Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad

by Bryan Hall

  1973

  “I know one of the medical doctors testified that you and Claire would have needed to drink fifty quarts of that broth a day—just to survive. And I’m not sure he was taking into account those enemas,” Jill said. “It’s pretty clear Gretchen was a klysmaphiliac—you know, someone with an obsession for enemas.”

  “Humiliating.” Iva shook her head. “And worse was having her or one of her assistants check the contents—like someone sieving for precious metals.” In her mind’s eye she felt the rude shock of the rubber tube, the onrush of the hot water, heard the ugly spatter of liquid feces pouring into an enamel pail.

  “In her books, she called them ‘enemata’—trying to sound high-flown,” Iva shrugged. “And you’re spot on about her obsession, because people who are starving have chronic diarrhea.”

  “What about the other symptoms?” Jill asked.

  Iva looked up at the canopy of leaves over her head. “Funny how your mind plays tricks. Sometimes I could only notice what was happening when I looked at Callie—as if the same things weren’t happening to me. The hair is pouring off your head, but you grow a kind of thin fur over your body—”

  “Lanugo,” Jill said. “I read about that. Survival at its most basic, the body’s attempt to stay warm.”

  “I drooled all the time, but I couldn’t chew,” Iva said. For a moment she put her hands over her face. “My God, it was awful ... cried all the time because I wanted to eat and I couldn’t.”

  “This was after Margaret came from Australia, after Callie died?”

  “Some part of me saw how much worse it was for Callie—when she lay on her back, the bones of her spine could be seen through her abdomen. I doubted I’d actually seen it; I looked a long time—years and years—before I found a picture that showed how someone’s spine could be visible when they lay face up. You know where I finally found it? In a book that showed piles of corpses in Auschwitz.” Iva winced. “My sister. She was like a carcass that’s been picked clean by scavenger birds.”

  1912

  Gretchen Burkehart was going to take the stand that day and because she and Maggie might be called as rebuttal witnesses, naturally they weren’t allowed in open court, but there were pictures in the newspaper and the prosecutor would be telling them about her testimony. The accused wore an elegant narrow-waisted brown merino dress with a high lattice collar, and a huge hat cascading with pheasant feathers that was straight out of the most recent edition of Ladies’ Home Journal. Undoubtedly, Iva remarked drily, the money for the fancy togs had come from Gretchen’s depredations on Iva’s own bank account. By then, both Iva and Maggie knew not only that Callie wasn’t Mrs. Burkehart’s first victim, but that she’d managed to seize assets—jewelry, valuables, and property—from other patients she’d killed as well. Hell, it turned out the land for Lakemere Sanitarium came from one of her former patients.

  On direct testimony, with her lawyer jollying her along, Gretchen wove a charming tale fraught with outright lies.

  “The tomato broth was merely a hot drink between meals. The Fredericks were allowed all the food they wanted to eat. But they refused everything my nurses cooked for them,” she began. “It was very sad, but then, you know Callie told me other doctors had given up hope on her case, so she and Iva came to me as a last resort,” she said. Nearby, artists sketched her face, the fluttering feathers on her hat, and the fan she coyly flashed at dramatic moments.

  Callie, she declared, had absolutely given all the jewelry to Gretchen and the nurses as gifts. Callie had known she was dying, and appointed Gretchen as Iva’s guardian because Iva was insane—and had been deteriorating mentally for several years. Callie had not died of starvation—but from an organic colonic disease that originated in her childhood and, according to Gretchen Burkehart, nothing and no one could have saved the young woman.

  “In fact, Callie was so grateful for the fact that I prolonged her life beyond what was expected, she changed her will.”

  Pens flew across reporters’ notepads; the court reporter’s typewriter beat the rhythm the scratching nibs kept time to. Gretchen Burkehart appeared calm, but even the reporters could see that as her testimony was drawing to a close, more and more frequently she glanced over at the prosecutor—and he was clearly itching to take her to task.

  “Mrs. Burkehart,” Vining said.

