Bestial

by Harold Schechter

  She continued to stick by him in spite of his increasingly bizarre behavior. There were the times when he would spring out of bed, throw on his clothes, and announce that he was going out to look for a job—at three o’clock in the morning. There were his crackpot schemes, undertaken with such intense (if short-lived) zeal—like the tune he put a small deposit on a vacant lot and set about constructing a house, a project he abandoned after erecting a wall approximately one foot high.

  Earle, in fact, was always promising Mary a house of their own, a pledge that led to one of the most humiliating experiences of her married life. One Saturday, he suggested that the two of them travel to Oakland to look at houses. They found a real-estate agent who spent several hours showing them some modest cottages outside of town. One of the places struck Earle and Mary as ideal. “This is the one,” Earle declared.

  By then, however, the agent had evidently become a little dubious about Earle-a feeling confirmed when he asked if the young man could afford the down payment. Digging a hand into his pants pocket, Earle fished out his entire fund of cash. “Is this enough?” he as1ked, holding out two dollars. Mary thought she would perish from embarrassment.

  Even worse, however, was Earle’s jealousy. At first, Mary found it quaint, even endearing. No one had ever felt that way about her before, and it seemed sweet (if slightly odd) to be treated as such a desirable woman at her age.

  It wasn’t long, however, before Earle’s possessiveness lost its charm. Mary found it impossible to have anything to do with another human being without sending her husband into a jealous fit. He would berate her if she so much as chatted with a trolley conductor or stopped a stranger on the street to ask the time. Even her female friends became the objects of his resentment. He would accuse her bitterly of caring more for them than she did about him. It reached the point where Mary was afraid to talk to her own brother in front of Earle.

  Mary rarely let herself get angry at her husband. But there was one occasion when his crazy jealousy drove her into a rage.

  Among her most cherished possessions was a framed, inscribed photo of Mr. John Dillon, a member of the House of Commons, who was a personal friend of her uncle. Mary had stowed the photograph in her trunk for safekeeping. One day, not long after she and Earle moved into their little place on Masonic, she decided to brighten up the dingy living room by displaying the photo on a shelf. When she opened her trunk, however, she discovered that the frame was empty.

  Confused and distressed, she sought out Earle, but he professed ignorance. Not long afterwards, however, while she was getting ready to do the laundry, she emptied his pants pocket and found the photograph, mangled and torn beyond salvaging. When his outraged wife confronted him with the ruined picture, Earle explained that he had thought it a memento from a male admirer and destroyed it in a jealous fit of pique.

  In spite of his violent moods, his wild suspicions and angry accusations, Mary never felt threatened by Earle. Not, at any rate, in the beginning of their marriage. There was something so hapless and childlike about him. Children, in fact, were the only human beings he seemed fully at ease with. Whenever she and Earle would visit his aunt, he would spend the whole time playing games with his little cousins—hide-and-seek and ring-a-levio and tag. Even at home he would play silly games. Sometimes, when Mary asked him to perform a simple household chore, he would run off and hide like a mischievous toddler, concealing himself behind the window curtains or squeezing behind the sofa. To Mary, living with Earle often seemed less like marriage than motherhood.

  In another way, however, their relationship was all too much like marriage for her tastes. Though she was willing, up to a point, to submit to Earle’s carnal demands—accepting the whole distasteful business as part of her conjugal duties—she was unprepared for his nightly importunities. On those nights when she rebuffed his advances, he would lie beside her on the mattress and abuse himself repeatedly, forcing her to flee the bedroom in disgust.

  There was no respite from his lust. In February 1920, six months after they married, Mary was taken ill and rushed to St. Mary’s Hospital. At first Earle behaved solicitously, visiting daily and bringing her trifles like flowers and candy. His presence, however, quickly became oppressive. He would sit at her bedside hour after hour, staring blankly into space or glowering at her doctor, whom he regarded as a rival for Mary’s affections. The very day she was discharged, Earle brought her home, helped her change into her night-clothes, and put her to bed. Then he climbed in beside her and forced himself on the enfeebled woman.

