The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares

by Oates, Joyce Carol

  101 Dalmatians Jude played, one of her old videos she’d long outgrown. (Jude had a thousand videos she’d outgrown!) It was a young-kids’ movie we had all seen but the Corn Maiden had never seen. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV eating ice cream from a bowl in her lap and we finished ours and waited for her and Jude asked would she like a little more and the Corn Maiden hesitated just a moment then said Yes thank you.

  We all had more Häagen-Dazs French Vanilla ice cream. But it was not the same ice cream the Corn Maiden had not exactly!

  Her eyes shining, so happy. Because we were her friends.

  A sixth grader, friends with eighth graders. A guest in Jude Trahern’s house.

  Jude had been nice to her at school for a long time. Smiling, saying hello. Jude had a way of fixing you with her eyes like a cobra or something you could not look away. You were scared but sort of thrilled, too,

  In the 7-Eleven she’d come inside to get a Coke and a package of nachos. She was on her way home from school and had no idea that two of us had followed her and one had run ahead, to wait. She was smiling to see Jude who was so friendly. Jude asked where was her mom and she said her mom was a nurse’s aide across the river in Nyack and would not be home till after dark.

  She laughed saying her mom didn’t like her eating junk food but her mom didn’t know.

  Jude said what our moms don’t know don’t hurt them.

  The Sacrifice of the Corn Maiden was a ritual of the Onigara Indians, Jude told us. In school we had studied Native Americans as they are called but we had not studied the Onigara Indians Jude said had been extinct for two hundred years. The Iroquois had wiped out the Onigaras, it was survival of the fittest.

  The Corn Maiden would be our secret. Beforehand we seemed to know it would be the most precious of our secrets.

  Jude and the Corn Maiden walked ahead alone. Denise and Anita behind. Back of the stores, past the Dumpsters, we ran to catch up.

  Jude asked would the Corn Maiden like to visit her house and the Corn Maiden said yes but she could not stay long. Jude said it was just a short walk. Jude pretended not to know where the Corn Maiden lived (but she knew: crummy apartments at Fifteenth Street and Van Buren) and this was a ten-minute walk, approximately.

  We climbed the back way. Nobody saw. Old Mrs. Trahern would be watching TV in her room, and would not see.

  If she saw she would not seriously see. For at a distance her eyes were too weak.

  The guest wing was a newer part of the house. It overlooked a swimming pool. But the pool was covered with a tarpaulin, Jude said nobody had swum in it for years. She could remember wading in the shallow end but it was long ago like the memory belonged to someone else.

  The guest wing was never used either, Jude said. Most of the house was never used. She and her grandmother lived in just a few rooms and that was fine with them. Sometimes Mrs. Trahern would not leave the house for weeks. She was angry about something that had happened at church. Or maybe the minister had said something she found offensive. She had had to dismiss the black man who’d driven her “limo-zene.” She had dismissed the black woman who’d been her cook and house cleaner for twenty years. Groceries were delivered to the house. Meals were mostly heated up in the microwave. Mrs. Trahern saw a few of her old friends in town, at the Village Woman’s Club, the Hudson Valley Friends of History, and the Skatskill Garden Club. Her friends were not invited to the house to see her.

  Do you love your mom? Jude asked the Corn Maiden.

  The Corn Maiden nodded yes. Sort of embarrassed.

  Your mom is real pretty. She’s a nurse, I guess?

  The Corn Maiden nodded yes. You could see she was proud of her mom but shy to speak of her.

  Where is your dad? Jude asked.

  The Corn Maiden frowned. She did not know.

  Is your dad living?

  Did not know.

  When did you see your dad last?

  Was not sure. She’d been so little . . .

  Did he live around here, or where?

  California, the Corn Maiden said. Berkeley.

  My mom is in California, Jude said. Los Angeles.

  The Corn Maiden smiled, uncertainly.

  Maybe your dad is with my dad now, Jude said.

  The Corn Maiden looked at Jude in wonderment.

  In Hell, Jude said.

