by Farris, John
He turned on Smith. "SHE'S NOT HERE! WHERE DID SHE GO?"
Smith gestured with both hands toward the windows, and although Terry knew nothing about sign language, it was obvious the preacher was telling him she had "flown." Like a bird, through an open window? Terry's raw nerves seemed to be on the outside of his body, an excruciating version of the aura Faren had described; he wanted to punch Smith for treating him like a child. The man was crazy. But Terry recognized, in spite of his distress, that Smith believed what he was signing, and seemed to be in shock. Terry looked again at the windows. They were small, narrow, only partway open. He thought of the width of Faren's shoulders, her pelvic girth—maybe, under stress, she could have squeezed through the available space with enough time to work at it. But the big jars of flowers on the sills had not been moved. And only about thirty seconds had passed since he'd lost sight of Faren and she had disappeared.
Disappeared.
The corona of Terry's nerves flared again; at the corner of one eye he saw a wide-mouthed snake and fangs. He turned and blundered to the door, stepping on toes, partly deaf from tambourines and the pounding piano.
Rain hit him in the face when he opened the door. He couldn't see a thing outside.
"FAREN!"
Lightning illuminated the humped bodies and heavily chromed front ends of the cars and trucks parked in the churchyard, the mercury-bright diagonals of windshields, the flogged high crowns of trees. Terry cleared and tried to shield his eyes, but saw no one moving in the glare. When the light faded it seemed twice as dark out there, even the dim outlines of vehicles receded from his view.
The door blew shut behind him; the hymning and ordeals of faith went on as before. Perhaps somebody would die tonight, grotesquely swollen and hemorrhaging from snake venom. Or perhaps they all led charmed lives, there was a God in heaven looking out for them. He cared only about Faren. And was terrified of the unexplainable, her disappearance: the utkena, most terrifying of serpents, did he have her now?
He went around the churchyard in the driving rain, calling hopelessly, falling down where it was slippery, staggering from car to car, snatching open doors at random to look inside.
"FARRRENNNNN!"
Then—
—there she was (Oh God oh God I believe!) standing by the tailgate of a pickup truck, her back to him, head moving slowly as if she were looking around for something. All this revealed to Terry in a forked gash of lightning, a crack of thunder so near, he fell shaking to his knees, certain he was about to die.
When he looked up she was walking slowly toward him, head held high and still moving in that questing, futile way, eyes in the afterglow wide with amazement. He got up to meet her. She was ten feet away and hadn't seen him. Dark again, the rain slashing his face, how could he see her so well in the dark?
And how could she be perfectly dry when he was soaking wet?
"Faren!"
She looked toward him quickly, as if she'd heard him, all right, but couldn't make him out. And kept walking straight at him.
Now six feet away. Staring. Listening. But not seeing him.
"Faren, it's me!"
Lightning.
Rain all around her, but not a drop touching her. And when the lightning died away she was still clearly visible, as if it were broad daylight. Slightly luminous, but that might have been an effect of the lightning on his optic nerves.
She was turning her head again, cautiously, apprehensively, a look of pain in her face now, eyes suffering.
He took a step back, obeying some atavistic alarm system as she encroached on his space, slipped down painfully on one knee and braced himself, reaching up to stop her as, plain as the living day, Faren walked weightlessly into him and through him.
And disappeared even before he could whip his head around to track her. Nothing at all behind him but the watery glow of lantern light in the (closed) side windows of the church, beneath which the musicians sat at their instruments and the worshipful danced, the pure of heart played deftly with deadly serpents frozen in their wrath.
He was down in the mud for a long time, without the will to drag himself up. Not even lightning crookedly engaging a rod atop the church, heating it to a saintly glow, could disturb him.
After a while he crawled to the ribbed running board of a car, reached up to open the door, crept inside where it smelled of old engine oil, soiled diapers, and sweaty overalls. A blanket covered the springy, worn-out front seat. He wrapped himself in it, whining, his teeth chattering, and thought of Faren walking through him, his head right where it had been when they had napped by the river in the afternoon, this time she was oblivious and he realized that one of them must be dead, but who? Whatever death was, it probably didn't smell like baby shit and feel like a spring digging into his behind in a 1940 Dodge sedan.
