The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (34 page)

He and Marjorie were persuaded to marry by the local matriarch, Mrs. John Jay Chapman. I had wondered if that act of submission
was related to Willie’s masochistic shift. He had been impressed with some local lore about John Jay Chapman incinerating
his hand to atone for a sin against a friend.

Willie and Marjorie were married in February of 1935, but kept it secret for some eight months, until after
Asylum
was published as a book and became a raging success. When they went public, it was also revealed that Katie had married Lyman
Worthington, Marjorie’s ex, at about the same time. As Lyman and Katie declined to give the date and place of their marriage,
one might also wonder if a double ceremony might have been involved.

Even as I had studied the microfilm, making that notation, I’d seen the contradictions continuing. The alleged history of
that Greenwich Village foursome, acknowledged even by Marjorie to some degree, constituted a further problem. There was scarcely
any time in probable chronology for it to have existed. Seabrook followed up the success of
Asylum
by going undercover in a state institution for the criminally insane, writing an exposé on that end of mental health. His
literary success with those endeavors would set off scores of imitators for decades, another unacknowledged impact. He was
then forty-nine and Marjorie was thirty-six. The next three years were bucolic—garden shows and social life on the River.

He’d traveled some around the U.S. writing real mainstream fare for
American Magazine
and
Reader’s Digest.
She was writing short stories for
Harper’s,
Mademoiselle,
and, herself also a Mencken creation,
American Mercury.
Marjorie had been happiest when they were both at their typewriters working. But then had come the infamous years of the
barn, of
Witchcraft.

I’d hoped to find the location by working from the old Dows estate and sometime girls’ academy described in
No Hiding Place
and in Marjorie’s book, but I was soon ready to give up until the morning. This was taking too long, and frankly, I’d not
wanted to risk being out near the mansions after sunset. I felt slightly foolish for so yielding to superstition. Still, the
descriptions in the old woman’s
Testament
had been very vivid, and Justine’s state of mind was too dicey for me to want to chance it.

We’d stopped in front of a seemingly vacant tract of land where I made one last effort to get our bearings. I was pointing
out landmarks across the River, in the directions of Port Ewen and Hurley, which were denoted on our Chamber of Commerce map.

Justine had been expressing curiosity that I had little or no interest in that icon of my generation, Woodstock, and giggling
about our being
“total tourists.”

“… way up in the mountains over there is the gorge where Rip Van Winkle was supposed to have slept after meeting Henry Hudson’s
ghost crew.” I laughed, enjoying, for my part, a certain feeling of normalcy.

She had followed my finger and begun playfully to debate whether that was
“really”
the location, or in the Blue Mountains closer to Woodstock, as some locals claimed. When she abruptly broke off, I looked
back to see her scanning about and behind us. Without warning, she bolted around the car and disappeared into the high weeds
and shrubbery. Startled, I had begun to follow, when the sound of her wounded cry quickened my pace.

I found her standing as you see the bereaved beside a fresh grave, one hand tight over her diaphragm and the other clutched
to her lips, her shoulders tensed and shaking. As I reached her, she gave up a strangled sob. “Marjorie’s little house is
gone!” Some rubble at her feet suggested that a building had indeed once stood there, and debating whether this was the actual
location of the cottage didn’t seem appropriate. I started to put my arm around her.

“Well, the walls were built by the Indians and finished out by the Dutch,” I began. “Nothing will endure forever, babe.” The
cloudy afternoon light dimmed abruptly, and I looked at the darkening, churning sky. There was a lot of circulation up there,
and it was about to rain. With a sudden apprehension, I knew I’d made some ghastly mistake.

Maybe I was accustomed to the flat Texas horizon. Perhaps I had stupidly not thought of how, above the cloud deck, the sun
might be setting just a hair earlier beyond Woodstock. While the higher Catskills weren’t all that lofty, dusk seemed to settle
much faster than anticipated. Whatever might be responsible for the effect, maybe only the slight change in latitude added
to a mere degree of elevation—it was as though the shadow of the haunted hills was already coming down over Rhinebeck.

————————

T
HE LEGENDS OF THE GORGES AND HOLLOWS
were not whom I feared, however. I now think that I had known what to fear since reading Madeleine’s
Testament.
Below us, toward the River, the lights had come on in some of the houses. Friendly lights, which might guide one home in
a benign evening.

When I looked back to Justine, I was alarmed. She was biting her knuckle so hard that she had drawn blood, and her face was
a mask of stark holy terror. Her eyes had changed color and looked blind, to anything including me, seeing altogether
elsewhere.

She whirled and ran madly up the hill behind us, oblivious to my calling after her, falling once, then scrambling on ahead.
Oh shit,
I thought I knew her.
Despite everything, I’d continued to persuade myself of that. Then she pulls something like this! I’d pursued Linda on suicidal
sprints toward highways more than once, but I’d been in much better shape back then. If this youngster was going to run amuck
on me, I
did
have a problem.

