Henry decided to pursue another line of inquiry. The collective slumber had followed the bonfire by only a few hours, so perhaps there was some connection between them. On his second trip to the school, he had to wait until the patients had their temperatures and blood pressure taken. He started with Pickle Raines, a scrap of a freckled girl wearing red pajamas, sitting with her legs stuck out straight in front of her like an unjointed doll. “I guess I expected a little magic,” Pickle said. She went on to describe the ceremony that was kept so secret from year to year: laying the bonfire, feeding it as high as the supply of kindling would allow; grabbing hands and dancing around it until it died down; appointing one person (Helen) to pour water on the embers; watching the faculty supervisor (Miss Barnes) poke around with a stick to make sure the fire was really out. “That’s all there was to it,” said Pickle. “It took about an hour. I think they make too big a deal of it.” Other West Dorm seniors expressed the same disappointment. Jill Bloom said, “When you think how long I’d been looking forward to it, it’s a little depressing.” Mercy Locke said she was sure Henry would understand, if anyone could. She thought the bonfire would be like the cemetery, “where something really did happen, Dr. Lieber—didn’t it?”
Since adolescence is the most feverish and idealistic time of life, Henry believed every adolescent was a potential visionary. At that time there was a window in the soul looking out on another realm, until experience of the world fogged the glass and darkened it with soot. Perhaps by seventeen or eighteen the visionary streak was all but extinguished. None of the graduates, Jill and Mercy included, had awakened with any sense of awe, curiosity, or even fear about their deathly sleep, the hours that had been stolen from them. What interested them most was finding a car, driving to Chester’s in West Raymond, and ordering mixed drinks with funny names. Chester’s had a dance band and a fleet of motorcycles parked outside on any given evening. As he walked down the corridor toward the reception room, Henry overheard Mercy trying to bribe Pickle (who was the smallest and nimblest) to sneak over to West Dorm and bring back her frosted pink nail polish.
Chapter Fourteen
Henry was perfectly content to stick to phenomenology—the broadest, most flexible system for his purposes, but he was running out of phenomena. Provocative incidents kept cropping up and coming to nothing—nocturnal invaders, red-eyed clouds, time lapses, collective slumbers. It seemed to him that his life was a sequence of tantalizing vistas and dead ends. He was becoming more and more of a materialist in matters of the spirit. He wanted apparitions and manifestations, rains of blood, rocks splitting asunder, unscheduled eclipses of the sun. Instead, he was presented with highly colored statements by immature female witnesses, interesting but inconclusive. Perhaps God was testing him, waving dross in front of his eyes to remind him of the color of the real thing. In June of 1974 Henry was still telling himself that the paranormal was merely an intellectual challenge like any other branch of learning, and in no way a serious rival to his vocation.
For this stage of life he needed the counsel of someone wiser. When Henry was at the seminary, trying to reconcile the sights of war with God’s infinite mercy, he called on Gilbert Barber, the head of the theology department, a bird-beaked man with a pin in his hip and, as he put it, “a relationship with pain.” Gilbert would have known when to listen quietly and when to bring him up short, to show Henry how things might look from a longer perspective; but Gilbert had been dead for ten years and Henry had only me and Walter Emmet to confide in, a cook and an antiques dealer.
Walter Emmet was unacquainted with any of the events since Easter because he had been “on the road” most of the spring, going up and down the East Coast from antiques show to antiques show, in a van packed as intricately as a Chinese puzzle. Henry thought he might drive over to Battle Hill Road, which was less than a mile from the school, and unfold his tale to Walter. Walter was an excellent listener, but he could listen properly only if he was doing something else at the same time. In cold weather he might be polishing wood or cleaning metal. In the summer he would be out by the shed, pot gardening. He planted bulbs and seedlings in shapely old clay pots and brought them up to the terrace as they came into bloom. On Walter’s terrace garden plants were always in their prime. Nothing was ever allowed to die back, except inside the roofless greenhouse to which all pots were banished once their flowering was over. Walter treated perennial plants like annuals, making no attempt to bring them through the winter. This method of gardening suited him because he went south every January and February and did not feel flush enough to spend money restoring the greenhouse. His approach to horticulture, which was really a form of stage design or set dressing, horrified my mother, who told him Nature would rise up against him for breaking her laws and treating her so arbitrarily. Walter laughed and brought Emily pots of lilies and foxgloves to adorn her property, but the plants ended up in the ground and the pots in fragments—even pots that Walter assured her had once been the property of one of the great English country houses.
