The Corn Maiden: And Other Nightmares

by Joyce Carol Oates

  3.

  There came a January 26 that marked the brothers’ fortieth birthday. And a few days later there came to an exhibit of E.W.’s new exhibit Fossil-Figures in a storefront gallery in the warehouse district near the Hudson River at West and Canal streets, New York City, U.S. Congressman Edgar Waldman who’d given a political speech that afternoon in Midtown, alone now, a limousine with U.S. federal plates waiting at the curb. Noting with satisfaction that the exhibit rooms were nearly deserted. Noting with disgust how the old, cracked linoleum stuck against the bottoms of his expensive shoes. The handsome congressman wore very dark glasses, he looked at no one, in dread of being recognized in this sordid place. Especially he was in dread of seeing the crippled brother—“E.W.”—whom he had not seen in nearly twenty years but believed that he would recognize immediately though by this time the twins—“fraternal” twins—looked nothing alike. Edgar anticipated the stunted broken figure in a wheelchair, yearning teary eyes and wistful smile that maddened, made you want to strike with your fists, that offer of forgiveness where forgiveness was not wanted. I am your brother, I am in you. Love me! But there was no one.

  Only just E.W.’s work, pretentiously called by the gallery “collage paintings.” These Fossil-Figures lacked all beauty, even the canvases upon which they were painted looked soiled and battered and the walls upon which they were (unevenly) hung were streaked as if the hammered-tin ceiling leaked rust. What were these artworks covered in dream/nightmare shapes, geometrical, yet humanoid, shifting into and out of one another like translucent guts, deeply offensive to the congressman who sensed “subterfuge”—“perversion”—“subversion” in such obscure art, and what was obscure was certain to be “soulless”—even “traitorous.” Most upsetting, the Fossil-Figures seemed to be taunting the viewer, anyway this viewer, like riddles, and he had no time for God-damned riddles, the rich man’s daughter he’d married to advance his career was awaiting him at the St. Regis, this visit to West and Canal streets was an (unmarked) stop in Congressman Waldman’s itinerary for the day. Wiping his eyes to better see an artwork depicting the night sky, distant galaxies and constellations, almost there was beauty here, suns like bursting egg yolks swallowing up smaller suns, comets shaped like—was it male sperm?—blazing male sperm?—colliding with luminous bluish-watery planets; and, protruding from the rough surface of the canvas, a thing so unexpected, so ugly, the congressman stepped back in astonishment: was it a nestlike growth of some kind? a tumor? comprised of plasticine flesh and dark crinkly hairs and—could it be baby teeth? arranged in a smile?—and a scattering of baby bones?

  A fossil, it was. A thing removed from the human body. Something very ugly discovered in a cavity of a surviving twin’s body. The fossil-soul of the other, that had never breathed life.

  Stunned, quivering with disgust, the congressman turned away.

  Walked on, in a haze of denunciations, denials. Seeing that some of the canvases were beautiful—were they?—or were they all ugly, obscene, if you knew how to decode them?—he was made to think that he was endangered, something was going to happen to him, there was the blunt statistical fact that in the last election he’d been reelected to his seat in Congress by a smaller majority than in any of the preceding elections, in such victory there is the presentiment of defeat. Through the maze of rooms circling back to the start of the exhibit and at a glass-topped counter there was a bored-looking girl with dead-white skin and a face glittering with piercings who seemed to be working for the gallery and he asked of her in a voice that quavered with indignation if these ridiculous “fossil-figures” were considered “art” and she told him politely yes of course, everything the gallery exhibited was art and he asked if the exhibit was supported by public funds and seemed but partly mollified to learn that it was not. He asked who the “so-called artist” E.W. was and the girl spoke vaguely saying nobody knew E.W. personally, only the proprietor of the gallery had ever seen him, he lived by himself outside the city and never came into the city, not even to oversee the exhibit, didn’t seem to care if his artworks sold, or what prices they were sold for.

  “He’s got some ‘wasting-away’ disease, like muscular dystrophy, or Parkinson’s, but last we knew, E.W. is alive. He’s alive.”

  And I won’t go away. You will come to me instead.

