The Monsters of Templeton

by Lauren Groff

  “Shit,” I said and ran inside, leaving Ezekiel in his great tow truck, and Vi, semiobscene in her seminudity, staring at each other, one full beat behind me.

  I GRABBED UP the telephone in a moment, and could hear nothing on the other end. “Honey?” I said. “Clarissa?”

  “I think, Willie,” Clarissa said, in the almost clinical voice she used when she was deeply upset, “that Sully maybe just left me.”

  “Wait,” I said. “What?”

  “Sully,” she said. “Just definitely left me. For a yoga instructor who works in Arizona. Ten minutes ago. She carried all his shit down to the car for him as he broke up with me.”

  I took a deep breath. “Holy shit,” I said.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “Holy shit,” I said again.

  “She’s really tall. Like six-four. And has wonky teeth. And is not even all that pretty, not at all. But,” my best friend said, “she’s got one thing going for her. She’s healthy. Just bursting with health. Not a lupus-addled pain in the ass, apparently. They met in the hospital café while I was getting my treatment. She had an infected splinter,” she said, giving one terrible lick of laughter. “In her pinky toe.”

  The house suddenly became still and quiet, and had I been listening, I would have heard my mother’s bare feet stepping up the stairs, the floorboards squeaking, stealing to her own room. “Oh, Clarissa,” I said.

  “Don’t,” Clarissa said. “I don’t want to start to cry. It’s all over if I start to cry.”

  “I’m coming,” I said. “Tonight, I’m coming. I’ll be there.”

  “No,” said Clarissa. “I hate this apartment. I hate this city. I can’t be here. Reminds me of Sully.”

  “I hate Sully,” I said.

  “I love him,” she said, and grew wild. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do. I swear to God I’ll kill him if I see him.”

  This kind of talk was a precursor, I knew from long experience, to everything falling apart for Clarissa. And when someone as strong as Clarissa falls apart, it is Samson all over again, bringing the pillars of the temple upon himself, a mighty, ugly mess. I sucked in my breath and began to think, which was hard going, because I was about to fall apart, myself.

  It was then that my mother, who had been shamelessly eavesdropping from the telephone in her room, spoke up. “Kill Sully?” she said. “Nonsense. You’re coming here to Templeton, Clarissa Evans. I’m a nurse, and though I don’t work in rheumatology, I can tell you that our facilities here in Templeton are primo, top-notch, first-rate. Plus, I get to take care of you from up close. Not far away, where I can’t feed you or take care of you or anything. Your room is waiting for you.”

  “Oh, Vi,” Clarissa said, helpless, over the line. “You’re a critical care nurse.”

  “Oh, Vi,” I said, softly. “What the hell are you saying?”

  “Stop it, you two,” she said. “Big dummies. Of course Clarissa won’t be in critical care; she’s going to get better here, in Templeton. I’ll make the reservations and get an old friend of mine to take you to the airport, Clarissa, honey. He lives in Noe Valley. Give me fifteen minutes,” she said.

  “I have to go,” Clarissa said abruptly. “I just have to.” Then there was a click, and my mother and I both said “Clarissa?” into the phone.

  I hung on to the line, listening to my mother’s breath. “She’ll be a-ok,” she said. “I’ll call back as soon as I’ve made the arrangements.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much, Vi.”

  “It’s not for you I’m doing this,” she said. “So you don’t have to thank me.”

  It was then that I felt the burst and looked down at my bare legs. I felt my heart rise in my throat. “Vi?” I said.

  “Willie, what? I have to call the airline.”

  “Vi,” I said. “I need you. Right now. Right now.”

  I dropped the phone back on the cradle and heard my mother’s footsteps as she ran to the stairwell and down. I stood still as she rumbled through the hallway, the formal living room, the dining room, then into the 1970s wing. She burst through the door like a wild woman.

  My mother’s eyes took in my legs, and her hands rose to her mouth. For the length of one sonorous chime of the grandfather clock, we stood there, in the doorway, both of us staring at my legs, where there were brown streaks of blood to my knees, a bright bloom already drenching the crotch of my shorts.