  Jude laughed. That way she had, her teeth glistening.

  Denise and Anita laughed. The Corn Maiden smiled not knowing whether to laugh. Slower and slower the spoon was being lifted to her mouth, her eyelids were drooping.

  We would carry the Corn Maiden from Jude’s room. Along a corridor and through a door into what Jude called the guest wing, where the air was colder, and stale. And down a stairway in the guest wing and into a cellar to the storage room.

  The Corn Maiden did not weigh much. Three of us, we weighed so much more.

  On the outside of the storage room door, a padlock.

  Anita and Denise had to leave by 6 P.M., to return to their houses for supper. So boring!

  Jude would remain with the Corn Maiden for much of the night. To watch over. A vigil. She was excited by the candle flames, the incense-smell. The pupils of her eyes were dilated, she was highhigh on Ecstasy. She would not bind the Corn Maiden’s wrists and ankles, she said, until it was necessary.

  Jude had a Polaroid camera, she would take pictures of the Corn Maiden sleeping on her bier.

  As the Corn Maiden was being missed the next morning we would all be at school as usual. For nobody had seen us, and nobody would think of us.

  Some pre-vert they’ll think of, Jude said. We can help them with that.

  Remember, the Corn Maiden has come as our guest, Jude said. It is not kidnapping.

  The Corn Maiden came to Jude on the Thursday before Palm Sunday, in April of the year.

  BREAKING NEWS

  Dial 911 your life is no longer your own.

  Dial 911 you become a beggar.

  Dial 911 you are stripped naked.

  She met them at the curb. Distraught mother awaiting police officers in the rain outside Briarcliff Apts., Fifteenth St., South Skatskill, 8:20 P.M. Approaching officers as they emerged from the patrol car pleading, anxious, trying to remain calm but her voice rising, Help me please help my daughter is missing! I came home from work, my daughter isn’t here, Marissa is eleven years old, I have no idea where she is, nothing like this has ever happened, please help me find her, I’m afraid that someone has taken my daughter!—Caucasian female, early thirties, blond, bare-headed, strong smell of beer on her breath.

  They would question her. They would repeat their questions, and she would repeat her answers. She was calm. She tried to be calm. She began to cry. She began to be angry. She knew her words were being recorded, each word she uttered was a matter of public record. She would face TV cameras, interviewers with microphones out-thrust like scepters. She would see herself performing clumsily and stumbling over her lines in the genre missing child/pleading mother. She would see how skillfully the TV screen leapt from her anxious drawn face and bloodshot eyes to the smiling innocent wide-eyed Marissa, sweet-faced Marissa with gleaming blond hair, eleven years old, sixth grader, the camera lingering upon each of three photos of Marissa provided by her mother; then, as the distraught mother continued to speak, you saw the bland sandstone facade of the “private”— “exclusive”—Skatskill Day School and next you were looking at the sinister nighttime traffic of Fifteenth Street, South Skatskill, along which, as a neutral-sounding woman’s voice explained, eleven-year-old Marissa Bantry normally walked home to let herself into an empty apartment and begin to prepare supper for her mother (who worked at a Nyack medical clinic, would not be home until 8 P.M.) and herself; then you were looking at the exterior rear of Briarcliff Apts., squat and ugly as an army barracks in the rain, where a few hardy residents stood curious staring at police officers and camera crews; then you saw again the mother of the missing girl Leah Bantry, thirty-four,
obviously a negligent mother, a sick-with-guilt mother publicly pleading If anyone has seen my daughter, if anyone has any idea what might have happened to Marissa . . .

  Next news item, tractor-trailer overturned on the New Jersey Turnpike, pileup involving eleven vehicles, two drivers killed, eight taken by ambulance to Newark hospital.

  So ashamed! But I only want Marissa back.

  It was BREAKING NEWS! which means exciting news and by 10 P.M. of that Thursday in April each of four local TV stations was carrying the missing Marissa story, and would carry it at regular intervals for as long as there were developments and as long as local interest remained high. But really it was not “new” news, everyone had seen it before. All that could be “new” were the specific players and certain details to be revealed in time, with the teasing punctuality of a suspense film.

