Lost (46 page)

“Bitch!” she finally managed.

“Oh,” he said, “you mean Mrs. Maddingly. It was a stroke and she's in rehab. Only a mild one and what language she's lost she seems to have regained. Is that it?”

It was, except Winnie pressed her hands on her hair and mimed cutting it. John was unable to decipher her question, and she let it go. She smiled at him, to thank him for the patient attention, and only after he didn't smile back did she realize she was chattering away again in a burble of watery syllables, and his look was one of panic or grief.

Stop, Gervasa,
she said, and Gervasa stopped.

He left. She slept. What Gervasa did she didn't know or care to find out.

When next she came to—the same day? The next day?—Irv Hausserman was in her room. He had a huge bunch of papery daffodils, looking well past their sell-by date, and he'd stuck them in a vase without any water. On the edge of the bed was the tape recorder.

“Now it's for you,” he said calmly, when she was more fully awake.

She said something that even to her sounded faintly like
bonjour,
but maybe that was wishful thinking. “Hi,” she managed, faintly.

“Are you in there?” he said.

“Sometimes,” she said, and corrected, “all the time.”

“Who are you?”

English asks that question the same way, whether the audience be singular or plural. Winnie heard it easily but found it hard to answer. She finally managed to say, “Us,” and hoped that would do.

He didn't seem alarmed. But he didn't believe in possession. He
was the staunchest skeptic she knew. “Will you mind if I get your voice on tape?” he asked.

The voice he was referring to had a strong opinion, but Winnie didn't know what it was. When she could get a word in edgewise, she squeaked, “Go ahead.”

He inserted a tape and pressed Record.

“What do you want to tell me?” he asked. “Can you say how you are?”

That was two questions, the fool, and Gervasa had some things to say and Winnie others, so they struggled and interrupted each other for a few moments, until Gervasa in a fit of pique cried out in a loud voice, and Irv's eyebrows went up but he managed not to flinch, and in the backwash of silence Winnie muttered, “What had Mrs. M said, what? Tell me.”

“On my tape of her?” said Irv. He smiled for the first time. He seemed pleased to hear that Winnie had that much memory, however faulty her ability to steer a conversation had become.

Winnie nodded. Gervasa was sulking somewhere. Good riddance.

“I don't want to plant ideas,” he said.

“Tell me, fuckhead,” she answered.

She'd gotten his attention; he laughed. “Oh, Winnie! Well, you're the boss.”

Not anymore,
muttered Gervasa, but as a teenager will mutter, from a sidelines, ineffectually.

“I won't diagnose nor will I hypothesize,” he said. “There are a great many gaps in understanding. But it's not a nice story such as I've been able to piece together. Are you sure you're up for it?”

Of course he didn't know that the Gervasa germ had migrated. But too bad. What was left of Winnie was curious enough to want to know. She nodded as if to say:
Hurry up and tell me
.

“Mrs. Maddingly seems to have been speaking in the first
person. Not in her own first person, you understand, but speaking as someone else.”

Yes, yes, that much was abundantly clear. Fire code was going to require that the place be cleared if Winnie got any more stuffed with identity. She tried to make a motion with her fingers,
roll on, speed it up
. But her finger got confused, and in a moment she realized her thumb had been resting comfortably in her mouth. She pulled it out, horrified, and tried to pay attention.

“The other voice, the French one, gave a narrative of sorts, broken by poor pronunciation and archaic or half-said words. And Mrs. M interrupted constantly in her own voice. I'm not sure that the non–Mrs. M speaker was all that—coherent.” His struggle for the word was admirable. He was clearly trying to keep from saying
bright
. On Gervasa's behalf Winnie took offense.

“A certain Gervase, perhaps of Normandy.”

“Gervasa,” said Winnie, easily enough, and hiked her boobs to make the point.

“Gervasa?” said Irv. “I don't think there's a feminine variant.”

“Fuck yourself.”

“I'll take that under advisement,” said Irv. “Whatever else has happened, your inhibitions as to language have been admirably loosened. Not quite Tourette's syndrome. More like Tourette's Lite. Shall I go on?”

She nodded, chagrined but eager.

“Gervase. Gervasa I mean. Of Normandy, let's say, or somewhere in northern France. She mentioned the Abbot of Saint- Evroult and the diocesan kingdom, if you will, of Lisieux, and I think Cluny came into it somewhere too.”

