There are rumors of physical abuse by parents … something this columnist finds nearly impossible to believe. I don’t know the Dawsons, but Horace and Elena Cobb are friends of many years’ standing, and are part of a group this column refers to as ‘The Happy Few’ in stories about local society goings-on.
Adding to the melodrama is the fact that the two girls fought the raiders tooth and nail before being handcuffed and dragged from the premises. They are both, we are told, in an out-of-state deprogramming facility undergoing appropriate therapy.
There are other rumors which we have not been able to verify, which are too scandalous to report here. Let it simply be said that as far as this column is concerned, the Drs Schechtner would appear to be unscrupulous psychologists and the Cobb and Dawson families have been gravely wronged.
Stay tuned …
Wow! This was dynamite. Things were starting to fit together. And there were more clippings in Joan’s envelope: stories about pretrial hearings, reports of videotaped interviews by psychologists of teens rescued from the house regarding satanic practices – being made to strip naked, make confessions and perform perverse sexual acts with each other and the Schechtners in a ‘weirdly painted attic room.’
These claims were vigorously disputed during cross-examination by attorney Spencer Addams. He tried to show that these videotaped statements were coerced, made under duress, or were the result of brainwashing by the interviewing psychologists. He tried to rattle the psychologists by demanding to know how much they had been paid to bend the teenagers’ stories. After objections by the prosecutor, Judge Bates admonished Addams for bullying these witnesses. Addams went on to assert that the Schechtners were licensed, their house was licensed, and that there was no cult.
Of course, I was struck by these claims of ‘perverse sexual acts’ enacted in the ‘weirdly painted attic room,’ as this threw a new and unexpected light on the murals.
Yes, it did seem conceivable that the people depicted on the walls were created to stand as witnesses to acts taking place in the middle of that room. Indeed, there was a diabolic aspect to their cold, leering faces.
I wondered: Could this possibly be true? Could the murals have served such a purpose?
Possible, I thought, but not likely, although I wasn’t sure why I felt that. Something about those painted people still struck me as an attempt to tell a story, not just to ornament the walls of a cult-oriented orgy room.
I learned from the clippings that suddenly, and without explanation, the case against both Drs Schechtner was dismissed and they were set free. There were rumors that a private settlement had been made, which the parties and the prosecutors refused to confirm or explain. After this, news of the scandal disappeared from the newspaper, except for a follow-up column, one year later, by the society columnist Waldo Channing:
CALISTA TIMES-DISPATCH, November 1, 1994
AROUND TOWN …
by Waldo Channing
People are talking about … the odd outcome of the Cobb family brouhaha, reported in detail in this column last year. Young Courtney Cobb, daughter of Horace and Elena, has not returned to the family home in Calista, even though more than a year has passed since she was spirited away by deprogrammers from a ‘cult house’ on Locust Street to an unnamed ‘out-of-state rehab facility.’
Teachers and friends of the girl at the Ashley-Burnett School, concerned about her well-being, received no responses to their inquiries from her family. Her parents and two older brothers refuse to answer questions regarding her mental and physical state, all offering the same by-rote answer: ‘This is a private family matter and we intend to keep it that way.’
In view of the fact that Courtney’s friend, Penny Dawson, has emerged from rehab, and is now a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, people are troubled by Courtney’s continuing unexplained absence. Your columnist has made similar inquiries and received the same stock non-response. Strange …
Meantime, the formerly jailed married psychologists, Theodore and Elizabeth Schechtner, have departed Calista, because, according to their attorney, Spencer Addams, ‘the outrageous charges brought against them have ruined their professional reputations.’ Addams tells this column that the Schechtners have relocated out of state in order to move on with their lives. When asked about rumors of a private settlement, Addams waved the question off. ‘The point,’ he said, ‘is that the community has lost two fine practitioners, and that what was taken from them, their good names and reputations, cannot be repaired by any amount of money.’
This was the last dated clipping in the envelope. Joan had given me a trove of material. Some things I had wondered about were explained, while others remained mysterious. But at least I had a context for the artwork. The question now was whether the murals were as powerful as I’d first thought, or whether I’d been seduced by the ‘strange’ (to use Waldo Channing’s word) circumstances in which I’d discovered them.
Hannah would take up the aesthetic value issues with her friend, Anna von Arx. She wanted me to accompany her, but I decided it would be better if she made the presentation on her own. I prepared a small twelve-inch-per-wall model of the murals with hinges on each wall to enable her to fold up ‘the room’ and carry it flat to her meeting.
Hannah Sachs
I phoned Anna to set up a meeting. I told her I had something interesting to show her, about which I was eager to hear her opinion. As we talked, I noticed strain in her voice.
‘Something the matter?’ I asked.
‘I’m really glad you called, Hannah. I’ll tell you all about it at lunch.’
At her suggestion we met at Giovanni’s, a red-checkered-tablecloth trattoria in the Little Italy district on Chandler Hill. I was surprised at this choice; I’d expected she’d want to meet closer to the museum. It was raining when I arrived, one of those summer storms that come out of nowhere – the sky turns dark, the rain beats down hard for a quarter-hour, then suddenly the sun re-emerges, pouring down dazzling light.
