The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (20 page)

Returning to the suburban town of his birth and to the house he’d shunned for decades seeing now with a pang of loss how the residential neighborhood had changed, many of the large houses converted to apartment buildings and commercial sites, and most of the plane trees lining the street severely trimmed or removed altogether. And there was the old Waldman home, that had once been their mother’s pride, once so splendidly white, now a weatherworn gray with sagging shutters and a rotting roof and a lush junglelike front lawn awash in litter as if no one had lived there for a long time. Edgar had been unable to contact Edward by phone, there was no directorial listing for a phone
under the name Edward Waldman, now his heart pounded in his chest, he felt a wave of dread
He has died, it is too late
. Hesitantly knocking at the front door and listening for a response from within and knocking again, more loudly, hurting his knuckles, and at last there came from within a faint bleating sound, a voice asking who it was and he called out
It’s me
.

Slowly as if with effort the door opened. And there, in his wheelchair, as Edgar had imagined him, but not so ravaged as Edgar had imagined him, was his brother Edward whom he hadn’t seen in more than two decades: a shrunken individual of no obvious age with a narrow, pale, pinched yet unlined face, a boy’s face, and his hair threaded with gray like Edgar’s, and one bony shoulder higher than the other. Pale blue eyes filling with moisture he swiped at with the edges of both hands and in a scratchy voice that sounded as if it hadn’t been used in some time he said
Eddie. Come in
.

. . . when it happened could never be determined precisely since the bodies were frozen and preserved from decay found together on a leather sofa made as a bed pulled to within a foot of a fireplace heaped with ashes in a downstairs room of the old clapboard Colonial crowded with furniture and what appeared to be the accumulated debris of decades but which may have been materials for artworks or the very artworks themselves of the eccentric artist known as E.W., the elderly Waldman brothers in layers of bulky clothing must have fallen asleep in front of a fire in the otherwise unheated house, the fire must have burnt out in the night and the brothers died in their
sleep in a protracted January cold spell: the brother to be identified as Edgar Waldman, eighty-seven, embracing his brother Edward Waldman, also eighty-seven, from behind, protectively fitting his body to his brother’s crippled body, forehead tenderly pressed to the back of the other’s head, the two figures coiled together like a gnarled organic material that has petrified to stone.

DEATH-CUP

Amanita phalloides
he began to hear in no voice he could recognize.

Murmurous, only just audible—
Amanita phalloides
.

More distinctly that morning, a rain-chilled Saturday morning in June, at his uncle’s funeral. In the austere old Congregationalist church he only entered, as an adult, for such ceremonies as weddings and funerals. As, seated beside his brother Alastor of whom he disapproved strongly, he leaned far forward in the cramped hardwood pew, framing his face with his fingers so that he was spared seeing his brother’s profile in the corner of his eye. Feeling an almost physical repugnance for the man who was his brother. He tried to concentrate on the white-haired minister’s solemn words yet was nervously distracted by
Amanita phalloides
. As if, beneath the man’s familiar words of Christian forbearance and uplift another voice, a contrary voice, strange, incantatory, was struggling to emerge. And during the interlude of organ music. The Bach Toccata and Fugue in D-minor which his uncle, an amateur musician and philanthropist, had requested
be played at his funeral. Lyle was one who, though he claimed to love music, was often distracted during it; his mind drifting; his thoughts like flotsam, or froth; now hearing the whispered words, only just audible in his ears
Amanita phalloides, Amanita phalloides
. He realized he’d first heard these mysterious words the night before, in a dream. A sort of fever-dream. Brought on by his brother’s sudden, unexpected return.

He did not hate his brother Alastor. Not here, in this sacred place.

Amanita phalloides. Amanita phalloides
. . .

