Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  The longer Henry stood at the window, the more un-Christian I felt. I resented being kept on tenterhooks, risking pneumonia. Whatever he was keeping to himself, no matter how shocking, could wait until my body temperature returned to normal. I picked up the cardboard box and started to go. I had my hand on the doorknob when I heard the window slamming shut. “Leave it here,” said Henry. He took the box away from me. I expected his face to wear a look of sorrow, but the expression in his eyes was as jarring as the feathers on the altar, a mixture of excitement and voracious curiosity.

  Chapter Five

  A pastor’s job is something like woman’s work. Once it is done it is almost time to do it over again. Like bed making and cooking, services are performed every day. The words change according to the calendar, but the rituals must be repeated from year to year, until the Second Coming. The moment it is swept up, dust begins to gather again in the corners. As soon as absolution is bestowed on a penitent sinner, weakness and wickedness accumulate, even in sleep. Special services such as Christmas and Easter vary the routine, but they also require more exertion, like baking and decorating for the holidays. The pastor and the housewife are rooted in the things of this world. They have little time for abstract thought and contemplation. Their dependents cling to their coattails or their skirts, holding them down, preventing them from dreaming and soaring.

  Except in the case of adults seeking confirmation, or of young people who think they might be destined for the ministry, Henry rarely handled matters involving faith and doctrine. His day was made up of countless practical tasks. He unfolded and stacked the chairs for parish meetings. He took the church garbage to the town dump. When the choir director was sick, he rehearsed the singers. He visited sickbeds and stayed to write letters for the patients. He showed busloads of grade schoolers how to make rubbings from headstones.

  Henry was losing interest in parish life. His parishioners would be the last to know it. Henry did not yet know it himself, so he could not speculate on the causes of it. He imagined he needed more exercise and decided to climb Mount Katahdin. He oiled his bicycle, caulked and painted the wooden canoe, booked a riding lesson with John Crowley and then canceled the appointment.

  Henry was a tall man with the frame of an athlete—a powerful chest, long muscular arms and legs. There was no fat on him and surprisingly little slack. He toed in when he walked, a habit you observe in ballplayers. He carried himself with a stoop, as if to deflect attention from the breadth of his shoulders. His body was younger than his face. His blue eyes had faded to grayish; and his fine, sandy hair was losing color. His fair skin freckled in the sun; but the freckles no longer receded over the winter. Now his freckles were age spots.

  Henry developed a habit, not quite a tic, of clenching one fist or both fists, and extending his fingers, usually when he was required to sit and listen. In a meeting, on the telephone, more than likely in private sessions with troubled parishioners, his hands began to work, opening and closing, clenching and splaying, clenching and splaying. If I saw him trapped in a corner at some social occasion, I went up to him and held his hand to interrupt the rhythm. This seemingly bridal behavior gave rise to a rumor about our passionate sex life. Around this time he began to hurt himself in little ways. He scratched his cornea attaching Concord grapevines to the arbor, not on a branch or a twig, but somehow on one of those green paper-sheathed wire ties. He dislocated his shoulder on his way from the living room to the kitchen, walking so fast he collided with a door frame. A cabinet sprang open, bruising him on the cheekbone. Paper cut his fingers. The furniture waylaid him, barking his shins.

  That was the essence of physical comedy, a big man cut down to size by inanimate objects. If the Unconscious was lodged in the body and the Conscious in the head, then Henry’s psyche was at odds with itself, playing hob with his excellent reflexes. No doubt he should have followed a regular program of exercise, if only to regain his normal coordination. A man of his build ought to give his body its due. If Henry had found an outlet in physical activity, it would have cured the symptoms, but left the disease untouched. Henry thought about climbing mountains and shooting rapids, imagining that feats of strength could make up for a lack of spiritual challenges. Speaking as his wife, I had firsthand proof that his spirit was ailing. Sex involved both the body and the spirit; and for the last ten months we had had a sexless marriage.