  Each year: January 26. One year, one insomniac night, Edward is flicking restlessly through TV channels and is surprised to see a sudden close-up of—is it Edgar? The demon brother Edgar? TV news footage from earlier in the day, rerun now in the early hours of the morning, suddenly this magnification of a man’s head, thick-jawed face, an aging face obscured by dark glasses, skin gleaming with oily sweat, an arm lifted to shield the disgraced congressman from a pack of pursuing reporters, photographers and TV camera crews, there’s Congressman Edgar Waldman being briskly walked into a building by plains clothes police officers. Indicted on multiple charges of bribe taking, violations of federal campaign laws, perjury before a federal grand jury. Already the rich man’s daughter has filed for divorce, there’s the quick smile, a suggestion of bared teeth. In the brothers’ childhood house in which Edward lives in a few downstairs rooms Edward stares at the TV screen from which the lost brother has faded uncertain if the thumping sensation in his head is a profound shock, a pang of hurt that must beat within the brother, or his own excitement, eagerness. He will come to me now. He will not deny me, now.

  EPILOGUE

  It was so. The demon brother would return home, to his twin who awaited him.

  For he knew himself now Not one but two. In the larger world he’d gambled his life and lost his life and would retreat now, to the other. In retreat a man sets aside pride, disgraced, divorced, bankrupt and a glisten of madness in the washed-out blue eyes. His heavy jaws were silvery-dark with stubble, a tremor in his right hand that had been lifted in a federal court to swear that Edgar Waldman would tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth Yes I swear and in that heartbeat it was all over for him, a taste like bile rising at the back of his mouth.

  Still the wonder. Disbelief. The corroded ruin of a face like clay that has been worn down by rivulets of water, wind. And that glisten of madness in the eyes: Me?

  In retreat now returning to his childhood home, he had shunned for years. The left-behind, broke-backed younger brother who’d been living alone since their mother’s death, now many years ago. As a young man he’d never considered time as anything other than a current to bear him aloft, propel him into his future, now he understood that time is a rising tide, implacable inexorable unstoppable rising tide, now at the ankles, now the knees, rising to the thighs, to the groin and the torso and to the chin, ever rising, a dark water of utter mystery propelling us forward not into the future but into infinity which is oblivion.

  Returning to the suburban town of his birth and to the house he’d shunned for decades seeing now with a pang of loss how the residential neighborhood had changed, many of the large houses converted to apartment buildings and commercial sites, and most of the plane trees lining the street severely trimmed or removed altogether. And there was the old Waldman home, that had once been their mother’s pride, once so splendidly white, now a weatherworn gray with sagging shutters and a rotting roof and a lush junglelike front lawn awash in litter as if no one had lived there for a long time. Edgar had been unable to contact Edward by phone, there was no directorial listing for a phone under the name Edward Waldman, now his heart pounded in his chest, he felt a wave of dread He has died, it is too late. Hesitantly knocking at the front door and listening for a response from within and knocking again, more loudly, hurting his knuckles, and at last there came from within a faint bleating sound, a voice asking who it was and he called out It’s me.

  Slowly as if with effort the door opened. And there, in his wheelchair, as Edgar had imagined him, but not so ravaged as Edgar had imagined him, was his brother Edward whom he hadn’t seen in more than two decades: a shrunken individual of no obvi
ous age with a narrow, pale, pinched yet unlined face, a boy’s face, and his hair threaded with gray like Edgar’s, and one bony shoulder higher than the other. Pale blue eyes filling with moisture he swiped at with the edges of both hands and in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in some time he said Eddie. Come in.

  . . . when it happened could never be determined precisely since the bodies were frozen and preserved from decay found together on a leather sofa made as a bed pulled to within a foot of a fireplace heaped with ashes in a downstairs room of the old clapboard Colonial crowded with furniture and what appeared to be the accumulated debris of decades but which may have been materials for artworks or the very artworks themselves of the eccentric artist known as E.W., the elderly Waldman brothers in layers of bulky clothing must have fallen asleep in front of a fire in the otherwise unheated house, the fire must have burnt out in the night and the brothers died in their sleep in a protracted January cold spell: the brother to be identified as Edgar Waldman, eighty-seven, embracing his brother Edward Waldman, also eighty-seven, from behind, protectively fitting his body to his brother’s crippled body, forehead tenderly pressed to the back of the other’s head, the two figures coiled together like a gnarled organic material that has petrified to stone.