Walking around like that, well, he'd seen her and he couldn't accept that Faren was dead either; it was as if she had been looking—looking—
Looking for a way back in, from somewhere.
Hadn't she heard him calling her? Hadn't she? Fucking right she had!
Wiping his leaking nose, crying a little but not whining anymore, Terry wondered.
Where was she walking now? And would she, could she, ever come back to him?
Chapter Fourteen
Wildwood, September 1906
For the first two years of her marriage, Laurette "Sibby" Langford lived like a monied adventuress, aboard a sumptuously appointed railroad train that went nowhere, while the French chateau her husband was building in the wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains slowly took shape. It was, to a young woman of her sensibilities, an absurd, eccentric, demeaning way of life, and the experience, worsened by the ordeal of the bedchamber soon imposed upon her by Edgar Langford, nearly drove her insane. She had no more been prepared for marriage—even a conventional marriage of her time—than a blind, newborn kitten is prepared for the sack and the river. In her predicament she was, unfortunately, typical of the well-brought-up young women of the Gilded Age.
She was a Waring. The Warings of Boston, Massachusetts, had been decently rich for a hundred and fifty years. They were Brahmins, the elite of a society where genealogy was even more important than wealth, where the world was neatly divided into "us" and "not one of us." Oliver Waring III, Sibby's hard-working father, owned two of the largest department stores in the East and had an interest in woolen mills in Lawrence and Haverhill. The family lived, during the winter months, in a house on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston's best address. They also owned an eighteen-room manor house at Prides Crossing on the north shore, and a country estate of one hundred fifty-six acres near North Easton, to which they went each spring and fall. The Warings, like most other Bostonians in comparable circumstances, shunned ostentation and could be mean with a dollar. The manor house and the estate were always referred to as "our place by the sea," and "our place in the country." Mrs. Waring made do with only five live-in servants at the Commonwealth Avenue brownstone. She bought hers and Sibby's clothes in Italy, where the fashions were up-to-date but less expensive than those of Paris. When the family traveled abroad they stayed at good, but not the smartest, hotels, in Naples, Amalfi, Venice, and Florence, the favorite watering holes of touring Bostonians. At home they belonged to the Congregational Church, which was socially acceptable but not as fashionable as the Episcopal Church. Oliver Waring IV ("Boshie"), Sibby's older brother, attended Harvard and received a gentleman's grades; like his father, he wore the small gold pig that was the emblem of the Porcellian Club on his watch chain. Porcellian was not the preferred eating club; it was the only club at Harvard that would do.
Boshie joined his father in business at a time when good fortune seemed totally to desert them: the business, their very lives, hung in the balance after a terrible fire in one of the department stores. Oliver Waring Ill had saved a little money where he felt it was destined not to show; but the less than first-rate company he chose to carry his insurance buckled under the we
ight of large suits and took refuge in bankruptcy.
Sibby knew about the fire and knew there were problems connected with it that threatened to send her father to an early grave, but she was spared the details. She had been spared almost everything that could be interpreted as unseemly, or just none of her business, when she was growing up. Unlike Boshie, and her two younger brothers who attended day school, Sibby was educated at home by tutors. She learned Latin and Greek, and French from an elderly French governess. She read the classics. She was permitted Elizabeth Barrett Browning as an escape from the drudgery of Milton. She learned to do sums. Because the family owned a farm where there were horses, she also was taught to ride. She had acquaintances among a select group of girls, but no real friends her own age. There were always boys around, but she was not permitted to play with them. Boys were a foreign nation to her, like Poland. She kept a diary, recording events and superficial emotions, while trying to equate the inevitable twinges and deeper longings of puberty with Mrs. Browning's polished sonnets. If she'd had sisters to talk to, or a mother who offered more than twice-daily visits to inquire about her wellbeing (always assuming she would hear no complaints), Sibby might have learned a little something about life before she was dashed into it almost without warning, a well-mannered, nicely dressed girl so pathologically shy she had to concentrate before speaking in order, not to stammer.