How beautiful, the Bach organ music! Filling the spartan-plain, dazzlingly-white interior of the church with fierce cascades of sound pure and flashing as a waterfall. Such music argued for the essential dignity of the human spirit. The transcendence of physical pain, suffering, loss. All that’s petty, ignoble. The
world is a beautiful place if you have the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it
Lyle’s uncle had often said, and had seemed to believe through his long life, apparently never dissuaded from the early idealism of his youth; yet how was such idealism possible, Lyle couldn’t help but wonder, Lyle who wished to believe well of others yet had no wish to be a fool, how was such idealism possible after the evidence of catastrophic world wars, the unspeakable evil of the holocaust, equally mad, barbaric mass-slaughters in Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China? Somehow, his uncle Gardner King had remained a vigorous, good-natured and generous man despite such facts of history; there’d been in him, well into his seventies, a childlike simplicity which Lyle, his nephew, younger
than he by decades, seemed never to have had. Lyle had loved his uncle, who’d been his father’s eldest brother; fatherless himself since the age of eleven, he’d been saddened by his uncle’s gradual descent into death from cancer of the larynx, and had not wanted to think that he would probably be remembered, to some degree, in his uncle’s will. The bulk of the King estate, many millions of dollars, would go into the King Foundation, which was nominally directed by his wife, now widow, Alida King; the rest of it would be divided among numerous relatives. Lyle was troubled by the anticipation of any bequest, however modest. The mere thought filled him with anxiety, almost a kind of dread.
I would not wish to benefit in any way from Uncle Gardner’s death, I could not bear it
.

To which his brother Alastor would have replied in his glib, jocular way, as, when they were boys, he’d laughed at Lyle’s overscrupulous conscience
What good’s that attitude? Our uncle is dead and he isn’t coming back, is he?

Unfortunate that Alastor had returned home to Contracoeur on the very eve of their uncle’s death, after an absence of six years. Still, it could only have been coincidence. So Alastor claimed. He’d been in communication with none of the relatives, including his twin brother Lyle.

How murmurous, teasing in Lyle’s ears—
Amanita phalloides
.

Intimate as a lover’s caressing whisper, and mysterious—
Amanita phalloides
.

Lyle was baffled at the meaning of these words. Why, at such a time, his thoughts distracted by grief, they should assail him.

In the hardwood pew, unpleasantly crowded by Alastor on his left, not wanting to crowd, himself, against an elderly aunt on his right, Lyle felt his lean, angular body quiver with tension. His neck was beginning to ache from the strain of leaning forward. It annoyed him to realize that, in his unstylish matte-black gabardine suit that fitted him too tightly across the shoulders and too loosely elsewhere, with his ash-colored hair straggling past his collar, his face furrowed as if with pain, and the peculiar way he held his outstretched fingers against his face, he was making himself conspicuous among the rows of mourners in the King family pews. Staring at the gleaming ebony casket so prominently placed in the center aisle in front of the communion rail, that looked so forbidding; so gigantic; far larger than his uncle Gardner’s earthly remains, diminutive at the end, would seem to require.
But of course deaThis larger than life. DeaThenvelops life: the emptiness that precedes our brief span of time, the emptiness that follows
.

A shudder ran through him. Tears stung his cheeks like acid. How shaky, how emotional he’d become!

A nudge in his side—his brother Alastor pressed a handkerchief, white, cotton, freshly laundered, into his hand, which Lyle blindly took.

Managing, even then, not to glance at his brother. Not to upset himself seeing yet again his brother’s mock-pious mock-grieving face.
His
watery eyes, in mimicry of Lyle’s.

