The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (26 page)

She filled me in on the elder Justine’s business history, as she’d gathered it from lawyers and locals. The old woman had
owned what sounded to have been the classic brothel with exclusive clientele. It had flourished through the Depression, the
war years, and well into the fifties, fine old decadent Atlanta being what it was. Around 1957, she’d made all the money she
wanted and retired, but amused herself in her late years with the burlesque club and
The Château.
Its bizarre sidelines were evidently a product of having the money and influence to do as she wanted, profitable or no.

I couldn’t complain about the meal. Justine’s choices were excellent though often strange—but my steak
au poivre
cost a small fortune. Among the things about the girl that I rarely saw change, even in four-star restaurants, were her eating
habits. Maybe a slightly hyperactive twenty-six-year-old metabolism was involved, but Justine ate like a pig at the trough.

Let me clarify this as a comment more on manners than quantity. They were less pronounced against her punker slouch than amidst
the moments of weirdly poised elegance. Her command of the correct forks came off as a virtual
abuse
of etiquette. Watching her almost literally
wading
through her plate of escargot was an appalling sight. I asked if she were enjoying the blue sauce, which looked like it might
be effervescing radon gas.

“Scrumptious,” she grinned, the expression leaving me a bit bemused. I wondered if that, like “big eyes” for ambition, was
something
else
that Gen-X imagined they’d invented. With our wine, we pored over the questions raised by the surviving library, and dissected
various aspects of the
Testament.

“While I was looking for more data on Willie’s relations with Aleister Crowley, I was scanning the index of Crowley’s
Confessions
for Seabrook’s name. Back up the list, I spied Tony Sarg, whom I recognized from
No Hiding Place
as having employed ‘Deborah Luris.’ The reference took me to a detailed description of the tantrums and general fussiness
of a woman named ‘Madeleine,’ procured by Sarg as a companion for Crowley’s trip. Crowley remembered her like this:”

… wonderful hair—orange-red curls, calculated to produce delirium tremens at a moment’s notice… a short sturdy figure trimly
tailored, with a round smiling face, and an ivory complexion framed in that pyrotechnic display of hair. Sarg’s eloquence
failed to do her justice.
⁶¹

“Later, I noticed that Marjorie had referred to a Madeleine, supposedly their Gypsy cook at Les Roseaux.” I handed her Worthington’s
book, which I’d brought along with us. “On page 150, she also describes a visit with Willie at a hospital, in the fall of
1933 when he was trying to detox. Seems like there was often a red-haired woman about.”

Justine found the place where Marjorie had walked in to find Willie talking with Ward Greene, and another friend, an unidentified
attractive redhead. The joking and laughing had ended in a sudden awkward silence, as if Marjorie were someone who had arrived
late at a cocktail party. She had reflected that these people had been part of Willie’s life before she had known him, sharing
old jokes, secrets, and adventures.

“For a moment she felt a strange relief,” I pointed out. “She imagined that Willie could somehow
slide back in time,
become well again. Then the eerie mood broke. Almost as though to convince herself, she then asserts that none of them could
be the same as they were a minute or years before.”

“
That
sounds like a twisted sister. You s’pose Marjorie was all—about a french fry short of a Happy Meal? Ooh, look here…” Justine
continued reading, “‘Ward Greene,
whom everyone called Jimmy,
said something funny…’ That’s dead on!”

I nodded. “There’s not the slightest question of the people Madeleine wrote about.” I told her of a photo section in the back
of
Jungle Ways,
depicting Seabrook and Wamba heading up their party, also a rare photo of Katie Seabrook in Africa. Justine continued to
leaf through the book as I talked. “The lesser-known legend about dead drummer boys and suicided girls sounds like something
I read in a piece called ‘Gregory’s Drum’…”
⁶²

Justine waved interruption, reading from late in Marjorie’s account, “And one evening my telephone rang, and at the other
end was a woman who had loved Willie, too. She told me he had been found in his bed…”
⁶³
She broke off and, when she looked up her eyes had moistened and her lip trembled. “We know who called her, don’t we? You
feel it, too; I know you do. Don’t ask me to believe other.”