  “Doctor—” Gretchen interrupted. “I prefer to be called doctor.”

  “You have no medical degree, Mrs. Burkehart,” the prosecutor said. His smile was knife-thin and everyone knew he was about to tear her to shreds.

  1973

  “All right,” Jill said, “I know Vining got a graphologist—a handwriting expert—who proved that Burkehart was full of shit. Callie never wrote that codicil to her will; Gretchen Burkehart did. And he brought in experts who testified about her other cases—not once when she performed the autopsy on one of her patients did she list starvation as the cause of death. It was always some half-assed diagnosis like paralyzed intestines—but plenty of other doctors completely contradicted her—her and her paid stooges. Those so-called nurses who backed her up.”

  “There was only one who slipped—and it was her testimony that was expunged from the record,” Iva said. “There’s a hint about Gretchen Burkehart’s power over people in what Maggie said, too. She told the court that even though she knew the tomato broth was made from canned goods, Gretchen actually convinced her at times that everything was farm fresh ... that the tomatoes had been raised locally—not purchased at some market—and therefore each serving had even more nutrients. That was impossible, of course. Tomatoes can’t be harvested before the end of August in New Hampshire, and we began treatment at the end of February; Callie was dead by May.” She watched Jill scribble the date and went on. “There were days, Maggie said, she had to fight off what Gretchen was saying: that I was improving—had improved tremendously under her care—that Maggie must recall how deranged I’d been before the treatment started. How ill I’d been and that Callie had been even sicker than I was ... Maggie said she made herself remember that Gretchen was lying through her teeth by reminding herself over and over that two other patients—also young women—begged her to take them away from Lakemere because they knew they were starving to death, and after the first ten days they were already so weak they couldn’t get away on their own.”

  “Disgusting ... that woman was disgusting.”

  “Evil,” Iva said. “Of course, you know that when Maggie arrived Gretchen Burkehart showed her someone else’s corpse and said it was Callie.” Iva herself had been too weak to make the trip to the funeral home or to the funeral—so her last memory of Callie was at her sister’s deathbed; Callie’s eyes starting from the sockets, her fetid breath rattling, claw-like fingers grasping a thin cotton sheet drawn over the wasted body.

  Jill nodded. “Tried to foist off the wrong body on a woman who raised the girl practically from birth. That was stupid—but we know she was very smart, so what made her think she could get away with it? Was her ego that overblown? Was she drugging Maggie’s tea or the broth she served you?” Jill lit a cigarette. “That’d be really rich—she detested pills so much she would’ve been the queen of the ’60s antidrug contingent.”

  “Maggie wasn’t the only one who thought Gretchen Burkehart had some kind of hypnotic power she could use to force people to do what was against their own better judgment.”

  1911

  “You’re looking ever so much stronger, Miss. The doctor says it won’t be long now before you’re up and walking!”

  Iva lay on a makeshift mattress on the bathroom floor. It had once really been a mattress she thought, but maybe rats had gotten to it and now it was little more than lumpy cotton batting wadded in a nest shape and covered with oilcloth. Above her hung a pail and a rubber hose. The end of the tube was in her rectum. She no longer had the strength to stand up and evacuate, so the oilcloth served as a sluiceway that disgorged her stinking brown water into an old p
rivy hole. Didn’t have the energy to get herself to the porcelain toilet, and the doctor still insisted the enemas were crucial to her treatment. Her nurse was prattling about being able to walk—as if Iva had been wheelchair-bound for a decade. Was it only last summer that she and Callie had trekked to Mount Kilimanjaro? It was painful lying on her side. Her bones—ribs, pelvis, and knee—dug into what was left of her flesh. If only she could see Callie, but they had separated the sisters, and the nurse, Marina, said she was too weak to leave her cabin next door. Last week Marina had carried Callie—the way a child carried a doll in her arms—over in the evenings. Could Callie have gotten so much worse so quickly?

  “Tub time!” Marina said. Iva wasn’t sure how long she’d been lying on the floor and drifting, but at the sound of the nurse’s voice, she felt herself being hoisted upward and then pushed into scalding water. She began to scream.