Now the organ interlude was over. The funeral service was ending—so soon! Lyle felt a childish stab of dismay, that his uncle
would be hurried out of the sanctuary of the church, out of the circle of the community, into the impersonal, final earth. Yet the white-haired minister was leading the congregation in a familar litany of words beginning, “Our heavenly father . . .” Lyle wiped tears from his eyelashes, shut his eyes tightly in prayer. He hadn’t been a practicing Christian since adolescence, he was impatient with unquestioned piety and superstition, yet there was solace in such a ritual, seemingly shared by an entire community. Beside him, his aunt Agnes prayed with timid urgency as if God were in this church and needed only to be beseeched by the right formula of words, and in the right tone of voice. On his other side, his brother Alastor intoned the prayer, not ostentatiously but distinctly enough to be heard for several pews; Alastor’s voice was a deep, rich baritone, the voice of a trained singer you might think, or an actor. A roaring in Lyle’s ears like a waterfall—
Amanita phalloides! Amanita phalloides!
and suddenly he remembered what
Amanita phalloides
was: the death-cup mushroom. He’d been reading a pictorial article on edible and inedible fungi in one of his science magazines and the death-cup mushroom, more accurately a “toadstool,” had been imprinted on his memory.

His mouth had gone dry, his heart was hammering against his ribs. With the congregation, he murmured, “Amen.” All volition seemed to have drained from him. Calmly he thought
I will kill my brother Alastor after all. After all these years
.

Of course, this would never happen. Alastor King was a hateful person who surely deserved to die, but Lyle, his twin brother,
was not one to commit any act of violence; not even one to fantasize any act of violence.
Not me! Not me! Never
.

In the cemetery behind the First Congregationalist Church of Contracoeur the remainder of the melancholy funeral rite was enacted. There stood Lyle King, the dead man’s nephew, in a daze in wet grass beneath a glaring opalescent sky, awakened by strong fingers gripping his elbow. “All right if I ride with you to Aunt Alida’s, Lyle?” Alastor asked. There was an edge of impatience to his lowered voice as if he’d had to repeat his question. And Lyle’s twin brother had not been one, since the age of eighteen months, to wish to repeat questions. He was leaning close to Lyle as if hoping to read his thoughts; his eyes were steely-blue, narrowed. His breath smelled of something sweetly chemical, mouthwash probably, to disguise the alcohol on his breath; Lyle knew he was carrying a pocket flask in an inside pocket. His handsome ruddy face showed near-invisible broken capillaries like exposed nerves. Lyle murmured, “Of course, Alastor. Come with me.” His thoughts flew ahead swiftly—there was Cemetery Hill that was treacherously steep, and the High Street Bridge—opportunities for accidents? Somehow Lyle’s car might swerve out of control, skid on the wet pavement, Alastor who scorned to wear a seat belt might be thrown against the windshield, might be injured, might die, while he, Lyle, buckled in safely, might escape with but minor injuries. And blameless. Was that possible? Would God watch over him?

Not possible. For Lyle would have to drive other relatives in his car, too. He couldn’t risk their lives. And there was no vigilant God.

A simple self-evident fact, though a secret to most of the credulous world: Alastor King, attractive, intelligent and deathly “charming” as he surely was, was as purely hateful, vicious and worthless an individual as ever lived. His brother Lyle had grown to contemplate him with horror the way a martyr of ancient times might have contemplated the engine of pain and destruction rushing at him.
How can so evil a person deserve to live?
Lyle had wondered, sick with loathing of him. (This was years ago when the brothers were twenty. Alastor had secretly seduced their seventeen-year-old cousin Susan, and within a week or two lost interest in her, causing the girl to attempt suicide and to suffer a breakdown from which she would never fully recover.) Yet, maddening, Alastor had continued to live, and live. Nothing in the normal course of events would stop him.

Except Lyle. His twin. Who alone of the earth’s billions of inhabitants understood Alastor’s heart.

And so how shocked Lyle had been, how sickened, having hurried to the hospital when word came that his uncle Gardner was dying, only to discover, like the materialization of one of his nightmares, his brother Alastor already there! Strikingly dressed as usual, with an expression of care, concern, solicitude, clasping their aunt Alida’s frail hand and speaking softly and reassuringly
to her, and to the others, most of them female relatives, in the visitors’ waiting room outside the intensive care unit. As if Alastor hadn’t been mysteriously absent from Contracoeur for six years, not having returned even for their mother’s funeral; as if he hadn’t disappeared abruptly when he’d left, having been involved in a dubious business venture and owing certain of the relatives money, including Uncle Gardner (an undisclosed sum—Lyle didn’t doubt it was many thousands of dollars) and Lyle himself (three thousand five hundred dollars).

