by Thomas Cater
“You’ve got no business sticking your Roman Catholic nose into my personal affairs.”
“Please, Mr. Case, remember, he was one of my parishioners long before he became acquainted with you.”
I slammed the receiver down.
“Something wrong?” Connie asked.
I loosed an angry scowl at the phone. “That is one of many reasons why I have elected to be a heretic.”
She glanced at the phone, a confused look on her face. “What is heretic?”
“One who opposes church beliefs.”
“So what do you believe?” she said.
“I don’t know what I believe, but I do know what I don’t believe, and that is the Holy Ghost, the Holy Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. I do believe that I am a child of the universe and I have a right to be here, and so do you. I do not like the way they manage other people’s lives, or tell them what to believe. They need to find a life of their own, but that would entail too many commitments.”
“A lot of people need it. Some of us aren’t good at managing,” she said.
“Personal relationships are just that. What business is it of his, who I lead astray?”
She was trying to correct an error with a bottle of white out. “I can tell you’re from out of town,” she said. “Preachers in this part of the country don’t just preach, they own, manage, extort, confuse, demand, curse, shame and seek revenge. If you were a ‘holy roller’ or a speaker in tongues, you could spend the rest of your life ostracized. They wouldn’t even let your kids talk to you.”
“That man is a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit, the pride of the corps. He’s supposed to be an intellectual, capable of freeing the human mind and spirit from the constraints of prejudice and bigotry, doggerel and dogma. I demand to be heard by a Jesuit, not a Baptist!”
“What did he say that upset you so?” She asked.
I scooted up on the edge of her desk and a muscle spasm tied my left leg into a painful knot. I tried to walk and rub it out, while she looked on.
“The priest told me I should go back to my wife.”
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“A little muscle spasm, that’s all.”
She studied the small plastic bottle of correction fluid.
“Maybe he’s right. Maybe you should…”
It had to be a little difficult for her to say those words, but there was ease in her manner that aroused my curiosity
“Go back to Myra? That would be the worst possible thing I could do, even if she wanted me. No, I’ll never go back. She’d rather see me dead and I think I would prefer it that way, too.”
Connie smiled and straightened up. “I don’t know why you think she’d feel that way? You seem like a nice guy to me.”
It wasn’t worth thinking about. I knew I was a nice guy, but something went wrong with our chemistry. I’m not quite sure what or when. Myra got out of bed one day and started taking apart my dreams, a piece at a time. She said I was wasting her precious time. She started subverting my beliefs. Before I knew it, we were screaming at each other instead of talking. I was in my prime and she kept saying, ‘do you realize in a few years you’re going to be much older?’ I never heard her say, ‘What are you worried about? You have your whole life ahead of you.’ I need that. I need action, not a wasting of my faculties. I need to be told that I’m doing meaningful work.
Connie’s mouth was open slightly and smiling. Some pretty little flytrap, I thought. “I am a nice guy,” I said calmly, “nice for someone else, but not for her. She’s happier without me.”
I was silent for a moment and shook my head. “Sometimes I feel so very old, as if I’ve been knocking around on the planet for eons. At other times, I feel like a newborn babe and I don’t know the first thing about life.”
She closed her mouth, smiled, and went back to writing letters or preparing purchase orders, or whatever administrative assistants do. I humbly excused my way out of the office and returned to the van.
Chapter Thirty-Six
My eyes were still puffy, but the redness had vanished and I was suddenly very hungry. I warmed up a can of tomato soup, drank chocolate milk and ate Ritz crackers. I also found a carrot and some leftover Christmas cookies. I boiled enough water for three cups of tea and sacked out on the bed, a journal under my arm.
I could see the sky turning a dull metallic gray through the van window. It was too early for snow, even in these melancholy hills, so it had to be clouding up to rain.
I tried to see myself as the lord of the manor in the Ryder house, but it was an unwilling image. The damned house had ideas of its own and it was trying to confuse me. I tried to imagine myself in a velvet smoking jacket and patent leather slippers sitting in front of an open fire sucking on a corncob pipe, but it didn’t work.
The only image that made its way into my mind was yours truly with a shovel in my hand digging in the soil and excavating rotting wooden boxes, dragging them from the earth through tangled weedy patches of brier to other hillsides, other graves. It was not a pleasant image.
I could not help wondering if it were possible to raise a child in that house, a child with eyes bright as tracer bullets tangled in the vines. With all its shadows and specters, the house, or whatever was in it, seemed to think a child the likely answer to all its problems.
The memory of Elinore’s screams cut through the fabric of my thoughts and started my heart beating too fast for comfort. Before I could move into my haunted house, I needed to move many things out: but how.
Carry them out, of course. Remove the coffins. I’d carried the skeleton of the creature out; the bones were now wrapped in a sheet under the bed.
I pulled the sheet out and looked again. I concluded that it wasn’t an arboreal primate, it was some kind of rock-dwelling, land-roving ape that spent a lot of time on its front and hind legs. There were differences among apes, but I wasn’t sure what they were. Apes didn’t have tails, and this beauty had a large tailbone. The jaws and teeth looked as if they belonged to a huge carnivorous cat. To provide access to the brains and eyes, the skull was incised. Nothing so incredibly unusual about that, it happened all the time.
