Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  It took all day to catch up with Henry, who had pastoral duties at the Poland Community for Mental Illness. Schizophrenics liked to talk to a counselor who wore a collar, since so often their poor heads were bursting with religious images. The brains of these patients lacked some kind of protective membrane, like clairvoyants who are flooded by impressions and unable to repel them. They were restful patients, Henry told me, when I asked him how he worked with them. “There’s not much you can do,” he said, “except for listening and keeping them company.” Late that afternoon I lured Henry to the fireside with jasmine tea and ginger shortbread. He compared his schizophrenics to the girls he had delivered to Myra Littlefield.

  “Sometimes they hit on a drug that works wonders for one of them, keeps him on an even keel for a period of years. They call it a ‘cure’ when the hallucinations stop. I’ve seen some of these cures. They come back to Poland as outpatients. They look lost—you know, bereft. They keep their heads cocked a little to one side, as if they were trying to hear something. In a couple of years, those two kids will have that same lost look.”

  “Do you want them to be frightened for the rest of their lives?” I asked.

  “I want them to remember that something remarkable happened. Keep faith with it, not erase it. To take a little pride in being the one it happened to.”

  “Henry,” I reminded him, “I’m waiting to hear what did happen.”

  It startled Henry to be wrested away from his speculations. He was caught up in the meaning of events, which the facts concealed. The truth was like a nutmeat protected by a tough shell of fact; and his job was to smash the resistant outer covering. I tended to think that the facts were truth enough, and that they took unkindly to human prying and tampering. It was one of the differences between us, between most men and women. I can’t say it caused trouble, but it was a source of exasperation, especially on Henry’s part. When he told me a story, I made him repeat himself. I pinned him down. When he baptized an infant, I asked him to describe the christening dress. A christening ceremony was short and straightforward, unless the godmother dropped the baby, but the Burridge girls’ scare in the churchyard was strange and complex, full of details that tantalized me. At least he had written them down, the disreputable facts. He left me to read them while he went to take the evening prayer service. His notes were abbreviated and roundabout, dashed off on the backs of Xerox copies of a budget he had submitted to the diocese.

  4/4/74. St. Wilfred destroyed the early Celtic church, sold it out to Rome. Humanity divorced from nature from that point on. I’m employed by a crippled institution. Kendrick’s Druids missing from my library. Had my hands on it in early December. Must have lent it to Walter. Is that what the girls saw? Some green man or nature spirit?

  Preposterous story. I’d think they were conning me except they were too distraught. All the trappings of a dime-novel horror story: looming black shape with glaring eyes, “zoo smell,” “growling.” Shape changed size, “high as a tree” → “low as a bush.” Opaque (a “black cloud”). (N.B. Ask M. Little-field what Shakespeare plays the senior class is reading.) Dispute about eyes: Mercy red, Helen yellow. Sequence: (1) smell, (2) growling, (3) sighting of shape. How close? They agreed it came as near as forty feet (twice the length of the living room).

  Shape identified as human, in spite of animal odor, noises, eye color: “An animal would have been less frightening.” Did it threaten them? “It kept moving closer.” What did they mean by human? Formerly human, the spirit of a dead person? A resident of the cemetery? Insisted shape not only human but masculine. Not a ghost, a man, “a real man.” Unshakable conviction on this point. It was a man and he was “real.”

  Pronoun of reference changed from impersonal to personal: “He wanted to rape us.” Raped by a dark cloud, cf. Correggio’s painting of Jupiter appearing to Io. Burridge students steeped in art history and mythology, overemphasis on goddesses. Where do the gods go? Tamped down into the unconscious, waiting to be split off under stress. Neurotic dissociation. I wish I were dealing with anyone but adolescents. Maybe nothing going on here but sexual repression.

  M. less embarrassed than H. by topic of rape. Spoke for both of them, H. nodding, gripping M.’s hand. Why did they think he intended to rape them? M: “We could read his mind.” H: “We could see it happening, like in a movie.”