  It was a good thing, the distraught mother gathered, that cases of missing/abducted children were relatively rare in the affluent Hudson Valley suburbs north of New York City, as crimes of violence in these communities were rare. This meant dramatically focused police attention, cooperation with neighboring police departments in Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Irvington. This meant dramatically focused media coverage, replication of Marissa Bantry’s likeness, public concern and participation in the search. Outpouring of sympathy, it would be called. Community involvement. You would not find such a response in a high-crime area, Leah was told.

  “Something to be grateful for. Thank you!”

  She wasn’t speaking ironically. Tears shone in her bloodshot eyes, she wanted only to be believed.

  It was in the distraught mother’s favor, too, that, if her daughter had been abducted and hadn’t simply run away of her own volition, hers would be the first such case in Skatskill’s history.

  That was remarkable. That was truly a novelty.

  “But she didn’t run away. Marissa did not run away. I’ve tried to explain . . .”

  Another novelty in the affluent Hudson Valley suburbs was the mysterious/suspicious circumstance of the “considerable” time lapse between the child’s probable disappearance after school and the recorded time the mother reported her missing at 8:14 P.M. The most vigilant of the local TV stations was alert to the dramatic possibilities here. Skatskill police will neither confirm nor deny that the department is said to be considering charging Bantry, who has no previous police record, with child endangerment.

  And how it would be leaked to this same TV station, the distraught mother had evidenced signs of “inebriation” when police arrived at her home, no one at the station was in a position to say.

  So ashamed! I want to die.

  If I could exchange my lift for Marissa’s.

  Hours, days. Though each hour was singular, raw as a stone forced down the throat. And what were days but unchartable and unfathomable durations of time too painful to be borne except as singular hours or even minutes. She was aware of a great wheel turning, and of herself caught in this wheel, helpless, in a state of suspended panic and yet eager to cooperate with the very turning of the wheel, if it might bring Marissa back to her. For she was coming to feel, possibly yes there was a God, a God of mercy and not just justice, and she might barter her life for Marissa’s.

  Through most of it she remained calm. On the surface, calm. She believed she was calm, she had not become hysterical. She had called her parents in Spokane, Washington, for it could not be avoided. She had called her older sister in Washington, D.C. She had not seemed to hear in their shocked and incredulous voices any evidence of reproach, accusation, disgust; but she understood that that was to come, in time.

  I am to blame. I know.

  It doesn’t matter about me.

  She believed she was being damned calm! Answering their impudent questions and reanswering them and again repeating as in a deranged tape loop the answer that were all she had in the face of their suspicion, their doubt. She answered the officers’ questions with the desperation of a drowning woman clutching a rope already fraying to haul herself into a lifeboat already leaking water. She had no idea, she had told them immediately she had no idea where Marissa’s father was, for the past seven years there had been no contact between them, she had last seen him in Berkeley, California, thousands of miles away and he had had no interest in Marissa, he had sought no interest in his own daughter, and so truly she did not believe she could not believe that there was any likelihood of that man having abducted Marissa, truly she did not want to involve him, did not wish to seem in the most elliptical way to be accusing him . . . Yet they continued to question her. It was an interrogation, they sensed that she had something to hide, had she? And what was that, and why? Until finally she heard herself say in a broken defeated voice all right, yes I will give you his name and his last-known address and telephone number that was surely inoperative after so long, all right I will tell you: we were never married, his name is not my child’s name, he’d pretended even to doubt that Marissa was his child, we had only lived together, he had no interest in marriage, are you satisfied now?

  Her shame, she’d never told her parents. Never told her sister.

  Now they would know Leah’s pathetic secret. It would be another shock, a small one set beside the other. It would cause them to think less of her, and to know that she was a liar. And now she must telephone to tell them before they discovered it in the media. I lied to you, I was never married to Andrew. There was no marriage, and there was no divorce.