  Gretchen Burkehart’s voice boomed from the doorway. “You’re not clean. Your stool is malodorous, your breath is foul. And, since you refuse to walk—”

  “I don’t refuse—” Iva was crying, but there were no tears; her dehydration was too extreme.

  “You refuse to walk,” Gretchen interrupted, “so the tub baths need to be hot.” She put her own hand in briefly and Iva registered that it emerged the boiled red of shellfish—and that was merely the osteopath’s hand—not her whole body. “Gordon,” she directed, “add another bucket. And scrub her down, she’s dirty.”

  “No,” Iva said, feebly trying to cover her breasts. “No!”

  1973

  “Gordon Fields,” Jill said, nodding. “He and his girlfriend, Marina Slade—the so-called nurse—both testified that he only lugged water to the cabin, that he was just a hired hand and never in the room when either you or Callie were given those baths—or the enemas.”

  “He and Marina were both Spiritualists.”

  “They don’t sound very spiritual to me.”

  “I’m not sure you understand.” Iva shook her head. “Give me another cigarette ... and damn, is it almost five o’clock? I’d like a drink before I tell you about what happened next.”

  Jill looked up at the slanting sun, shielding her eyes, and then glanced down at her watch. “It’s been five o’clock across the pond for at least five hours. Close enough for me.” She opened a brightly striped wool shoulder bag she used as a tote and pulled out a mayonnaise jar she’d filled with Almaden wine. “Look, it’s not the greatest and I don’t have glasses. I planned on snatching a couple from the hospital cafeteria.”

  “A lady knows when to forego niceties. Hand it over.” Iva swigged, wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and passed the jar to Jill.

  “If anyone—curious or otherwise—comes over here, this is a urine sample I’m bringing to my doctor,” Jill said. “So don’t get caught swilling.”

  They both began to laugh.

  1911

  “It’s very simple,” Gretchen Burkehart said. “Marina is not only a nurse, she’s a talented medium. You’d be helping Callie, of course. She’s still grieving for your mother and she’ll be stronger emotionally. It may be her best chance at getting well.”

  Iva looked at her sister, blade-thin, propped on pillows and seated at a small, round table between Marina and Gretchen. Gordon Fields sat opposite. In the center of the table, a pair of slates—like the ones used by school children—had been hinged together. Just now they were lying open with a piece of ordinary white chalk lying on the one on the right.

  “Let’s try. Please, Iva?”

  There was nothing to lose—or so Iva thought.

  Gordon Fields closed the slates and latched them shut.

  The lights were extinguished and Marina admonished them not to be frightened and to keep holding hands. She recited a prayer and asked Rose Fredericks if she would come and make herself known to her daughters. A long while passed and then suddenly, in the pitch black, the sound of scratching on the slates could be heard.

  1973

  “When they lit the candles, Callie opened the slates and the words Flower Girls: Calla and Ivy were written in chalk. My mother called us her flower girls,” Iva said.

  She motioned for the jar of wine and Jill handed it to her saying, “I drank ninety percent of this. There’s only a sip left; go ahead and finish it.” Iva nodded. “Go on,” Jill said.

  “After that, that’s when I started seeing Marina wearing Callie’s silk robe, and Gretchen wearing a diamond ring that had belonged to Mother.”

  “Do you think Callie told them—even accidentally?”

  “I think one of them found those words written in Callie’s red leather diary. It was one of the things that was gone. Even Maggie couldn’t find it.”

  “So they tricked her into thinking your mother was there and communicating.”

  “Oh yes—all the usual japes and shenanigans. From trumpets floating in the air, to ectoplasm, to more and more detailed messages written on the slates.”

  “Did you believe it was real, Iva?”

  “I was out of my mind with hunger, cold, and fear.”

  “Did you think it was your mother?”

  “I was certain Callie came back to me.”

