Decatur (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE
Tuning the Instrument

The two Surrey waitresses rode along in the Decatur evening with windows rolled down and their cigarette smoke wafted into the street. Mona drove a battered Dodge Dart; the optional bucket seats had wooden beaded covers and a hula girl danced on the dashboard. She, of course, had never been to Hawaii but you could always hope. The town psychic was on the outskirts and being alone with Marilyn suddenly seemed strange so Mona fiddled with the radio dial with one long nailed hand, the other clutching the wheel.

“You want me to find a station?” Marilyn asked, as the neat streets turned darker with fewer streetlights and houses were mixed in with the squat buildings of car repair places and used appliance stores.

“Nah, it gives me something to do,” Mona replied, wondering why she had ever volunteered to take Marilyn to have her fortune told. Bored, she guessed, what with Tim on the road again, the nights stretched long. There, she found WLIT, the big Chicago station that played the giant hits, that was better.

Marilyn had only gone along with Mona to be accommodating, as she had found that it was often easier to just say yes to the crazy things that people proposed to her, but now that she was in the car she was suddenly keyed up. They had set out a little after eight-thirty, after Marilyn had done all her evening side work, had a plate of Amanda’s chicken and dumplings and walked her dog. Mona, who only worked the day shift, had drunk half a bottle of Blue Nun to get her courage up, re-teased her hair and had changed into knife-creased polyester slacks. Her hair was big and frosted blond and she wore a long brown vinyl coat with the wide lapels but Marilyn, the beautiful spook, was still in her black uniform with just a cardigan against the chill.

Decatur’s psychic spot was a one-story dirty white clapboard ranch with a pink neon sign in a window that said Palm Readings and had a tiny gravel parking lot illuminated by an outdoor light on a crude wooden post. Beyond it stretched only corn and soy bean fields. An old brown pick up was parked next to the house but other than that they were the only ones there that Wednesday night.

Marilyn and Mona waited on the cement steps as they heard the door bell chime throughout the house. Nothing. Mona pressed the bell again, feeling stupid suddenly. She had told everyone at work that she came here all the time but in fact she had only been here once before and that was on a winter Sunday afternoon when her truck-driving husband had been gone for six weeks and she wondered if he would ever return. “Maybe she’s not there,” Mona said.

“Sign’s lit,” Marilyn said.

“That don’t mean nothing, let’s go,” Mona said, popping a piece of gum in her mouth just as Madam Josie with her hair braided like a crown around her head cracked open the blue painted door that had a triangle and an eye with long black painted lashes in the middle of it. She didn’t take drunks or pre-teens. “We’re here for a palm reading, you read my cards last time but you said come back so I did,” Mona said, chewing to cover her nerves.

“Oh yes, I knew you would,” Madam Josie said. Satisfied with their ages and sobriety, she opened the door wide. “And with a friend, good girl.”

“Marilyn, with Mona from the Surrey restaurant,” Marilyn supplied for the fortune teller, who nodded wisely and murmured that she knew that.

With an amused sidelong glance at Mona, Marilyn walked first into what passed for a psychic salon in Central Illinois; beige wall-to-wall carpeting with a clear plastic runner on the heavy- traffic areas, red sheers over yellowed pull shades on the windows, and a table in the middle of the room covered in black felt with a deck of Tarot cards laid out on top, and two chairs.. Mona scrambled in behind her. As Madam Josie went to shut the door there was a sudden wind gust and the heavy candelabra with three lit candles on the sideboard blew out for a split second and then they re-lit.

The palm reader looking like a giant turtle in a purple silk mu-mu cocked her head and regarded Marilyn.

“It’s going to be an unusual night,” she said with slightest lisp. “You,” she motioned to Mona and one of the chairs next to the table with Tarot cards, “Sit here and wait for Madam Josie.” Obediently Mona took her seat, nervously running her hands over her shiny coat. Then with a thin smile Madam Josie picked up the lit candelabra with one hand gesturing to Marilyn with the other, “Follow me.” She then led her through the beaded curtain to a back room.