Winnie sat up more strictly, trying to pay the hardest attention she could; she wasn't sure if Gervasa was sitting up, too, seeing whether Irv would get it right.

“There was something about a fire, and a lost baby.”

Winnie slumped. She didn't want this story. There was no fire, there was not even any ghostly possession, just the same old nightmare reinventing itself in new garb at every turn.

“No fire,” she said, but then Gervasa said
Fire!
and it seemed as if Winnie's skin began to shrink and pucker. She clutched herself.

“Shall I stop?” said Irv, looking at some monitor.

“Not yet,” she managed, before Gervasa broke in excitedly. Irv waited with politeness, and though Winnie waved her hands he didn't catch her message:
Speak over the rabble, will you, while I'm awake
. Only when Gervasa's recitation faltered again did Irv say, “There was an indictment by some tribunal, probably a clerical magistrate of some sort, against—uh, let's call the narrator Gervasa then. As you like. Something like an excommunication, we'd guess.”

We? Meaning exactly you and who else? thought Winnie with a shred of jealousy, but then managed to say to herself, Who am I to be sniffy about plurals? Who are we?

“Anyway, Gervasa was implicated. I can't figure it out,” said Irv. “According to the story that Mrs. Maddingly told, the G character was—well, I should add this is rather horrible—was burned alive.”

“When?”

“Gervasa doesn't give dates. I was hoping that you, the practicing novelist, might have some idea. Just for the sake of narrative satisfaction, mind you.”

Winnie didn't know if she was being asked to channel the deposition of a ghost or to write fiction on the spot. She winced. Gervasa thought no clear answer in her mind, only spewed forth useless syllables.

Maybe useless. They were being caught, anyway, on the tape.

A huge scowling cresty-haired sister came whisking in. “The monitors signaled spiking levels; severe rest is required,” said the
matron. Winnie wasn't sure that was the most legitimate use of the word
severe,
but she didn't care. Severe rest was what she needed, already. She was asleep before Irv Hausserman could be given the bum's rush by Sister Teutonia.

 

The doctors came and gabbled in med-speak. They made less sense than the noisy objections of Gervasa, who seemed to take umbrage at their examinations. But though Winnie could sense her mind seizing up on her from time to time, the tenancy of a Gervasa de Normandie within her apparently wasn't detectable by the doctors. Winnie's muscles and willpower remained her own, as far as she could tell. Gervasa was quiescent, did not flinch or flare up. Even the use of the muscles of the mouth to vocalize Gervasa's chortles and chirps seemed somehow voluntary, a shared effort. Winnie could claim not to be hijacked, but a partner.

Winnie wasn't able to glean what the doctors were diagnosing, if anything, but though they came regularly, they left just as regularly.

 

Winnie was beginning to think of Gervasa as her inner ghoul, half tomcat, half tomboy.

 

It seemed a little less hard to pay attention every additional time she was awake, except that it was hard to tell the time.

 

It was laughable, even slightly mortifying, to imagine being possessed by something so improbable, so foreign—a thirteenth-century peasant martyred at the stake? Puh-
lease
. But then perhaps not as surprising as all that. Every sane soul, thinking “Curiouser and curiouser!” as she observes her own life, secretes a sort of chitinous shell around her own vulnerable keep. One presumably builds up resistance against more garden-variety infections and viruses. Over the
deaths of her own parents, for instance, Winnie had not languished longer than propriety required. Sure, she had run through the usual catalog of residual effects—fond memories, resentments, unanswerable puzzlements—but a haunting by either of the Rudges, those gentle, slow-release Acts of God? It would be like being haunted by air or light—only a genius could manage even to notice such a thing.

For a ghost to take hold, perhaps it had to rely on the strategies of surprise or disguise, of nonsense even. A ghost had to be devious to slip past the phagocytes of the psyche that repel the more obvious invaders.

 

Winnie was awake, and talking to herself. She asked Gervasa questions in English, out loud, and Gervasa answered in what sounded like toddler patois. The tenant within managed to lapse into a sociable silence when John Comestor and Allegra Lowe came by, with a bouquet of lilies and hothouse snapdragons wrapped in a crinkly acetate. Winnie was beginning to realize that if she didn't open her mouth to speak any English, she could sometimes prevent Gervasa from yakking for attention.