  Jill flipped through her notebook and read, “In 1926, Harry Houdini wrote, ‘Distressed relatives catch at the least word which may remotely indicate that the Spirit which they seek is in communication with them. One little sign even, which appeals to their waiting imagination, shatters all ordinary caution and they are converted.’ Is that what happened to you?”

  Iva lowered her eyes and shook her head.

  Callie. The dreams. Callie barefoot by the lake, shuddering with cold. “I’m hungry, Iva.” She mourns. “I’m so cold and so hungry.”

  “But you know that Gretchen Burkehart stole from you and others—she took money and jewelry, property. You know that she killed many, many patients—ten or fifteen others. She was arrested for practicing medicine without a license even after she served time for murdering Callie.”

  Iva gave a thin smile. “Maggie told me those same things—over and over—all the rest of her life. Callie was starved to death, and I was nearly dead—but I’m still alive. I’m one hundred two and still alive because Callie has never left my side.”

  SKIN DEEP

  BY CARSON BUCKINGHAM

  It all began innocently enough with the removal of a single unsightly wart.

  Lucinda Parker had been begging her mother for years to take her to someone who could get rid of “the immense-by-any-standards” growth next to her nose.

  “Mother, it looks like I have three nostrils,” she would wail, and her long-suffering parent would then give her the same, half-listening broken record response, “When you’re older.”

  To which Lucinda’s broken-record rejoinder was, “I’ll never be ‘older’ because I’ll kill myself before then!” This was invariably followed by stomping down the hallway and slamming her bedroom door—often more than once.

  “The difficult years have arrived,” Mrs. Parker could be heard to mutter as she dried another dish.

  The difficult years. Lucinda was twelve. She had had exactly one menstrual cycle, thirty-two (she counted them) pubic hairs, and one training bra which she wore night and day. She was already shaving her underarms and legs, though not out of necessity, and was experimenting with make-up. Her best effort to date made her look, if you squinted, like Lady Gaga; her biggest failure, a cross between Alice Cooper and Tammy Faye Bakker.

  The hairstyles are not to be mentioned, much less discussed.

  In short, Lucinda felt that she was now a Grade-A, one hundred percent woman, and she wanted the perks that went with it; but before they could even begin to kick in, she had to do something about her face.

  Everything would be perfect if I could only get rid of this tumor next to my nose. It dwarfs the Empire State Building, for cryin’ out loud!

  Mr. and Mrs. Parker remained unconcerned for most of that year, chalking their da
ughter’s antics up to number one, a phase, and number two, hormones.

  However, as Lucinda’s thirteenth birthday neared, things shifted dramatically.

  “Lucinda, it’s Saturday night. Why don’t you go out to the movies with your friends?” Mrs. Parker asked.

  Her daughter looked up from her copy of “Marie Claire” and rolled her eyes. “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Oh nonsense. Of course you do! Call one and go out—my treat.”

  Lucinda sighed and picked up the phone.

  Ten minutes later, there was a soft knock at the front door.

  “Must be Lu’s friend,” Mr. Parker muttered behind his newspaper.

  Mrs. Parker, ever cautious, glanced into the peephole. “There’s nobody there, George.”

  “Damned kids. You’d better see if they left a bag full of dog crap on the stoop, hoping that you’ll step on it.”

  “George Parker, really!”

  “We did it when I was a kid. Doubt things have changed all that much.”

  “Haven’t,” Lucinda said, walking in. “Except now they set fire to it to make sure you step on it.”

  “How charming,” Mrs. Parker said. The word “disgust” could have actually appeared across her forehead and no one would have been surprised.

  “Aren’t you going to open the door?” Lucinda asked.

  “There’s no one there.”

  “Sure there is.” She swung open the door and there stood six-year-old Charlie Foley from next door. He was so small that he didn’t show up in the peephole.

  “Oh, I’m sorry to keep you waiting out there, Charlie,” Mrs. Parker said. “Does your mother need something? Eggs? Sugar?”

  “No, m’am. I’m here fer Lucinda. We’re goin’ on a ... uh ... what was it again?” he asked Lucinda.

  “A ‘date,’ Charlie.”