  Why was I alarmed by his preoccupation with that box of rubbishy feathers he kept under lock and key in his bottom desk drawer? Or by watching him light a bonfire in our driveway to which he fed the candles the thieves had left behind? He dropped them one by one into the flames, waiting until each of the six had melted down and was utterly consumed. Why was I startled to find him standing in front of the altar, reading from the service for the consecration of a church? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. I should have been grateful. Henry needed a shot of novelty, and life had injected one. Walter Emmet’s psychical research group, started in the fall, had petered out after only four meetings, to Henry’s disappointment. Walter spent the winters in Florida and Mary Grey Hodges went back to Massachusetts to attend her dying sister-in-law. David Busch was off to Alaska on assignment for the National Geographic. In spite of its lively beginnings, Walter’s group was focused on book learning, dry stuff compared to the mystery on our own church doorstep. Instead of worrying about my husband’s unpriestly obsessions, I should have been hoping it would sustain him longer than Walter’s study group.

  Chapter Six

  There was a boarding school on Sinkhole Road, five miles north of Dry Falls. It is still in business, although enrollment fell off drastically in 1975. Burridge Academy, known as “The Sink” to students and townspeople, was founded in the 1940s by Miss Nancy Burridge, whose father, one of the developers of the machine gun, sold his patent to the Belgian government and made a fortune in the First World War. A suffragette and a Master of Arts in medieval literature, Miss Burridge had her own ideas about the instruction of young women. The school brochure still includes her statement of purpose: “to foster those feminine values that are neglected by traditional systems for educating men.” Miss Burridge believed that women were the preservers of culture and men the destroyers, a notion that has made little headway since the Age of Chivalry.

  The Burridge curriculum was weighted toward the arts and self-expression: free movement; free verse; freehand watercolor and drawing; art history; spinning and weaving; hand-built pottery. She created a course in Mythology that was given to every senior class. Forty years later, we would call such a course a “workshop.” As I understood it, each student picked a different goddess to be her term project. They built shrines in the woods behind the school—a circle or platform of stones, a mound of earth—and collected the emblems that were sacred to their goddesses, such as an image of an owl for Athena; a dove for Aphrodite; a sheaf of wheat for Demeter, or a clay figurine of a sow, her favorite sacrifice. The girls made costumes and headdresses—a full suit of cardboard armor for Athena, a papier-mâché mask of a she-wolf for Hecate. They wrote speeches for their goddesses and delivered them at a full-dress ceremony at the end of term. I have a copy of part of one such soliloquy in my files, spoken in May of 1974 by Mercy Locke, the student who had chosen to play the role of Demeter:

  I am She who mourns the loss of a virgin daughter

  I wander the grasslands of Arcadia where I heard her cry of terror

  I left her for an instant

  I left her gathering poppies by the river

  My tears salt the ground

  My tears blight the land and its harvests

  While my child is a prisoner in Hades

  Dragged below by the black-browed Abductor

  I will make Hell on Earth

  Nothing grows where I walk

  I scatter Death with my footsteps …

  Burridge Academy graduates, who were stuffed to the gills with goddesses, could hardly be blamed for concluding that the gods w
ere subordinates, drones who played bit parts in the Olympian drama. Their education, however progressive, was out of balance. Generations of girls were exposed to needless danger because Nancy Burridge belittled the masculine principle. We saw Burridge girls in Dry Falls buying ice cream cones and magazines. They came into town on free afternoons and weekends, riding their bicycles or walking in pairs, linking arms, a homogeneous, honey-colored crew with shiny hair and white teeth. They used our library and helped out at the annual book sale. Some came to St. A’s or the Fourth Congregational on Sundays. We knew them generically, not personally, since they all looked like cousins.