  DEATH-CUP

  Amanita phalloides he began to hear in no voice he could recognize.

  Murmurous, only just audible—Amanita phalloides.

  More distinctly that morning, a rain-chilled Saturday morning in June, at his uncle’s funeral. In the austere old Congregationalist church he only entered, as an adult, for such ceremonies as weddings and funerals. As, seated beside his brother Alastor of whom he disapproved strongly, he leaned far forward in the cramped hardwood pew, framing his face with his fingers so that he was spared seeing his brother’s profile in the corner of his eye. Feeling an almost physical repugnance for the man who was his brother. He tried to concentrate on the white-haired minister’s solemn words yet was nervously distracted by Amanita phalloides. As if, beneath the man’s familiar words of Christian forbearance and uplift another voice, a contrary voice, strange, incantatory, was struggling to emerge. And during the interlude of organ music. The Bach Toccata and Fugue in D-minor which his uncle, an amateur musician and philanthropist, had requested be played at his funeral. Lyle was one who, though he claimed to love music, was often distracted during it; his mind drifting; his thoughts like flotsam, or froth; now hearing the whispered words, only just audible in his ears Amanita phalloides, Amanita phalloides. He realized he’d first heard these mysterious words the night before, in a dream. A sort of fever-dream. Brought on by his brother’s sudden, unexpected return.

  He did not hate his brother Alastor. Not here, in this sacred place.

  Amanita phalloides. Amanita phalloides . . .

  How beautiful, the Bach organ music! Filling the spartan-plain, dazzlingly-white interior of the church with fierce cascades of sound pure and flashing as a waterfall. Such music argued for the essential dignity of the human spirit. The transcendence of physical pain, suffering, loss. All that’s petty, ignoble. The world is a beautiful place if you have the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it Lyle’s uncle had often said, and had seemed to believe through his long life, apparently never dissuaded from the early idealism of his youth; yet how was such idealism possible, Lyle couldn’t help but wonder, Lyle who wished to believe well of others yet had no wish to be a fool, how was such idealism possible after the evidence of catastrophic world wars, the unspeakable evil of the holocaust, equally mad, barbaric mass-slaughters in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China? Somehow, his uncle Gardner King had remained a vigorous, good-natured and generous man despite such facts of history; there’d been in him, well into his seventies, a childlike simplicity which Lyle, his nephew, younger than he by decades, seemed never to have had. Lyle had loved his uncle, who’d been his father’s eldest brother; fatherless himself since the age of eleven, he’d been saddened by his uncle’s gradual descent into death from cancer of the larynx, and had not wanted to think that he would probably be remembered, to some degree, in his uncle’s will. The bulk of the King estate, many millions of dollars, would go into the King Foundation, which was nominally directed by his wife, now widow, Alida King; the rest of it would be divided among numerous relatives. Lyle was troubled by the anticipation of any bequest, however modest. The mere thought filled him with anxiety, almost a kind of dread. I would not wish to benefit in any way from Uncle Gardner’s death, I could not bear it.

  To which his brother Alastor would have replied in his glib, jocular way, as, when they were boys, he’d laughed at Lyle’s overscrupulous conscience What good’s that attitude? Our uncle is dead and he isn’t coming back, is he?

  Unfortunate that Alastor had returned home to Contracoeur on the very eve of their uncle’s death, after an absence of six years. Still, it could only have been coincidence. So Alastor claimed. He’d been in communication with none of the relatives, including his twin brother Lyle.

  How murmurous, teasing in Lyle’s ears—Amanita phalloides.

  Intimate as a lover’s caressing whisper, and mysterious—Amanita phalloides.

  Lyle was baffled at the meaning of these words. Why, at such a time, his thoughts distracted by grief, they should assail him.

