The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Finale

  Overture

  * * *

  “All my towns are fallen….”

  —Montross

  One

  Diana Stoving Accidentally Sees Something That Interests Her

  Back out of all this now too much for us, as the poet Frost once began a piece called “Directive,” there is a town that is no more a town (there are, in fact, four of them, and in driving downstate after leaving one of them, to get to some other place, she passed one of those temporary red cardboard signs which proclaim “Frost Heaves,” and not having seen one before, and it being one of the states in which the poet had spent his last years, she thought it was some snide commentary about him, like the graffiti that insinuate, “Nixon Sucks,” and pointing this out to her companion, or consort, she wondered aloud if the poet’s regurgitation was his reaction to their story. Her companion, or consort, did not seem to get it…perhaps because he was dead).

  But to begin at the beginning, or at least, since this may be thought of as a narrative account without any conventional beginning at all, for reasons that will appear, once it is started if not begun, this now-too-much-for-us of which the poet speaks: the day that the wobbly Wheel of Fortune, out of alignment, needing a retread, needing in fact a whole front-end job, happened to cross the paths of the hero and heroine, who could and might never have met.

  Mid-June. Her new Porsche 911E, blood red, fate swift, had hit a pothole on a decrepit section of the Garden State Parkway, and Diana Stoving, 21, a graduate the week before of Sarah Lawrence (major: dance), had been required to proceed slowly and with many vibrations to the nearest exit, at East Paterson, and there scan a yellow pages in search of the nearest Porsche dealer, P.F. Gillihan, Inc. of Garfield, N.J.

  Quivering with her car into the Garfield dealer’s shop, she learned that her left shock was fouled up and would have to be replaced. She was asked if she could leave it. Diana explained that she was just passing through, with her passenger, Susan Trombley, 22, also just graduated from Sarah Lawrence (major: printmaking), and was on her way to Susan’s home in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, for the weekend. The service manager pointed out that while a shock replacement is ordinarily the work of inside an hour, they were temporarily out-of-stock, or rather, not-yet-in-stock, of that particular part. When Diana and Susan looked dismayed and each groaned, the service manager said that he could send a boy some other place to locate one, if they wanted to wait, and they said please do.

  It was already well into the afternoon, and Diana and Susan, sitting and waiting in the dealer’s showroom, wondered how far it was to the other place, and how long it would take the boy to get there and back with the part, and what means of travel he was using. They smoked cigarettes and had soft drinks from the dealer’s dispenser. Susan had a candy bar, as well, and thumbed through several back issues of Road and Track, indifferently. From the table Diana picked up a copy of the local newspaper and read the funnies and “Dear Abby,” reading aloud an item from the latter for Susan’s amusement, but the circumstances being what they were, Susan was not amused. She had arranged dates for the evening, with two particularly promising men recently graduated from Princeton, and home seemed a long way off.

  “Why don’t you phone,” Diana suggested, “and tell them we might just be late? Your folks, I mean.”

  “They,” said Susan, a bit archly, “don’t even know we’re coming. But maybe I should try to reach Larry. At least to find out what he has in mind. What if he has tickets for a play in Philadelphia or something?”

  “What if?” said Diana, who was beginning to resent Susan’s tacit grudge. It wasn’t her fault the pothole was waiting there in the road.

  “Okay,” said Susan. “I will.” She went into the dealer’s office to borrow a phone.

  Diana resumed looking at the local newspaper, a thin daily with a neighborhood slant and too much regional coverage of golden wedding anniversaries, Elks’ meetings, church socials, and recent college and high school graduates. She read what little national news there was; then, because there was absolutely nothing else to do, she began reading the local news. Good grief, New Jersey! of all places to be stuck in.

  She found herself doggedly reading a “local interest” article entitled, “E. Passaic Man Reveals Age Regression Experiments.” Suddenly her apathy took flight of her.

