Walter and Henry exchanged a glance. Each of them had been counting the various reports of cloudlike fogs or foglike clouds that had been littering up the case, vagrant data in search of a shelter. Emily’s report, plus Mercy’s and Helen’s, plus Helen’s alone, added up to the number three, one integer above coincidence.
Emily’s next statement recalled one of Helen’s. The fog moved as she moved, “billowing” forth if she advanced and back when she stopped or retreated. “It was warning me off,” she said. Henry stood up abruptly, turning his back to the room. Walter put down his pen. I found I was holding my breath. We were no longer discussing a natural, if freakish, event. We had been confronted with an “it” that displayed independent volition and a hint of malice. This single piece of evidence had the power to alter Henry’s future. Up to now he had. been a dabbler, playing at parapsychology to allay his disappointment with the priesthood. If he accepted a supernatural explanation for Hannah’s disappearance, he would be well on his way to changing his professional allegiance.
Henry turned toward us. His face was alight with the flame of certain knowledge, transfigured as it must have been in the trenches of Belgium, when God had addressed him. The Christian god was only one aspect of the supernatural, one Entity among many. Henry’s outlook had expanded to include all its other manifestations, however clownish, impure, or ill-conditioned. He had converted, you might say, to polytheism. All at once he was charged with purpose instead of duty. He brought up the matter of keeping careful records. With more enthusiasm than she had shown in many days, Emily agreed to write down everything she had seen in as much detail as she could manage. Walter could transcribe her handwriting into typescript and take notes when Henry conducted formal interviews. Henry described his own notes as a shambles, which had to be decoded. He hoped I would help him collate the witnesses’ statements, paying special attention to similar features and similar wording. “We’re looking for stable elements,” he said. “We still don’t know if we’re dealing with one phenomenon or more than one.” He reminded us, somewhat didactically, that so-called “irrational” events often happen to rational people, whose perceptions can provide us with solid empirical grounding. The more fantastic the event, the greater the need for exhaustive observation and description.
From her seat by the window Lorraine began to shift uneasily. She gripped the comb so tightly it was surely making teeth marks on her palm. Her eyes were open, fixed on some object located in her mind. There was nothing in her line of vision but a patch of cracking plaster on the wall. Rough sounds came from deep in her throat, as if she wanted to speak but had not yet acquired the use of language. Her chest rose and fell in spasms. Still holding the comb, she pressed her fists to her chest, as if to relieve some pressure. Walter rose from his seat to help her, but Henry held him back. Emily was breathing shallowly, in response to Lorraine.
She began to speak in an unfamiliar voice, the voice of a frightened young man with a rustic accent: “I’m in a phone booth. They set me up. I’m gonna make a run for it. You never heard from me, O.K.? You tell them I walked out on you … I don’t know … Get out. Go to Carrie’s …Jesus. Shit. I’m out of change … You hear what I said? Go to Carrie’s …”
Lorraine heaved a sigh, toppling sideways with a grunt onto the window seat, unconscious or asleep. Henry picked up her wrist and felt for a pulse. When he found it was normal, he dropped her arm roughly, irritated by the brevity of her performance and, more so, by its total irrelevance. “That does it,” said Walter. “That should teach us.” Emily rose from the sofa unaided, left the room, and did not come back again. I heard the kitchen door slam; she was retreating into her garden.
Lorraine was still out, fatigued by her psychic exertions. Poor Lorraine, unfairly denied the credit that was due her. She had tuned in to the owner of the comb—some petty crook double-crossed by his cohorts, but her genuine perception did not conform to the group’s agenda. As I saw it, she had done us a favor, by braking this parapsychological freight train, with its cargo of chimeras, before it built up to breakneck speed and ran off the rails.
