by Avery Corman
“I don’t speak for the entire, worldwide church. I can give you a sense of some of the current thinking around here, in this archdiocese. Right now, I’m what you might call our spokesperson on church matters. So I can say to you we’ve gone up and down on the subject of possession. For a long time we didn’t have anyone officially appointed as an exorcist. And we still don’t do many exorcisms hereabouts, usually under extreme circumstances, when all traditional methods have been exhausted.”
“Could you give me a number, per year?”
“I’ve heard a hundred or so a year within the American Catholic Church bandied about, but that’s from writers such as yourself. I don’t have a number like that based on my conversations with people. In our archdiocese, which is Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island, and some counties outside the city, a handful, less than a handful. Of course, if you go outside the Catholic Church, to the Protestant deliverance ministries of which there are hundreds, there are probably thousands of exorcisms per year. How many of those people we in the Catholic Church would categorize as possessed is another matter. I don’t know where you are in your research. You do understand the distinctions in possession?”
This seemed like a test question. She felt he was entitled to assess his audience and she answered, “Demonic possession, full-scale possession, is usually defined as a person taken over completely by Satan or one of Satan’s demons. The person no longer really functions as himself and is more of a vessel, an instrument of Satan. While a demonic oppression is more common, where the person is infected by the demon, but not taken over completely and the victim still functions as a person.”
“I would give you an A on that,” he said, confirming for her that he was administering a little quiz.
“Of course, there’s another distinction,” she said, “the fundamental one: Whether or not it ever really happens.”
“That’s why we’re conservative here. In the deliverance ministries, when you read about some of the exorcisms they perform, I’d have to say the problems can be explained more easily by psychological factors than by invoking the demonic. I read your article, by the way. Very good.”
“Thank you.”
“What you said about self-help with Satan as a hook is relevant. I think sometimes beyond this archdiocese, beyond Catholicism, so-called demons are exorcised in what is closer to self-actualization, human potential movement kinds of things, with Satan as a hook, as you put it, than it is to religious belief. Depressed? It’s demonic. Do an exorcism. And for many people it works. I’d hazard they never were demonically possessed or demonically obsessed as I understand the terms. Of course, if someone thinks they’re possessed that doesn’t mean they’re trying to pull off a hoax.”
He was so natural in his manner, direct, Ronnie made a fundamental error, misreading him as though she, as a nonbeliever, was in the room with another nonbeliever, ignoring his collar and the context of the conversation, that they were in a church office and he was an official of the church. And it was then he surprised her.
“But there are the times when a person is possessed.”
She was so caught off guard she said, “I beg your pardon?”
“The rare, true possession. The Devil is an awesome thing. I know how he works. With the full force of his evil.”
“You believe there are possessions that are Satan’s work?”
“Definitely. And as you write your book, I would be so bold to suggest you never become so embracing of rational explanations that you fail to recognize that for those unfortunate to be chosen by the Devil, he is a fallen angel, of higher intelligence and higher will than mortal man. To be afflicted by the Devil is a dreadful affliction. It takes a great purity of faith by an exorcist to rid a person of his terrible power.”
Ronnie asked about his direct experiences with exorcisms and he was vague, suggesting that any time it became known, “in a knee-jerk response, the people claiming to be possessed come out of the woodwork.”
Lingering for her on the way home was the pure belief he expressed. She felt it was unprofessional on her part to have assumed his beliefs were hers. He was someone who could say to her sincerely, openly, “The Devil is an awesome thing. I know how he works.”
She was in a hall of mirrors in an amusement park fun house. Her parents were there with her in the fractured reflections and then the image changed, she was an adult, and they were gone, no one else was there, and she was frightened. The expression she saw on her face in the reflection was fear, and she turned to leave, but she was lost, blocked by mirrors, and then coming into focus, in multiple images on all sides of her—front, left, right, everywhere she turned—was Satan, the dark angel with human features and lascivious lips, smiling, patronizing. The mirrors broke, shattered glass, and as she ran, new unbroken mirrors formed a tunnel, she ran through the tunnel, the Satan multiple images continued along the tunnel, moving with her as quickly as she ran, and she saw dim light at the end. She burst out into a street, it was night, the light was from a lamppost, and leaning against the lamppost, smiling, with an expression that said to her, Run, but you won’t get away, was Satan, the last image when she awoke.
Her dream had movie qualities, an element of cinematography to it, and camera angles, as she later explained to Kaufman, Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, and the therapist offered that people sometimes do copy movie techniques in dreams, that movies are dreamlike in the first place, in the way they reorder reality, and dreams can reflect movies we have seen.
“There’s a new level here that interests me,” Kaufman said. “Not Satan, he’s a familiar player in your dreams and not the broken glass, also familiar. Your father and mother together. Is it possible, Veronica, that with all the other guilt you take on yourself, that you also take on survivor guilt, they’re gone and you remain?”
“I never thought of it.”
“Wouldn’t seem likely, would it, the way you’ve described your relationship, that you’d put your father in the same frame as your mother? He was always distant, from eleven when your mother died, to the day you went off to college?”
“Pretty much.”