  If she had not been on the right place of the Garden State Parkway that particular afternoon, if the pothole had likewise not been there, if her Porsche 911E had not hurt its shock, if she had not been required to locate this dealer, if the dealer had not been out of stock, if she had not had to wait, if she had not picked up this newspaper, if she had not begun reading it practically column by column, then she would never, never have

  Two

  Some New Jersey Newspaperwoman Has Written an Article of Interest

  By Patricia Klumpe, Roving Reporter. Are you skeptical of age regression? Do you know what age regression is? I’ve just had the unsettling experience of spending an afternoon with etaoin shrdlu 2 col. p. 8 ETAOIN SHRDLU ington Road, East Passaic.

  Mr. Sedgely, a teacher of English at East Passaic High School, has spent his off moments during the past three years delving into the mysteries of this phenomenon, with uncanny results.

  Sedgely has met with some controversy at East Passaic High School, where he recruits “subjects” from among his students. A few parents have complained about the propriety of his experiments, but John B. Pitts, principal of the school, feels that “it’s all a lot of harmless foofaraw.”

  Several of Sedgely’s students have been age-regressed by him, under hypnosis, not only back to early childhood, but also, supposedly, to their previous incarnations! One eighteen-year-old East Passaic senior, for example, told under hypnosis of being born in 1880 in Connecticut as one “Daniel Lyam Montross,” who later traveled to the south and west and met a violent end in the 1950s.

  Although Sedgely has been unable to verify any of the facts about his subjects’ previous “existences,” he feels confident that with enough time and research, it might be possible to trace the “life” of such persons as “Montross.”

  In another case, that of a seventeen-year-old girl who under hypnosis claims to be the wife of Thomas Jefferson, it has been possible for Sedgely to check the facts and ascertain that the girl, who knows little about Jefferson, much less his wife, has a truly remarkable knowledge about them while under hypnosis.

  “Make no mistake,” Sedgely declares, “we are on to something.”

  Three

  Diana Stoving Changes Her Mind

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Susan, returning from her telephone call. Funny that she should have phrased it that way, for it was a ghost Diana had seen. “What’re you reading?” Susan asked.

  Diana folded the paper and put it down. “Nothing,” she said. “Just some story about an accident.”

  “Well,” said Susan. “Is my face red. I talked to Larry, and told him we’re stranded in this awful Jersey town, and guess what, he and his friend were going to take us to dinner at Three Wells and then to, you haven’t seen it, have you, the new Truffaut movie. So bye-bye lovely evening.” Susan stamped her foot and added, Oh shit.

  “Why don’t you take a bus?” Diana suggested.

  “Ha! Why didn’t we take a bus in the first place, instead of risking our necks in that…that beyooty-full new—”

  “I drove over that hole on pur
pose, you see,” Diana said, “so I could get out of sitting through a Truffaut movie with a blind date from Princeton who will go into the army as a second lieutenant and spend the next year writing me tragic letters from Vietnam and—”

  “Oh, you’re a scream, Diana Stoving,” Susan said, “and I think I will.” She screamed a small scream.

  “Seriously, Suke,” Diana said, “why don’t you take a bus? There’s still time.”

  “You keep saying why don’t I take a bus. Not we but I. What about you?”

  “I’ll stay with my poor maimed car,” Diana declared.

  “All night probably,” Susan said.

  “All night then.”

  “You don’t really want to go with me. You never did.” Susan’s right eye filled up and a teardrop hung precariously on the edge of the lower lid. “School’s all out, all over, and there won’t be any more. Any more.” The drop teetered off the edge and rolled an inch down her cheek. “And there’s nothing to do but have a good time, and I thought you would, if you went with me. So that’s why I asked you. And that’s why I asked Larry to ask his friend. So now what?”

  “I’m sorry,” Diana said. “I guess I shouldn’t have said I would, to begin with.”

  “So now what? What are you going to do? You can’t go back to Bronxville. They gave us our parchments and kicked us out forever.”