A few moments later Madam Josie returned, only now a record was playing in the next room, it was scratchy and the music was foreign sounding to Mona, with instruments she couldn’t identify. The palm reader took Mona’s long hand in her own coarse stubby one.

“Where’s Marilyn?” Mona asked. She felt responsible, coming here was her idea and the strange music was giving her the creeps.

“Visiting with my half sister Tina and my younger brother, Ham. She’s just fine and you didn’t come here to worry about your friend. You’re worried about your marriage, isn’t that right, and you want to know your fortune. Madam Josie knows.” She kneaded the woman’s lotioned hand with its long manicured nails, nails that would need a lot of upkeep but this was no lady of leisure, she was a waitress like the other, but not like her at all. The one called Marilyn was now in the room that only a few ever got to. But this one, she had a lot of evening time to spend on her nails, T.V. and resentful anxiety. A traveling husband -- she had come once before. Madame Josie massaged the hand remembering all that she could about this blonde with the high frosted hair while a clarinet sobbed in the background. Soon Mona was engrossed in the criss-crossing lines of her own palm, a road map of her past and future teased out by Madam Josie who seemed to know everything about her unique, underappreciated personality and marriage.

Madam Josie’s brother, Ham, had a sparse beard and pinstriped suit pants of indeterminate age on with suspenders and a thermal underwear top while the half sister, Tina, was skinny in a yellowed antique lace dress. They were conferring together on torn sofa cushions on a peculiar love seat made out of deer horns and wood when Madam Josie first brought Marilyn in. They stopped talking, stood up and then they all looked at each other silently for a long moment in the pine paneled room. Marilyn instantly felt the internal resistance she had when people identified with her oddness. It usually meant trouble. She shouldn’t have gone along with Mona and now here she was in the back room with a couple of would be necromancers intent on reading her like they might a newspaper. And even Father Weston was bugging her about a new professor in town, why couldn’t people leave well enough alone? She shook her head, her black glossy hair like a thunder cloud around her face.

“You sure of this, Josie?” Ham asked finally, almost mournfully, as if he might be inquiring whether his sister was telling the truth about the price of tires for the pick-up.

“See for yourself,” Madam Josie said and put the candelabra down on the floor with a surprising amount of grace for a big woman.

“I reckon I will.” Then the brother pointed for Madam Josie to go back into the front room. She nodded and picking up a round navy blue carton of Morton’s salt, poured a line of salt by the door and left them. The skinny half sister put a record on an ancient player, dropping the needle with care and the bearded man smiled and said in a silky way that Marilyn should sit on the sofa. The three candles were burning brightly in their holder on the floor but the air seemed syrupy. There was a canvas on the faded red and white checkered linoleum floor that was painted with astrological signs and dried red rose petals sprinkled around the edges. Marilyn sat down only because she didn’t want to startle Mona by taking off out of there which is exactly what she felt like doing. Then the man put his hand on the top of her head. It felt heavy and hot. The skinny one barked suddenly at the brother to stop faking it and turned urgently to Marilyn. “You know who you are?” Tina asked in faintly accented English.

“No,” Marilyn answered evenly, picturing her dog Rowley in her head to steady herself. But she knew that the two people were afraid of her now, even though they wanted something in her, something she normally kept hidden.

“You’re an instrument,” the half sister said. The man nodded and repeated in his silky voice, “A most beautiful instrument.”

The two of them then got on each side of her and began speaking softly together. The woman twisted the antique lace in her claw like hands, “There’s a lot of money to be made. People won’t be able to help themselves once we get started in this town but oh, we could make a lot of money.”

At the same time Ham the brother was whispering, his mustache beaded with perspiration, “You are the one we were looking for, you could teach us so much, we know you could. Would you like to join us?” he asked and put his hand on Marilyn’s shoulder, not able to help himself. There had been so many false starts, snake oil days, and card tricks; they couldn’t let this one get away.