I did not ask. I knew exactly what she meant. I had felt it at least since we had entered the octagonal room, where a poignancy
nothing less than tangible clung to every possession—of a woman who had worshiped the memory of a lost love. Justine, of course,
was fixated on the personality of William Seabrook.

“Hey, I’m way sure he’s the only father figure I’m ever gonna have.” Well, I decided to let that one go right by, noting she
could find that ancestry in the autobiography, including his contention that black magic was in the blood. He had written
of his ancestor Peter Boehler, of the Moravians, associate of Count Zinzendorf and John Wesley. Upon being accused of witchcraft
in his later years, the old churchman had contended that he had only been fighting fire with fire.

I also noted that Madeleine’s Lowell Thomas reference was to be found under the heading “Possibility of Precognition” in Seabrook’s
book on witchcraft. I still didn’t “spoil” the two chapters on the other Justine by going too far into that material. In a
bit of surly perversity, I think I was then feeling that she was falling too far behind on the shock quotient, and should
get to share more impact of all this fun! There is a standing joke that the nice thing about being a guy is not having to
deal in feelings. After the emotional overload of the recent days, I was perfectly happy to engage in some well-earned denial.

“What’s up with the place where my mother, and all the children, were always lied to?” she asked.

I sighed. “She couldn’t have been more right about
that.
A substantial percentage of the respectable matrons of postwar east Fort Worth had formerly been on staff at a fine old establishment
called Top-O-The-Hill. It was near where Lake Arlington was built in 1957. ‘What did you do in the war, Mommy?’ was not a
question to be countenanced on the pious east side.

“Babe, I see ‘sluts,’ like apparently your entire maternal lineage, your
gens,
as partisans in a revolution whose benefits you are reaping. There was a sexual revolution and the ‘bad girls’ won! Some
were victims, like your mother and, evidently, her mother.” The steely armor did not reappear, so I pressed ahead. “The ‘morality’
those girls were taught was a monstrous obscenity, that they would burn in hell for loving. In reality, the only rule was
not to get caught. When she did, JJ believed that, despite the ring on her finger, she was an unlucky loser—damned to control
by a vicious animal she had to try to please.”

Justine looked askance. “Was there some kinda law that she had to marry him? She could’ve been with you.”

————————

“S
HE BELIEVED HER PERSONAL LIFE ENDED RIGHT THERE.
Even had she been able to make that choice, the fact that she got knocked up forced her to ally herself with
some
man.” I thought of the young JJ as she had been before. “She was such a good little poet. Did you know that? Maybe it helped
her hold on to some semblance of self-esteem. It was as near a tragedy as her mother…” My emotions were in a horrible tangle.
Reaction to the uncanny events and the hurts and regrets of the past bled into each other. Somehow, I had to draw back from
all this for a while.

Justine nodded and spoke softly, “I love you for that, I really do. But you can’t go there, ’twixt Mother and me—big issues!
I gotta tell you that I agree with the
Testament.
These big ‘differences’ are muchly a matter of one generation always lying to the next. Hey, other than JJ, please?”

“There’s something to that. I truly loved all that part about nonhistory,” I complied. “In the time and place where JJ and
I were trying to grow up, no thought was allowed unless it suggested the desirable social and political conclusions. I guess
that’s why I despise concepts like ‘politically correct,’ and I imagine that the old woman regarded it as a hideous little
hellhole.”

I speculated that you could extend that proposition, as Seabrook had apparently begun to do. The postwar reaction had not
been exclusively against political ideas—also sexual nonconformity. A largely successful campaign had been launched to convince
the entire “Boomer” generation that personal liberties had never been broader than they, themselves, were experiencing. The
Orwellian madness then spread like an oil slick. The most bizarre censorship had been directed at obscuring the nature and
implications of scientific knowledge—especially, though not solely, as it had related to the recent war.

“Even today, we only get tidbits on such anomalies as the occasional V-One rocket bomb found unexploded on American soil.
Back when JJ and I were in grade school, the public-school buildings still had the residue of blackout paint on the windows.
Suppose that wasn’t an unnecessary precaution?”

