Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  If physical life was a powerful attractant, it was not the special property of the female population. Dry Falls is a prosperous farming community, the exception in Maine, teeming with life, surrounded by fields of feed corn and tender alfalfa, by pastures where mammals with distended udders are grazing, where circles of cow dung swarm with carrion insects. In the summer the farm hands work bare-chested, raising a sweat, bringing earth and manure indoors on the soles of their boots. We have chicken farms in the area, hens raised for eggs. Michel Roque breeds sheep and goats, and makes tangy cheeses from their milk. Evan McNeil’s Highland Kennels is famous in New England for its Border collies, uncanny, intelligent herding dogs with a cast in one eye. Around here the life cycle operates at a sped-up pace. Something is always breeding in our vicinity—sprouting, dropping, hatching, whelping, fermenting. The township of Dry Falls fairly reeks of generativity, more than enough to call forth the legions of the disembodied.

  If bodiless entities are attracted by an abundance of life, there are those in our community who are drawn to the immaterial. Among our year-round inhabitants are a number who have retired or escaped from cities, and whose interests are far removed from agriculture. Some of these peaceable refugees started a discussion group, meeting at one another’s houses as often as they could manage it. They kept the group and its purpose to themselves. If they had broadcast the fact that their topic was psychical research, who knows what kind of chowderheads and dabblers might have begged for admittance? No one in the group was a professional parapsychologist; but they were well informed on the subject, serious and skeptical. Walter Emmet had scholarly credentials in another field, eighteenth-century American furniture and decorative arts. Mary Grey Hodges was a registered nurse, formerly in practice in Bangor, who founded our Visiting Nurses Association. David Busch had been a staff photographer for Decade magazine, who went off on his own to specialize in nature and landscapes. Lorraine Conner Drago was a local real-estate agent, a mundane career for a person with clairvoyant abilities. At age fifty-one, my husband, Henry, was their youngest member.

  When Henry joined up, I remember hoping that Bishop Hollins wouldn’t get wind of it. Our Bishop was the crusading sort of clergyman, not much interested in the spiritual life, let alone in spirits. He thought the mission of the Church was people helping people, like the Community Chest, the March of Dimes, or the United Way. On one of his official parish visits he scolded Henry for holding too many meditation sessions, and ordered him to start a bimonthly meeting of Parents Without Partners. Henry’s psychical research group did nothing to ease the pain of divorce or stop world hunger, but it seemed to me they had some concern with human betterment. When they met at the rectory in October of 1973—four sober elderly people and my youthful husband—Mary Grey read aloud a paper on healer-treated water. Mary Grey read too fast and dropped her voice at the end of every sentence, but the message and its implications were far-reaching. If one healer could purify a tank of contaminated water, a squadron of healers might be able to revive Lake Erie.

  After the reading I provided light refreshments—coffee, cider, and date bars made with oatmeal. Walter wanted to conduct an experiment in extrasensory perception. “Not a very rigorous experiment,” he said. “Just a little stricter than a parlor game.” He brought in a folding screen from the dining room, and placed a side table behind it. Behind the screen he opened a satchel and placed an object from his private collection on top of the table. Walter himself did not know the identity of the object. He had asked someone else to select it and wrap it in several layers of heavy brown mailing paper. Walter gave us ten minutes by the clock to receive impressions and to write down any images that came to us, however fragmentary. I played along, so as not to disrupt the atmosphere, but my mind wandered out to the kitchen where the supper dishes were soaking in the sink and the macaroni and cheese was hardening in its casserole.

  Ten minutes later, Walter called us to order. “Nothing,” said David. “It couldn’t have any relevance. I kept getting a name with a ‘k’ in it—Kennett? Or Mackenzie?” Lorraine read her notes out loud: “wavy glass,” “the size of a julep cup,” “bubbles,” “black flecks,” “tilting sideways.” Mary Grey’s paper was blank. “I kept dozing off,” she apologized. “I pass,” I told Walter, “I have about as much ESP as a tree stump.” Walter turned to Henry, whose notepad was covered with writing. When Henry closed his eyes he had seen a circle of light, golden light, with a red glow at the apex of the circle. In a moment the circle developed a foot, or base. “Like a bowl,” said Henry, “a yellow bowl, but I think it was metal.”