John and Allegra, hmmm, thought Winnie. Suppose that Allegra was only lying when she said she'd taken up with Malcolm Rice? But that was too tedious a path to follow. So what? What difference did it make even if she were? Gervasa was half the story now, and Gervasa didn't know John and Allegra from Adam and Eve.

“I had a devil of a time getting DHL to release this packet to me,” said John, brandishing an overnight mail parcel. “I had to get the doctor to write that you were in seclusion for your health before the delivery service would let it out of their hands. Shall I open it?”

She wanted the heft and stress of a pull tab to jerk, cardboard to rip, but when she saw that it was several photocopied pages, she remembered her request of that fellow in Brookline.

There was a brief note. It began, “Dear Winnie—The fourth grade is having a W. Rudge Read-a-thon in honor of a visit we hope you'll make to us—” She put the note aside.

She couldn't read the photocopied text aloud for fear of Gervasa's interruption. She handed the thing to John and motioned to him: Read.

He recognized it at once. “This old stuff? Are you sure?”

She nodded. It had been a long time since she had looked at any of it.

“All of it?”

She managed to squeak, “Start,” while Gervasa was having a think about something else.

John shrugged. “As you wish.

 

“Haverhill, Kent, August twelfth, '71.

“To my Dear Niece Dorothea from your Uncle.

“I endeavour to keep my promise to you today and pick up my pen to correct your mistaken notions of my father and your grandfather, the late Ozias Rudge. Since the death last year of Mr Dickens I have heard little but nonsense spoken about our good and decent forebear. To the silliness spoken at Miss Bairnfeather's table on Saturday last I take the most extreme objection.

“There can be no doubt as you so engagingly related that your grandfather claimed nothing less than a ghostly visitation. His memories of such were often recounted in contradictory renditions depending on whether there were ladies present clergy et cet.”

 

John said, “Rather a failure as a prose stylist, our many-times-great-grandfather. Dry stuff. You could have a relapse.” She made a motion:
Go on. She thought, Better get what I can while Gervasa is quiescent.

He ran his finger along the paper, squinting at the long flattened loops of the handwriting.

 

“Being sensitive and suggestible as the gentler sex must to their sorrow be, by rights you ought to be spared the details that surround the stories of your grandfather. But I am gravely discomforted by hearing you sport with your family's history and gabble such a confloption as turns your dear grandfather into a rustic fool.”

 

“What a lead-up,” said Allegra, who had been pretending not to listen.

“Well, here comes the good cheese. Here's Ozias's son lecturing poor Dorothea. As they say, the next voice you hear is Edward Rudge's.

“Quote.

 

“Ozias Rudge claimed to have engaged the young Master Dickens with a tale of hauntings said to have taken place in Rudge House, in the very darkest days of December, nearly fifty years ago—'24 I think it was, or '25. Having overseen a mining enterprise until a pit collapse cost a grievous loss of life, your grandfather fell into low spirits. Past the springtime of his life, he repaired to Hampstead to take the healthful airs. His new work supplied him with connexions on the Continent and it was long supposed by his widow your grandmother Cornelia that he turned his gaze abroad to escape sad memories of the disaster at the mine.

“As you have persistently neglected your study of the affairs of nations I doubt you remember that across the
Channel, the Bourbon monarchy had been briefly restored to the throne of France. In 1821 or thereabouts, the revenue accorded the Church by the state was increased above previous allotments. So the Church embarked upon renovations of their crumbling masterpieces of idolatry from which we English can happily count ourselves safely removed.

“Rudge and his associates undertook to advise Bishops and Chevaliers of the Church in their campaigns of preservation, and to supervise projects in Paris and in the outlying regions. It was in the curiosity of Mont-Saint-Michel off the coast of Normandy that the firm of Rudge and Blackwood discovered a small piece of statuary in some tomb or oubliette. A statue of the infant Christ held lovingly by his mother, not without a certain charm despite being sentimental and common. Your grandfather wondered if perhaps the thing had been hidden during one of the periodic attacks on the famous Mont in previous decades, or perhaps it had been there hundreds of years. It was impossible to tell. But your grandfather took a blanket from the cell in which it was found and smuggled the piece out from under the eyes of wolfish prelates, and back to London. I do not know what has become of the artifact but your objectionable narrative about a duel and a murder and an unfaithful woman was shrill and sensational. I should like
you to know there is no truth to it at all. Furthermore it is an insult to your sainted grandmother, and she would be very aggrieved indeed to learn about your indiscreet remarks.”