  “Maybe I’ll go home too,” Diana said.

  “To Arkansas?” Susan said. “After all the times you’ve bad-mouthed that place to me?”

  “Well, maybe then I’ll go into New York and try out with Merce Cunningham, after all.”

  “You’re a mixed-up kid, you are,” Susan said. Diana made no reply to that, and after pacing the floor for a moment Susan said to the floor, “But what about me?”

  “Take a bus,” Diana suggested.

  Four

  An Interesting Hypnotist Is Visited

  Susan Trombley took a bus home to Ardmore, Pennsylvania, arriving in time to shower and change and call a girlfriend to substitute for Diana as a date for Larry’s friend. When I located her the following spring, nine months later, working as a typist in a Philadelphia law firm, she told me, “Well, if you mean was I the last of her friends to see her after graduation, I guess maybe I was. She took my luggage out of her car and even rode with me in a taxi to this bus station, in Clifton, I think it was, and told the taxi to wait, so she could ride back to that Porsche dealer and wait for her car to be repaired. She told me she might go home, meaning Little Rock, or she might go into New York to audition with a dance group. But I just know she didn’t really want to do either one. Poor Diana. Maybe she did go into New York and maybe she got mixed up with some hippies and got murdered, for all I know. She was always an odd one. We were roommates the last year at Sarah Lawrence, and she was always doing funny little things, like—”

  Like asking the Porsche dealer how to get to East Passaic. He, not the dealer actually, but the service manager, who had been kind enough to stay overtime and replace the shock absorber himself, finishing the job at half past six and declining her offer of a handsome tip, replied to her question by asking out of curiosity if she knew anybody in East Passaic. “Not yet,” she said. But he got a map from the front office and traced the route for her. It wasn’t far. A mile to Passaic, another mile to East Passaic. There she stopped at a telephone booth and consulted the directory, under S, for Sedgely. There was only one, a P.D. Sedgely, at 1244 Wallington Road. She thought of phoning, but decided to go there instead, and stopped at a Mobil station to ask directions.

  It was a suburban community, of middle and lower-middle income families, identical to hundreds that speckle the flats amidst industries in that area. The Sedgely bungalow, save for its individual shade of gray paint, was the quintuplet of four other development houses on the block. Price Delmer Sedgely, “Del” to his few acquaintances on the faculty of East Passaic High School, lives there alone, as Diana discovered.

  Ringing his doorbell, she was more than uneasy; she was queasy, and nearly frightened. She did not know what to expect, and thus prepared herself for the worst: a goateed Mephistopheles in a black cape, with a wand, who, like Mandrake, the only other hypnotist she had ever heard of or read about (in the funnies, long nearly forgotten, of her childhood), might put her into a helpless trance merely by gesturing.

  She was surprised, then, to see that P.D. Sedgely looked like a high school English teacher, which he is. He is the epitome of the career high school English teacher: middle-aged, graying, dandruffed, bespectacled (steel rims), thin, a bit stooped. And it was he, not she, who was really nervous. He did not open the door fully but only a foot or so. One of his hands held the door ready to slam shut while the other hand tremblingly brushed supper crumbs from his mouth as he asked, “What do you want?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” she said, for she could plainly see that he was disturbed. “I would like very much to talk with you.”

  “What about?” he asked, sizing her up. “Are you a reporter?”

  Diana had not given any thought to what she would be, to him, beyond determining that she should not tell the man who she really was or what her interest in the matter was. Now his question provided her with a mask, although in her driving clothes—polo shirt and blue jeans—she knew she did not much look like a reporter. “Yes,” she said.

  “There’s been too much publicity already,” Mr. Sedgely declared. “I don’t want any more.” He started to close the door.

  “Please,” she said quickly. “I’m not going to print anything about you. I’d only like to ask a few questions about your patient, I mean, your subject, the one who is, uh, connected…with Daniel Lyam Montross.”

