Incubus

by Ann Arensberg

  I hated these subjective reports. Even now, as a psychical researcher, I have trouble with unsubstantiated personal testimony. The notion that a subject can be a reliable witness eluded me then and still eludes me, in spite of my later tribulations. There were two English ladies who visited Versailles in the early 1900s. They heard music, with no musicians in evidence, and saw people dressed in antique costumes, whom they took to be Marie Antoinette and members of her court. Afterward they wrote up their adventure (which makes the most wonderful reading), a case of what we now call “walk-in retrocognition.” It doesn’t take much to shred their story to ribbons. It doesn’t take scientific training, only common sense, once you know that they composed their first account three months after the event and later brought out several other versions, which expanded and improved on the original. The “dreary, unnatural depression” that seized them on their tour of Versailles was evidence of nothing more paranormal than a heavy French lunch. What the ladies probably saw, according to a recently published study, was a dress rehearsal for one of the historical tableaux put on at the Petit Trianon by Count Robert de Montesquiou and his bohemian friends.

  If I had been put in charge of Adele’s case, I would have said she was probably free-associating, constructing a rationale to account for the alleged time lapse, which was causing her intense anxiety. I would have hypothesized a blow to the head (she had fallen when she tripped), which had brought on temporary deafness, then loss of consciousness. I would have had her examined by one, or several, neurologists, to see if my theory squared with their expert opinion. Unlike me, Henry valued personal, anecdotal testimony. He was interested in Adele’s experience as well as her account of it. While I was mainly concerned with whether Adele was believable, Henry saw her as a storehouse of priceless information. Unlike him, my inclination was to sift subjective reports of all their impurities in order to determine what gold might remain, if any. All that was left of Adele’s story after faulty memory, narrative embroidery, and the process of perception itself had been sifted out was her claim that she had “lost” the hours between ten p.m. and midnight.

  Here at the Center for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena, Henry considers our main task to be description, not evaluation. He believes our role should be that of self-effacing scribe and listener. We must be like the tillers of the soil, patient and plodding, gathering a harvest of insignificant details. The keystone of our work is the person who has the experience—the subject, the participant, the “experient” (to use the term currently in fashion). The subject is our supreme authority, along with those subjective reports I so mistrusted. There would be no supernatural phenomena without a subject-observer, nor any paranormal experience without an experiencer. Can hauntings go on in houses that are uninhabited? Aren’t Bernadette and Our Lady two halves of a single phenomenon, like Joan of Arc and her voices, or the corn-belt farmer and the flying saucer? Henry finds himself at odds with many investigators in our field, who think that emphasizing personal testimony is either bad science, or sensationalism, or both. This contingent of researchers is apt to leap ahead to theory, preferring abstract speculation to the pedestrian chores of interviewing and data collecting.

  If Adele Manning’s time-lapse case were on our current agenda at the Center, I would have to charge Henry with jumping to conclusions as fast as his opponents do. As soon as Adele had finished telling her story in Tim Webb’s office, I noticed a change in him. Performing the rest of the services, the last of them at six in the morning, on his feet without sleep for twenty-four hours, he had never been more charismatic. Evan McNeil came up to me afterwards and in his forthright way voiced what I was thinking, “Just between us, Cora, your man’s been riding on empty and now the tank’s filling up again.”

  Between the services Henry kept looking in on Adele, offering each time to have someone drive her home. From four-thirty to six-thirty a.m. she was asleep in Tim Webb’s swivel chair, using his bunched-up parka as a pillow. Tim sat on a straight-backed chair in the corner, leafing through a stack of back issues of the Ranger, guarding her rest. During the breaks, Sally and I joined the clean-up committee, helping to scrape plates, rack the rinsed dishes and glasses, pack the leftovers, bag garbage, and load everything into the McNeils’ covered pickup for delivery to the kitchen in St. Anthony’s parish hall. Monday would be time enough to deal with it, since we were already well into Easter Sunday, with three services on the docket for Henry (eight a.m., eleven a.m., and five p.m.) and a choice of three for his parishioners.