  Now comes the anomalous detail, the flash of gold in the streambed, the skewed, off-center item that could rescue the tale from convention and/or pathology. M: “There were others.” What they “saw”: other women, hundreds (?) of women, dressed in white, “nightgowns” (grave clothes?), lying still, face upward, on the ground beneath the trees surrounding the churchyard. Had they been/were they being raped? Answer shocked me: “No. Not yet.” They were earmarked for rape, inventoried, stockpiled. “He knows who they are.”

  H. sheet-white, pupils dilated. M. dropped her coffee cup. Remorse: I had pushed them too far. Had to help them close off the experience. What could they have done to gain release from the shape? They brought up the sage and the salt again. (Same little spat: H. blamed M. and vice versa. Normal energy returning.) What could they do to protect themselves in the future? One of their “manuals” said to strew garlic around their bedrooms, take it up and burn it in the morning. Both girls owned gold crosses. Would I bless them? I said yes, if they prepared for confirmation. At this point they started fretting about school, missing classes, facing Miss Littlefield. Drove them back. They seemed relieved to be rid of me.

  N.B. Keep in touch w/Myra. Girls may need counseling.

  I was a teenage girl myself once. I had that advantage over Henry. Polly Ellis and I made a wax doll of our sports teacher, Miss Crocker. We stuck pins in its knees. If she were incapacitated—just a little, not seriously—we reasoned we could get out of gym, which we hated because we were scared of the balance beam. One day Miss Crocker was rushed to the hospital with a burst appendix. We knew we had caused it, although knees and appendixes were unconnected anatomically. We were sick with guilt, sympathetic stomachaches and spiking fevers. We swore off magic for a year, until we fell in love with a pair of brothers. We slept with their pictures under our pillows and always said their names backwards—that is, “Yar” and “Nnelg.”

  Teenagers think the world begins and ends with themselves. In other words, teenagers are religious because their universe is personal. They organize life, which is disorderly, by the use of invocation and ritual, as in “Make him call in the next ten minutes and I will never be mean to my sister” and “I will get good marks if I don’t change my clothes during exam week.” They live at the hub, where everything is freighted with meaning. They see signs and correspondences everywhere—in the phases of the moon, the wind in the trees, the cries of animals, common household objects. They grow out of this mystical stage, for the better, although Henry wouldn’t agree with me. Their world widens, grows intricate and unmanageable. Other people enter into it.

  I read and reread Henry’s notes while daylight turned to dusk. There was nothing like a fact in them anywhere, nothing solid to stub your toe on. By the time I was finished I had used up my patience for make-believe. Henry’s “flash of gold,” that palaver about the future rape victims, got high marks for creativity. Fantasy was tiresome. I wouldn’t pay to see it in a theater. If their visions were real, or experienced as real, why didn’t they run for their lives? I heard the church-bell ringing the end of the vesper service. When Henry came home, I’d be busy making bread in the kitchen. With my hands on dough, I was always even-tempered and tactful. I resolved not to ask annoying questions. Although his notes made it clear he was not quite so skeptical as I was, he would never take this brand of moonshine too literally. A man who had heard God’s voice could hardly mistake it for the growling of a specter.

  PART III

  Christ Within Us

  Chapter Seven

  There is nothing unusual about sexual drought in marriage. Every couple goes through such periods. T
hese dry spells may last for weeks or months at a stretch and have nothing to do with the age of either partner. We have little information about the frequency of sex in marriage. When we wed, we expect to have intercourse at least three times a week. If you conducted a survey of sex in long-term relationships, your subjects would assure you that their expectations have been met. Everyone lies about sex when questioned directly. They lie about numbers, duration, and satisfaction. Only a fly on the wall or a camera in the woodwork could expose the truth and rectify the statistics.

  In the majority of cases it is men who lose their sexual appetite. When their natural aggressiveness is blocked in some other quarter, such as work or money-making, their libidinous drives are often dampened accordingly. When this happens, the wife will protest but the husband will deny it. She will nag and prod and worry the subject past bearing. The more she attempts to draw him into a dialogue, the more she is faced with a stricken, mulish silence. During these seasons of indifference every wife feels alone in the universe, as if no other woman had ever been sexually orphaned. Henry and I had been inactive for nearly a year, not a record, by any means, but still in the upper percentiles.