  For the first time, she began to wonder if her brother, Frank, was right. For months, he had been urging her to leave Earle. His sister, he believed, had been driven by her own desperate loneliness into a disastrous union.

  Visiting Mary in the hospital one day, Frank found his brother-in-law seated on a chair at her bedside, staring unblinkingly upward. “Hello there, Earle,” Frank said amiably. But if the peculiar young man was aware of the greeting, he gave no indication. He continued to gape at the ceiling, his lips working ceaselessly as he chattered silently to himself. “That fellow is crazy,” Frank whispered to his sister, who simply chewed on her bottom lip and blinked back her tears.

  As soon as Mary was discharged, Frank begged her to break off with Earle. Mary, however, was not only a devout Roman Catholic but also, as she put it, an “Irish woman of the old type.” Divorce was out of the question. She had vowed to stick by her husband in sickness as well as in health. And he was sick, mentally sick—the “worst kind of sickness you could have,” she believed.

  He became even worse after the accident. Right from the start of their marriage, Earle had been afflicted with savage, recurrent headaches. When they struck, his face became haggard and pinched, his skin turned ashen white, and his eyes seemed to darken until they looked like two black, fathomless holes. Mary would try to soothe him by applying witch hazel to his brow but nothing seemed to help. One day, while working for a landscape gardener, he fell from the upper branches of a tree and landed on his head. He was admitted to a hospital with a serious concussion but fled after two days, showing up at home with his head so heavily bandaged that his eyes were barely visible beneath the thick turban of gauze.

  Afterwards, his headaches grew more frequent. And his behavior became even more erratic. And scarier. More and more often, she would find him sitting silently in the kitchen staring intently at nothing. When she asked what he was doing, he would point wildly at the blank, flaking wall.

  “The faces!” he would cry. “Don’t you see them?”

  His religious preoccupation grew more extreme, too, burgeoning into a kind of mania. He took to wearing a rosary. One evening, when he and Mary were out for a walk, they passed a store that sold religious articles. In the display window was a painting of a beatific Christ, his soft eyes gazing heavenward.

  Earle grew strangely excited. “See! See!” he exclaimed, jabbing a finger at the picture.

  “See what?” asked Mary.

  “There! Don’t I look like Christ?”

  Mary stared at her husband. Far from looking beatific, there was a coarse, hulking quality to Earle. If anything, his thick, sensual features were the very opposite of the sublime face in the picture. A saying she had once heard flashed into her mind. “For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel. Thus is the Devil ever God’s ape.”

  Not long afterwards, Mary went to see her priest. Tearfully, she explained her predicament and asked his advice. He told her that “kindness can cure insanity.” She should “do her best” and “bear with it.” Mary was heartened by this counsel. Perhaps Father O’Connell was right and, with a little kindness and patience, Earle’s condition would improve over time.

  For a while, they moved in with his Aunt Lillian. During this period, Earle would sometimes disappear for weeks at a time without telling anyone where he was going. Even Lillian could not understand why Mary would tolerate such behavior in a husband. Still, s
he was grateful that her nephew had found such a loyal woman.

  When Earle returned from one of these mysterious sojourns in the spring of 1921, Mary decided that a change of scenery might be good for them. That April, they moved to Palo Alto and rented a little bungalow. Within days, both of them had found work at a private school for girls—Mary as a cleaning woman, Earle as a handyman. It wasn’t long, however, before Earle began making life miserable for her again.

  One morning, not long after they began their new jobs, the school’s headmistress, Miss Harker, asked Mary to bring in the laundry. As Mary was plucking the clothes from the line, an elderly man named Patrick, who doubled as gardener and watchman, strolled up and began making small talk. Seconds later, Earle burst from the schoolhouse, his eyes (as Mary would later describe them) “all black and angry and fierylike.” While Mary stood there trembling and speechless, Earle stormed up to the old man, shook a fist in his face, and began shouting threats. “What do you think you are doing? She’s my wife! I’d better not see you talking to her again. If I do, why, I’ll—”

  At that point, Miss Harker herself, alarmed by the commotion, came bustling out, demanding an explanation. The two livid men simply glowered at each other. It was left for Mary to stammer an apology and promise that there would be no such scenes in the future.