“Join us,” the skinny one repeated and Marilyn felt like they were each talking into one ear and the words were charging negative and positive against each other. She stood up suddenly and the room tilted and the candelabra slid across the room as a wind came up and whirled dust balls, salt particles and dried flower petals around them. She knew they were weaker than her, and darker too, angry and confused, she could resist them and all she had to do was leave. She shook Ham off and they followed her to the door like bleating children but wouldn’t cross the threshold that had the thin line of white table salt like a barrier to the normal world. When she passed through the beaded curtain she had a momentary vision of a rock wall lined with hundreds of empty vials that made her sick to her stomach and then hot shame burned in her gut. There had been another vial, this one full of dark amber fluids in a beautiful glass case, forbidden and then when the pain smashed across her temple she let the image go and the plastic red beads swished and she pushed through the curtain and she was back in the tawdry front room.

“They’re kind of country gypsies, I guess,” is what she said to Mona when they were back in the car. True, she had come through to the front parlor with her eyes like huge black smudges in her white face but walked out the door without another word to Madam Josie and Mona, feeling awkward, just put another five down on the ten she had given the woman and followed her. It was clear Marilyn wasn’t going to talk about what had gone on in the back room with Madam Josie’s relatives, at least not with her. Mona decided driving her home that trying to be helpful was a little too expensive for her purse and Marilyn didn’t appreciate it anyway.

CHAPTER FOUR
A Scientific Study

The dinner crowd was always light at the Surrey but just enough for Scott, the manager, to insist that one girl always stay on with the busboy and Walt until the bitter end at 7PM. Marilyn was on the dinner shift most nights of the week as she would come in at eleven after the lunch set-up was done by Mona and Betty, but it would be her marrying ketchups in the fading prairie light at the end of the day. The menu at that time of day, typed up with the same painstaking mistakes every week by Scott on the little Smith Corona and then mimeographed in purples with the peculiar smell that only he was allowed to breathe in the tiny office just upstairs from the dining room, was “limited” with the few things that Walt could make reliably on his own without Amanda’s help: grilled pork chops with candied canned crab apples, deep fried frozen fish with lemon slices and a sirloin steak with grilled onions. You could get applesauce or coleslaw on the side and, of course, no liquor was served.

Marilyn saw the loping figure of the professor as soon as he came through the revolving door even though she was hidden by the back of the last wooden booth used by the waitresses as their own office of sorts. When she had phoned Father Weston about her visit to the palm reader, he had gotten his new friend the professor involved, and now here he was, at the end of the shift. She had lined up all the ketchup bottles in a v-shape on the booth’s table, just like she always did, because it helped to have everyday habits, and was methodically emptying the dregs of one into the red fullness of the other, wiping their white caps and their necks and bases so by tomorrow it would appear that every bottle of ketchup served by the Surrey was brand spanking new. It was fifteen minutes to closing and even Scott seemed a little less like a used car salesman at the door as he pulled the vinyl covered menu with the little mimeographed sheet from the small stack by the door.

The professor Max Rosenbaum wore his corduroy jacket and a neck scarf over neatly cuffed pants and he smoothed his graying dark hair in an artless way as his eyes darted around the dining room. Nearly empty. Unconsciously he sighed in relief, clutching his black leather-bound volume of notes more tightly, reassured by their presence. He hated being paranoid but as his old mullioned windowed office at the University of Chicago seemed increasingly like a dream and the visits from polyester-suited Federal Bureau of Investigation officers cruising over from Springfield in big Ford sedans to “check in” on him in his new cramped quarters at Charlesworth happened like clockwork, Max had begun to avoid talking on both his office and apartment telephone and always looked in the rear-view mirror for someone shadowing him.

Sitting in the booth second to the back, he waited for the waitress named Marilyn to approach him. From long practice, the professor carefully opened his leather-bound pad and made a note of the time and date, and then laid his ink cartridge pen across the top signaling that he was ready. She came bearing coffee in a glass and plastic beaker and a thick cream-colored mug. Max was glad that they didn’t use the cheap white dinnerware that was almost translucent. He had taken peyote buttons once with a shaman in the New Mexican desert and on the way back had stopped at a diner that used the cheap white china and it looked like a sick person’s skin to him, and he couldn’t eat or drink off of it ever after.

