Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  I was making fresh bread crumbs for the tops of the casseroles by my own whipstitch method, grabbing hunks of crustless bread and rolling them between my palms. Looking down, I saw that half the crumbs had piled up at the edge of the counter and the rest had sprinkled onto the floor. In all conscience I couldn’t use the ones on the floor, although I would have if I’d been cooking for only Henry and me. Hannah had left, but she was preying on my mind, as much as if she were still sitting in the kitchen droning at me. I needed a container for disposing of renegade facts, something roomy and respectable, like the mind-body explanation. Suppose the wounds were a hysterical reaction to the horror of the nightmare, the psyche seeking to escape by bursting through the skin? If the cuts were nothing more than dream stigmata, there was no need to imagine an outside agent or evildoer.

  What sort of agent? In those days I was not a particularly imaginative person. I thought shadows were made by solid objects intercepting the light. The play of light and shadow over surfaces enhanced the beauty of things. I failed to observe that light and shadow were well-matched antagonists. I never considered that shaded areas might be doors to the underworld, through which legions of the unbodied slipped in and out at pleasure. As far as I knew then, there was no underworld, or if there were, it was wholly housed in the unconscious.

  My volunteer ladies were arriving and I hadn’t even started on the compotes. Mariette Roque could easily plump the dried fruit in boiling water, and Ruth was equal to the task of making a light syrup flavored with cinnamon. I would tie an apron on Adele Manning and set her to washing pots and pans, even though she did let the water run continuously. It was best to give Adele a simple task, since she could keep her mind on only one thing at a time. I had made a brief attempt to discourage her from serving on the supper committee, but it was always a bad idea to look a gift volunteer in the mouth.

  I heard car doors slamming and the sound of voices. I went to the window. Naturally they had all arrived at once in separate cars, in spite of the gas shortage. Mariette Roque wore no hat, coat, or gloves. She never did, even when she was working outside or in an unheated barn. Her face was roughened and cracked from the cold the same way a sailor’s is weathered by the sun and wind. Ruth was muffled up to her nose in her down coat and six-foot scarf. Down coats flattered no one, especially Ruth, who had short legs, a thick waist, and an overhanging bosom. Although Easter was on the late side this year, we were having a cold snap, which might very well put an end to Henry’s plan for holding part of the vigil service outdoors around a bonfire.

  At odds with the weather whatever the time of year, Adele followed Mariette and Ruth wearing a purple cotton skirt, a blouse with billowing sleeves (soon to be soaked in dish water), a black cloak cut from a limp, unseasonable fabric like silk or rayon velvet, and a pastel knitted cap with earflaps. On warm days you might find her sporting construction worker’s boots and a tweed vest. She was twenty-six years old and had come of age in the 1960s, when fashion was taken out of the hands of the special interests and given back to the people.

  With her pale, oval, eyebrowless face set on a swan’s neck, her slanted eyes, high forehead, and fair hair skinned up and knotted at the crown, Adele was the image, in repose, of some late medieval princess—Henry the Fifth’s fair Katharine of France. In fact, she was the daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter of Episcopal parsons. Typing and filing for the Reverend Henry Lieber, she was, in a way, going into the family business, from which women would be excluded for a number of years to come. We were living in unstable times for the younger generation. Adele’s arrangements with Henry were changeable also. She settled down to work for three or four weeks at a time and then was apt to take off for a week or so, seized by some enthusiasm—a workshop, a seminar, a marathon retreat weekend that promised to reveal the secret of life. When she was in harness, Adele was so good she read Henry’s psychology and theology journals and wrote abstracts of the articles so Henry could decide which ones he could skip, without having to plow through all of them. Adele was able to make peace between Michel Roque and Hubby Drago, vestrymen who were always squabbling about how to invest the church’s tithes and pittances; and she had come up with more than one idea for a sermon. She had trained the ladies of the altar guild to funnel all requests for Henry through her. Henry remarked that Adele had been sent to him as a form of spiritual discipline, a constantly renewed reminder that all good things must come to an end. The Lord giveth a perfect secretary, and the Lord taketh her away again.

  During one of Adele’s “sabbaticals” from Henry’s service, she had spent two weeks on an estate in the Catskills, sitting at the feet of a wrinkled Indian guru, Sri Bandha, about whom no harm was known. Adele was a seeker as much as a nonconformist. Her generous nature embraced many people, and some of these people had odd beliefs. She, in turn, would want to broadcast the word about her latest inspiration. I have many little gifts that provide a record of Adele’s experiments—a square of red silk in which to wrap my tarot deck (always supposing I owned one), a ceramic statuette of the goddess Isis from a museum gift shop, a tape recording of the marriage rites of the Nemo tribesmen of West Africa, a packet of dried mushrooms I keep meaning to throw out, since I’ve forgotten whether they’re culinary or hallucinatory.