The eye sockets, I noticed, were larger than those found in human skulls. I fished the ring out of my pocket and turned it over in my hand and mind. So how did it come to be on an animal’s finger? Elinore would not have buried a ring bearing an inscription to someone she loved. Either it was stolen, or she parted with it willingly. On the finger of someone whose love was unconditional, it would be impossible to remove.
Would Samuel have demanded that kind of sacrifice from a daughter, or from her husband? Even if her marriage was not pubic knowledge, some of his actions seem to indicate he loved his daughter. He was trying to buy her sight.
“Samuel must never know…I think he knows.”
I knew what was required. I had to return to the cemetery and open Elinore’s grave. I had to know if her eyes were sewn shut, and what a lobotomy did to a human brain, and if there were a similar gold band on her finger.
I wondered if there might be some less confrontational way. My old aches and pains were not healing, especially in my mind. I was also concerned that I may be pushing my luck. I could still feel the painful impression of a backbreaking jolt in the middle of my spine. I decided to postpone further excavations for a day or two. I wanted to take the skeleton to a university and find out exactly what kind of a ‘critter’ I was consorting with.
I could also bone up on the history of eye surgery, talk to someone in the medical school and see what they knew about Grier. Connie said someone from the university had written a paper on the Alberichs. Even Grier had found them interesting enough to devote a little time and study to their fate. What had happened to the paper? Of course, it was in the back of the folder, a slim document in relatively good shape. What had he called their condition? ‘Geonlinger’s Disease; a Case Study of the Alberichs -- three male d
warfs of an undetermined age residing at the insane asylum, Vandalia, W. Va. April 3, 1923’. Snappy title.
The first few pages were devoted to personal information: weight, height and general health. There was no info regarding family, birth dates, places of birth and other unknowns. The following six pages were devoted to the hard science of diagnosis. Limb and skull dimensions, how many teeth, a few rough drawings, and the results of various tests, physical and mental, none of which I was able to clearly decipher and understand.
The remaining pages summed up the results of the tests. From what I could gather, there was nothing different in the way the Alberichs functioned, only that they were aging at a much slower rate.
It was not a very philosophical or theoretical tract. In fact, it was intolerably dull compared with the subject matter he had to work with. It was apparent that Grier was not interested in changing the course of medical history. He only wanted to correct a condition he viewed as unnatural, and with information that he could substantiate, which amounted to no information at all. Even his conclusions were extraordinarily brief.
The Alberichs, he stated, “Were aging at a rate five to ten times slower than normal, and there is no way explain it,” proving that it required a medical thoroughness and attention to detail he and the current state of science were unable to achieve.
There were a few attempts to make age comparisons. At one point, he discussed the tendency of one generation to mature faster than the previous one. He examined the prevalence of young women in the 1800s to start their menstrual cycles when they were 15-16 years of age. Years later, they were menstruating at 13-14, and again it was common for 11 or 12 year-old girls to menstruate. It also claimed that a poor diet, such as occur in Third World countries, delay sexual maturity. Which translated into good health equals rapid development into old age, while poor health equals slower development and a longer life.
Despite its subject matter, it was a brief article and not brilliant or perceptive. It was full of physical data but slim on theory. I would have preferred to read something more speculative, something that may have intimated the possibility was within all of us to slow this aging mechanism down and live far beyond our normal life span. If the Alberichs could do it, why couldn’t everyone?
Grier never really considered it as a possibility. He looked upon it as a perversion, a disease, something to cure. It is possible he considered the price too high. To spend one’s life as a dull-witted gnome was not worth 100 more years of longevity, at least not to a psychiatrist-surgeon.
I decided his Case Study would accompany me to Morgantown with the skeleton. It may be something I could trade to get information about Grier and anything he may have submitted to them.
I checked my watch. It was time to start making phone calls to Harmons. I put several dollars worth of change near the public phone and took up temporary residence. I was in luck. There were about two dollars worth of Harmons living in Vandalia and Elanville area. I called the first number and a woman answered.
I introduced myself and told her I was passing through town and looking up distant relatives. I mentioned the name of Frank Harmon and waited while she slogged through a memory of names, but none that seemed to coincide with a Frank in the early 1900s. She was having difficulty breathing; black lung, she said, from living close to mines and coal tipples. She wanted to tell me about it and asked if I knew someone who could help, but I kept asking about Frank.
“No, I don’t think so,” she finally said. “William’s Daddy is gone and so’s his gran’pap. He had brothers, but I don’t think any were named Frank.”
I was glad to hear it.
“You talk it over with the mister when he gets home from work,” I said. “If he knows or remembers anything, you have him call this number.”
I gave her Virgil’s home phone number. I didn’t want his teenybopper secretary losing any potential leads. I knew he would think I’d lost my mind.
