I rose abruptly and began to load the tea tray, taking Henry’s half-filled cup out of his hand. “I wasn’t finished,” he reproached me. “I’m going in now,” I said. “Stay out as long as you like.” That night I sat up until Henry had gone to bed, claiming that I had reading to do, a book of recipes from Maine inns and restaurants for possible review in my food column. I slept in my clothes on the sofa. I wanted to distance myself from Henry and his love of shadows.
Years ago Henry had performed an exorcism at a house in Poland Springs, where sounds of weeping could be heard. By the power of his faith he had reprieved the unhappy spirit and allowed her to move on. Exorcism is a form of psychic healing. Both exorcist and healer run the risk of taking on pain or even injuries that belong to their subject. Henry experienced no ill effects that time, unless you counted a slight case of laryngitis—hoarseness, really—that lasted less than a week and didn’t prevent him from preaching on Sunday. Recently Bishop Hollins had asked him to do another exorcism, this time on holy ground, or very near it. At a small community of Anglican nuns outside of Bridgton, there was a wandering cold spot on the second floor of the retreat house, only fifteen feet away from the tiny chapel. Henry refused because the dates conflicted with his rotation at the psychiatric hospital. He was wise to turn it down. Face to face with a malicious spirit, a doubting priest had about the same chance as a cornered mouse with a cat. How could Henry protect the women of his own parish from the encroaching shadows, real or imaginary? Figuratively speaking, he was holding the door open for them, welcoming them in, when he should have been developing a sound immigration policy. As Henry had counted on God to guide and sustain him, I counted on Henry to distinguish truth from illusion. Did losing your faith in higher authorities mean losing your devotion to them? It was always so with God. I hoped it was not the case with a husband.
I woke up to find former mentor and lover bending over me. To my great relief, my heart still opened to him. On his face I could read both hurt and perplexity, as well as a deep reluctance to talk about them. I sat up and rubbed my cheek. During sleep the pattern of the slipcover had been embossed on my skin. Henry smiled and offered to bring me a mirror. He said next time he was going to come down and carry me upstairs bodily. The smell of coffee wafted in from the kitchen, along with the aroma of freshly made toast. I didn’t doubt for a second that he had also squeezed oranges for juice and emptied the dishwasher. By just such delicate adjustments are human connections restored to stability before they swing permanently out of balance.
Chapter Seventeen
We were approaching the Feast of Mary Magdalene, July 22, a red-letter day on the church calendar. Since the risen Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene before he showed himself to his disciples, she is honored at a special service of evening prayers. At St. Anthony’s the flowers on the altar were always red on her feast day, although these may not include roses. All the red flowers came from my mother’s annual garden—salvia, snapdragons, cockscomb, dahlias, and zinnias. As a favor to the altar guild, I offered to pick them a day ahead and keep them in water. Mariette Roque and the other guild members were intimidated by Emily, who followed close behind them as they picked and often took the clippers out of their hands. Mariette in particular was apt to pick too many. Emily had also caught her breaking stems with her fingers, nearly pulling up an entire plant. Although her flower beds were characterized by profusion, Emily could be oddly ungenerous about sharing their harvest.
In her fastness on Mt. Pughole, Emily’s eldest child might as well have moved back to Albany, for all I saw of her. Emily drove up the mountain to visit her, uninvited, walking the last part of the way to spare her old car. When she returned she passed on bits of information to me, so I was not surprised when I saw one of Hannah’s black obelisks installed in the tiny garden adjoining the historical society. Hannah did not communicate with us directly. When Henry decided to clean out the gutters over the July 4 weekend, he looked everywhere for the extension ladder. I took it for granted that Hannah had swooped down in her van and taken it, but we found it leaning against the back of the church, where the roofers had left it. I had expected I would keep running into her in town, like it or not. I assumed she would be dropping by our house for showers and free meals, and using my cupboards and icebox as a convenience store. When a thorn in your side is removed, the place where the thorn was lodged smarts for a while. At first I missed the irritation. Then I forgot about my sister, as I had long been accustomed to do, knowing that at some inopportune moment she would take center stage again.