  Walter started unwrapping the object before Henry had finished, tearing at the paper, wrenching the bands of Scotch tape. He pulled out a little footed cup, four inches in diameter, hammered out of brass, burnished to a soft golden luster. “One of my prizes,” said Walter, handing it to Henry. “This communion cup belonged to the first rector of King’s Chapel in Boston. He took it with him to deathbeds, when he was called out to give the last rites.” There was a round of applause for Henry. David clapped him on the shoulder. “A religious object,” he said. “You had an unfair advantage, padre.”

  Henry’s accomplishment called for a round of drinks. I took orders and poured out the liquor. Henry asked for a brandy. Lorraine seemed a little less animated than the others. She had once taken part in the ESP trials at Duke University, when the great J. B. Rhine had given her a high mark for accuracy. Walter salvaged her pride. “You got through,” he said. “You scored a hit. You, too, David.” He explained that the communion cup was displayed on a cabinet shelf next to a beaker, a hand-blown colonial drinking vessel dating from the 1760s. The name of the person who had selected the brass cup and wrapped it was Janet McKay, who did occasional secretarial chores for Walter.

  The Uncanny was with us, a seventh presence in the room. I caught the group’s excitement, a collective shiver. Henry’s direct hit now seemed less dramatic than Lorraine’s and David’s oblique ones. A priest, after all, is supposed to be in touch with the invisible. I could see that their faces looked younger; years had dropped away. With his small, sharp features, Walter looked like a boy turned white early. Henry’s face was so flushed and unguarded I was almost embarrassed for him. My own face, reflected in the mirror over the fireplace, looked as pretty as I get, with my bumpy nose, pale green eyes, pale hair, pale lashes and eyebrows. I looked like a piece of straw, but a fresh piece of straw before the weather starts to spoil it. I blessed Walter (who is actually a judgmental, self-centered little stickler) for bringing some spark to our lives just as winter was upon us.

  At the time I believed no harm could come from these games, since their immediate effects were restorative and beneficial. I listened as they talked about agendas for the next month of meetings. I thought I might join them, if more of the sessions were like this one. It seemed their appetite for thrills had been slaked, at least for the present. In Henry’s opinion, they were putting the cart before the horse, delving into parapsychology without more grounding in physiology and psychiatry. David suggested they read a new book on the two halves of the brain. Mary Grey offered to report on dissociation and multiple personalities. I decided not to join them after all, if they were going to be so studious. At least my husband had found a hobby, an interest outside his work. For some time I had wondered if his work were more burdensome than satisfying.

  Chapter Two

  Henry Lieber received his calling in a Belgian forest on the sixth of January, 1945. With no trucks, a crippled radio, and dwindling ammunition, Captain Lieber and his troops were marooned at Rocheles-Vierges, a cluster of farmhouses whose inhabitants had long since evacuated. Waiting for contact with the 41st armored infantry, last heard from to the south of them on the far side of the Sononmont River, they were surprised by German rocket fire on the night of the fifth, driven out of the pastures, and up to the thickly wooded highland.

  Out of sixty-five men, thirty-two reached the cover of the forest,
where trees were still standing from the campaigns of Julius Caesar. Working desperately slowly in ground that was partially frozen, they dug into foxholes as the sun rose behind banks of snow clouds. When the Germans renewed their assault at eight the next morning, the foxholes had little to offer by way of protection. Artillery fire brought down branches and trees on their heads, splintering the wood into daggers as lethal as forged steel. Within minutes Henry Lieber was sharing his foxhole with a dead man.

  The thunder of the shelling, the shattering and crashing of tree trunks filled Henry’s head and his chest, exploding both around and inside him. If Death was the absence of sound, he was ready to die. With his eyes closed, he gave himself up and waited for silence. Almost at once the battle noise receded, as if it were coming from a distance, perhaps his own memory. Finally he heard nothing except the whistle of a bird, and a faint gentle rustling like a breeze through a stand of long grasses. Then a voice spoke out of the stillness, as close as the body lying next to him: “Why are you troubled? Why do thoughts arise in your heart? I am with you always, even to the end of the world.”

