The Drowning Girl
Page 27
I have decided not to surrender Too much fun fooling the police
Had my fun at police
Don’t Try to find me.
—catch us if you can
Scattered among these gruesome artifacts of the Black Dahlia murder were an assortment of illustrations that have accompanied variants of the “Little Red Riding Hood” tale over the centuries. Some were in color, others rendered only in shades of gray. Gustave Doré, Fleury François Richard, Walter Crane, and others, many others, but I don’t recall the names and don’t feel like searching through the book for them. They would have only seemed incongruous to someone who was blessedly unaware of Perrault’s agenda. And displayed among the postcard facsimiles and the red-capped girl children were eighteenth-century images of the creature believed to have been responsible for all those attacks in the Margeride Mountains. From my description, it may seem that the installation was busy. Yet somehow, even with so many objects competing for attention, through some acumen on the part of the artist, just the opposite was true. The overall effect was one of emptiness, a bleak space sparsely dotted with the detritus of slaughter and lies and childhood fancy.
But this odd assemblage, all these sundry relics—every bit of it—was only a frame built to mark off Perrault’s own handiwork, the five sculptures he’d fabricated from Eva’s life casts and, presumably, with the aid of the taxidermist acquaintance she’d mentioned to me. The centerpiece of The Voyeur of Utter Destruction and, later on, Werewolf Smile. The desecration made of the body of Elizabeth Short, as it had been discovered in that desolate lot in Leimert Park at about ten thirty a.m. on the morning of January 15, 1947. Here it was, not once, but repeated five times over, arranged in a sort of pentagram or pinwheel formation. The “corpses” were each aligned with their feet towards the wheel’s center. Their toes almost, but not quite, touching. There are twenty or so photographs of this piece in the book, taken from various angles, the sculpture that Perrault labeled simply Phases 1–5. I will not describe it in any exacting detail. I don’t think that I could bear to do that, if only because it would mean opening up Perrault’s book again to be certain I was getting each stage in the transformation exactly right. “It’s not the little things,” Eva once said to me. “It’s what they add up to.” That would have served well as an epigraph to Werewolf Smile. It could have been tucked directly beneath the author’s dedication (as it happens, the actual epigraph is by Man Ray: “I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive”). What I will say is that Phase 1 is an attempt at a straightforward reproduction of the state in which Elizabeth Short’s naked body was discovered. There’s no arguing with the technical brilliance of the work, just as there’s no denying the profanity of the mind who made it. But this is not Elizabeth Short’s body. It is, of course, a mold of Eva’s, subjected to all the ravages visited upon the Black Dahlia’s. The torso has been bisected at the waist with surgical precision, and great care has been taken to depict exposed organs and bone. The severed arms are raised above the head, arranged in a manner that seems anything but haphazard. The legs are splayed to reveal the injuries done to the genitalia. Every wound visible in the crime-scene photos and described in written accounts has been faithfully reproduced in Phase 1. The corners of the mouth have been slashed, almost ear to ear, and there’s Perrault’s “werewolf smile.” Move along now, widdershins about the pinwheel, until we arrive at Phase 5. And here we find the taxidermied carcass of a large coyote that has been subjected to precisely the same mutilations as the body of Elizabeth Short, and the life casts of Eva. Its forelimbs have been arranged above the head, just as the Dahlia’s were, though they never could have been posed that way in life. The beast lies supine, positioned in no way that seems especially natural for a coyote. It was not necessary to slash the corners of the mouth. And as for phases 2 through 4, one need only imagine any lycanthropic metamorphosis, the stepwise shifting from mangled woman to mangled canine, accomplished as any halfway decent horror-movie transmutation.
The face is only recognizable as Eva’s in phases 1 and 2. I suppose I should consider this a mercy.
And at the end (which this will not be, but as another act of mercy, I will pretend it is) one question lingers foremost in my mind. Is this what Eva was seeking all along? Not enlightenment in the tutelage of her bête noire, but this grisly immortality, to be so reduced (or so elevated, depending on one’s opinion of Perrault). To become a surrogate for that kneeling, red-capped girl in Fecunda ratis, and for a woman tortured and murdered decades before Eva was even conceived. To stumble, and descend, and finally lie there on her back, gazing upwards at the pale, jealous moon as the assembled beasts fall on her, and simply do what beasts have always done, and what they evermore will do.
The End
9
There is a very famous poem by Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), “Dover Beach,” that has always been a favorite of mine. I’ve read it aloud to myself many times, delighting in the interplay of words and metaphor. But, until this past week, it has never assumed a personal meaning for me. My own private meaning. It’s only ever been pretty words written in a time when all the world was a different and rapidly changing place:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
I’ve beheld the Sea of Faith, and now I’m left with no choice but to listen closely to the melancholy, long withdrawing roar, which is a siren’s song on a fogbound night when waves pummel the naked shingles of the world.