  Next, they needed to know exactly where she’d been after she had left the Nyack clinic at 6:30 P.M. of the day her daughter had disappeared. Now they knew she was a liar, and a desperate woman, now they had scented blood. They would track the wounded creature to its lair.

  At first Leah had been vague about time. In the shock of her daughter missing, it had been natural for the mother to be vague, confused, uncertain about time.

  She’d told them that she had been stuck in traffic returning home from Nyack. The Tappan Zee Bridge, route 9 and road repair and rain but yes, she had stopped at the 7-Eleven store near her apartment to buy a few things as she often did . . .

  And was that all, had that been her only stop?

  Yes. Her only stop. The 7-Eleven. The clerk at the cash register would recognize her.

  This was a question, a probing, that had to do with Leah Bantry’s male friends. If she had any, who would have known Marissa. Who would have met Marissa. Who might simply have glimpsed Marissa.

  Any male friend of the missing girl’s mother who might have been attracted to the girl. Might have “abducted” her.

  For Marissa might have willingly climbed into a vehicle, if it was driven by someone she knew. Yes?

  Calmly Leah insisted no, no one.

  She had no male friends at the present time. No serious involvements.

  No one she was “seeing”?

  Leah flared up, angry. In the sense of—what? What did “seeing” mean?

  She was being adamant, and she was speaking forcibly. Yet her interrogators seemed to know. Especially the female detective seemed to know. An evasiveness in Leah’s bloodshot eyes that were the eyes of a sick, guilty mother. A quavering in Leah’s voice even as she spoke impatiently, defiantly. I told you! God damn I have told you.

  There was a pause. The air in the room was highly charged.

  There was a pause. Her interrogators waited.

  It was explained to Leah then that she must answer the officers’ questions fully and truthfully. This was a police investigation, she would be vulnerable to charges of obstruction of justice if she lied.

  If she lied.

  A known liar.

  An exposed, humiliated liar.

  And so, another time, Leah heard her voice break. She heard herself say all right, yes. She had not gone directly to the 7-Eleven store from Nyack, she had stopped first to see a friend and, yes he was a close male friend, separated from his wife and uncertain of his future and he was an intensely private man whose identity she cou
ld not reveal for he and Leah were not exactly lovers though, yes they had made love . . .

  Just once, they had made love. One time.

  On Sunday evening, the previous Sunday evening they had made love.

  For the first time they had made love. And it wasn’t certain that . . . Leah had no way of knowing whether . . .

  She was almost pleading now. Blood seemed to be hemorrhaging into her swollen face.

  The police officers waited. She was wiping at her eyes with a wadded tissue. There was no way out of this was there! Somehow she had known, with the sickening sensation of a doomed cow entering a slaughter chute, she had known that a part of her life would be over, when she’d dialed 911.

  Your punishment, for losing your daughter

  Of course, Leah had to provide the police officers with the man’s name. She had no choice.

  She was sobbing, crushed. Davitt would be furious with her.

  Davitt Stoop, M.D. Director of the medical clinic. He was Dr. Stoop, her superior. Her employer. He was a kindly man, yet a short-tempered man. He was not in love with Leah Bantry, she knew; nor was Leah in love with him, exactly; and yet, they were relaxed together, they got along so very well together, both were parents of single children of about the same age, both had been hurt and deceived in love, and were wary of new involvements.

  Davitt was forty-two, he had been married for eighteen years. He was a responsible husband and father as he had a reputation at the clinic for being an exacting physician and it had been his concern that he and Leah might be seen together prematurely. He did not want his wife to know about Leah, not yet. Still less did he want Leah’s coworkers at the clinic to know. He dreaded gossip, innuendo. He dreaded any exposure of his private life.

  It was the end, Leah knew.

  Before it had begun between them, it would end.

  They would humiliate him, these police officers. They would ask him about Leah Bantry and Leah’s missing daughter, did he know the child, how well did he know the child, had he ever seen the child without the mother present, had he ever been alone with the child, had he ever given the child a ride in his car for instance this past Thursday?