  In the hardwood pew, unpleasantly crowded by Alastor on his left, not wanting to crowd, himself, against an elderly aunt on his right, Lyle felt his lean, angular body quiver with tension. His neck was beginning to ache from the strain of leaning forward. It annoyed him to realize that, in his unstylish matte-black gabardine suit that fitted him too tightly across the shoulders and too loosely elsewhere, with his ash-colored hair straggling past his collar, his face furrowed as if with pain, and the peculiar way he held his outstretched fingers against his face, he was making himself conspicuous among the rows of mourners in the King family pews. Staring at the gleaming ebony casket so prominently placed in the center aisle in front of the communion rail, that looked so forbidding; so gigantic; far larger than his uncle Gardner’s earthly remains, diminutive at the end, would seem to require. But of course deaThis larger than life. DeaThenvelops life: the emptiness that precedes our brief span of time, the emptiness that follows.

  A shudder ran through him. Tears stung his cheeks like acid. How shaky, how emotional he’d become!

  A nudge in his side—his brother Alastor pressed a handkerchief, white, cotton, freshly laundered, into his hand, which Lyle blindly took.

  Managing, even then, not to glance at his brother. Not to upset himself seeing yet again his brother’s mock-pious mock-grieving face. His watery eyes, in mimicry of Lyle’s.

  Now the organ interlude was over. The funeral service was ending—so soon! Lyle felt a childish stab of dismay, that his uncle would be hurried out of the sanctuary of the church, out of the circle of the community, into the impersonal, final earth. Yet the white-haired minister was leading the congregation in a familar litany of words beginning, “Our heavenly father . . .” Lyle wiped tears from his eyelashes, shut his eyes tightly in prayer. He hadn’t been a practicing Christian since adolescence, he was impatient with unquestioned piety and superstition, yet there was solace in such a ritual, seemingly shared by an entire community. Beside him, his aunt Agnes prayed with timid urgency as if God were in this church and needed only to be beseeched by the right formula of words, and in the right tone of voice. On his other side, his brother Alastor intoned the prayer, not ostentatiously but distinctly enough to be heard for several pews; Alastor’s voice was a deep, rich baritone, the voice of a trained singer you might think, or an actor. A roaring in Lyle’s ears like a waterfall—Amanita phalloides! Amanita phalloides! and suddenly he remembered what Amanita phalloides was: the death-cup mushroom. He’d been reading a pictorial article on edible and inedible fungi in one of his science magazines and the death-cup mushroom, more accurately a “toadstool,” had been imprinted on his memory.

  His mouth had gone dry, h
is heart was hammering against his ribs. With the congregation, he murmured, “Amen.” All volition seemed to have drained from him. Calmly he thought I will kill my brother Alastor after all. After all these years.

  Of course, this would never happen. Alastor King was a hateful person who surely deserved to die, but Lyle, his twin brother, was not one to commit any act of violence; not even one to fantasize any act of violence. Not me! Not me! Never.

  In the cemetery behind the First Congregationalist Church of Contracoeur the remainder of the melancholy funeral rite was enacted. There stood Lyle King, the dead man’s nephew, in a daze in wet grass beneath a glaring opalescent sky, awakened by strong fingers gripping his elbow. “All right if I ride with you to Aunt Alida’s, Lyle?” Alastor asked. There was an edge of impatience to his lowered voice as if he’d had to repeat his question. And Lyle’s twin brother had not been one, since the age of eighteen months, to wish to repeat questions. He was leaning close to Lyle as if hoping to read his thoughts; his eyes were steely-blue, narrowed. His breath smelled of something sweetly chemical, mouthwash probably, to disguise the alcohol on his breath; Lyle knew he was carrying a pocket flask in an inside pocket. His handsome ruddy face showed near-invisible broken capillaries like exposed nerves. Lyle murmured, “Of course, Alastor. Come with me.” His thoughts flew ahead swiftly—there was Cemetery Hill that was treacherously steep, and the High Street Bridge—opportunities for accidents? Somehow Lyle’s car might swerve out of control, skid on the wet pavement, Alastor who scorned to wear a seat belt might be thrown against the windshield, might be injured, might die, while he, Lyle, buckled in safely, might escape with but minor injuries. And blameless. Was that possible? Would God watch over him?