  I had some time alone with Henry a little before six. The hem of his cassock was coming unsewn and I wanted to tack it up. I carried needle and thread in my purse for such vestimentary emergencies. To save time I began to hem it with Henry in it, sitting tailor-fashion on the floor while he stood facing away from me.

  “This is ready for the rag bin,” I said. He shifted his weight, interrupting my stitching momentarily. “I wonder what she saw,” he said, “what she’s blocking out.” “What makes you think she saw anything?” “It must have been something tremendous to require drastic measures like amnesia.” “Hold still,” I said, refraining from more pointed comment. “It’s all there in the literature,” he said. “Sensory dislocation. The cessation of sound. ‘The approach of the numinous’ is what Hoskins called it.” “I don’t know what that means,” I said, trying to rethread my needle in the dim lighting. “Oh, yes, you do,” said Henry, “when you’re not trying to get my goat.” “You don’t have enough to go on,” I said, “it’s too soon to be calling it supernatural.” “There is nothing wrong with her hearing.” “You have only her word for it,” I said. “Whose word do I need? She’s the expert. She’s the one who went through it.”

  Henry went on to accuse me, as he still accuses me, of trying to attribute all supernatural events to incorrect perception or defective reasoning. I snipped the end of the thread with my nail scissors. I told him he was married to a lowly worm without wings to soar. Then Haverford Bissell, Senior, rang a bell to call us back to worship, a silver bell borrowed from his own dining room, used by Edie Bissell, when she was still alive, for summoning the maid.

  Chapter Eleven

  After the episode of Easter Eve we tried to keep Adele close to us. By now she was starting to forget whatever it was she couldn’t remember. The intervening weeks had taken the edge off her ordeal. The only residue was an occasional bad dream in which she was paralyzed from the neck down. Otherwise, she had come around to thinking that her experience had been more remarkable than frightening. She talked about it freely and colorfully, as if she were telling a story about someone else. People who wanted to get in to see Henry were so entranced they never noticed how long they’d been kept waiting in the outer office.

  Since Adele worked next door and had lunch with us in the rectory kitchen every day, we began asking her to stay for supper too, and to spend the night, and to give some thought, if she liked the idea, to moving back in with us. When Hannah abandoned the attic, taking her belongings and her vibrations up to the mountain, Mary Fran and I gave the room a good turning-out, washing the floors, walls, windows, and wooden furniture, putting a dash of ammonia in the wash water. I ordered a new mattress for the bed, an expensive and famous brand. Adele had once lived in the attic contentedly for several months, draping the chairs and book cartons with Indian cottons, hanging strings of beads from the sconces and the standing lamp. This time, however, she declined our offer abruptly. I was aware, in any case, that I had invited her as much for our sake as for hers. When a marriage is sexually empty, it helps to fill the house with extra people.

  If Adele did not want to stay with us permanently, she was perfectly happy to let us drag her around with us as if she were a daughter or a younger sister. We took her almost everywhere we went, to the shopping plaza in Windham to stock up on paper goods, to my mother’s on Sunday evenings for vegetable soup and gin rummy, to Walter Emmet’s veranda, where he set up a telescope and showed us how to find the
three bright stars that make up the summer triangle—Altair, Deneb, and Vega. Like the family dog, who hops in the car the minute the door is opened, Adele went along with all our plans. She enjoyed riding in the back seat with her head out the window and the breeze blowing in her face. Riding in the car was the best way to keep cool for all of us. The only breezes blowing at that time were mechanically generated.