She met Edgar Langford aboard ship, sailing home from Naples at the end of August 1903. After he had taken notice of her and made the appropriate overtures to Sibby's mother and her mother's sisters, both spinsters, and chaperonage was arranged, she was allowed to stroll with Edgar around the decks of the spartan old steamship, one or both grizzled aunts a few paces behind. He was forty years old, and she was eighteen. He had never married. He had a crooked back, the crookedness becoming more pronounced as the day wore on. He walked, painfully, with an ebony cane around which silver vines twined upward to meet the handle, a large, gold-and-silver serpent's head with ruby eyes. It was a gift, he said, from the shah of Persia, a close and dear friend. Sibby trembled and pulled her cape closer around her; she had never seen anything quite so exotic.
Edgar was frequently flushed by the sea wind, by some internal combustion that also produced a torrent of words describing the beauties of unearthed civilizations and starry desert nights, nomads on camels, caliphs in their minaret kingdoms. She had read some of Herodotus, but she'd only vaguely grasped the fact that well beyond the eastern Mediterranean world of the Greeks, in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, complex and inventive societies had flourished. Babylon had occupied the same site on the plain of Shenar for at least three thousand years—almost twenty-seven centuries longer than familiar, staid old Boston had been in existence. And Babylon had been much larger than Boston; fifteen square miles, the inner city surrounded by a water-filled moat.
Edgar Langford was easy to be with; although for three or four days she seldom dared to look at him, Sibby was not required to speak, only to listen, with a nod or exclamation when one seemed called for.
Mrs. Waring knew from the first day that Edgar Langford would ask for her daughter's hand. This distressed her, not because she didn't like his looks (except for his twisted back and the waxed goatee he affected, he was rather a handsome man, with good features, pale but penetrating eyes, and a heroic width of jaw), but because instinctively she felt that one way or another, Sibby would be corrupted and ultimately destroyed by the marriage. There was something unholy about the man, which his paganistic cane symbolized. Her husband, however, was in trouble, despondent and perhaps suicidal. Edgar Langford was very rich. The meeting of Edgar and Sibby, at this crucial time, might have been ordered by fate. Sibby, to her credit, seemed to find him acceptable, even fascinating company. When Edgar, on their last day out, asked permission to call on Sibby at home in Boston, Mrs. Waring was able to agree with the semblance of a gracious smile.
Edgar Langford visited them several times during the winter. After the customary ten-course dinners, he entertained the family with tales of bizarre adventures in wild and hostile lands. He performed feats of magic. They applauded the Indian rope trick, and gasped when he drove sharp swords through a cabinet that contained the Warings' parlor maid. The girl emerged giggling and unscathed. He produced doves and bouquets of flowers, fresh flowers, in snowbound January, from beneath silk handkerchiefs. He was resourcefully charming. With a few strokes of his pen he rescued Oliver Waring III from certain financial collapse and, perhaps, prison. Sibby received, when Edgar was not in Boston, letters ornately romantic in style yet impersonal; she wrote to him every day, and at night often dreamed restlessly of the cane serpent's rubbed-down precious head and glaring ruby eyes. Their wedding day was announced. Time, for Sibby, passed in a blur of preparations and anticipation. At Edgar's request she had her portrait painted by John Singer Sargent. Her stammer had become virtually unnoticeable. There were two thousand two hundred sixty-eight pearls on her wedding dress, which weighed thirty-three pounds, exactly one third of her own body weight. On the day they were married it was 96 degrees in Boston. She got through the ceremony without fainting. Edgar Langford, whose skin disease had flared up, was in agony in a Savile Row morning coat with a stiff high collar, but he walked without his cane, and had a razor-thin smile for everyone. They had exchanged a single chaste kiss to seal their vows, but afterward he asked not to be touched by anyone, he was in too much pain. The two hundred fifty wedding guests, including his older brothers, who appeared not to like him, kept their distance at the reception. At eight o'clock that night Edgar and Sibby, serenaded by three dozen violinists, boarded the honeymoon express at Boston's North Station. He did not bother or even think to inform his bride that many years would pass before she saw any member of her family again, and that she would never return from what she had been told was to be a two-week wedding trip.