“Back in the day, there was this totally weird buzz on, about an explosion at Medina Base.” Justine named the San Antonio
depot where nukes were still stored.

I confirmed her childhood memory of a dark rumor, “Except that it was long before you were born, back in the fifties. There
was damage throughout the city, and it’s still classified. Babe, if you could visit the past, I think you’d find it a very
different place than we assume, almost an alternate world in itself, just due to the lies that have become ‘common knowledge.’

“Mark Twain was only a bit more fanciful when he visualized a time traveler initiating an industrial society centuries before
a social and economic base existed to sustain it. He was realistic to have it disappear, except for tiny ‘anomalies,’ not
dissimilar to the sorts of things archaeologists really find.”

“What are we thinking here? Please, where are you trying to go?” I was aware that I’d been bouncing off the walls, using peripheral
conjectures to avoid the troubling central revelations. My implausibly “happenstance” involvement with no less than two previous
generations of her family had been revealed as only the beginning. My quest to reconcile my personal issues had culminated
in both an “inadvertent” return to the presumed source of that line and, “coincidentally,” an open-ended involvement with
yet a third generation! I wasn’t ready to deal with it all, and she’d been willing to tolerate my digressions.

“Visualize this, as if you were reading a science fiction novel. American scientific magazines become embroiled in the burning
question of communication with the dead, while a decadent intelligentsia waffles among fascinations from sentimental belief
in guardian angels to embrace of sexual sadomasochism. In the heartland, fascistic movements obsessed with ancestral heritage
battle with working-class communists. A dread of alien invaders provokes panic while the real powers arm for Armageddon with
everything from high technology to black magic, and virtual secret societies seize control of national security and communications.
An alternate world?”

“Hate rhetorical questions,
hate
them!” She slurped at her
étouffé.
“What? A near-future scenario?”

“The autumn of 1938. My only point with this is that we are not, in any sense, highly knowledgeable about a ‘real’ past. For
argument’s sake, postulate an alternate past in which the ‘problem-solving group’ at the Philadelphia Naval Yards was very
high-powered.
⁶⁴
They and their colleagues had written science fiction in much the same way as former intelligence personnel have written
spy fiction.

“Assume further that the so-called Philadelphia Experiment did involve tinkering with space-time, as has been represented
in some fiction. There would have been heavy security on this, to be sure, just as around the Manhattan Project.” I was reminded
of the story of the 1944 raid on the office of
Astounding Science Fiction.
“Greg Benford wrote that the Manhattan Project was so afraid of imagination, disciplined with facts and numbers, that it
feared science fiction itself.

“Willie could, with at least a marginal interest in ‘scientific romance,’ have been aware of some of this. Other science fiction
writers, in particular Murray Leinster, who, you’ll remember, had written the first branching-worlds story in 1934, were picking
up on things. Maybe Willie knew Leinster. Continue this chain of remote associations to the physicists he knew, like Bayard
Rodman. Or his friend Robert Wood, who, having written some of the earliest science fiction, was part of that community.

“Willie’s published work in the forties leaves no doubt of his obsession with space-time. The barn experiments were about
seeing across time and realities, as well as tickling his pickled libido. But all that aside, I must believe Seabrook’s alleged
late obsession with government was not much more than that. While the Feds may have cast a wide net for anything they paranoically
imagined a threat to U.S. scientific hegemony, Willie was not engaged in anything that remotely approached hard science.

“I think it’s safe to assume that, nearing the end, he was not the most stable personality of whom you’ve ever read,” I concluded.
“I relate to him too well for that! I’m only stressing that in the ‘real’ era of the Second World War, as opposed to the conventional
assumptions we hold about those times, it was probably easy enough to imagine anything.

“Fun conjecture somewhere has to run up against bedrock science, and some of the more colorful propositions of science fiction
must be discounted. None of the rationales that may have affected Willie’s thinking do a thing to increase the probability
of fantasies such as, say, security considerations of secret government projects to alter history.”