  Throughout the month of June 1974, the temperature was always the same, sunrise to sundown, as if the needle on some cosmic thermostat were stuck at an unwavering 87. The skies were still and windless. Perhaps I am exaggerating. There was some fluctuation: at night it might go down to 85 and in the daytime creep up to 90. (After that short-lived heat wave in late April, we had gone back briefly to seasonable conditions, clouds and sun in perpetual competition, with fleeting victories on either side. The weather we were used to in Maine was, above all, variable.) As the days went by and the novelty of constant hot temperatures wore off, the residents of Dry Falls gave in to grumbling and uneasiness. The hot “spell” we were having began to seem permanent, not temporary. Ernie Silver told his captive audience at the lunch counter that it was on account of the government launching rockets and satellites, and Mary Fran Rawls said she heard it was caused by using hairspray. We had to drive only seven miles south to Oak Hill or ten miles north to Bancroft to discover we were living under some kind of climatic glass bell. The rest of the county put on layers of clothing and shed them again several times during the day, shivering or sweltering at the whim of the barometer.

  If heat had been allied to drought, our grumbling would have turned to paranoia, but we had regular periods of rainfall during the month, enough to keep the farmers happy and let our lawns go without watering. These rains were also unusual for our part of the world—teeming downpours, as if a tap had been turned on full force, with the sun shining through the whole time and the cloud disappearing as soon as the tap was turned off—very much like rains in the tropics, or so I was informed by Walter Emmet, who had visited Cuba and the Bahamas. Ruth Hiram called these downpours “waterfalls from the sky” and thought there was something spooky about them, but Ruth needed a bit more local folklore to round out her new anthology and she went looking for it under every rock and toadstool. In Bancroft and Oak Hill and elsewhere in the Lake Sebago region, foul weather ran its course as God and Nature intended: rains threatened before they arrived, darkening the sky; showers lingered after a drenching; and rain clouds took their time scattering.

  When does a heap of earth become a mountain instead of a hill—at a hundred feet? At five hundred? I would have called Hannah’s mountain an oversized hill, but we found it on a topographical map in the town surveyor’s office, where a local cartographer had dubbed it Mt. Pughole. I was in the process of baking sesame wafers, eighteen dozen of them. On the premise that any elevation, including a stepladder, would be cooler than my kitchen, I decided to bake one more batch and then take off for higher ground. Every year I did the canapés for the Burridge Academy graduation, for which I was paid the equivalent of four newspaper columns. Burridge graduation fell very late, around the summer solstice, since the girls were required to take a job off campus during January and February.

  I went over to the parish house to collect Adele—an automatic reflex by now—and found she had nothing to do for the rest of the afternoon except the place cards for a dinner honoring Haverford Bissell Sr.’s retirement from the vestry, which she was writing out in elegant cursive script. Henry was in Portland for a meeting of the diocesan ethics committee, so we left Casco Answering Service to pick up the telephone. I was carrying towels, bathing suits, and a thermos jug of iced tea flavored with lavender. Adele laughed at me. “Why did you bring suits?” she asked. “Are you still modest in front of your big sister?”

  Adele prided herself on her easygoing attitude toward nudity, but Adele was not a native of Maine. Mainers are not prudish; they are chilly, which may appear to be the same thing, a set of reflexes that resemble inhibition or bodily shame. When you walk on Maine’s beaches, you have no need to avert your eyes in case nude sunbathers have taken refuge behind the dunes. A glimpse of nudity in the open would be as rare as the sighting of a moose on the Dry Falls common. Sunbathing is a meditative pursuit requiring total relaxation. Just as you cannot relax while sand flies are stinging you, you cannot tan naked in the sun if the sun keeps going into hiding. In Maine the sun clouds over so often that nude sunbathers would be constantly jerking upright, snatching towels or robes to cover their gooseflesh, shivering until the sun reappeared, hoping there might be some truth to the notion that you can burn just as quickly on an overcast day as on a clear day.

  The tribesmen of Central Africa are more self-assured with their clothes off; but northern people lost a measure of confidence with every item they removed. Nakedness left us exposed to the elements and to the wrath of God, who was reminded by the sight of our worm-white bodies how He had driven us from the gardens of Paradise for our disobedience. What would happen if natives of Maine liked having their clothes off? I wondered if Dry Falls would prove to be a test case, now that we were three weeks into a spell of hot temperatures and our climate was beginning, in its own small way, to approximate conditions in Zambia and Zaire.