Before Henry could leave the school to see Walter, he ran into Jane Shufelt in the infirmary waiting room. At first glance the room appeared to be empty, but Henry saw Jane Shufelt in the far corner putting a quarter in the vending machine and pressing the button for a ginger ale, the only drink the machine had been programmed to dispense. Jane took her drink over to a seat by the window, where Henry joined her. He told her he wanted to confer with Walter Emmet, who had helped Judge Harvey’s widow find her lost sapphire engagement ring.
“Why don’t you ask Lorraine Drago?” asked Jane, always the champion of her sex. “I don’t want to put her on the spot,” said Henry. “Walter has no personal stake in his so-called powers.” “Of course Walter could find a ring,” Jane said. “He’s better with objects than he is with people.” “I like that impersonal quality,” said Henry. “I tend to trust it.” “I don’t know the name for our little epidemic,” said Jane, “but it’s not in the same department as a piece of lost jewelry.” “All right, then,” said Henry. “I’ll leave Walter out of it.” “Oh, count him in, by all means. But there are a few items that might be a little strong for his delicate stomach.”
Jane’s honest, square face was best suited to serious expressions, not broad, knowing grins. She seemed to enjoy the idea of offending Walter as much as she had relished shocking Jean Leatherbee. Aesthetic sensibilities were just asking to be violated, in her opinion. For some reason, she put Henry in the same category as doctors and nurses, who embraced life in its crudest state and strove to triumph over death. What Henry witnessed of moral corruption and spiritual torture entitled him, in Jane’s eyes, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the surgical staff of a hospital. “You’re tough,” she would say to Henry, as if his ministry were conducted amid the blood and stench of a downtown emergency room instead of a quiet village. The trait Jane most admired in other people was a lack of squeamishness. Her faith in Henry was justified. Far from wincing at the material she proceeded to give him, he made her repeat it a number of times, until she no doubt regretted her intention of using it to test male fortitude. Henry asked her to put everything down on paper as soon as possible, before it faded. She dropped her typewritten account at his house before he was back from Walter’s.
Jane’s revelation was baffling, embarrassing, appalling. It also met one of the standards of objective truth: two different witnesses confirmed it. Myra Littlefield had taken Jane to examine the sleeping bodies. What Jane saw, Myra saw—although Myra would have given her shares in Littlefield Shipyards not to have seen it. Although she was willing to confirm Jane’s report with “yes” or “no” answers, Myra did not want to commit herself further—but Jane was able to express herself in straightforward, neutral language, the language of case notes:
We found them lying naked on their backs with their knees bent outward, six girls in the identical position. The inner thighs were wet from the pubis to the middle of the thigh, glistening with fluid. The vaginal
secretion is volatile and dries so fast that I was forced to conclude that they were having some kind of sexual experience on the spot, with no external stimulus to account for it. The quantity of fluid being produced was unusually heavy and would create a personal hygiene problem if it were habitual. However, there was no odor connected with it. We could not establish the onset of the secretion, but we observed it had stopped by nine-thirty a.m., or shortly before we moved the girls to the infirmary. It must have been going on for some time, since it had soaked through the sheet and the mattress pad and dampened the mattress. Aside from the fluid, other signs of sexual arousal were also apparent: hardening of the nipples and the clitoris; swelling and reddening of the labia. If they hadn’t been so deeply asleep, I would have expected to see rapid breathing and pelvic activity.
These are the facts as I perceived them. It is not my place to offer any theory. Someone is bound to suggest, however, that each of the girls was dreaming an erotic dream. From what I know about sleep physiology, dreams are always accompanied by rapid eye movements and there were none. The girls had reached—and remained in—a stage of sleep far below REM sleep.