  If I had known from the start how many women were likewise afflicted, the knowledge might perhaps have brought me some measure of comfort. Ironically, these wives began coming to Henry for help. A modern pastor is trained to act as a psychotherapist, to deal with issues far removed from the articles of faith. He learns to listen objectively and compassionately, no matter how embarrassing or close to home the topic. Jane Morse, Sally Bissell, Ruth Hiram, Gail Croft, myself—a meaningful proportion of the wives in our small church membership. Henry told me afterward that it seemed like a new strain of virus. Much later, when I interviewed Clark Harmon, the Congregational minister, he reported the same epidemic with higher figures, since Congregationalists outnumber Episcopalians in New England. We are entitled to presume, on the basis of these sample communities, that the affliction was not limited to churchgoing Protestant matrons. We can estimate that roughly a third of the women in Dry Falls suffered at that time from some degree of sexual deprivation.

  In the animal kingdom spring is the breeding season. On the farms that surrounded us, the females were ready to multiply. That April and May there were signs of disturbance in the reproductive cycle. Our weekly newspaper, the Windham Runner, reported widespread stillbirths and false pregnancies. Out of fifty pregnant dams at Michel Roque’s sheep farm, only nineteen produced a healthy, normal lamb. Monstrous births occurred at the Ashby farm—calves with two heads or with limbs represented by stumps. Septic fever claimed a good number of the Marstons’ nursing sows. Evan McNeil’s prize bitch rejected every pup in her litter.

  Around Easter the Runner printed an alarmist editorial on the subject of the lowest animal birth rate in county history. Questions were raised about improper fermentation of silage, pollution in the ground-water, the competence of local veterinarians, the need for an official inquiry by the state agricultural commissioner. The Runner covered a meeting at the Dry Falls grange hall, where one dairyman stated that his cows had been frightened by something getting into the barn. One night he heard them bellowing and stamping in their stalls. He turned on the lights and found they had kicked out some of the slats. He thought it must have been a weasel or a fox. Michel Roque described a similar incident, but he put it down to a spell of freak weather—thunder and lightning with no rainfall. Will Marston himself, who had a doctorate in animal husbandry from Cornell, said the tragedies were an act of God outside the reach of science.

  Something in our neighborhood was hostile to females of all species, interfering with their natural function. Like their human counterparts, mother cows grieve from lack of fulfillment. They go off their feed or develop patches of eczema. Cows must languish in silence, whereas human females have recourse to psychotherapy, or pastoral counseling as it is called when practiced by a minister like Henry. His appointment book filled up during Lent with the names of married women. Lent is a season when the faithful are bidden to practice self-denial, an odd time for a priest to be dealing with carnal matters. I wasn’t displeased to imagine Henry on the hot seat. His clients would be speaking for me as well as for themselves. He was in a dubious situation, like a hypnotist who smokes treating patients who want to stop smoking. What could Father Lieber say to these unhappy women? Did he tell them, as he often told me, to “give him time”? How did he avoid the pitfalls of countertransference, which meant, as I understood it, seeing my features on their faces? Sexually deprived women are labile: their moods change quickly. By turns, they can be pathetic, shrill, or vengeful. Much later I discovered how Henry preserved his neutrality. He kept a pencil stub in his hand, which he sharpened before each session. Whenever he heard their complaints as attacks on himself, he drove the point of the pencil into his palm. Sometimes he broke the skin, although he kept from wincing. The tiny, dotlike scars took many months to disappear.