“Did you eat separately at dinner?”
“We ate together. He’d call from work to pick up food if we needed it and usually he cooked something, short-order things, or I did when I was an older teenager.”
“And you ate together and it was then in the evening that he would withdraw?”
“Pretty much.”
“So your father sat down with you for dinner every night?”
“I suppose he did.”
“And weekends you said sometimes he would take you to the movies.”
“When I was younger.”
“And it stopped when?”
“Sixteen or so, when I started seriously hanging out with friends.”
“Did he ever take you ice skating or roller skating or museums or—”
“Baseball games. He took me to some baseball games, and the other things, too.”
“Maybe he wasn’t such an absent father. Maybe he was a man who couldn’t cope with the role he was cast into, and he managed as well as he could, given his limitations. And so, he has a part of your heart, too, Ronnie, and you miss him, too, and you feel guilty that you’re here, and he’s not, and for the sadness you feel you created in his life that became such a burden for him. You know your mother loved you, you feel it. May not be such a bad thing for you to know, and my guess is it’s true, that your father loved you, too. And he didn’t blame you for your mother’s death. His grief was profound and ultimately it overwhelmed him, but you were his little girl and he was trying.”
Ronnie sat for a few moments, reflective.
“Possibly,” she said, softly.
“I’ll take ‘possibly,’” Kaufman said.
Richard returned to New York, Nancy was with Bob, and to fulfill a fantasy of hers, they made love in Ronnie’s bed, in the apartment, Ronnie wanting the feeling that he was there with
her in the place where she lived, slept, so she could feel the added intimacy. She thought about her performance. She believed by the very nature of their sex together she was getting better at it and that she fulfilled him. She couldn’t imagine how she might compare with some of his other women—she assumed there had to be others as he made his rounds, German actresses, Swedish nurses, her fantasies about his sex life—but she was mainly comparing herself to herself and decided that he was with her, he returned to her, he must have thought she was worth it, and if it came to pass that he did limit his travel it might begin looking like a genuine New York affair, after all.
Richard told her they were invited to dinner at Antoine Burris’s apartment and Ronnie was very interested to go, an opportunity to observe some aspect of Richard’s private life. They went on a Saturday night, Ronnie wearing a new black dress, Richard picking her up in a taxicab, in his ever-constant blazer, jeans, and a white silk shirt this time, dress-up for Saturday night.
Burris lived on West Twelfth Street in a converted factory building, the apartment overlooking the Hudson River, the main living room/dining room area filled with books, outdoing even Richard’s display.
“Tremendous,” Ronnie said.
“I’m a collector,” Burris responded. “I’m also compulsive, a deadly combination.”
He introduced her to a woman he described as “my lady friend,” Olga Sirvaya, six feet two, long black hair, pale white skin, hazel eyes, out of the pages of Vogue, wearing a skintight white dress.
“That dress,” Ronnie whispered to Richard. “It’s so tight, I’d say it was designed for her to ride the Tour de France.”
“Olga is a model.”
“No kidding. If I stand next to her I don’t think we look like we’re in the same species.”
Olga barely spoke. She ate sparingly, a dinner of beef curry, prepared in the kitchen and then served by two elderly ladies in white server’s outfits. The dinner conversation at first was dominated by Richard’s recent trip and the feasibility of the Swedish behavioral scientist’s findings, that there is a “joiner gene” that impels certain people to habituate toward groups, and in its extreme, to join cults. Her publisher then asked about the progress of the book and Ronnie gave a positive account of the work thus far. Knowing it would be of interest, she reported on her interview with Father McElene and the crystal surety of his beliefs.
They talked about faith among the clergy, to what extent, in their bones, modern-day clergymen still believed in the eternal struggle between God and Satan. The discussion shifted to Richard doing the book on satanic ritual abuse. The subject, which included satanic cult members possibly abducting children, with some accounts supposedly extracted from recovered memory, was fascinating to Ronnie, although it did not seem to register with Olga, who sat silently, bored and thin.
Ronnie considered the evening a great time. Michael was erudite, more so than anyone who preceded him, and he could have handled himself in the room, but it would have been as an observer. These men were right on good and evil, human behavior, satanic influences—the entire intellectual aspect of being with Richard that led her to sign on originally.
They went back to his place this time. He would be away about a week, research for the book. He needed to see a satanic cult in operation in Germantown, Maryland. The leader was ill and retiring, he had been in business for thirty years, and this was Richard’s last chance to observe the Family of the Fallen Angel and talk to its main person.
“Looks like I very well may be around come the fall. You’ll get bored with me.”
“Bored is Olga. I’d have a way to go.”
Ronnie rewrote the last paragraph she was working on, put her feet up on her desk, thinking about the material, whether to include her personal reaction to Father McElene’s remarks, which was a larger concern; how much of herself to insert into the book or to keep it all detached third person. She originally assumed a traditional third-person style was the way the book should be written and was now not so certain, a major structural decision. She wouldn’t solve it immediately and thought she might play with a portion of the text to see how it read. Nancy came home from the office.
“So?”
“An excellent evening.”
“Bet your Richard was nicer to his friends than he was to yours.”