In Dry Falls the rumor mills grind slower than in some villages. The flow of information was sluggish, encountering numerous blockages such as Yankee skepticism, lack of imagination, and overriding personal concerns or crises. News of the Burridge seniors’ mysterious disorder trickled into the public awareness through an obvious conduit, Trooper Centrella’s answering service. The daytime operator lived in Windham, but her nephew was married to Ernie Silver’s daughter, Carol, who called her father from her home in Waldoboro. Ernie listened with half an ear. He was calculating the amount of cold cuts, rolls, and macaroni salad the Chamber of Commerce would eat when they came in for their monthly lunch meeting. Mary Fran Rawls was out front refilling ketchup bottles and salt shakers. Something she overheard Ernie saying piqued her curiosity and she asked him to explain it. While he was telling her, she accidentally knocked over a napkin dispenser, which brought a glass bud vase and two plastic sprigs of lily of the valley down with it, driving Ernie’s story out of her head until after quitting time.
When I finally got wind of the rumor, the school had been closed for vacation for several weeks. Peggy McClintock, who came up from Philadelphia to spend the summers, invited me to tea to discuss “the Burridge scandal.” Thirty years ago, Peggy had been expelled from Burridge for running a three-volume lending library—Forever Amber, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Casanova’s memoirs. She still relished any incident that brought discredit to the school. From Peggy I heard the accepted popular version. The girls had let some boys into the dorm after hours and “things had gotten out of hand.” Peggy added an ornament of her own to the story, to the effect that the head nurse had been paid for her silence. Some people believed the school was covering up for rape, and others merely for promiscuity. The gossip increased the town’s resentment against a wealthy institution that paid no local taxes, opened its tennis courts to the public for the month of August only, and its swimming pond not at all.
The gossip reached my mother through her next-door neighbor, Marion Smalley. Emily was horrified for Myra Littlefield’s sake. She imagined Myra coping with lawsuits, trials, reporters, the ruin of Burridge Academy. In a well-meaning fluster, she appeared on Myra’s doorstep, offering to help in any way she could. Myra gave Emily the uncensored version, but begged her not to try to set the record straight. Boys in the dormitory were preferable, on the whole, to the inscrutable facts.
When my mother took fright, she never feared for herself or, I might add, for me. Her fears centered on my sister. In her imagination Hannah was always imperiled, either by fate or because of her own wayward nature. A volcanic eruption in Hawaii sent Emily racing to the map, to see how close Hannah lived in Albany to a range of high mountains. The tale of the six drowsy seniors reminded her that Hannah in her cabin was isolated and vulnerable. I recited a list of potentially lethal weapons available to Hannah on her premises—ax, sickle, fire poker, pocket knife, chain saw, automobile jack. Emily became even more agitated, picturing these instruments and tools being used against Hannah instead of by her. She wanted to set off for the mountain right away, but her car was in the garage until the next day, Friday, for work on the transmission. I did not offer to drive her. I had no intention of being roped into this expedition.
There were downpours on the morning of the Feast of Mary Magdalene, torrents of water cascading from the skies—brief in duration but heavy enough to decapitate my delphiniums and wash a second plantin
g of lettuce seedlings out of their furrows. I wondered what the rains had done to the Pughole road and whether Emily had been forced to turn back, her mission aborted. I had never been fond of Mary Magdalene, this saint who was two different people—a psychotic whom Christ exorcised of seven devils and a woman honored above the apostles, to whom the risen Lord said, “Go to my brethren and say unto them, ‘I ascend unto my Father.’” It was appropriate that my mother was rushing to my sister’s side on this particular day. “Mary” was derived from the Aramaic word for “rebellion,” and Hannah was marked by her resistance to authority, one of her private devils. In spite of her devils, or because of them, she was an artist who was true to her art and did not work for worldly gain. Perhaps she was reserved for some extraordinary fate, like Mary Magdalene. Certainly she was honored above all other daughters.