After four days rest at Wildwood, the cool herbal baths which Edgar took three times a day, and the various unguents he tried, began to have a healing effect. He felt well enough to consummate his marriage and, almost as soon as the thought crossed his mind, he went to Sibby's bedroom.
She put down the translation of A Thousand and One Nights she had been reading and smiled drowsily up at him from her chaise longue.
Edgar's sexual experience had been limited to numerous whores and Arab catamites, who had conditioned his expectations. Without saying a word he stripped off his toga and was naked in front of her. If he had been able to stand erect he would have been above average in height, with long straight legs. But his body was sadly awry, and he had scabs and scars from old breakouts everywhere from his lower chest to his thighs. His skin was still somewhat inflamed. Most unfortunately, his testicles were grotesquely large, his penis like an upraised club. He was accustomed to this state of readiness eliciting fawning admiration, a mime of passion. Sibby's mouth just fell open.
He kneeled and seized her in a clumsy embrace, then opened her dressing gown. He went to work. In some ways he was as ignorant of human anatomy as Sibby herself. He didn't know what a virgin was. Her virginity ultimately defeated him, even as her cries of pain and terror excited him to a climax.
When he left her bedroom less than three minutes later Sibby lay sprawled on the chaise longue too stunned to cover herself. She was bleeding from a torn hymen, although not seriously. She felt as if she had been violated with a railroad spike and, since she was unacquainted with semen, what he left behind on her skin felt as loathsome as if she'd been urinated on by a pig in a barnyard. And that was the end of wedded bliss for Sibby Langford.
In a fit of enthusiasm, oblivious of the fact that he had not achieved suitable penetration of his bride, Edgar the next day ordered a custom-made nursery car, in shades of blue, from the Pullman company.
Sibby considered throwing herself over a cliff. And her stammer returned with a vengeance.
Over the next few months she was raped sporadically by Edgar, who was only angered
by her reaction, her unconcealed distaste for his methods, the act itself. Sibby quickly understood what Mrs. Waring had been trying to tell her during their brief, and only, mother-daughter talk on the eve of the wedding.
There were days when she would not come out of her bedroom, when she sat and stared at the cold mountain rain streaming down the windows of the railroad car, and felt as if her soul had died while her body, sore and misused, wrongfully lived on. But she did not go mad, and she did not destroy herself in a frenzy of retribution and shame. She had a previously untested but strong will. Except for those periods when she isolated herself Sibby did not allow a ripple of discontent to show on the surface of the marriage. What was to be gained from that? More humiliation. Even if she had been living in a spacious mansion on Madison Avenue in New York, she could not have left her husband. Here it was both physically impossible and morally beyond the pale. She was married. For life. She belonged to Edgar Langford.
Edgar, enjoying a resurgence of good health, was kept very busy winter and summer with the construction of the chateau and his scholarly projects; he took frequent trips of two or three weeks' duration to visit universities and museums, always leaving her behind. Quite often, for months at a time, she saw her husband only at dinner and during his unannounced visits to her bedroom. She learned to endure his lust, and his eventual displeasure that no child had been conceived. The nursery car, with its cradle of gold mesh and ceiling murals of angelic cherubs at play on rosy clouds, arrived and sat disused on a siding. Sibby visited it only once. Stifled by boredom, she read, particularly romances by authors such as Richard Harding Davis, books she would have denounced as trash if she happened to be exposed to one before her marriage. She wrote long letters of false good cheer to her family and confided nothing of consequence to her diary, although scarcely a day went by when she did not find a reason to mention the architect, Mr. James B. Travers.