  Once in a while a few of them took on a separate identity. Mercy Locke had red hair and Helen Akers was tall and walked with a limp, the result of a bicycle accident. Mercy and Helen were the geese in the Burridge Academy swanherd. They failed to conform to the physical standard, Mercy because her beauty was full-breasted and womanly, and Helen for the reason that pain pinched and sharpened her features. Neither girl was rebellious in the classroom; and both expected to graduate with honors. The present headmistress, Myra Littlefield, Miss Burridge’s grand-niece, had some good words to say for the two girls, and some reservations: “Excellent college material. They’ll be a credit to the school down the line. Most of our students are just kids, open books, easy to read. These two look you in the eye and you still can’t imagine what they’re thinking.”

  Henry made the acquaintance of Mercy Locke and Helen Akers one night very early in April. He had come to check the boiler in the church basement, which was acting up and shutting itself off. As he left by the main door, he noticed two bicycles propped against the churchyard gates and went over to investigate. The moon was full, casting dramatic shadows, stark contrasts of black and white over the cemetery. A light frost sparkled on the ground, still frozen under the trees, where snow lay in patches. In that lighting Helen and Mercy looked like frightened children, crouching behind a leaning tombstone that only half hid them, covering their faces with their hands to keep the approaching figure from noticing them. The midnight hour rang out from St. Anthony’s bell tower. By the stroke of twelve, the dark figure was looming over them. Miss Littlefield would have been pleased. At that moment they were easier to read than the youngest of her charges.

  Sticky tears blotched their cheeks as the tall man pulled them to their feet. They seemed reassured to discover that Henry was human. Helen clung to his arm. “We thought you were something else.” Mercy saw Henry’s collar. “We’re sorry. Do you have to report us?” “Show me what you brought,” said Henry. Mercy hung her head and pointed to a newer tombstone, a slab of marble on four short pillars, a sort of mortuary coffee table. On its surface lay three brown eggs in a nest of pine needles, an alto recorder, and a strand of red hair tied with black ribbon. “You owe me an explanation,” Henry said, “and you owe me twelve dollars for the beeswax candles.”

  I settled the girls in one of our guest rooms, gave them nightgowns and toothbrushes, hung their jeans out to dry on a chair by the radiator. Henry telephoned the school and told Miss Littlefield he had found them in the graveyard. “They were spending the night there on a dare. We’ll bring them back to you in the morning.” Miss Littlefield laughed. “I’ll have to punish them, of course. What do you suggest?” “Tire them out,” said Henry. “You must have a pile of logs that need splitting.”

  I put it to Henry that he hadn’t been entirely truthful. An impartial observer might conclude that he had lied to Myra Littlefield. He could tell I was teasing, but he met my eyes defiantly, like a boy protecting his turf from an inquisitive adult. “What did you expect me to tell her? I won’t know anything positive until I grill them after breakfast.” Before I went to bed I mixed up the batter for a batch of pancakes, adding some chopped pecans and wildflower honey. The young ones might need something to sweeten the ordeal ahead of them.

  Washed, dressed, and fed, the girls followed Henry into our living room. A fire was burning in the grate, as much for light as for comfort. It was seven-thirty in the morning on a gray day with rain in the forecast. Henry sat them side by side on the sofa and took the armchair opposite them. He had allowed them only six hours of sleep, so they were heavy-lidded and yawning. I brought in cups of coffee, although coffee was forbidden at Burridge Academy. I began to hover in the background, but Henry stared me out of the room.

  I returned to the kitchen and finished washing the breakfast dishes. I suppose I could have stripped the guest beds and done a laundry, or tested a recipe for my cooking column, which was due by the weekend. I had no intention of staying in the kitchen, busy and obedient, waiting for a secondhand report at Henry’s convenience. I opened the kitchen door and found that their voices reached me quite clearly. I overheard some of the proceedings from the dining room, where I sat at the table out of sight with a pencil and an oversize message pad, a present from a houseguest, which bore the word URGENT in red capitals at the bottom of each page. In a combination of handwriting and shorthand (which I had taken for a term in college), I transcribed all I heard satisfactorily, feeling certain that Henry would thank me for it.

  Mercy (high-pitched, deliberate, with a slight patrician drawl): Everybody is supposed to choose a different goddess but we took the same one.