I’d been checking in on my mother frequently, bringing staples from the grocery store, jars of soup, and covered dishes. She ate what I brought and cleaned up afterward. Her house and garden were in pretty good order, as was her person. We exchanged few words. She thanked me for the food; but she didn’t want my company. One day, on my way out to see her, I got a call from Mark Centrella. My prodigal sister, or someone fitting her description, had been spotted thumbing a lift on Route 5, a few miles south of Cornish, near the Maine–New Hampshire border. Hannah had an artist friend in Fryeburg, a short distance northward. “I called your Mom,” Mark said. “Maybe you’d better go see how she’s taking it.” I arrived at Emily’s unannounced, carrying an offering of freshly baked bread. When she opened the door, she stared at me, bewildered. I could see from her expression she had hoped against hope I was Hannah. Before I could speak, she closed the door in my face.
PART VII
Christ to the Right of Us
Chapter Nineteen
On the front and side lawns of St. Anthony’s the booths and tables for the church festival were draped in baby-blue sheeting, the closest shade to Mary-blue the fair organizers could come up with. Mary-blue, the Virgin’s emblematic color, was darker and clearer, without the grayish overtone. On this date, according to church doctrine, Christ appeared as the apostles were taking Mary’s body to the grave and carried it with him up to heaven, where it was reunited with her soul. It must be said that Mary’s assumption, so sudden and peremptory, bears some resemblance to an abduction, recalling abductions from older traditions than Christianity, when gods and fairies snatched mortal beings for their pleasure. Unlike Roman Catholics, Episcopalians were not required to believe that Mary was lifted to heaven. The Feast of the Assumption was not an article of faith, but a token recognition of the feminine principle, suppressed by the Church over many centuries. Mary was the only goddess we had in the Christian pantheon, a saccharine, watered-down version of a goddess, someone simple men and woman could turn to as a last-ditch measure.
On Assumption Day, 1974, the feminine principle was suffering a visible setback. Under skies bleached white from the heat, the vegetables at the produce stands browned and puckered. The flesh of Ruth Hiram’s prize beefsteak tomatoes split open, oozing sallow juices. Jane Morse’s rhubarb lay as limp and rubbery as leftover spaghetti. Peppers and eggplants wore their skins loosely. Like dishonest retailers, we kept rearranging the displays, placing the freshest vegetables topmost, hiding the bad ones underneath. We were understocked to begin with. Late crops of lettuce and spinach had bolted before they matured; and the corn was inedible. Our local peaches had succumbed to the heat, rotting on the branch, although you had only to drive as far as Raymond to see tree after tree bowed down by the weight of the ripe fruit. The flower arrangements, on the theme of “Lazy Summer Days,” were exhibited at the back of the church, wilting in their containers, from which water was rapidly evaporating. Onlookers shook their heads at the judges’ selections. By what standard had Edna Merrifield’s entry been awarded a blue ribbon? In a toy canoe three feet long, lined with green florist’s clay that hadn’t been wetted down for several hours, cattails, pond grasses, ferns, and pink Joe pye weed hung lifelessly over the gunwales, brushing the tabletop.
Like the chief mourner at a funeral, I stood behind the baked goods table until closing time. Any other year, our stores would have been depleted by noon. This August our only customers were church members, who bought token items from a sense of obligation. Out-of-towners, summer people, and tourists approached our table and edged away, feigning interest in the Attic Treasures booth behind us, stocked as it was with nonperishable goods made of china, wood, and metal. As the heat wore on, our table began to resemble a visual catalogue of culinary failures. Sponge cakes collapsed in the center. Meringues softened gluily. Angelfood cakes sank to half their lofty height. Icings me
lted and separated, lazy droplets of butter trickling onto the platters. There was nothing to tempt a buyer but our loaves of plain bread, which had held up nicely but were perceived to be guilty by association.
Henry passed among the booths, inspecting the cash boxes. His hopes for installing a new furnace were dwindling rapidly. My mother made a short appearance after lunch to pick up a supply of Arnold Crowley’s honey. I watched her at the produce table, smiling as she handled a wrinkled green pepper and a spotted tomato, deriving some secret amusement from their inferior condition. I saw Sally Bissell going into the church with a watering can, too late to save the flower arrangements, but I had lost sight of Adele, who was usually on duty at the crafts table, where some of her own work was on sale: beach stones painted with mysterious faces, matted and framed collages of feathers and dried flowers, lopsided baskets woven from grapevines. Mariette Roque said she’d gone home to get more of her beach stones, which were enjoying an unaccountable popularity, but Henry claimed he’d seen her in church, praying on her knees, head bowed over the pew in front of her, undisturbed by loud-voiced visitors to the flower show.