  Already there were signs that the heat was an agent of change. There was no real need for Jimmy Hawes to be pumping gas bare-chested, runnels of sweat crisscrossing his torso, blue jeans held up by pure willpower, like the juvenile lead in a Tennessee Williams play. I have never seen the common get so much traffic, as if everyone who lived in town had moved outdoors. Young mothers loaded strollers with diaper bags, baskets of food, and babies, a household on wheels, headed for the greensward each morning, and pitched camp until after sunset. Employers and employees took their lunch hour under the trees, loosening collar buttons, rolling up shirt sleeves, lifting skirts to mid-thigh or higher, knotting blouses or jerseys over the sternum, revealing the midriff. In an effort to serve his country during the ongoing energy crisis, Hiram Baldwin at Baldwin’s Hardware turned off the air conditioners and let his salesclerks come to work in shorts and sleeveless shirts. Hiram himself, a man over sixty, went only so far as to leave off his jacket, but I’m sure he winked at me as I was accepting change from a ten-dollar bill for a package of large staples, and Sally said he had winked at her too.

  If there is anything Mainers are not, it is touchers. Yet I saw my neighbors putting their hands on one another, patting a shoulder, a forearm, a cheek; ruffling a head of hair, tweaking a ponytail; exchanging kisses with “Hello” and “Goodbye,” like city people and foreigners. We northern New Englanders used to make fun of this kind of behavior. We called it “southern.” In my own family, the term was stretched to include bad taste of any kind, as in “did you notice that southern cozy on the toaster/beading on the bridesmaids’ dresses?” No one had appointed me official town censor, nor did I want the job. I was not being censorious, although I preferred a decent reticence in public interaction. I was only stating the facts when I told Henry that if the heat went on much longer it would be the end of civilization as we knew it.

  On top of Mt. Pughole a little breeze was stirring, but the current was warmer, instead of cooler, than the surrounding air. I had honked the horn as we entered the spacious clearing, but Hannah was not one to dash out and wave you a joyous welcome. We were climbing the porch steps when she appeared at an open window. “Oh, good,” she said. “You can help me do some sandpapering.” We told her we had come to laze around and we expected her to join us. Hannah liked Adele. She was amused by the way her parts didn’t work together. We sat on the porch and sipped iced tea. Adele and I passed the thermos cup back and forth; Hannah drank from the bottle. “You didn’t bring food,” said my sister.

  Although Adele intended to sunbathe without her clothes on, she undressed inside the cabin and wrapped a beach towel around her, Tahitian-style. We watched her as she walked down across the clearing, stepping as high as a stork over
thick tufts of grass that might have tripped her, clutching her towel in front, carrying her gear in a paper sack, impairing her already precarious balance by denying herself the use of both hands. “Suspenseful, isn’t it?” said Hannah. “I can hardly bear to watch,” I said. “Oops,” said Hannah, “there she goes again.”

  Near the edge of the woods, Adele began circling the grass, looking for a place to lie down. When she found the right spot, she groomed it carefully, picking up twigs and stones and throwing them away, flattening the long grass with her feet before taking off her towel and spreading it on the ground. Naked in the sunlight, she stamped back and forth on the towel, flattening the grass further. “I wish I could draw,” said Hannah, appraising Adele’s small, high breasts and sloping hips. “I wish I could catch that Botticelli/scarecrow quality.” It was true that my sister could carve wood and model in wax and clay, but her drawings on paper were formal and lifeless. Naturally, she wanted to draw in direct proportion to her lack of talent for it, just as great comedians yearn to play tragedy, and popular novelists write poetry in secret. Adele’s bosom and bottom had no aesthetic significance for me. All I saw was youth and smoothness—as well as bad posture, which would take its toll in ten years or so.