  25

  Storm

  I SAW IT all clearly, but somehow I wasn’t involved; somehow, my brain clicked off and my body moved into action, sliding off the shorts and swabbing myself with the washcloth my mother handed me, taking new underwear and jeans and a maxi pad and putting it all on; and somehow, amid all this, I thought to grab the thick envelope that I’d gotten in the mail that day so I’d have something to read during my hospital wait. I followed my mother outside, meek as a dog, into the car that she threw into reverse and sped with reckless endangerment of the tourists’ drosophila lives, squealing by so fast that their ball caps blew off their heads and their cotton candy smeared pink across their chins and the baseball bats that they jauntily carried over their shoulders fell clanging to the ground. We swerved up River Street, and the Susquehanna River roiled on our left, fat from the previous day’s storms, and my mother pulled under the carport of the Emergency Room wing. She put me into a wheelchair, and rolled us past the intake desk and under the eye of the attending, who was snapping some small boy’s shoulder back into joint, where my mother described what was happening to me in no uncertain terms, and the small boy’s eyes grew so wide they almost burst, and I imagined the great fluidy pop that bursting eyeballs would make, like a grape pinched and splitting its skin in a goopy shower of vitreous humor. The attending, wordless, left the dislocated boy to the resident, followed my mother into the examination room and helped her undress me, and then, because my mother’s voice had begun to rise in pitch and grow loud then louder, he banished her to the waiting room where one of her thick-ankled friends seized her in a bear hug. As the curtain closed, the doctor with his weary eyes behind the hipster glasses patted me into the paper-coated bed, and with a voice calm and flat as a plate, he told me to lie back and relax, and we’ll see what we can do, and relax, darling, let me look and relax and relax and relax, honey, relax…

  26

  Après Storm

  AFTER THE ULTRASOUND, which left a slug trail of goop across my belly, after the strange, crumpled psychiatrist who smelled of popcorn and sleep, I waited, shivering in my paper pinny, to know whether I had lost the Lump. I thought of Clarissa, of Vi, of the ghost in my room drawing thick and warm around me, to keep from imagining the Lump still in there, bleeding from its little wrists because it couldn’t bear to be born into the world with such a fool for a mother. I imagined it tying a little noose in the umbilical cord and sliding its mole-star head inside.

  Time ticked on in the hospital. On the floor above, I heard a slow pacing, the shuffle-drag-shuffle-drag of a sleepless someone with an IV tower. There were the groans of the nurses’ shoes, a low murmur of conversation, once in a while a whiff of coffee from the cafeteria down the labyrinthine hall.

  And under the weight of all that time alone, I thought of our lake monster, those centuries under the dark water, its immense solitude, and wanted to weep for the poor, sweet beast. Such a long sweep of time, such cold. Glimmey, looking longingly up at the boats zipping atop the water in the same way we watch movie screens, to see reflections of ourselves.

  At last, my mother came in, her head down so I could see the zigzag of her part. I watched her, holding my breath as she took a chair and pulled it to the side of my bed, and sat. She took my hand and kissed it.

  “So I lost it,” I said. “Okay.” I only felt numb, not dismayed, not relieved, either.

  But my mother said nothing for a long time, just rocking a little in her chair, her eyes closed, giving, I pr
esumed, a little prayer in her head.

  She opened her eyes. She cleared her throat. Then she said, wincing, “When you found out you were pregnant, did you take a test, Sunshine?”

  “Oh. No,” I said. “No test.”

  “Why not, honey?” she said.

  “My period stopped,” I said. “I was nauseated all the time. It was clear.”

  “Ah,” she said, and closed her eyes again.

  Again, there rose between us the noises of the hospital and the sound of her foot in its clog tap-tapping on the ground.

  Like this, she said, “We don’t think, Sunshine. Well, that you ever really were pregnant.”

  I blinked. “What?” I said.