Signed in full
Jane Elyce Shufelt, R.N.
Battle Hill Road dead-ended at Walter Emmet’s property. Walter’s house rose up where the road stopped, so in winter a town snow truck was obliged to plow Walter’s driveway and turnaround unless the driver wanted to back down the hill half a mile to Cass and Albert Nolan’s. The front of the house was plain—unpainted, unshuttered, with only a strip of molding around the doors and windows. The back of the house was fancy. Walter’s balustraded terrace, with its enormous paving stones and semicircular marble steps, might have been attached to a Renaissance villa. Henry was mercifully free from the sin of envy, except when he stood on Walter’s terrace gazing across at dark wooded hills and a green upland meadow, set like a jewel in the center of the view, where Michel Roque pastured some of his sheep.
Walter was planting September-blooming lilies, the glorious Green Dragon, six feet tall, ivory tinged with chartreuse, in a pot that weighed seventy pounds when it was filled with soil. Walter hauled pots this size and larger every day, rarely using a wagon or a dolly. Walter’s strength was not apparent from his looks. He was slight, narrow-chested, a little taller than the Green Dragons, with a close-fitting reddish beard, sunken cheeks, and deep-set brown eyes. Because he was so thin, he gave a false impression of frailty. As far as anyone knew, Walter did nothing to build his muscles the rest of the year except lift heavy illustrated reference books on the decorative arts. With one long, slender, dirt-stained hand Walter waved Henry to a seat and told him to have some iced tea. As usual, Henry poured himself a glass from the thermos jug on the white iron table and asked Walter if he could do anything to help him. Walter thanked him, as he always did, and said he was nearly finished. Knowing Walter was most attentive when his hands were busy, Henry settled back in a white iron chaise longue against the striped canvas cushions. “I’m going to start talking,” he said, “and I’m not going to stop until I’ve finished.
With his eyes on the distant hills, he began to bring Walter up to date month by month—March, April, May, June. Even for a friend and former member of the psychical research group, Henry felt obliged to coat his discourse with irony, implying that he would be the last man to swallow such a mountain of hearsay and unlikelihood whole, in spite of his profession. He had a three-quarter view of Walter at his work table, enough to take account of his reactions. Walter was stirring compost, sand, and crushed limestone in a washtub, making his favorite recipe for potting mix. Henry expected a smile from Walter when he got to the “red-eyed cloud” described by Mercy and Helen, but Walter’s face wore a distracted look, as if he were imagining the ideal location for the potted lilies. A flicker of annoyance did cross his brow as Henry summarized Adele’s experiences at the Easter Vigil—or perhaps he had merely encountered an undecayed avocado pit in the compost. The incident of the West Dorm seniors, so fresh in Henry’s mind, made Walter mutter something under his breath. Later that day I started to ask my husband if he’d mentioned the black dog to Walter, only to recall that I’d neglected to tell Henry about it in the first place; it had seemed both too outlandish and too trivial.
Henry began to recite the nightmare that had driven Hannah from our attic and been “picked up” by Adele, then by me. Henry was attracted to dreams because their source and their message were mysterious, but he discounted three-quarters of everything my sister said, and he presumed the same skepticism on Walter’s part. Before he finished his recital he noticed that Walter had stopped stirring.
In a moment he spoke, asking Henry to run through the dream again. Afterwards, he said, “All three of them thought the weight was a man? Or somehow masculine?” “I should tell you,” answered Henry, “that my wife thinks she had a nightmare. It’s the other two who think it might have been something else.” “What about you, my friend?” asked Walter. “Do you have an opinion?” “I don’t see the point of having opinions in advance of the facts.” Walter smiled. “I’m surprised at you, Henry. You never struck me as one of those modern pastors—one of those mental health professionals in cassocks.”
Henry began to feel like a backward schoolboy, as if the answer to a question were lying under his nose and he was too thick to see it. “That’s the way we do it, Walter. If a parishioner comes to see us with a vision or a revelation, we have to clear away the psychiatric rubble first. An authentic spiritual experience should be able to stand up to the closest scrutiny.”