It was Aaron Schmidt himself, of Schmidt’s Auto Shop, who found Emily walking on Route 243, a mile beyond the turnoff to the mountain road, six miles in all from Hannah’s cabin. “She was weaving,” he told us later, “wandering into the road. I thought she might be heat-struck.” Emily was headed away from Dry Falls in the direction of Poland Springs, unaware of where she was going, unable to see through a rage of tears. It was more than Aaron could handle, a gray-haired woman moaning in a broken voice and beating her breast within the sight of passing motorists, who slowed down at first, perhaps to help, then sped off when they observed her disarray. Aaron’s first thought was for Emily’s transmission, so recently repaired but in need of replacement before the winter. He reasoned astutely that a breakdown miles from her house was not the cause of her moaning. He had many female customers, some of whom used tears to persuade him of an emergency—but none had been reduced to so woeful a state by mere vehicular failure, even in the passing lane of the Maine Turnpike.
With a sense of relief Aaron recalled that Dr. Bayer’s office, always open on Saturdays, was on the road back to town, only a few minutes’ drive. He led Emily into the waiting room and let Gail Croft, Dr. Bayer’s receptionist, take charge of her. By the time Dr. Bayer saw her, she was dry-eyed. If she had been weaving as she walked, she told him, it was because she’d broken her spectacles and he knew how blind she was. Her car wouldn’t start so she’d been obliged to walk, quite a long walk in shoes that fit badly and gave her blisters. Of course she had tears in her eyes. The blisters had broken and her heels were rubbed raw. Emily’s version contradicted Aaron Schmidt’s report, but Pete Bayer was a busy doctor, not a detective. He didn’t have time to get to the bottom of it, so he prescribed a cortisone salve and five milligrams of a widely used tranquilizer, to be taken as needed. Emily asked Gail to call the town taxi. Gail said Matt Redmond charged an arm and a leg and suggested she call me. Emily refused, so I didn’t see her until three days later, when I was scheduled to pick her up and take her to one of her Huguenot Society meetings, held in the library’s rare-book room. When she opened the door, I was rendered speechless by the sight of her.
Emily reeked of loss. Every aspect of her appearance proclaimed her inconsolable. Her coarse gray hair, flattened in back and wild on the sides, had not been groomed since she’d slept on it, and it was obvious she hadn’t done much sleeping. Her face was drained of all color except for the lines in her forehead, which were etched in red. Her short-sleeved shirt was creased and stained and her faded denim skirt was darkened by dirt at the hem. The right lens in her eyeglasses was cracked. I couldn’t let her go to the meeting looking as if she’d been shot in the head and smelling, I soon perceived, somewhat organic. If the state of the kitchen was any evidence, she hadn’t eaten, although it was clear she had intended to. Dishes of food sat untouched on the counter: sandwiches curling up at the edges; salad greens turned dark from lying too long in dressing; a bowl of beet soup that had fermented, as I could see from its unquiet surface.
Emily followed me into the kitchen and stood at the screen door looking out at her garden, shaking her head, as if the sight of so much gaiety and color offended her. When she turned to face me I saw her mouth was set in anger, a jangling note in such a show of sorrow. Emily’s appearance betrayed her emotion, but her manner was calm, even stately. Her composure so impressed and humbled me that I forgot to question the source of her suffering. I only felt a desire to attend to her. I heated broth from a can and sat with her while she sipped it as a courtesy to me. Afterward I thew away the uneaten food, washed the dishes, and swept the kitchen floor. I persuaded her to skip the meeting and stretch out on the sofa. I advised her not to try to sleep, just to rest her eyes. I sat in an armchair at her head and waited until I heard a gentle wheezing and saw her eyelids quiver. Only when she was safely asleep did I begin to wonder what had injured her. I concluded that only the person she loved most could have hurt her so deeply, and that person was my sister.
Chapter Eighteen
Emily got all the way up the Pughole road in her rusty car, skirting crevices and washouts, parking on the meadow below Hannah’s cabin. It was seven o’clock in the evening, with two hours before the light faded completely. There was no sign of life in the cabin or behind it. She pressed the horn timidly to announce her presence and started up the rise with a bag of treats and groceries—licorice ropes, giant olives with pimiento centers, cheese tortilla chips, as well as new potatoes and chard from her garden, and the pick of her raspberries. In the trunk of the car were a hooked rug in a pattern of blocks (old, valuable, and my grandmother’s) and a long-handled dustpan and brush, purchased from a catalogue. She made several attempts to carry everything at once, but she couldn’t manage it. It was a good thing she had forgotten the carton of art books from Hannah’s old room.