  Helen (eager to cooperate, rushing her words): Mercy picked Artemis and I picked Selene. They’re not actually the same. Later on in history they got mixed up with each other.

  Henry (low-keyed, unthreatening): Why did you choose them?

  Helen: They rule the moon.

  Mercy: The moon rules women.

  Helen: If we go out in the moonlight we can synchronize our moontime with the phases of the moon.

  Henry: Your moontime. Your menstrual cycle?

  Mercy and Helen: (dead air)

  Henry: (maintaining a judgment-free silence, like any good therapist)

  Mercy: It was wrong to put the feathers in the church. It was a joke. We got them from the costume room.

  Helen: We needed candles for our shrines. We thought church candles would work better.

  Mercy: We brought the mirror so we could see the goddess’s reflection.

  Henry: You don’t want to gaze at the moon directly?

  Mercy: No, that’s not it. We want to see her face. Her face emerges in the mirror.

  Helen: What really happens is we see her features on our own faces.

  Henry: You know what the moon goddess looks like.

  Helen (beating Mercy to the draw): Well, it takes a long time. It takes a while to develop the skill. At first you only see colors, or the mirror begins to mist over.

  Henry: Why did you choose the cemetery?

  Mercy: There is a witch in the cemetery. Mistress Huckins. I think that’s funny, a witch in a churchyard.

  Helen: Mercy means that the church burned witches. We get really upset by that.

  Mercy (belligerently): Do you know what a witch is? A witch is a woman who knows something.

  Helen: They healed people with herbs. That’s why men hated them.

  Henry (only a wife would suspect that his patience was fraying, as any man’s does, faced with unsystematic thinking): If I remember my mythology, Hecate was the goddess of witchcraft.

  Helen: Good for you! She rules the dark of the moon. Artemis is the Maiden, Demeter is the Mother, and Hecate is the wise old Grandmother.

  Henry (changing the subject prematurely, in my opinion): What about the eggs and the wooden flute?

  Mercy (contentiously): That’s pretty obvious. Women are fertile when the moon is full. It’s our time of power.

  Helen: We drink a toast to our Mother with wine and we sing her a song. She loves to hear us sing.

  Mercy: Helen plays the recorder because her parents won’t buy her a silver flute.

  Helen: Come on, Mercy. They’re very expensive. Plus which, Burridge is expensive.

  Henry (hanging on the ropes): How many times have you visited the cemetery?

  Helen (taki
ng a moment to answer): The first time we went it was wonderful. We felt really connected. I don’t know what went wrong.

  Mercy: I do. We forgot to bring protection.

  Helen: You were supposed to get sage leaves from the cook.

  Mercy: You said you’d bring the salt.

  Henry: Slow down. This is new to me. Back up a little. Something happened this time. Can you talk about it?

  Mercy (close to tears): I don’t want to.

  Helen: You heard it too. You grabbed my hand. You nearly broke my fingers.

  Mercy: I’m not the one who was whimpering.

  Helen: All right, but when something starts growling that close by …

  At this interesting juncture I heard the telephone ringing, as it always did in times of crisis or high drama. Ruth Hiram kept me on the line for ten minutes, asking me to speak at one of the library’s monthly book teas. To put an end to the conversation, I agreed to review a new book on whole-foods cooking, by an author who believed that eggs, milk, and cheese are poison. It was too late, in any case, to resume my post in the dining room. Henry was starting the station wagon, backing down the driveway. I could see from the kitchen windows that Helen was in the passenger seat and Mercy in the rear. Helen was wiping her eyes with the ends of her scarf. Mercy was slumped against the back rest, scowling. High-handed of Henry not to invite me along. My mother was an acquaintance of Myra Littlefield’s, and my Beaulac grandparents were in attendance when the school cornerstone was laid. I might have helped, as a woman, an additional feminine presence, to soften the encounter between the girls and their headmistress. A brazenly self-serving argument on my part. I was no better than the gawkers who collect at the scene of a traffic accident.