  “Have you ever heard of an hysterical pregnancy? Pseudocyesis, we call it. Grossesse Nerveuse. You can manifest all the symptoms of pregnancy, without actually being pregnant.”

  “What?” I said. “That’s not what happened.”

  “Unfortunately,” my mother said, “it appears to be.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not crazy, Vi. I missed three periods. I was sick all the time. My belly was growing. No, that’s not what happened. I was bleeding. There was a Lump.”

  “Willie,” said my mother. “The blood was excessive menstruation. The rest, well.”

  “Well?” I said, hearing the panic sharpen my voice.

  “Well, the brain is sometimes much, much stronger than the body, and can sometimes trick the body into believing it is wrong. Or, sometimes, it’s the fear of pregnancy itself that tricks the endocrine system into believing the wrong thing. The psychiatrist said you had a normal profile. Just that you seemed to be under a tremendous amount of stress.”

  There was a giant pause and I could hear a nattering television, a cart going by, a small child wailing somewhere that he just wanted to go home.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “I can’t believe this.”

  She smiled wearily at me and said, “You’re not the only one in the world this has happened to, Wilhelmina. It’s even happened to men, if you can imagine. It won’t get past this hospital.”

  “Right. Name me one other person, Vi. This is so fucked.”

  My mother thought, then said, “Mary Tudor, Queen of England. She thought she was pregnant for a really long time. She wasn’t, of course. Sterile.”

  I gaped at her. “You mean Bloody Mary?” I said. “You mean, the woman responsible for the deaths of thousands of her own subjects?”

  “I didn’t say,” said my mother, biting back her grin, “this necessarily happened to sane people.”

  “You said I had a normal profile,” I said.

  “You do,” said Vi. “To the best of our knowledge.”

  “I’m going to throw up,” I said.

  “At least we know it’s not morning sickness,” said Vi.

  I watched as the silvery fillings in her teeth flashed in the fluorescents, her mouth opening wide as she smiled. I said, “I love you, Vi, but sometimes I think I hate you a little, too.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, standing and kissing my forehead. “I love you, too. I’m sorry about that. It was uncalled for. And I’m sorry for your loss, truly.”

  “I did,” I said. “I did lose something. I feel as if I did lose something, Vi.”

  She pushed my hair off my cheeks and looked at me in a long and strange way. “I know you did, Willie,” she said. “I really am sorry for you.”

  As Vi left to fill out the paperwork, I passed my hands over my navel again and again. Where I had once felt another heartbeat, I now felt nothing. Air and stomach, fluids and blood. Nary a little growing thing in me; nary even the weeniest little Lump in the world.

  AND SO I waited in the hospital, under the wan humming lights, in the hushed din of so many bodies exhaling sickness and sadness into the cycled air. And when I realized my mother must have gone off to give me a moment, I picked up the envelope I’d brought with me, Clarissa’s wild scrawl on the outside. I couldn’t stand being alone, just then. As the night thickened in my high window, I tore the flap open and pulled out the photocopied pages and read it all once, then twice. Still, Vi didn’t return. That night I read the pages over again and again, because reading made me forget about Vi and the Non-Lump and Clarissa, and the ill puce light around me entirely; it was a blessing, it was a reprieve.

  Jacob Franklin Temple

  CIRCA 1822, painted by Jarvis. Note both his smirk and the apparent nimbus around his head.

  27

  Shadows and Fragments

  THIS IS WHAT I saw when I opened the envelope:

  1. A note in Clarissa’s loopy handwriting:

  W—check this out—I found it in this sort of a miscellany of JFT’s leftovers: Shadows and Fragments: A Posthumous Collection of Jacob Franklin Temple’s Words, arranged and edited by his Daughter, Charlotte Franklin Temple. Printed in 1853; One of a series of a thousand by E. Phinney and Son Publishers, Templeton, New York. Also, get a load of Charlotte’s note at the end. Maybe it’s a clue? Love, C.