  When she first arrived, fresh from a summer job at Stanek’s in Portland, the region’s occult bookstore, Adele asked my advice about putting in a garden on the sunny side of the Bissell garage, over which she was living. She had found a book or a pamphlet called Floral Therapy, and she wanted to grow flowers and extract the flower essences for her personal pharmacy. “Apparently what I need, Mrs. Lieber, Cora, is something called ‘mugwort.’ Is that easy to grow?” “It grows like a weed,” I said. “What does it do for you?” Adele picked up the booklet, which at that time was always on her person, and began reading: “O.K. It gives you ‘greater psychic sensitivity in crossing the spiritual threshold, especially during sleep.’” I asked her to translate, and she said it meant she would have more coherent dreams instead of baffling fragments.

  The rest of the flowers on her list were hardy in New England: pink yarrow for emotional clarity, iris for opening the soul life, Shasta daisy for archetypal understanding, black-eyed Susan to cure self-blame and self-censorship, phlox for distraction. I told her I thought she was a wonderful person and why did she go in for all this fiddling and fine tuning? “I wouldn’t want to be a priest,” she blurted out. “Even if I could. You don’t have to be a priest to see God.” That was her intention. She was making herself ready. She wanted to be worthy of seeing a vision, while some fully accredited male cleric was bypassed in her favor. I asked her how she could be sure, when the time came, that it was God she was seeing. “At this point I don’t know that it matters. I don’t care if it’s a man from Mars. I’d settle for anything out of the ordinary.”

  I watched by the window, waiting until my volunteers started coming up the path before I opened the door and let in the cold air. They were still standing in the driveway, listening, as Adele unfolded a tale. I could see her only from behind, but she was making a production of it, flapping her arms, looking like an animated clothesline. She was almost six feet tall, as tall as any man who was privileged to take holy orders. When she was growing up, her height had embarrassed her and made her awkward. I smiled to think of Adele at the Easter Vigil supper, carrying one of those hotel dining-room trays large enough to hold thirty dessert dishes. As she moved back and forth between the tables, every diner in the room would be keeping an eye on her inadvertently. Adele had never actually dropped anything while she was waiting on table, but her saves and near-misses were heart-stopping.

  My ladies broke out of their huddle and started up the walkway. The walk concealed a triple hazard: wet moss, patches of black ice, and bricks heaved askew by past frosts. Adele slipped only once and righted herself by grabbing Mariette’s shoulder. I came out to greet them. I said, “When you got here you were five minutes early.�
� Mariette kissed me on the cheek. “Adele was telling us about a nightmare.” “I hate hearing about people’s dreams,” said Ruth, “but this one was as good as a ghost story.”

  “There was someone in my room,” said Adele, breathless and starry-eyed. “I heard it coming up the stairs, swish, swish, swish, what a funny sound, like a dust mop. I knew it was there across the room. I could hear it breathing. I heard it all night. It was strange for a dream. I could see every part of the room the way it is in real life.” Adele hugged me strenuously. “I know I was probably asleep. But what if I wasn’t? Wouldn’t that be something?” I think she expected to be congratulated. She was hungry for manifestations, if not full-scale miracles; and she needed the support of her cheering section. I got her inside along with the other two and showed them where to put their coats. I deflected the conversation away from nightmares by offering to make a sandwich for anyone who hadn’t eaten and asking if they wanted coffee or a glass of raw milk from Arnold Crowley’s cows.

  I was sick of dreams for one day. I was tired of reassuring fanatical dreamers that I believed what they said, every word of it. I did pause to note that two women in one night, living less than five miles apart, had had dreams with very similar motifs: the “whooshing” or “swishing” sound, the presence in the room, the uncertainty as to whether they were asleep or awake. Since I was a nondreamer, I knew little about dream symbolism except that flying was supposed to mean orgasm and empty boxes, suitcases, or trunks stood for the uterus. Perhaps it was as common to dream about a specter swooshing into your bedroom as it was to dream about finding yourself in a public place with few or no clothes on. In my opinion, there was nothing particularly symbolic about these dreams. Neither Hannah nor Adele had a current sexual partner or even an admirer. If I had been endowed with foresight instead of the useless hindsight that burdens me now, I would have taken the time to question Adele meticulously.

  And what could I have done with any stray bits of lore I gleaned? Appointed a round-the-clock watch on her? That afternoon my perspective was typically feminine and mole-eyed, close to the ground. I looked no further than my kitchen. All I could see were mounds of vegetables wilting on the counter, piles of cheese losing moisture, pans of white sauce clotting on the stove—all these elements needing, while life was still in them, to be blended and changed by the transforming power of fire. My foresight extended only as far as the lodge at Violette Brook Campgrounds, an oversized shed with a wall of windows facing away from the road toward the woods, that shed full of expectant people, waiting for the dawn of Easter Sunday, whose stomachs would be filled and palates charmed by dishes of my own concoction. Cooking was the most esoteric discipline I practiced or believed in. Jesus Christ said, “Take no thought for what you shall eat or what you shall drink,” but it was not his heavenly father who kept him and his disciples from starving on their lifelong road tour. It was the Marthas like me who came out of their houses to wait on the dusty performers and lead them to the table.