  When the Bulge was closed on January 23, the Allied casualties numbered 81,000. Henry Lieber was alive, unimpaired in mind or body, and a few days short of his twenty-third birthday. As soon as he was released from active duty, he obeyed his calling as he had understood it. When he disembarked at the port of New York, he rode uptown and enrolled in St. John’s Seminary. Conrad Lieber had died just before the invasion of Normandy, so Henry had no earthly father to disappoint. Henry’s place in the family business would go to his cousin, a wide-awake young man who wanted to branch out into frozen fish sticks.

  The failure rate at the seminary was high, since a good many entrants imagined, quite mistakenly, that divinity school was a prolonged retreat, an opportunity for leisurely thought and meditation. Ex-Captain Lieber thrived in this competitive setting, and obtained his doctorate three years later. By the time he was assigned to a parish in his hometown of Portland, Maine, he was already being referred to as “bishop material.”

  Henry never became a bishop or even a dean. His first post was All Souls and Ascension, a “social” parish, the kind that gives the Episcopal Church its reputation for snobbery. All Souls catered mainly to Portland’s upper classes. Its middle-aged and elderly members had known Henry’s father and mother. When he served communion to this gray-haired congregation, he felt like a child passing plates of canapés at his parents’ cocktail parties. Because of its location in the old part of town near the waterfront, All Souls had some working-class members from the boatyards and the fisheries, as well as a group of servants from the households of the rich, who had retreated to the heights of Portland in the 1920s. The carriage trade, with its domestic staff, turned out full strength at eleven o’clock on Sundays. The working poor who lived in the neighborhood came on foot or by trolley to eight o’clock communion. Only on weekdays at Morning and Evening Prayers did the two congregations worship side by side, although most of the worshippers at these daily services were elderly women wrapped up in their private devotions.

  Henry Lieber quickly identified his mission: to unite his divided parish into a democracy. To every committee—the vestry, the altar guild, home visiting—he appointed members from the old town as well as from the heights. If Mr. Bickford, a widower residing on Hill Street, was confined to his bed after surgery for phlebitis, Mrs. Raposo from Wharf Street was sent to call on him and make sure the private nurses were earning their keep. When Sharon Malone gave birth to the fifth of her children, Harriet Gould and her daughter, Amy Washburn, drove down to run errands, cook lunch, and watch out for the little ones. To the Bible-reading classes held in the Lenten season came Portuguese, Irish, Blacks, and Anglo-Saxons. When the roof sprang a leak, the brickwork needed pointing, or the steeple began, unaccountably, to lean sideways, young men of all estates worked in shifts to complete the repairs—stevedores, fishing hands, and college boys on short leave from Bowdoin. When Raposos, Malones, and Browns, with their scrubbed and groomed offspring, began to appear at High Mass on Sunday mornings, Father Lieber gave thanks, keeping some of the credit to himself, well pleased with the success of his efforts.

  By the power of his office and the force of his personality, Henry Lieber had imposed reforms on his parish community. The poor accepted him because he lived in their midst; the rich respected him because they could vouch for his pedigree. Henry’s flock was an outward model of Christian conduct, of charitable duties performed automatically and cheerfully. Even the signs of social difference had been reduced. The gentry came to church in plain wool coats; the working-men wore pressed jackets and sober neckties. Some men like to ride the crest of their accomplishments, but Henry looked over the horizon to further challenges. He had managed to change the behavior of his parishioners, without, he suspected, transforming their inner hearts. He could point to only one example of genuine friendship—between Amy Washburn, whose early marriage to an alcoholic had ended in divorce, and Patricia Santo, a seamstress from Dock Street who was childless for no known reason. Patricia went often to Amy’s big house while her husband was at sea. She was teaching Amy how to knit and was patient with her clumsiness.

  Henry Lieber left All Souls and Ascension in 1958. He was thirty-six years old and overdue for a transfer or a sabbatical. He was exhausted in mind and body and he felt like a failure. Instead of listening to his body’s wisdom telling him to rest and restore himself, he volunteered to work at a settlement house in black Harlem, where he ran interference for destitute families with the welfare system and started a program for teaching older people how to read and write.

