung over her shoulder, an accoutrement from her previous life that she sometimes still used because of its functionality. Inside the pack was her digital camera and a black leather book of unlined paper she used to write poetry and random observations about life. The Book of Lies, she called it.

  Directly across Mulberry Street from the Warrings’ was a house that truly was abandoned, though it wouldn’t have attracted more than a glance by a realtor cruising by in a BMW, looking for fixer-uppers. The house at 1666 Mulberry Street had sat empty for all eighteen years of Ophelia’s lives—her life as Ophelia, and before that, her other life, the ordinary one, which had been filled with fear, helplessness, and despair. The Haunted House, as Ophelia had always known it, was empty of inhabitants but not of furniture. She had peeked through the windows on many occasions at the elegant old-fashioned furniture, the oil paintings on the walls—nineteenth-century landscapes, she guessed—and plants. One of the city’s more aggressive security firms maintained the burglar alarm and patrolled the property at night, a side benefit for the neighborhood, which remained remarkably free of the usual urban mischief. A cleaning crew came by every two weeks to dust, and a plant maintenance van stopped by slightly more often to take care of the ferns, rubber plants, and big jade plant that sat in the front hall and must have been more than a hundred years old, judging by its carefully manicured size.

  The house was never visited by its owner.

  Ophelia’s mother had told her a trust maintained the property. Its owners were apparently too wealthy and busy to visit the home. Or maybe, Ophelia thought, they were all dead, and there was nothing left but the trust, using the proceeds of some careful investment to maintain a simulacrum of life in the house long after its owners had surrendered to death and decay.

  The house across from Ophelia’s was haunted. Everybody said so. Even her mother. The house’s ghost was a sea captain who had grown rich on voyages to the Far East back in the days when ships were powered by sails. The captain was a sad figure, a man whose family had been killed during the Civil War. Ophelia had seen evidence of the haunting on several occasions over the years. There were lights in the upper rooms—not electric lights, but more like candles, as if the ghost made his visits by the light of an earlier century, when people relied on whale-oil lamps and tallow candles to see after dark.

  Growing up across the street from the Haunted House had shaped Ophelia’s imagination as a child. She began to consciously collect San Francisco ghost stories when she was thirteen. She knew all about the Bleeding Staircase and the Knocking Crypt, as well as many more obscure occurrences known mainly to the local cognoscenti of the supernatural. Ophelia sometimes took her friends on walking tours of the city’s haunted places. For the past year, she had maintained a Web site devoted to local hauntings. The site grew week by week, with new stories and photos, the collection of which had taken Ophelia abroad on her present mission. A tour company had offered her a job leading after-dark tours, but she had no need of money, and no interest in interacting with tourists and other ordinary mortals.

  The house was dark when Ophelia unlocked the door and went inside.

  The foyer had a musty smell, the floor littered with unopened mail and newspapers still wrapped in plastic delivery bags. The Chronicles and Wall Street Journals were all at least six months old, the unread newsprint turning brittle and brown. Ophelia had canceled the subscriptions. There was no point having newspapers clutter up the hall if her father was just going to drop them on the floor when he came and went on his infrequent trips away from the house. Ophelia sometimes thought about bagging them up as garbage, along with the rest of it, but she let it be. It was her father’s business, not hers.

  Stephen Warring was sprawled forward across the kitchen table, an empty vodka bottle and a tumbler near his hand. He did not move when Ophelia turned on the light. She stood in the doorway long enough to assure herself that he was still breathing be
fore filling the teakettle on the big Viking chef’s stove to make herself a cup of herbal tea. Ophelia straightened up a bit while waiting for the water to boil. A dirty kitchen was the one thing she could not abide. Her mother had loved to cook, and the room had always been spotless when she was alive. The kettle began to whistle. Her father did not stir. She could have set the house on fire and he wouldn’t have budged. If she did set the place on fire, she might be doing them both a favor.

  Ophelia turned off the fire, finished loading the dishwasher, put in some soap, and started it. She got down a saucer and china cup—her mother had insisted on drinking tea and coffee from china cups—put a bag of Red Zinger into the cup, and added water. She gathered up her pack and tea and paused long enough to put her hand gently on her father’s shoulder. He did not stir. He was too drunk to go to his bed, and even if Ophelia could get him to wake up, he was too big for her to help him up the stairs.

  Ophelia kissed him on the back of the head, turned out the kitchen light, and went upstairs in the dark.

  While her tea cooled, Ophelia transferred the digital photos from the camera into her computer.

  The only evidence of Gothic preoccupation in the young woman’s bedroom was Ophelia herself and the Victorian mourning clothes she affected. The room remained exactly as it had been when her mother died during Ophelia’s sophomore year of high school. She and her mother had decorated it together; they picked out the wallpaper and drapes, went shopping for the desk and matching bookcases, now loaded down with books, all of which Ophelia had read, some of them many times. It was not a feminine room in the exaggerated way some parents do up their daughters’ bedrooms. Ophelia had never been that kind of girl. Even as a child, she had sensible, mature tastes. Her room, as she and her mother had decorated it, looked more like the home of a studious college-age woman with aspirations of becoming a poet—which had been Ophelia’s intention since she started to write couplet verses in first grade.