Walter turned to face Henry, gesturing with his trowel, letting fly a spray of dirt. “What if you’re throwing the revelations away with the rubble?” Henry started to defend himself—his character, his ministry, the relatively new field of pastoral counseling—but Walter interrupted. “It’s not only a question of discarding some scrap of divinity. People come to you with visions of light, but there are others—more, I would guess—who bring you visions of darkness. What happens to discarded demons? Do they die a peaceful death on your rubble heap?”
Henry answered, “They surface in some other form. So do the angelic ones.” “They have a course on Freud at your seminaries,” Walter persisted, “but I understand they’ve dropped demonology.” Henry suppressed a snort of laughter. He said, “I think demonology was dropped from the curriculum in the 1700s.”
Walter dragged the hose over to the workbench so he could wet down the potting soil. He was red in the face and more out of breath than the job entailed. “But we still perform exorcisms,” put in Henry, as if to reassure Walter that the Episcopal Church was medieval enough for him. “You don’t study demonology,” Walter repeated. “So you go out into your parishes unprepared. You make mistakes. You misdiagnose. You underestimate.”
Henry lifted his big frame out of the chaise and began pacing back and forth, glass in hand. He had several inches on Walter and felt at less of a disadvantage standing up. It very nearly made a comic scenario—an antiques dealer haranguing a doctor of divinity about the education of the priesthood. Yet who was more concerned with tradition than an antiques dealer? More concerned, in truth, than the Bishops of the Anglican Communion, who approved the rewriting and modernizing of the Prayer Book, an act equivalent, Henry felt, to installing Coke machines in Chartres Cathedral. Henry submitted to Walter’s scolding patiently. It seemed that Walter had something to teach him about his blind spots and deficiencies. The most serious of these, apparently, was his tendency to favor the transcendent and ignore the abysmal, forgetting that the human soul is composed of depths as well as heights. It wasn’t his fault, according to Walter, because Christians were brought up to believe that the Dark and the Light are two separate kingdoms, instead of two halves of a whole, each requiring the other. Walter implied that “mystics like Henry” could be dangerous to other people.
Henry protested this unfairness. How had Walter suddenly become his spiritual director? He said, “I wouldn’t have sough
t you out in the first place if I weren’t uneasy.” Walter put down the hose. He took a handful of wet potting soil and squeezed it to make sure it held together. “You’re right to be uneasy,” he said. “I’d suggest an even stronger reaction might be appropriate.”
Henry had taken enough condescension for one afternoon, especially from someone who was only an amateur in occult matters, whatever impression he tried to create to the contrary. “May I get off my knees now?” Henry asked. “Be my guest,” said Walter, who was pleased with himself and feeling expansive. He had accomplished what he’d set out to do, although he deplored using shaming tactics. He had put Henry on the scent. Henry would track these events to their source, never wavering in his commitment, spurred on by the idea that it depended on him to save his fellow creatures from some as yet unspecified harm. Walter was willing to serve as a consultant as long as he did not have to leave home. He had traveled all winter, ending up in Palm Beach. It had been a stressful visit. During a séance with a well-known British medium, held in an empty, neo-Moorish villa, he had witnessed some disturbing manifestations, including a fireball with a zigzag flight pattern, and he had the singed eyebrows to prove it.
It was true that Henry went around with his eyes raised heavenward, seeing all human experience as an opportunity for choice, change, growth, and/or redemption. “When in doubt, go for the trans-personal” was his motto as a pastoral counselor, and he always managed to elicit a statement of something positive, even from patients who painted the bleakest pictures of their lives. In the middle of a tale of disaster and misery, a patient might cock his head and say, “You know, I did have a good laugh yesterday” or “I was driving home from work and I noticed how beautiful the light was,” and Henry would go for it. From one faint spark of hope he and his patient went on to build a blaze. Henry was never one to let a patient stew very long in his own pathology, although a more distinctive and zesty mixture might have resulted from the simmering process.
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