Adele worked at a church and came from a long line of churchmen, but her attitude toward religion was pantheistic, not to say heretical. If she was worshipping indoors, when the vast temple of nature was available to her, she must be prey to some misfortune or disturbance of mind. Over the last three weeks I’d been taken up with my mother, my lost sister, the festival. I had disregarded my young friend, whom I hailed in passing at the parish house without stopping for prolonged conversation. Adele had been absent for several days during this busy period, leaving Henry stranded. When I asked what was wrong, he said, “She didn’t give a reason and I damn well didn’t ask.” Adele may have looked paler and droopier than usual, but she tended to wear loose summer clothes in greenish shades that washed out her complexion. I left Jane Morse in charge of the bake sale and made my way through the thinning crowd to the church building.
The church was empty and a scant degree cooler than outdoors. Over an exhibit of miniature roses arranged in a child’s tea set (“Meet Me in the Playhouse”), one of the spotlights was flickering, about to die. I climbed on a chair and removed the bulb. The roses had shed most of their petals anyhow. From my higher perch I glimpsed the toes of a pair of feet protruding into the aisle, feet wearing sandals with wide straps and shaped soles. I stood the folding chair against the wall and approached the feet cautiously, in case, by some chance, they belonged to a stranger. I was halfway down the aisle when Adele sat up in her pew, like a reanimated corpse from a coffin, startled to be awake and to find herself in such surroundings.
Unlike a figure in a horror story, she began by apologizing. “I’m sorry you had to come looking for me. I know I should be on duty. They must be furious at me.”
I sat down in the pew behind her. “No one sent me,” I said. “Henry saw you. He said you were praying.”
She flopped down on her back so I had to lean over to talk to her. “I was resting my head on my arms. I’m so tired I can’t describe it. I thought if I didn’t lie down I’d fall down.”
“You should go home. There are plenty of hands to spell you.”
“I suppose so. As long as it’s light. I can’t fall asleep at night.”
“Emily makes a good herbal tea. It might help you.”
Adele sat up abruptly, trying to gather herself together, smoothing her hair back, digging into her duffel-sized purse for a handkerchief to mop her forehead. “I have teas. I have tinctures. I have herbal pillows and white-noise machines. Nothing helps.”
“Are you sure you want to drive? Can’t I take you?”
She turned on me in anger, as if I were the author of her insomnia. “You can’t expect me to last without sleep. There has to be an end to this.”
I watched her march out of the church, her version of a stormy exit, the effect somewhat marred by the fact that she dropped her heavy bag and it tripped her. She saved herself from falling, but several items rolled out of the bag—a jar, a pencil, a checkbook. She ended up on her hands and knees anyway, rooting under a pew for her runaway possessions.
If the feminine principle was losing ground in our neighborhood, crops succumbing by degrees to the heat and drought, our women were also being subverted from within. The female character was under assault from its lower side. In every household to which I had entry there was a woman suffering from helplessness or phobia, diseases of dependency. Friends and acquaintances displayed symptoms for which fatherly physicians usually suggest daily doses of tranquilizers. Earlier in the season I had watched them growing sleek from sexual attention, blooming and ripening along with the fruits of summer. Now the glow of fulfillment had left them. Ruth Hiram’s cheeks, chest, and forearms were covered with a rash diagnosed by Pete Bayer as dermatitis, a purely descriptive term meaning inflammation of the skin, in which the emotions were often implicated. Every salve she applied aggravated the itching, until the inflamed areas were dotted with blackish scabs. At the library, where she presided on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, she refused to look the borrowers in the eye, offending many of them by her changed, gruff manner. Jane Morse discovered her pregnancy was imaginary. She took the news hard, as if she had brought some disgrace on herself and her husband and was no longer fit to show her face in public.