It went on like that for fifteen minutes. Everyone had grandparents who had brothers and sisters, but no one knew what their names were or where they worked, or whom they had married. Most lived with his or her wives for a few years before someone died of pneumonia, or measles, or whooping cough, or some other disease seldom mentioned in modern medical practice.
It was still early, but my finger was getting tired of punching numbers and my ear was getting tired of listening to the twangy nasal sounds that seemed to issue from Harmons, or perhaps all the people in the Elanville area. I decided to call Virgil and tell him what to expect.
I considered holing up in the van and reading Grier’s journals until 5 pm, or going back to the house and start on Elinore’s grave. The last idea was the least appealing of them all.
I decided instead on a trip to Morgantown to find out what I could about the skeleton and Doctor Grier, and to see if the graduate student who took an interest in the Alberichs was still around.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I took my time on the interstate. I was only getting ten miles to the gallon and the price of gasoline was increasing faster than the speed of my van, especially since I wasn’t going anywhere, only back and forth on a tiresome highway. If I could save on the van’s mileage, I wouldn’t regret the loss of money as much as time.
Theoretically, I wasn’t making much progress at the Ryder mansion, either. My credibility was at the breaking point. No matter what I said about the house and its history, I would be nominating myself for a closed and padded room at the state hospital. I made a mental note to be discrete regarding things that had happened. Despite a penchant to ‘spill my guts’ at the drop of a question mark, I would try to confine my revelations and queries to facts surrounding Grier and the Alberichs.
I found a parking space on the street, which was a good omen, since most spaces were reserved for properly stickered University cars. It was close to the library.
Inside several co-eds in the reference section behaved as if they had been awaiting my arrival. They stopped giggling long enough to offer help. We discussed the possibilities of unearthing material on Dr. Grier and his term as Vandalia’s chief medical officer. She wrote his name and the dates down and asked questions, which I dismissed with “anything at all on him or the hospital.”
She tossed her hair around and caught a lock between her fingers.
“We have tons of material on the hospital,” she said, “state and local reports, pictures, just tons of information. Maybe you would like to see his published papers, or papers published on or about him, or papers by other superintendents of the hospital. The author of ‘Sybil’ used to be a superintendent there; In fact, one of her patients was the personality in question. They say she’s still there, or at least some of her personalities are,” she said giggling.
I wanted all I could get my hands on, but not tons.
“How about some medical books on lobotomies and eye transplants, and color blindness,” I said, feeling incurably lazy and bureaucratic for passing on the legwork.
She wrote that down, too, and wanted to know what else I needed.
“Does the university have a paleontologist or a zoologist on its staff?” After I thought about it, it seemed like a stupid question. Her eyes thought so, too.
“That would be Dr. Richard Cavell. His office number is…” and she gave it to me, along with directions on how to get there. “You can’t miss it just follow the path across the front lawn.”
I said I’d be back for the books in thirty minutes. She smiled and released a veritable blitz of scrupulously maintained enamel. I walked jauntily out of the building, feeling the cerebral sweetness that blows through the lofty towers of a university campus. It meant something to command the services of one so young and attractive, especially in the service of intellectual pursuits.
I followed the footpath across the lawn to Cavell’s office. I was told Cavell wasn’t in; he was out, or rather in the basement working on his fossils and shards. Shards? bones of a dog-shark? I thoug
ht, or perhaps a shark-dog?
I made my way to the basement, making all the wrong turns, until I accidentally stumbled into a gallery overflowing with broken pots, bone fragments and fossils.
In a brightly lit office beyond the gallery, I saw three figures moving around a table, laughing joyously as each piece of a small puzzle came into perspective. I approached the office undetected until I stood outside the door. One young man instinctively, as if I had triggered some primitive signal, looked in my direction. I wondered what had given my presence away.
“We have a guest,” he said.
He motioned me toward the door. I extended a hand as I entered and mentioned Dr. Cavell’s name. He smiled to let me know my search had ended. I introduced myself and gave my address as Vandalia.
“I’ve got something to show you,” I said. “Something I ‘dug up’ in my back yard.”
His ears perked up and his eyes sparkled.
“Pot shards, or Indian relics?”
I shook my head, dismissing the obvious.
“Nothing so redundant; it’s a skeleton.”
“Human?” He asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Some kind of animal then: dog, cat, fox?”
I got the impression he enjoyed guessing games.
“Bigger,” I said, and his interest mounted.
“Bear?” he questioned.
Judging from the size of the rib cage, the teeth and the length of the arms, I shook my head.
“It’s in my van,” I said. “Come and take a look.”
He was helpful and obliging.
“Bones aren’t my bailiwick. I’m more into fragments, fossils, pieces of puzzles, than biology, but I may be able to help.”
He slipped out of his lab jacket and grabbed a windbreaker from a hook on the back of a door. He carried it in one hand as we walked up the stairs. Outside, he slipped his arms into the sleeves.
“You found it in Vandalia?”
“I was doing a little excavating in my back yard; it’s still intact.”
“And you don’t know what it is?”