  PART IV

  Christ Beneath Us

  Chapter Ten

  In the middle of April 1974, Dry Falls had an August heat wave. It began the day after Easter and ended ten days later on the feast of the hermit saint Declan, who kept poisonous snakes as pets and was able to read men’s minds. The weather systems that moved across the rest of Maine, bringing cool, sunny days, chilly nights, and regular rainfall, bypassed our eastern section of Cumberland County. This localized hot spell, with temperatures in the high eighties, went totally unreported on radio and television. For ten days and nights Dry Falls slipped through the nets of the weathermen. According to their maps, we showed daytime lows of 40 and highs of 54. At first no one bothered about the discrepancy, although Ralph Hiram called the Portland University classical music station to complain. Everyone expects the weather report to be inaccurate.

  I had to put shade netting over the seedlings in the kitchen garden, the cool weather crops—lettuces, spinach, and peas. They drooped and died and I reseeded them when the climate returned to normal. Henry started to sand and paint the wrought-iron garden furniture, a task he usually performed a month later. I outlined a column on various ways to brew iced tea (steeped in the sun, steeped in cold water in the fridge overnight, steeped in boiling water with the addition of raspberries) until I realized my topic was premature. Most of my readers were still wearing coats and sweaters.

  Unless they were farmers or gardeners, my fellow townspeople seemed to believe that hot, dry weather was unconditionally good and cold or wet weather evil. They were especially overjoyed when temperatures turned warm out of season or in time for a weekend. All over Dry Falls people were congratulating one another, taking our heat wave as evidence that Nature had lost this particular round and Humanity had won it.

  There were dissenters, of course. On the fifth day, a Friday, I had occasion to go to St. Anthony’s around noontime. Bishop Hollins had called, asking Henry to take over Dean Cortesi’s guided tour of English cathedrals, scheduled to leave June first, because Cortesi had broken a leg and would still be on crutches. The Bishop always wanted a same-day (if possible, a same-minute) answer. I stepped into the nave, looking for Henry, and there was my mother kneeling in the first row of pews and Arnold Crowley seated at the back with his head bowed, since his knees gave him trouble. They were praying for rain—at least Emily confessed to it later.

  All the hurtful years with my father had never driven her to church, nor had a lifetime of countless other barometric hardships—late frosts, premature thaws, droughts, nor’easters. What was different about this spot of eighty-seven-degree weather with summer just six weeks away? It was happening in the spring, after all, not in January, the stronghold of winter. Emily had always relished all weather, even when it brought some devastation to her garden.

  When a squall was brewing, I have seen Emily take a chair to the window and sit there, watching until it blew itself out. It was a form of entertainment for her. The storms she liked best were the violent ones, the ones that would be suppressed if they were cop shows on television. If it was merely pelting rain instead of threatening to tear the roof off, Emily often went out in it, hooded and caped if it was cold, bareheaded and unprotected in summer. She would stand there way past the saturation point, until her clothes and pores could not absorb another drop and she was streaming with water like a fountain figure. She took us out with her when we were little, holding us by the hand, but we soon grew restless and ran back indoors. Emily stood too long in one spot and made us observe complete silence. Her behavior never seemed odd to me until Mrs. Smalley happened to witness one of these drenchings and expressed concern for Emily’s health, when it was clear from her tone that it was Emily’s mind she was worried about.

  Emily passed on to me her love of the changing seasons and to Hannah her ability to take the weather one day at a time. Hannah never learned to love weather in all its variety, but she was, unlike me, inured to it. To her, it was usually a negative presence, an obstacle or problem, causing paint to dry too fast or too slowly, tools to rust, boards to split, or an artist’s fingers to become numb and clumsy. My sister carried on in spite of the weather, and developed a remarkable tolerance for physical discomfort. I welcomed change, that stately progress of one season to another, birth to death to rebirth, in a timely, orderly round, but I hated deviations from that round. I hated meteorological events that were out of order, unless they were provided for by long-established tradition, like Indian summer or the January thaw. When it hailed in July or snowed in mid-September, I was disturbed unreasonably, and most of all when it grew hot in the colder months, since I was among those who believed the world would end in fire. Disorderly weather seemed to me to be a sign of some calamity approaching. It meant the universe was out of kilter and our earthly habitation with it.

  I followed Emily home from church and let myself in without knocking. She was already in the kitchen, cutting up some store-bought broccoli to cook in the steamer and eat with
lemon juice and margarine. I knew because I had seen it so often—she would steam the broccoli for twenty-five minutes, until it was khaki-colored and waterlogged. It was a great mystery to me that a woman whose own garden produced such abundant, unblemished vegetables would consistently overcook them and anoint them with a tasteless butter substitute. She asked if I would stay to share her lunch, and I could truthfully say that I was meeting Sally Bissell at Ernie’s in the village.

  When I saw how Emily looked, gray and puffy, pushing up her spectacles to dab at her eyes, I felt a pang of worry. I hoped that she was only fatigued from sleeping badly on these hot nights, or that something in the heavy, unmoving air might have revived her allergies. I was still childish enough to want her unimpaired, sound and competent, in good working order like the natural cycle of the seasons. Some part of me imagined that my mother’s demise would render the earth sterile and upset the balance of things. We are so primitive with regard to our parents. We cannot help making gods of them.