“Have you thought about what I asked you?” His voice was deep and he smiled in way that crinkled up his eyes, but Marilyn knew that he was just trying to appear relaxed.

“You better order, professor. Walt don’t like to cook as it is and ten minutes to closing he will start cleaning that grill no matter who is sitting here. Get the special.” She lightly touched the mimeographed sheet where it said
Amanda’s American Chop Suey
. Biting his lip and fighting back memories of Szechuan scallops and snow peas from his favorite Chi-town Chinese restaurant he nodded, “Sure.” Max watched her turn and enjoyed the sway of her ass as she went through the swinging doors to get his supper. Marilyn might be a waitress and had never read Jung much less the mysteries of the Kabala, but she was by far the most interesting woman in Central Illinois.

She brought back two homey plates of macaroni, tomatoes, and hamburger, with fluffy white rolls and a side of slaw. Shrugging she sat the plates down and then herself, casually announcing to Scott by the register, “I’m gonna eat now.”

Scott nodded, totaling register tapes on the adding machine with a wheezing series of clicks. “Better get the scholar to pay, Marilyn if we want to get out of here tonight.” She smiled inscrutably and pushed a little green ruled slip across the table with hurried script that read “special and coffee”, the total came to $6.95, and Max fished in his pocket for his wallet, laying out a five and three singles. She scooped up the money and trotted towards the register, gave the required sum to Scott and put the rest in the slash side pocket in her black waitress uniform. Sitting back down, she whispered, “Don’t mind him. Eat your dinner.” Max ate never taking his eyes off of Marilyn, watching her pink tongue dab little droplets of hamburger goulash (why did they call this chop suey?) from her red-lipsticked lips.

“So it’s a scientific study,” Marilyn finally said, her black eyes with the heavy lids and long lashes narrowing slightly, “I’m only talking to you because Father Weston asked me to. You’re Jewish, what are you doing hanging out with a priest anyhow?”

“You’re a woman, and I could ask you the same,” Max answered, a little more sharply then he meant as he watched Marilyn pull away from the table, leaving her fork in the slaw, scooting to the edge of the booth as if she might just get up and run. “Sorry,” he quickly apologized, “I don’t primarily identify as Jewish. The Father and I like some of the same books.”

“Books, huh, and you don’t ‘primarily identify’… now you do sound like a professor.” But she relaxed and moved back into the booth, picking up her fork again. “Father W said you were in Chicago at some big research institute.”

“Priest or no priest, Frank Weston runs his mouth a lot. University of Chicago has -
had
,” he corrected himself, “ the beginnings of a pretty advanced think tank putting together collaborations between psychology, ancient religions, and pharmacology that no-one had ever thought of. The old fogeys hated it but the students, oh, man.” Max hunched his shoulders, the familiar pain creeping up the back of his neck as he tried to push down flashbacks of the last meeting in the dean’s office.

“What are you doing here then?” Marilyn asked simply.