Emily was not made welcome, in spite of the gifts she bore. Breathing fast after two trips up the meadow from the car, she tried the cabin door and found it locked. Cupping her hands around her eyes, she peered in the window. All she could see was Hannah’s unmade bed. She peered in the window on the other side of the door and scanned the room. At one end stood the fieldstone fireplace. The hearth, stacked with paint cans, was being used as a storage bin. On the opposite side of the room was a wooden table with a battered book propped under one leg. The surface of the table was scarred, as if someone had been stubbing cigarettes out on it. Around the table were four decent Windsor chairs, old enough to be called antiques. In one of the chairs, writing or sketching, sat Hannah with her back to the window.
Emily rapped on the pane. Hannah failed to turn around, so she knocked on the door. Emily knew her habits. When Hannah got a new idea for a piece of sculpture, she was deaf to the world, unaware, even, that she was working in a stifling room with the door and windows closed. She was so removed from the world that its demands made no impression on her. Thus she could hear a knocking on the door perfectly well, but it conveyed no more urgency than one of the sound effects on a television set. Emily knocked again. She called her daughter’s name loudly. Her voice broke on the high note. She stopped to clear her throat before she tried again. She could not produce enough volume to achieve her purpose, although she did summon up an echo down the meadow. Through the window she could see that Hannah was no longer moving an implement across a sheet of paper. She was leaning back in the chair with her arms folded over her chest.
There were windows on the long sides of the cabin. Hannah was facing one of the windows. If Emily went around back and looked in, Hannah could not fail to see her. There was an opening, large enough for Emily, between two overgrown honeysuckle bushes. The ground behind the cabin was littered with dead branches, and sawdust and logs piled haphazardly. The hand saw was lying on the ground where it would attract rust and where anyone could trip on it. Hannah had borrowed the saw from Henry, but she was as careless with other people’s possessions as she was with her own. Emily picked her way over to the window. She had a clear view of the room and its occupant. Now Hannah had her chair turned in the other direction, facing the porch. She was smoothing a piece of crumpled paper over her knee, presumably
a discarded sketch she had decided to salvage. Emily clenched her fists in frustration. She rounded the cabin for the second time, moving cautiously through the log-littered yard, snagging her sleeve on a honeysuckle branch.
As she approached the front window she expected to see Hannah’s back, as if this were a bad dream in which she was the loser in a cruel parlor game. The chair had not been moved. Gazing inside, she looked straight into her daughter’s eyes. Filled with elation, she waved, tapped, and called out, then stood back and waited for the door to open. When it didn’t open, she peered in again. Hannah was looking at her without seeing her, or without acknowledging the fact that she saw her. As the expression goes, she was looking right through her. Emily caught her breath. For a moment her emotions hung in the balance, suspended between embarrassment and misery. This private snub was more painful than a cut administered in a social setting before an audience of sharp-eyed gossips. With no real hope that she might be mistaken, Emily raised her arm to signal her once more. She froze in mid-gesture. Hannah stood up and moved closer to the window. Her cold stare could not be misinterpreted.
Either a masochist or a philosopher, Emily did not take suffering personally. If Hannah had chosen to deny her existence, there must be a reason for it. When the family was living under one roof, Hannah had seen her father ignore her mother, pass by her or occupy the same room without speaking to her any more than he would have greeted a piece of the furniture. She had watched Emily accept his behavior without questioning it. Emily had sanctioned Francis Whitman’s conduct years before, and, by extension, her elder daughter’s. Emily blamed herself for arriving at a time when Hannah resented an interruption, or when she was expecting someone else. She might be expecting a man. Emily had never met one of her men, but she knew they lived in a culture from which family ties had been banished.
Incubus Page 20