Something was inimical to women in the Dry Falls vicinity. For the first time in parish history there were more men than women in church on Sunday mornings. Father Darren reported a similar imbalance, as did Clark Harmon, the Congregational minister. Female parishioners filed into their consulting rooms, but these same women were skipping worship services. Most of them were active members, the kind of women known as “pillars of the church.” Fortunately, none of these good women abandoned their parish duties. They neglected their spiritual welfare, but they continued to look after the church. Each week Sally Bissell picked up the vases, filled them with greenery and blooms from her estate, and returned them, or asked me to return them, to the altar. She dashed in and out of the sanctuary without making a reverence in front of the cross, as if she were a delivery person from the florist’s instead of a Christian believer. Jane Morse taught Sunday school in the parish house common room, as she always did, but she did not accompany the children into church at the end of the service, when they were allowed to sit and watch from the back pew and take part in singing the rousing recessional hymn. Mary Fran Rawls had stopped going to Mass at St. Mary’s, but she still cleaned St. Anthony’s for us. She knew God was not a Protestant.
From Henry’s perspective, these women appeared, at first, to be going through a crisis of faith. Like the other disaffected church-women, his own constituents were frightened and angry. They were angry at God, more or less consciously, for being a man. They took out their bitterness on Henry. “Yes, I know,” snapped Ruth Hiram. “I know He has no gender. Or so you say. Just don’t tell me you’d be a priest if He was a woman.” Sally Bissell was querulous and tearful. She didn’t like being rude to Henry, who was her pastor and her closest friend’s husband. “I’m sorry, Henry. That’s exactly the point. God can’t protect me. He’s utterly useless. And so are you.”
Adele didn’t make an appointment. She poked her head in early one morning and asked if he had a minute. She was defensive and on edge, as if she had come at Henry’s insistence instead of on her own. Some of her remarks echoed Sally’s. She referred to the Deity as “your God” and “my father’s God.” She lashed out at Henry, “How can He protect us? He’s one of them.” Since he thought I was in her confidence, Henry asked me what man she was lumping in with God. Who was her current or recent lover? What had he done to her? I said it worried me sometimes that Adele had no men in her life, hurtful or otherwise.
After the first session, Henry predicted they wouldn’t come back. He hadn’t made a dent in their resistance. An ethical counselor never tried to hook a client into returning. He let them go with his good wishes, like thi
stledown blown on the wind. Henry knew his therapeutic instincts were slipping because his baser curiosity was aroused. He was hooked himself. He wanted to know why all of them had raised the subject of protection. He wanted to know what had made them so angry—angry and cosmically defenseless all at once, a blend of feelings he hadn’t witnessed since his fieldwork courses at divinity school, when he was assigned to St. Luke’s Women’s Infirmary, doing the intake forms on rape victims.
One by one his clients reappeared, except for Adele. By then Henry had made the connection. Each of them had come to him before, complaining of sexual frustration. Now they alleged they were oppressed by sex. They needed protection from the demands of overeager partners. “We got what we asked for,” said Sally. “You think it’s funny, don’t you? It’s a joke on women.” “I’m going to leave him,” whispered Jane. “I’m going to my mother’s.” Mariette took more forceful measures. She moved into the guest cottage and bolted the door from the inside. “I don’t know how he got in,” she said. “I’m sure I locked the windows. He left before it was light. Of course he denied it.” Ruth challenged Henry with bleary eyes. “You have to do something, Henry. This is an indignity.”
It was not the first time in his work as a counselor that Henry had felt he was out of his depth. Now he found himself once more at a juncture where his compass wavered and all signposts to the truth were weatherworn and unreadable. Any insight into a marriage stopped at the bedroom door, but it was impossible to associate these husbands, his friends of long standing, with acts of such crudity. Perhaps Ralph Hiram was a little humorless, and Frank Morse, to put it kindly, wasn’t very complicated. Ford Bissell had a materialistic streak and the money to implement it. Michel Roque castrated sheep and slaughtered them, all in a day’s work. But these were tendencies, not characteristics. How could any of them have built such strong, monogamous marriages on a foundation of sexual callousness?
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