  2. An excerpt, Chapter 32:

  …how it holds great puzzles! For instance, only one year previous, a mightily strange story circled in the village, as follows. One day, three maidens venturing out into the greater forest on a strawberry-hunt wandered far from their path, and soon discovered themselves lost. Upon erring aimlessly in the dark and frightening woods, the girls, in their distress, began to quarrel, and at last, one of their party ran away from her friends, piqued. Because night was falling, and there had been rumors of a great bear in the woods, the other two began to run until they found their path. On their way home, however, a scream arose from the woods that nearly curdled their blood, and they arrived at their houses scraped by thorns and barely speaking in the clutch of fear. When the third girl failed to arrive at her house by the next morning, the men of the town gathered and gravely went looking for her, but only found one tattered fragment of her hem. All assumed that she was lost.

  That is not the depth of the mystery, however, for, by the next spring, the missing girl was discovered living in her house as if nothing had happened at all. Though her family’s mouths were sealed tight against questions, soon a number of evidence rose up, some of it contradicting the rest: that there were three terrible cicatrices like claw-marks raked across the girl’s visage; that a white shock had sprouted in her raven hair; that her mother, after only one month of confinement and her figure as thin as a rake, gave birth to a strapping, rather hairy baby boy; that during the time she’d been away the post-man had seen her in Oneonta, washing clothing, and certainly not pregnant in any way. Most puzzlingly, however, was the observation that whenever the girl saw one gentleman from the village, she would quake and run to hide; and what was strange about it was that this gentleman, though admittedly ursine, was of a great village family and was universally considered almost womanly in his gentleness, and would never have…

  3. Charlotte’s note:

  This is an especially puzzling fragment, for I know not from what larger piece my father banished this story, or why he kept it amongst his most important papers. Yet it is fascinating, for it was founded on a piece of actual gossip that I recall from when I was just a girl. In the true version, there were not three, but four young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two who went into the woods that day. Only two returned that night; one never did, and one returned as was related above. The girl who did not return was young Lucille Smalley. Poor Adah Phinney appeared as described above, and it was perhaps a mercy that she died of measles not long after her sudden reappearance, for the oft-repeated rumors that her brother was actually her son would have shamed her deeply (another untruth here is about the hairiness of Simon Phinney, who has had a bald pate since the age of fifteen). The other two girls, the ones who returned unharmed, developed into beacons of our town: Euphonia Falconer, née Shipman, became a devout member of the Methodist choir, and Bette Rhys, née Cox, married our beloved mayor and had a brood of ten children.

 
Chingachgook, or Sagamore, with dog

  The bronze statue called “Indian Hunter” in Lakefront Park. Templetonians are frequently confused about who this statue represents—Natty Bumppo, or his Native American companion—though Willie has always believed it to be Chief Chingachgook.

  28

  Sagamore (Chingachgook, Big Snake)

  FIRST SENSED THE girl was a wild creature one night. Eight years, nine years old. Woke to hear her moving across the hut. Saw her lift the oilskin, lean out into the brighter night, the fistful of stars. Broke an icicle and put it in her mouth. I shut my eyes. She wanted to eat the world.

  Seven years. Seven years we kept Noname in the hut. My granddaughter. Such terrible things done to her, the child, she lost her tongue at four, five years old. Nine years, she grew beautiful. Mushroom skin, no sunlight, tender as a mouse’s belly. Cora’s face, my son’s face, Uncas’s eyes, Cora’s fine shape. A body that came early under the fawn-skin shift I made for her, soft on her body. Twelve, she was ready for a husband.

  Hawkeye spent his time hunting, fevered with her nearby. No heart to give her to him yet. She was too young. Instead, we ate well, his bounty. She slept on furs.

  In the night I sang to her the old songs. Taught her the crafts. She made baskets with weave so small the ladies thought they were of thread. But she spent her days looking down at the world, Templeton, the granite-colored lake.

  All day, I sold my baskets, saving for her when I was not here. A very old man, I felt my joints turning to stone. My bones ached. Wanted to drink the potion and leave this earth for better grounds. Instead, coin after coin leaping into my small pouch like fish up a stream. For Noname.