  In those days a white man in Harlem was a lightning rod for anger. Henry’s tall, athletic frame kept trouble at bay for a while; but he refused to wear his clerical collar, which might have protected him. He liked to go on long walks to work out the kinks in his limbs and in his spirit, along St. Nicholas Avenue, where all social life took place on the sidewalks, up to Washington Heights, where he could see the Hudson River and the cliffs beyond it. On the streets around Rhinelander House he was recognized and left alone; but he wandered away from his territory once too often.

  On the corner of 160th Street, one of the highest points in Manhattan, while he was ambling instead of striding, lifting his face to the early spring sun, he felt a sharp blow on the back of his neck and another between his shoulder blades. Before he could turn around to confront his attackers, a rain of stones descended on him. He bent over double, covering his head, and tried to stumble out of range. As suddenly as it had begun, the assault stopped. When he straightened up and looked behind him, the street was empty. As he made his way back to the settlement house he was no longer in danger. The sight of blood seeping down his forehead kept bystanders well clear of him.

  The doctors at St. Luke’s Emergency Room diagnosed bruises, superficial cuts, and a collapsed lung, a condition associated with stress. They kept him in a hospital ward for two weeks. He refused to be transferred to a private room. The Bishop of New York labeled Henry’s illness “battle fatigue” and sent him to recuperate at Grail House when his lung was functioning normally. The Grail was an Episcopal order of celibate laymen. They lived on the little finger of the Finger Lakes in a vast shingled camp willed to the Church by a paper baron. Martin Kinder had bequeathed his lakeside camp and 100 acres, along with an endowment that, in the postwar economy, barely paid the heating bill.

  The Grail brothers spent their days maintaining the property, shoring up one section of the house at a time while the rest went on deteriorating. They had no time to take a break to observe the canonical hours, so they recited the holy office wherever they happened to be working—replacing planks on the docks, grouting the chimneys, cleaning the spark plugs on the tractor, spraying for carpenter ants. Guests on retreat were provided with large rooms and plentiful meals, and urged to take advantage of the reclining chairs on the porches and in the garden. The sight and sound of the brothers at
their ceaseless labors were apt to rouse even the seediest guests from the cushioned lounge chairs. Henry slept for twenty-four hours upon arrival and awoke to the noise of hammers and electric drills. Thereafter he joined Brother Joe on outdoor detail, and chopped enough wood for the stove to see Grail House through the winter.

  Mindless work, clean air, and a diet of grains and vegetables gave Henry back his vigor and his customary optimism. Like many of the guests, he went through a period of wanting to take vows and join the order, a phase that died a natural death as soon as his release date was agreed upon. He was summoned to diocesan headquarters in Augusta, Maine, by his Bishop, Malcolm (“Coach”) Hollins. Hollins put up his fists and darted a feinting blow to Henry’s midsection, testing his reflexes, making sure that his boy was in shape for the next engagement. Henry told the Coach he was out of contention for the present. He asked for a small-town parish in a rural district, where class warfare was at a minimum. Bishop Hollins assigned him to the church of St. Anthony the Hermit, located in the town of Dry Falls in the Lake Sebago region.

  Where was God all this time? While Henry toiled in His service, was He looking out for him? God had passed the ball to Henry, who caught it and ran with it, scoring point after point for His church without flinching from injury. God gave Moses a detailed map of the Promised Land, describing the boundaries as precisely as any surveyor. The Son of God told Saul to get up and go into Damascus. His Mother, Mary, told Bernadette to build her a chapel. God’s instructions to Henry were in no way specific. Henry Lieber was not a prophet, an apostle, or a saint: all God had given him was questionable proof of His existence.

  Henry had worked sixteen hours a day, neglected his nutrition, taken a total of a month’s vacation during his tenure in Portland. He had hankered after several nice women, one of whom he had known since Mrs. Weld’s dancing classes. He broke so many dates that these ladies lost patience. His former dancing-school partner married a surgeon, whose hours were slightly more reasonable than a preacher’s. If Henry denied himself the comfort of marriage and the pleasures of outdoor sport, he did so entirely on his own authority. He was not under orders from God to wear a harness with blinders.