  Like any other member of the psychiatric community, pastoral counselors pledge to keep their clients’ secrets. Their vow is respected by judges, lawyers, and policemen, but it rarely holds up under questioning by spouses. Over the years, Henry came to trust my discretion. I never betrayed him, no matter what knowledge I harbored. My behavior toward Eleanor Webb, with whom I served on the library board, did not alter in the slightest after I learned that she’d been caught shoplifting at Woolworth’s in Portland. It was harder with Gail, Ruth, and Sally, who were old friends, although only Sally was a bosom pal (I had known the other two so long that “friend” was the only word for them). Often I was tempted to steer our conversations toward intimate matters. No prompting was necessary. They volunteered the humiliating details. Their disclosures were indelicate, but scrupulous in one particular: by tacit agreement they never mentioned their sessions with Henry. I often wanted to make a meal of it with my kinswomen, to throw my hunk of meat onto the common fire pit, squat down and watch the raw flesh sizzling and separating from the bone. When the impulse to join in became too strong, I developed my own way of keeping faith with my husband and the ethics of his profession. I took a strong mint tablet from a tin I kept in my purse, popped it in my mouth, and sucked on it until my eyes watered.

  Each of our cases was different. Jane and Frank Morse were in their twenties, while Ruth and Ralph Hiram were in their early sixties. Frank Morse was a carpenter and house builder, a feast or famine business. There was an infant in the house and Frank had lost the bid on a colony of lakefront cabins. Ralph Hiram was the bank’s vice president, uneasy about retirement. Sally Bissell’s husband had undergone surgery for cataracts. Gail and Tommy Croft’s daughter had been put on probation in high school for cheating on a test. Each woman claimed to remember a full, rambunctious sex life, although their memories were probably exaggerated, given their current inactivity. My ladylike friends, whose clothes matched their reserved New England manners, began to show an aptitude for pornography, like women in labor who shout foul words no one dreamed they knew the meaning of. It was hard to imagine wispy, runny-eyed Ralph Hiram as having a “big, juicy cock,” or, indeed, any cock at all, except perhaps the kind of generalized nub found on anatomically correct boy dolls. This description fell from the lips of his wife, our head librarian, who read only the classics, by her definition books written before the First World War.

  Sally Bissell, my gardening and cooking buddy, childless like myself, was the president of the Abenaki Association, a private trust that gave money to needy families in our county. Ford (or Haverford) Bissell had no ambitions, or, if he once did, had decided to table them. I thought he was a happy man, managing their large estate on Notched Stick Hill, over five hundred acres of woodlands, leased pastures, ponds, and stocked trout streams. Ford was something of an expert on fly-fishing. He had patented a lure that fish mistook for a damselfly nymph. I learned from Sally one overcast day, while we were trying to come up with a humidity-proof recipe for meringues, that he was also something of an
expert at cunnilingus, which is delicate work, like fly-tying, though not chiefly performed with the fingers. “Yankee men,” said Sally, measuring out the cream of tartar, “are usually squeamish about it.” She gave me a questioning glance, which I evaded by opening a cabinet to get out the cookie sheets. “He can’t come into me,” she said, “but you’d think he could still do that.” “Can’t means won’t,” I retorted. “Are you saying it’s a matter of will? That he could if he wanted to?” “There’s nothing wrong with him,” I said. “His eyes are fine. Laser surgery isn’t painful.” Fortunately, Sally misinterpreted me. She thanked me for taking her side with such loyal vehemence. The weather defeated us that day. The batch of meringues we produced was flat and gummy.

  Like a person who is dying, the female partner in a sexless marriage goes through several phases: self-condemnation, rage, denial (including scheming and “fixing”), and, after a lingering time, acceptance. Self-blame came naturally to most of Henry’s clients, except for Gail, who jumped straight to Phase Two and dug in there. “My breasts sagged after the baby came,” Jane told Henry. “It was late in the day to start painting my face,” said Ruth. Sally ripped up her favorite nightgown, worn smooth and comfortable, full of little holes darned with colored thread. Every contented wife owns a similar nightgown, as much a symbol of emotional security as a costume for sleeping. Before the Dry Falls emergency I slept with no clothes on, but I had other ways of flaunting the stability of my marriage. Perhaps I let my hair go, tied it back too severely, waited too long between washings and cuttings. My mouth went in need of reddening, my lashes of blackening. My fingernails were blunt. My underwear was white and serviceable. The same could be said of all of us. In New England plainness in women was still equated with decency.