Something happened to Max then. The booth seemed to both darken and lighten. The dark was at the edge and high sides but the light was where they were sitting and the front door and the man clicking on the adding machine might have been on the moon for as far away as they seemed. The words tumbled out of him as the images played across his mind. He felt as if something was drawing the most intimate truths out of him. He could see himself ten years younger in the early sixties with Carnaby Street striped pants on standing at a podium-- the paper he gave in London at King’s College to thunderous applause where he asserted that modern life had veiled the connections between the mind and soul. How he had experimented with mushrooms that night and wandered Kensington Garden feeling all the cells in his body and how they connected to all the cells in the plants, wandering in a full revel through a glowing moon garden planted in the middle of the city. That had been the turning point. He began to gradually move away from more traditional studies and plot his own course, taking advantage of his full professorship and tenure to protect him from his more conservative critics. He had some fans at the University as well, like Dr. Wendell, an archeologist who was a brilliant researcher, but the students, they were his biggest fans. The course at University of Chicago he taught on the mystic texts of the Kabala was always full to overflow as students flocked to his lectures. The earnest insistence of a brilliant baby-faced graduate student, Lawrence with the mop of curls, to let him be Max’s academic chronicler. Lawrence followed him breathlessly as he charted Max Rosenbaum’s meteoric rise as the boldest, most brilliant professor in the entire University, connecting the mysteries of the Kabala, where man is put into the world to repair the flaw that God made, and contemporary psychology, while gently advocating for careful experimentation of mind-altering substances as ancient priests and shamans would to reconnect with the Divine. His wife’s withdrawal to the ladies circle at the Temple and finally her sudden move back to her parent’s suburb of Lake Haven. The troubling automatic writing of his protégé Lawrence and then reviewing his incoherent thesis with the same phrase, “I have made the Connection and God will have Mercy,” repeated thousands of times. How he then botched it, alienating Lawrence, urging him to see a counselor. The graduate student’s parents standing at the back of the lecture hall, he in a fedora and double-breasted suit, she in gloves and a beige dress, looking like they had come to witness some shameful act. The grad student twitching and leaving through a side door of the lecture hall. The campus police banging on Max’s brownstone’s front door.

“Lawrence committed suicide by jumping out the twenty-third floor of his hi-rise dorm. There were tabs of LSD found along with the suicide note that repeated over and over ‘God will have Mercy’.” Max clenched his fists and lowered his head.
Had he led the kid astray? Had his work poisoned a young mind? He knew he would never know and the not knowing haunted him.
But he hadn’t told anyone this much ever about the journey that had brought him divorced and disgraced to Decatur, Illinois. “Technically I’m on leave. But make no mistake, I’m hiding out. A friend of mine is letting me teach psychology 101 this semester. I’m not sure how long Charlesworth can even let that continue. Nothing was proven of course and I never advocated for LSD to my graduate students but…”

“And you want me to be part of a study. I’ll have to remember to thank the Father when I see him. I should have never told him about going to the fortune tellers. He worries too much.”

Max nodded, his eyes sad but full of empathy, without a trace of condescension or pity. Marilyn inhaled.
As long as he didn’t pity her.
“You still believe in your work?” she asked huskily.

“Yeah, I do. What happened to Lawrence… there’s a kind of solace in the work. It’s hard to explain,” Max said. “I think if you’ll let me, I might be able to help you, Marilyn. Father W thinks it’s worth a try too or you know he wouldn’t have introduced us. I know my methods may seem a little unconventional and my pedigree dinged, but there’s a new institute forming where I might be able to make a contribution -- if I have fresh research.”

“A new institute? On what?”

“Oh, it will be called something academic I’m sure, with an emphasis on alchemical history and ancient religious rites but it will be also focusing on conducting studies of the paranormal, its role in science and religion, that sort of thing. It’s terribly exciting that we’re finally able to get the academy or least some outpost of it to examine the entire nature of reality or realities. I think if I could just submit chapters for a new book, they might accept me. They’ll have a couple of branch centers in Europe and one here. My friend, Dr. Wendell, has been working getting the funding.” Max’s teeth hurt just thinking about it. He wanted to be part of the new center - there maybe he could start over or at least try starting over. Being accepted wouldn’t erase what happened but at least he could find his way out of the academic backwaters he was now confined to.

Marilyn paused, looking at the professor; he seemed so earnest and worried that she might not accept his proposal. “I won’t do drugs, not that I think that’s what you’re asking. And it’s hard for me to talk about this stuff. I don’t know how much help I can be.” Marilyn bit her lip. “I’ll call you when I want to talk.” She got up, taking their plates over to bus tray, and went back to the last booth where the ketchups were still lined up in the V-shape. Walt was just coming through the kitchen door with his wind-breaker on and Scott was bundling up the receipts. Closing time, thought Max, rising where he could see over to the booth where Marilyn was.

The ketchup bottle in the V between the two lines was vibrating oddly, it seemed like its own quake zone. Marilyn put her hands on it, as if to make it stop and then turned to look over her shoulder to Max.

“Sssh,” was all she said.