Imp typed, “I’m free of the phantoms of Perrault and the Black Dahlia and the wolf who cried girl and the November Eva who never was and never came to me. I have locked them inside a story from which they can never escape to do me harm. I’ve exorcised them.”
But I’m not unhaunted. I’ve already written on the permanence of haunting. I wrote, “Once Odysseus heard the sirens, I find it hard to believe he ever could have forgotten their song. He would have always been haunted by it all the rest of his life.”
However, now I think I have crossed a threshold where my ghost story has ceased to be malicious twins. Now it wears a single face.
Imp typed, “This may, at least, make my ghost story, in some sense, comprehensible.”
I have placed one Eva behind me. I have only July, and Caroline and Rosemary, and The Drowning Girl and Phillip George Saltonstall, “The Little Mermaid” and the Siren of Millville. That’s quite enough ghosts for one madwoman.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
I really should be out looking for a new job.
Wandering between two worlds, one dead
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
All is changed utterly, the gyre still widens here in my night of first ages, and, in the end, I am left with a terrible beauty and a slouching beast. The monster is neither shackled nor is she conquered, and I gaze on her monstrous and free. And this, too, as my head races with Matthew Arnold, Yeats, Conrad, races and tangles, all wanting out at once. All wanting to be done writing of July Eva and my mermaid ghost story:
She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,
And over the sand at the sea;
And her eyes are set in a stare;
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-lade
n,
A long, long sigh;
For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden…
It’s been a strange day, but I’m going to try hard to relate it coherently, resorting to the sort of linear narrative that has so often now eluded me. I don’t think in straight lines, neat number lines (0–9,-9–0), once upon a time and happily ever after, A–Z, whatever. But I’m going to try hard this time.
I spent the morning putting in applications at places that weren’t hiring, but would be sooner or later. Bill gave me a good reference, and that surprised me, right? Sure, sure it did. But he said he understood it wasn’t my fault, and he would hire me back if not for the owner, and he didn’t want to see me long unemployed. I filled out applications at Utrecht on Wickenden Street, some other shops on Wickenden, shops on Thayer, at Wayland Square (including the Edge, though I know not one jot about being a barista). Ellen told me I should apply at Cellar Stories, so I did. I would love to work there. I would, though it seems unlikely. Altogether, I filled out fifteen applications. Maybe I’ll be called back for an interview or two.
Abalyn and I arranged to meet at four o’clock p.m. downstairs at the Athenaeum. She said there was something she wanted to look up, which seemed strange to me, as she rarely seems to read anything but her digest-sized volumes of manga (which I confess make no sense to me, and always seemed very silly when I’ve tried to read them). She was seated at one of the long tables across from the tall portrait of George Washington. Her laptop was out and on, and she had her iPod and iPhone. She wasn’t using any of them, but I suspect, for her, they’re like Linus van Pelt’s security blanket. Talismans against the unfriendly, intolerant, misunderstanding world. But she was reading a book. Not a very old book, and she closed it when I spoke to her. She closed it and looked up at me. The cellophane library cover glistened in the sunlight from the windows.
“Any luck with the job hunting?” she asked, and rubbed at her eyes.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe. Probably not.”
I sat down in the chair beside her and dropped my bag to the floor, one of Rosemary Anne’s old shapeless bags. This one was pea-green corduroy.
“What about you? Did you find whatever it was you were looking for?”
She stared at the cover of the book a moment. It wasn’t a very old book, and the cover read The Lemming Cult: The Rise and Fall of the Open Door of Night by William L. West. There was a PhD after the author’s name. I turned away and stared at the shelves, instead. Being faced suddenly, unexpectedly, with this book, this particular book, Abalyn’s discovery, I felt like I’d come suddenly upon a gruesome accident. No, that’s not right. But I don’t want to waste time finding a better analogy.
“I won’t tell you, if you don’t want to hear.”
“I don’t,” I replied, still staring towards a shelf of plays and books on theater. “But what I don’t know is worse than what I do.” The unknown thing under the water, devouring and unseen, versus the banal danger of a hunted great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias, Smith, 1838; Greek, karcharos, meaning jagged, and odous, meaning tooth; kar-KAR-uh-don kar-KAR-ee-us).
“You’re sure?”
“Please,” I said, and maybe I whispered. But, in the library, my voice seemed very loud (even though, as I’ve noted, it can be a very noisy library).
I heard Abalyn open the book, but I didn’t turn back to her. I stared at the tattered spines of antique editions and listened while she quietly read from Chapter 4:
“‘One of the more visible outspoken members of the cult was Eva Canning, a native of Newport, Rhode Island. Canning arrived in California in the late summer of 1981, having received a scholarship to attend UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate, she developed a strong interest in Mediterranean archaeology, and received her BS in anthropology in June 1985, afterwards remaining at Berkeley to work towards a PhD in sociocultural archaeology. During this time, she did fieldwork in Greece, Turkey, and on several Aegean islands. However, one of her two coadvisers was Jacova Angevine, and when Angevine left the university in ’eighty-eight, so did Canning. There are unsubstantiated rumors that the two had become lovers. Regardless, Canning would soon become one of Angevine’s most trusted confidantes, and interviews with surviving members reveal that she was one of four women accorded the rank of High Priestess of the Open Door of Night. During the ceremonies at the Pierce Street temple in Monterey, Canning is said always to have been in attendance, and to have been among those responsible for the induction of new members.