Lyle had stood in the doorway, staring in disbelief. He had not seen his twin brother in so long, he’d come to imagine that Alastor no longer existed in any way hurtful to him.

Alastor cried, “Lyle, brother, hello! Good to see you!—except this is such a tragic occasion.”

Swiftly Alastor came to Lyle, seizing his forearm, shaking his hand vigorously as if to disarm him. He was smiling broadly, with his old bad-boyish air, staring Lyle boldly in the face and daring him to wrench away. Lyle stammered a greeting, feeling his face burn.
He has come back like a bird of prey, now Uncle Gardner is dying
. Alastor nudged Lyle in the ribs, saying in a chiding voice that he’d returned to Contracoeur just by chance, to learn the sad news about their uncle—“I’d have thought, Lyle, that you might have kept your own brother better informed. As when Mother died, too, so suddenly, and I didn’t learn about it for months.”

Lyle protested, “But you were traveling—in Europe, you said—out of communication with everyone. You—”

But Alastor was performing for Aunt Alida and the others, and so interrupted Lyle to cry, with a pretense of great affection, “How unchanged you are, Lyle! How happy I am to see you.” It wasn’t enough for Alastor to have gripped Lyle’s hand so hard he’d nearly broken the fingers, now he had to embrace him; a rough bearlike hug that nearly cracked Lyle’s ribs, calculated to suggest to those who looked on
See how natural I am, how spontaneous and loving, and how stiff and unnatural my brother is, and has always been, though we’re supposed to be twins
. Lyle had endured this performance in the past and had no stomach for it now, pushing Alastor away and saying in an angry undertone, “You! What are you doing here! I’d think you’d be damned ashamed, coming back like this.” Not missing a beat, Alastor laughed and said, winking, one actor to another in a play performed for a credulous, foolish audience, “But why, brother? When you can be ashamed for both of us?” And he squeezed Lyle’s arm with deliberate force, making him wince, as he’d done repeatedly when they were boys, daring Lyle to protest to their parents.
Daring me to respond with equal violence
. Then slinging a heavy arm around Lyle’s shoulders, and walking him back to the women, as if Lyle were the reluctant visitor, and he, Alastor, the self-appointed host. Lyle quickly grasped, to his disgust, that Alastor had already overcome their aunt Alida’s distrust of him and had made an excellent impression on everyone, brilliantly playing the role of the misunderstood prodigal son, tender-hearted, grieved by his uncle’s imminent death and eager—so eager!—to give comfort to his well-to-do aunt.

How desperately Lyle wanted to take Aunt Alida aside, for she was an intelligent woman, and warn her
Take care! My brother is after Uncle Gardner’s fortune!
But of course he didn’t dare; it wasn’t in Lyle King’s nature to be manipulative.

In this way, Alastor King returned to Contracoeur.

And within a few days, to Lyle’s disgust, he’d reestablished himself with most of the relatives and certain of his old friends and acquaintances; probably, Lyle didn’t doubt, with former women friends. He’d overcome Alida King’s distrust and this had set the tone for the others. Though invited to stay with relatives, he’d graciously declined and had taken up residence at the Black River Inn; Lyle knew that his brother wanted privacy, no one spying on him, but others interpreted this gesture as a wish not to intrude, or impinge upon family generosity. How thoughtful Alastor had become, how kind, how
mature
. So Lyle was hearing on all sides. It was put to him repeatedly, maddeningly: “You must be so happy, Lyle, that your brother has returned. You must have missed him terribly.”