After we settled into a booth, I asked her why she’d chosen the place.
‘It’s quiet, the food’s good and it’s unlikely any of my co-workers will be lunching here.’
‘So, tell me – what is going on?’
As she launched into her saga, tears filled her eyes. She told me she’d been having an affair with Anders Carlsen, director of the museum.
‘It’s been going on a year,’ she said. ‘Of course, we’ve kept it secret. Intimate relationships between staff aren’t permitted and are regarded as especially egregious when there’s such a disparity in status. Also, Anders is married and has young kids. Now he wants to leave his wife and move in with me, which means I’ll have to quit my job.’
She took a breath. ‘I love this job – not the fundraising part so much, but developing a department of outsider art. I’ve pushed through some amazing acquisitions. If I go along with Anders, that’ll end. I’ll be labeled a home-breaker … you know, “that little blond bitch who used to work in the museum.” And if I break up with him, I’ll have to leave anyway. It would be impossible to stay on and act like nothing happened. Meantime, some nasty person wrote an anonymous letter to the board chairman. When he asked Anders about it, Anders grinned and gave an ambiguous shrug as if to say “How could that possibly be true?” Now, if he moves in with me, he’ll look like a liar. The new plan is for me to quit, then a few weeks later he’ll leave his wife and take an apartment near mine. That way, if we’re discreet, we can continue without a scandal. But I lose either way.’
‘How do you feel about the guy?’
‘I like him a lot.’
‘And?’
‘He claims he adores me.’
‘He’s putting you in a difficult position.’
‘Awful!’
‘So what’re you going to do?’
‘Don’t know yet.’ She wiped her eyes and forced a smile.
I felt badly for her. We’d been classmates at Ashley-Burnett. Whil
e I’d gone on to study textile art at Cranbrook, she’d gone to NYU, then to the Courtauld in London, where she’d earned her doctorate in art history. After my years working in New York, and hers at museums in Houston, Portland and Minneapolis, we’d both coincidentally landed back in our hometown.
We quickly reconnected and fell back into our high-school habit of sharing intimate details about our lives. She knew all about my relationship with Jason, and I knew all about her unhappy marriage and bitter divorce. But I hadn’t known until that day about her affair with Anders Carlsen.
Her situation struck me as fairly miserable. I had only met Carlsen once, at a museum opening, and was not impressed by his self-important hauteur. The dish on him was that he was arrogant toward subordinates and obsequious toward museum board members and wealthy donors. So what was my lovely friend doing with this guy, and why had she allowed him to put her in such an awful bind?
‘Now your turn,’ she said. ‘What’s going on with you? The interesting thing you want to show me – it’s in the portfolio, right?’
‘After what you just told me, I don’t know if this is a good time to bring it out.’
‘Please, Hannah – show me what you’ve got. Anything to take my mind off this damn … I don’t know … whatever.’
I told her Jason had come upon a room in an abandoned house with all four walls covered in murals, and that in the portfolio I had a small collapsible model of the room with photos of the murals mounted on the walls. I told her I’d like to hear what she thought of them, whether she saw them as works of outsider art or perhaps something else. Also, that I’d appreciate it if she didn’t ask me questions about where Jason stumbled on them and to please not mention them to anyone else.
‘So what you want from me is …’
‘Whatever you care to say. Jason and I have our thoughts. I’m bringing this to you for an outside opinion.’
‘You’ve gotten me excited,’ she said, as I brought out the small model, set it up on the table so she could see how the murals filled the room, then opened it flat to give her an unobstructed view of the four walls.
She studied them for a while, asked the dimensions of the room and then how close the paintings came to the ceiling. She nodded when I explained that the ceiling was a four-way roof.
‘I get it – like a gazebo or cupola,’ she said. ‘But no windows?’
‘They’re boarded up. The murals are painted on plywood.’
She erected the model again, studied it, then laid it flat and studied it some more.
‘Pretty spectacular,’ she said. ‘I’d love to know who did these. Is this outsider art? Not literally. Clearly the artist had some training. But it does have an outsider quality in the way it takes you into the artist’s world, a world totally unlike your own.’
She squinted at the model. ‘This is certainly not a happy set of murals. It seems to have been generated by dark emotions. One rarely finds such an intense vision. Nothing improvised here. Whoever created this knew from the start what he wanted to do. He had a plan and carried it out. Powerfully, I’d say. I can just imagine standing in the center of this room, seeing this, turning and seeing the other walls. It would make for a compelling experience.’
She looked up at me. ‘I know I’m not supposed to ask where Jason found this. But I do wonder whether he found it at night?’
‘That’s when he goes into places.’
‘I ask because I see this as a night-time experience. I don’t see any lights in the room. Are there?’
‘Don’t know. The power was shut off.’
‘OK, I won’t ask anything else. You want my evaluation – aesthetic, not monetary. I’d say this is an extraordinary work, and I say this without knowing the story behind it. That’s the thing about really good outsider art: it’s great to know the backstory – who the artist was and what he was thinking – but with the best works you don’t really need to know. They stand up on their own.’ She paused. ‘This is an enigmatic work. It’s filled with mystery. I can imagine people seeing it, then making up stories to explain it, and I think everyone’s story would be different.’