  That night, back at home, Earle went wild, accusing Mary of deliberately going out to the school’s backyard to flirt with other men. He worked himself into such a state that Mary, fearing for her safety, fled the house.

  In spite of Mary’s promise to Miss Harker, Earle continued to make mortifying scenes in public, sometimes in front of the students. On one occasion, he confronted his wife in the dining hall and, florid with rage, accused her of having a boyfriend. As the horrified children looked on, he grabbed her left hand and tore off her wedding ring, bloodying her finger.

  Mary managed to break free of his grasp and ran sobbing to Miss Marker’s office while Earle stormed out of the school.

  Inside her office, the headmistress urged Mary to leave Earle before he did serious harm to her. “That man is absolutely insane,” warned Miss Harker.

  By the time she arrived home that evening, Mary had made up her mind. She found Earle pacing back and forth in the kitchen. “Pack up your bags,” he commanded. “We’re leaving this place. They’re all against me, every one of them.”

  Steeling herself, Mary told him her decision. She was staying. She liked Palo Alto. And she was happy at the school. But she wanted Earle to go. She could not live with him anymore.

  Earle said nothing. But the look on his face was so terrifying that Mary turned and bolted, taking refuge at a neighbor’s. When she returned in the morning, Earle was gone.

  That afternoon, however, he came back. Mary was at work at Miss Marker’s, sweeping out the kitchen, when Earle suddenly appeared, looking as if he’d spent the night in a gutter. There was something in his face that rattled Mary so badly that she dropped her broom and ran. Earle gave chase, cornering her in the pantry.

  Clutching his hands like a supplicant, he implored her to take him back. When Mary refused, his eyes took on a startling look, the pupils contracting so completely that there seemed to be nothing but white.

  “It’s him, ain’t it?” he snarled.

  In her terror, Mary could barely croak out a reply. “Who?”

  “Him. The one who’s keeping you from me.”

  “There is no one, Earle,” she managed to say.

  “I’ll get you back,” he said with an emphatic nod. Taking a step towards her, he raised his curled hands as though he meant to throttle her.

  Letting out a scream, Mary ducked beneath his outstretched arms, scrambled out of the pantry, and made for the nearest office. It belonged to Caroline Wellman, the matron of the school. “He’s after me!” Mary shouted as she burst into the room.

  The startled matron snatched up her phone and called the Palo Alto police. Just then, Earle appeared at the threshold. Panting, hands clenching spasmodically, he stood there looking wildly from Mary to Miss Wellman, who was talking excitedly into the phone.

  It was a cloudless day in late spring, and the school windows stood wide open. Backing toward the hallway window directly behind him, Earle climbed halfway through and fixed his wife with a baleful look. “I’ll get you!” he shouted. “I’ll get you yet!”

  Then, hurling a final curse at the ashen-faced woman, he slipped out the window, dropped to the grass, and was gone.

  6

  †

  Eugene O’Neill, The Hairy Ape

  If you’d seen the look on her pale mug when she shriveled away with her hands over her eyes to shut out the sight of him! Sure, ’twas as if she’d seen a great hairy ape escaped from the zoo!

  After the lapse of so many years, it’s impossible to know the particulars of the incident that occurred on May 19, 1921. The only existing record is a brief article from the following day’s San Francisco Chronicle, and the information it contains is very sparse. It doesn’t say, for example, how Earle Leonard Ferral came to choose the house at 1519 Pacific Avenue, or what his motives were for bluffing his way inside.

  Only these facts are known: sometime during that Wednesday afternoon, Ferral appeared unexpectedly at the threshold of Mr. Charles Summers’ modest home. The door was opened by Summers’ twenty-four-year-old son, Charles Junior. Claiming to be a plumber who had come to repair a leaky gas pipe, Ferral gained admittance to the house and immediately descended into the cellar where twelve-year-old Mary Summers was playing with her dolls.

  Moments later, Charles Junior heard his sister scream.