Many journalists have extended Canning’s role in the cult’s swift rise to prominence beyond recruitment. It’s readily evident that it was through Canning’s promotional efforts and acumen that the ODoN attracted so many so quickly. She not only took advantage of the nascent internet but spread the cult’s doctrine via college campuses, the underground zine culture of the late eighties and early nineties, and numerous mentions appear in Factsheet Five from 1988 onwards. During this period, articles on ODoN, and two interviews with Canning, appear in zines in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan (for a summation, see Karaflogka, Anastasia, “Occult Discourse and the Efficacy of Zines,” Religion 32 [2002]: 279–91). Following the events at Moss Landing, her suicide note (one of only four left behind) was printed in many of these homegrown publications.
While at Berkeley, Canning also arranged for the creation of the Usenet group alt.humanities.odon, which saw considerable traffic from 1988 to 1991. One can only imagine how much more damage Canning might have managed if she’d had the World Wide Web at her disposal.’”
Abalyn paused, and I didn’t say anything for a moment. I say “a moment,” but I don’t know how long. And then I asked her, “Is that all?”
“No. That’s not even the most important part. Do you want me to go on?”
“I do,” I replied. “I want you to go on. You’ve begun this. You can’t very well stop now.”
And so she read a little more from Chapter 4:
“‘Before Eva Canning departed New England for California, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter. The child was adopted by Canning’s mother and father. I have chosen to omit her name here, as she’s already suffered much unwanted and hurtful attention in connection to her mother’s involvement with Jacova Angevine.’”
Abalyn stopped, and I could hear her turning a page or two. Then she read, “‘Eva Canning’s body was sent back East, and her badly mutilated and decomposed remains were duly cremated. Her ashes were strewn in the sea from high cliffs at the eastern edge of Aquidneck Island, near Salve Regina College, her mother’s alma mater. However, there was also a modest memorial service at Middletown Cemetery in Newport. A headstone in the Canning family plot marks an empty grave.’”
Again, silence. I could hear footsteps overhead, and the voices of patrons and librarians. I glanced towards the staircase leading to the ground floor, polished oak and worn red carpeting.
“I want to go there,” I said. “I need to go there, Abalyn. I have to see her grave for myself.”
“It’s too late to go today.”
“Then we’ll go tomorrow.”
I don’t have a membership to the Athenaeum, because I can’t afford one. But I had several pages of The Lemming Cult: The Rise and Fall of the Open Door of Night by William L. West (New York: The Overlook Press, 1994) photocopied, so I’d have them for later, because of what Rosemary Anne said about remembering significant things.
As we left the library and stepped back out into the cold November evening, Abalyn asked if I was all right, and I lied and told her I was fine. “We need to stop by the market on the way home,” I added.
And the next day, it snowed, and the next day, we went to Newport. Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.
Obituary from the Newport Daily News (April 11, 1991):
NEWPORT—EVA MAY CANNING
Age 30, of Lighthouse Avenue, Monterey, CA, drowned on April 4 at Moss Landing State Beach, Moss Landing, CA.
Born in Newport, RI, on October 30, 1960
, she was the daughter of Isadora (Snow) and the late Ellwood Arthur Canning.
Miss Canning received a bachelor of science in anthropology in June 1985 from the University of California, Berkeley.
Eva was working on a graduate degree in archaeology at the time of her death. She was widely traveled, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, and published several notable papers in prominent scientific journals. As a young girl, she had a passion for poetry, collecting seashells, and bird-watching.
She is survived by her daughter, E. L. Canning, and by her mother, and several aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Her funeral will be held on Monday, April 13, 1991, at 11 a.m. at the Memorial Funeral Home, 375 Broadway, Newport, with a funeral service at 12 p.m. in St. Spyridon’s Greek Orthodox Church, Thames Street, Newport. Burial will be in Middletown Cemetery in Middletown.
Memorial donations may be made to St. Spyridon’s Greek Orthodox Church, Endowment Fund, PO Box 427, Newport, RI 02840.
Eva Canning had a daughter. A daughter whose first initial is E. Why is her full name not given here? Anonymity, an effort to protect her from Eva’s Open Door of Night connections and subsequent scandal? And who was the father? The daughter would have had to be born…when, while Eva was still in high school? Was the daughter raised by Eva’s mother? Too many questions, and my head spins and lists with them. Abalyn found this obituary yesterday, and I have added it to my file labeled “Perishable Shippen; Eva Canning.”