‘Like a Rorschach? Their stories would tell more about them than about the work?’
She nodded. ‘These murals don’t need interpretation. I think they work on their own terms. What I’m saying is they’re strong enough to embrace a multitude of interpretations and that in the end it doesn’t matter what the actual story is or was. The power comes from the feelings they evoke – fear, menace, awe. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such an emotional and, at the same time, disciplined piece.’
‘Do you think it could be important?’
‘Absolutely! Sure, there’re some technical weaknesses. Also some naïveté. I’m certainly not saying these murals are mind-blowingly magnificent, though I might change my mind if I saw them in place. But like all important works, these represent a powerful unified vision. What more can you ask from a work of art?’
I was thrilled by her enthusiasm. It coincided with mine and Jason’s. But I didn’t agree that the backstory was irrelevant. To me, as to Jason, the story behind the murals was the key to understanding them.
As we left the restaurant, the rain started up again. We unfurled our umbrellas and promised to stay in closer touch. Then I hurried back to CAI to tell Jason what Anna had said.
‘We weren’t deluding ourselves – that’s a relief,’ he said. ‘But you’re right – we have to find out who created these and what they’re about.’ He told me he couldn’t imagine war photos without captions to give them context. He recognized that the murals weren’t documents, but he was certain they told a story.
He said he was going to ask Joan to do some more research on the Cobb parents, the Schechtners, Courtney Cobb and Penny Dawson, the lawyer, Spencer Addams, and the society columnist, Channing, who, Jase told me, sounded like a jerk.
‘There were plenty of people living in that house. They can’t all be dead. There’s gotta be someone still around who knows stuff. Also why are these murals not known? Could they have been deliberately hidden away?’
Anna called me that night.
‘I can’t stop thinking about those murals,’ she told me. ‘They’re haunting, you know – like a dream. Anyway, I feel haunted by them. Also …’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Something in them … I don’t know, I could be wrong … but there’s something in them that seemed … familiar somehow.’
Joan Nguyen
I really like Jason, though perhaps not in the way he thinks. He’s an interesting guy, very talented, and flawed just like the rest of us. I admire him but certainly don’t idealize him. That said, I was happy to pull that set of clippings for him. But when he came back to me for more, I told him I wanted to be let in on the story as it progressed, not just at the end. I told him if he’d go along with that, I’d be happy to put in some real effort.
‘That means writing about you, Jase, because often the story of the quest is more interesting than the end result.’
I think that’s what convinced him. Like most people, he’d be delighted to play a starring role. I’m not saying he was vain-glorious, but he did have an ego. Why else would a guy go around the world covering wars, if not, at least in part, for the glory?
‘OK,’ he said. ‘You’re in.’ Then he handed me a list of people about whom he wanted info.
I told him right off that Horace and Elena Cobb were deceased, that Cobb Industries, originally a steel company, was now under the leadership of their sons, Jack and Kevin Cobb, a very lucrative, privately held chemical and paint manufacturer, and perhaps the biggest industrial polluter in the state. I told him that the Cobb brothers were movers and shakers, major backers of the Calista Museum of Art and the Calista Symphony, and that they were also self-styled libertarians who made large financial contributions to national ultra-conservative causes and backed ultra-conservative candidates and office holders.
‘I
never heard they had a sister,’ I told him.
As for Waldo Channing, he too was long gone, and yes, I had to agree, based on his columns, he’d been a bit of a horse’s ass.
‘He was pretty powerful here back in the day,’ I told Jase, ‘when society newspaper columnists reigned over American cities.’
I said I’d see what we had on the Schechtners and their lawyer, Spencer Addams, and look for anything on Courtney Cobb and Penny Dawson. I told him I’d check our morgue files as well as Facebook and other sources.
‘We have ways of finding people even when they don’t want to be found.’
It was fairly clear that Courtney and Penny were key to the story. They had met and become friends at after-school art classes and they’d been dragged kicking and screaming from the Locust Street house attic. One of them must have been the artist who painted the murals, possibly with the assistance of the other.
How to find them? To get a better understanding of the layout, I drove slowly by the house. I didn’t want to attract the attention of the nosy observatory caretaker, so I didn’t stop in front.
Indeed, the house did look creepy, like a location for a horror film. It seemed almost too obvious a place for a cult. Maybe there’d been a cult or maybe there hadn’t. That, I decided, was worth looking into.
I started with Penny Dawson. Channing reported she’d enrolled at SFAI. As expected, the Institute refused to answer inquiries regarding alumni, but the nice woman did agree to pass on a message to Ms Dawson. My message was simple: ‘Please contact me, Joan Nguyen, at the Calista Times-Dispatch. I’m working on a story, your name came up and I’d like to ask you about a couple things.’
Next I called the Danzig Heights Community Center to ask about art classes. Turned out they used to offer them to young people but discontinued doing so years before. The center was now serving the senior community. I asked if any of the art teachers from twenty-five years ago were still there. The manager said she’d ask around.
The Murals Page 5