  Though the news account supplies no physical details about little Mary Summers, she must have been a strapping girl. Earle himself was no flyweight but a burly twenty-four-year-old who had done manual labor throughout his adult life. But when Earle suddenly set down the tools he was carrying and fell upon the child, she put up a ferocious struggle. Screeching, kicking, tearing at his face, she was able to fend him off until her brother heard her frantic cries.

  Rushing down to the basement, Summers threw himself on the attacker. The two young men grappled fiercely until Earle managed to break loose and flee the house. Summers chased him into the street and tackled him. They battled again, Summers knocking Earle down at least three times. Finally, Earle landed a punch that staggered his opponent and took to his heels. After checking to see that his sister was unhurt, Summers hurried to the nearest precinct house and reported the crime.

  Two hours later Earl Ferral was arrested on a Polk Street trolley car by Traffic Policeman Ebner Esteranz, who had been supplied with a detailed description of the suspect. Earle was taken to the city jail and booked on an assault charge. In his mug shot, he looks more like the victim than the perpetrator. Hair wildly dishevelled, face battered and clawed, he gazes at the camera through hurt, hooded eyes. There is a strange mix of coarseness and sensitivity to his face. He looks like a thug who might burst into tears at any second.

  In Palo Alto the next morning, Mary Fuller received a double shock. Less than a week had passed since her last, frightening confrontation with Evan (as she still believed he was called). Early Thursday morning, not long after she arrived at work, two policemen showed up at the school to inform her that a man claiming to be her husband had been arrested for attacking a young woman in San Francisco. Mary had to sit down to keep from swooning. Her distress was compounded when the officers told her the prisoner’s name, Earle Leonard Ferral. For the first time, Mary Fuller discovered that her husband had married her under a false identity.

  In spite of all he had put her through, Mary continued to feel responsible for Earle, as she would until the end of his life. She promptly made arrangements to take several days off from work and visit him in jail. By the time she arrived in San Francisco, however, he had already been transferred to the city Detention Hospital at Ivy Avenue and Polk Street. From the moment of his arrest, he had acted bizarrely—babbling about
voices, staring intently at the empty air, threatening suicide. During his first night in jail, he had somehow managed to pluck out his eyebrows with his fingernails.

  In his cell at the Detention Hospital, Mary found her husband bound in a straitjacket and strapped to a cot. Though he gaped at her with his crazed, browless eyes, he did not seem to recognize her. He kept ranting about the leering faces on the wall. When Mary insisted that there were no faces, he clamped his eyes shut for a full minute, then popped them open, stared at the wall, and let out a cry. “There! There! Can’t you see them?”

  That same afternoon, Mary called on Lillian Fabian, who told her about Earle’s previous stint in Napa. It was the first Mary had heard of it. Suddenly, she was faced with many disturbing discoveries about her husband: his true identity and his recent history as a mental patient in a state institution, as well as another piece of information the police had uncovered and conveyed to her, namely, Earle’s ignominious record as a military deserter.

  In an effort to keep him out of prison on the assault charge, the two women decided to institute insanity proceedings against Earle. On June 10, 1921, an Affidavit of Insanity was filed in superior court before Judge John J. Van Nostrand. Earle was ordered to appear for a hearing in three days.

  The hearing took place as scheduled at precisely 11:00 A.M. on June 13, 1921. Mary was there to testify, as were two medical examiners, Doctors D. D. Lustig and Arthur Beardslee, who had interviewed the prisoner in his cell at the Detention Hospital two days earlier. Their conclusions were summarized in an official “Statement of Facts”—essentially a two-page, fill-in-the-blanks questionnaire—that became part of Earle’s file.

  There is a distinctly perfunctory quality to the answers on this form. In response to question #4, “What is alleged insane person’s natural disposition, temperament, and mental capacity?,” the medical examiners typed, “Eccentric, not industrious, could not concentrate.” Question #10 asked, “Is alleged insane person noisy, restless, violent, dangerous, destructive, incendiary, excited or depressed?” Instead of supplying an answer in the space provided, the examiners simply crossed out the words they regarded as inapplicable (noisy, destructive, incendiary), underlined the relevant ones (restless, violent, dangerous, excited, depressed), and inserted one small emendation, typing “to wife and self” above the word dangerous.