  The man hesitated. Then he said, “Well, come on in,” and held the door open for her. She followed him into his living room, which was furnished in nondescript New Jersey taste. There were few books—mostly textbooks—in his bookcase. There was nothing in the room to indicate that he was a hypnotist. “Sit down,” he offered, and she sat in an overstuffed modern armchair not of recent manufacture. “I was just finishing my supper,” he said.

  “Please don’t let me keep you,” she said, and realized that she had not eaten yet herself.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’m ready for my coffee. Would you like a cup?”

  The June evening was too warm, for her, for coffee. She shook her head, but then she said, “If I could have it iced.”

  “Iced?” he said, pausing in mid-turn.

  “Yes. Like iced tea.”

  “Oh.” Clearly he had never tried it himself. “All right. How much cream? How much sugar?”

  “None, thank you.”

  While he was out of the room she turned her head and read the titles on the spines of the few books in his bookcase. There was nothing about hypnotism, nothing about age regression, not even The Search for Bridey Murphy. There was only one book which might be about reincarnation: Many Lifetimes, by Kelsey and Grant. She got up and removed it from the case and began flipping through it, but then she considered that her host might think it rude of her to pry uninvited into his library, so she put it back and returned to her chair just as he reentered the room.

  He gave her the iced coffee—not in an iced tea glass, as she had expected, but merely in a coffee cup with two or three ice cubes thrown in. It was still warm, and the ice was quickly melting. He sat down with his coffee on the sofa across from her, and took a sip, and sighed, and said, “You wouldn’t believe all the trouble I’ve had today, on account of that piece in the paper. I guess you saw the piece.”

  “Yes,” she acknowledged.

  “Parents calling me up,” he said. “And kids. But that isn’t as bad as the nuts and crackpots, and people wanting me to find out for them who they were. One fellow offered me a hundred dollars to mesmerize him—that’s the word he used, mesmerize—and find out who he was in his previous incarnation.”

  “You didn’t accept?” she asked.

&n
bsp; “Of course not,” he said. “I refuse to commercialize, to allow any taint of money to…. Besides, the man was probably hoping to find that he’d been Napoleon Bonaparte or Jesus Christ himself, and he would have been disappointed to discover that perhaps he was just some lowly peon or stableboy or something.”

  Diana decided that Mr. Sedgely, because of his sincerity, his manner, even the look in his eyes, was not himself a nut or crackpot. So she asked him, bluntly, “Do you honestly believe in reincarnation?”

  “No,” he said. “Not quite yet, at least. There is too little proof, at this stage, for me to accept reincarnation without question. I like to think of myself as a scientist, young lady. Scientists are, must be, constantly skeptical. And of all phenomena susceptible to proof, reincarnation must be the most difficult to prove. But I’m trying. We’re trying. I’m not alone in this thing, you know. What most people don’t realize is that there are quite a number of scientists, all over the globe, who are actively engaged in this quest.”

  Diana, satisfied, at least, that she was not dealing with an absolute absurdity, said, “I wonder if I might be able to meet the boy who…who apparently is…the reincarnation of Daniel Lyam Montross.”

  “Sure,” the man said. “That’s Day Whittacker, he lives not far from here. I could call and ask him to come over.”

  “If it’s all the same,” she said, “I wonder if you could simply tell me where he lives, and let me go and talk with him.” The man looked at her strangely, and she added, with a smile, “Just to be scientific. So that he isn’t under your influence when I’m talking with him.”

  Mr. Sedgely laughed. “I see. Well, yes, but I’m afraid he couldn’t tell you much about his previous life unless he’s under hypnosis.”

  “You mean he doesn’t know he was Montross when he’s awake?”

  “‘Awake’ isn’t actually the word, because, you see, the hypnotic state isn’t sleep in the conventional sense. Actually, in fact, it’s a heightened form of consciousness, even beyond ‘wakefulness.’”