“He was. Except with Antoine Burris’ date, it wouldn’t have mattered. She was barely listening. Olga, the model from outer space. The guys were high octane, though, like talk show guests on some quirky religious channel.”
Nancy was distracted. In the wastepaper basket next to Ronnie’s desk were pages Ronnie had printed out and then doodled on. Nancy removed a page from the basket, her eyes enlarging. On the top of the page was a drawing of Satan, vengeful, threatening, and along the sides of the page were his minions, demons ecstatic-looking in their evil, the drawings exquisitely rendered, malevolently powerful.
“This is unbelievable.” She held the page up for Ronnie. “I didn’t know you could draw like this.”
“I can’t,” she said, a headache suddenly rushing in.
“Did you copy it from a book?”
“I wouldn’t’ve been able to, nothing like that,” as she looked at it, bewildered, pressing her forehead for the pain. “I don’t remember doing it at all.”
12
SHE WAS AFRAID TO sleep, fearful the creatures of the page would inhabit her dreams. She and Nancy had settled on an explanation. Similar to the manner in which Ronnie had previously dreamed images from her research, she had somehow created these drawings from what she had seen in the research material or from her own dreams. Ronnie’s problem with the explanation was that never in her life had she exhibited the slightest ability at draftsmanship.
After lying awake for several hours she fell into a sleep of fatigue. In the morning she was relieved, not for the sleep, but because she could not recall her dreams. She was not due to see the therapist for another three days. She didn’t know how she could go that long and left a message on Kaufman’s machine asking if she could come in as soon as possible, that day. Nancy stood by while Ronnie placed the call, unsure if she should even go to work. Ronnie insisted she didn’t need Nancy standing over her and watching her and Nancy, under protest, went to the office. Ronnie sat at her desk, staring at the drawings. She still couldn’t make the connection, when she had done it, how.
She walked over to Broadway to buy a newspaper and the man in the box was in his place. He had disappeared for a while in one of his periodic absences, rather like Richard, she thought. Their last exchanges had been upsetting so she was going to give him a wide berth and walk past him. He noticed her, this man who didn’t respond to anyone, and spoke in a husky voice, “Keep away from me.”
He was in the rear of a television set box and tried to place more distance between them and there wasn’t any room, his back was squeezed against the cardboard.
“What do I mean to you?” she said.
He didn’t respond, within his private madness.
She moved on, feeling as though she could camp outside Kaufman’s office if she didn’t see her right away. She approached the building and became aware of a car cruising alongside her. The car stopped and Detectives Santini and Gomez emerged.
“Ms. Delaney, I see you’re wearing a Yankee hat,” Gomez said. She had popped it on when she was leaving the house.
“What?”
His voice was distant, outside her range of concentration.
“I said you’re wearing a Yankee hat.”
It still took a beat for her to concentrate, he was talking to her, talking to her about a hat.
“What of it?”
“You work out, Ms. Delaney?” Gomez said.
“Not really. I jog some. Look, I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
Santini was not fully engaged in his partner’s suspicions and let Gomez continue on his own.
“Sometimes a person’s physical frame doesn’t tell you how strong they
are.”
“Yes? And? You’re a detective. Can’t you detect I’m not in the mood for questions right now?”
“Randall Cummings was murdered, Ms. Delaney,” Gomez said. “You were one of the last people to see him alive. If we’re trying to find the murderer and you think we have to check your mood first, you’re sadly mistaken. Familiar with Mariano Rivera, Ron Guidry?”
“Yes.”
“Both of them, wicked fastballs, nothing you’d take from their physical frames. A person’s size can be misleading. And someone who was harassed, in anger, might find the strength to perform a physical act on the person they thought was harassing them, an act you wouldn’t predict, given their physical frame.” She was overwrought, from everything, tapping her fingers on her side impatiently. “You’re nervous, Ms. Delaney. It isn’t easy living with something you’re holding inside you.”
She carried her cell phone with her and Kaufman hadn’t called. She also left the number for the apartment. She needed to get upstairs to see if there was a message on her machine. She had to get in to see her right away.
“What?”
“I said it isn’t easy living with something you’re holding inside you. Is there something you should be telling us, Ms. Delaney?”
“We’re in different solar systems,” and she walked away from them.
“That was effective,” Santini said as they observed her go into the building.
“Girl is a powder keg.”
“Maybe she figured Cummings was harassing her, and now we are.”
“Was worth a shot. Still is.”
Ronnie placed another call to Kaufman saying it was imperative to see her. She couldn’t work, she watched television, cable news, and finally a few minutes before 10:00 A.M. the phone rang.
“Hello.”
“Veronica, it’s Dr. Kaufman. What seems to be the trouble?”
“I can’t tell you on the phone. Can I come in and see you? It’s extremely urgent.”
“I’ll cancel a lunch. Come to my office at one.”
Ronnie tried an experiment, sitting at her computer, surfing the Net, checking herself periodically. Did she go into a cloud, do another set of drawings unconsciously? She did not. The slow morning passed and she placed the sheet of paper with the drawings in an envelope and headed for Kaufman’s office.