Even so, I chased after her through the deepening gloom. In the fading light I almost collided with the wall of a large structure.
Long, tall, and narrow, it was of the configuration that the old New Yorkers called a “saltbox barn.” Sagging in abandonment
with its paint long eroded, it was nonetheless evident from the various window casings at upper and lower levels that it had
once been converted to habitation. There was no glass left in the staring windows, and a large front doorway yawned mutely
empty.

Following Justine’s hysterical weeping, I found her kneeling on a dirt floor, as if the cavernous space she was facing were
a cathedral. The place had been entirely gutted, remnants of good Depression-era parquetry bearing silent testimony to the
two missing floor levels. High above, I could see the darkening sky through tears in the roof. If this indeed had been Willie’s
barn, all trace of his loving work had been gone these many years.

“It’s the dream,” she moaned miserably as I knelt beside her. “I forgot the dream, and now it’s come after me.” Gone were
the faintest intonations of the young woman I’d known, and hearing nothing but the speech of the old Bronx was chilling. Thunder
rumbled and lightning flashed away to the west. The crew of the
Half-Moon,
I thought crazily, remembering the legend, bowling with their ninepins up in the Catskills.

“I believed I’d awakened, but I kept waking up again, here,” she cried with the terror of an abandoned child. “Oh, my Lord
in heaven, please help me. Oh, help me wake up!” Her voice lapsed into a croaking whisper, seemingly akin to the dream experience
of “silent screams,” which one cannot seem to get out of one’s throat.

The lightning flashed again, closer, and I could see that she had a profuse nosebleed. As in despair, she flung herself on
the dirt and thrashed about, in a virtual
fugue
state. I endeavored to pin her down; there were certainly nails and God-knew-what in the debris around us. I’d succeeded
in embracing her with a good grip when she threw up. Blood, snot, and then puke. I was getting the full treatment and hoped
it was good for the soul, because I was not letting go. I noted with indifference my heart pounding to the unaccustomed exertion.
If I were going to lose her there, I’d just as soon be dead, rather than face a meaningless world without her.

She had gone into full babble mode, and I frantically worked to decipher what it was she perceived. It seemed she believed
herself on a parquet floor, adjacent to a bedroom where she’d gone to sleep; though other dream images and renderings continued
to intrude. Some amber light source she was seeing, like a heating grate or a night-light, became the “scare furnace,” and
other distractions such as that.

She tried to squirm away from me, seeking after a vanished staircase. She was mumbling about plaster saints, African masks,
and shelves of witches’ dolls. Like a little child, she was terrified of looking at the painted faces—for fear of surprising
them
looking back.

The memory images were so intense that they were patently visible to her. I tried to help her recall that at least some of
those memorabilia were packed away back home, but she would only keep begging, “Help me, help me.
Oh, Willie, à 1’aide!
Wake me up, please wake me up …” Torturously, I pieced the thing together. She was not seeing merely where she wanted to
be, but
where she thought she was!

I had to stay with her, incoherent and out of it as she might be. If there were any hope of pulling her back, I had to go
with it. I could only pray that there would be another day, when review of my interpretation of her semicoherent snatches
had proven sufficient to the purpose. I cannot begin to recount the discursive bits and pieces from which I was obliged to
frame an overall sense.

She rambled on about those other things Willie had kept upstairs, the witch’s cradle, the rack. She longed to feel the chains
from the rafters against her naked flesh. Even the thought of being placed on the torture instruments was comforting and desirable
as compared with … The lightning flashes again defined the present moment, and I thought,
God help me, I know what’s happening here!
The girl in my arms had never been in this place, but within her, no longer so deep, were the memories of how the other Justine
had known it over the years, and especially on her last night together with Willie in 1945.

To her, it was as if she were sleeping here on that night, having a nightmare from which she couldn’t awaken. Unconscious,
her mind had drifted, as Dunne had theorized, into an unknown future and found … this present moment. To her,
this was the dream.
This nightmare—a world with her beloved Willie gone, the barn gutted, such a dark and sad place. She was trying with all
her might to consolidate the memories that had defined that other self, fight her way back to an acceptable reality,
to him.

I reacted as if to an evil demon, as Willie had perversely wanted to be seen, or perhaps feared that he might really be. “No,
Seabrook, you bastard! You can’t have her!” I screamed out, though maybe only in my mind; I’m not sure. “You didn’t care for
her before, and now she has another chance. Let go of her!”

But I could feel her slipping away, somehow detaching from the here-and-now. I knew she would joyfully quit this life if she
imagined that she would wake in his arms on that other night. The war had ended, Uncle Sam was the last man standing and girding
himself as the new Romulus. Her countrymen had imagined the dawn of a brave new world, but something within her would know
that darkness had been closing over hers.

For the rest of her life, and into another, her unconscious mind would never escape the accusation of the unremembered dream—the
prescient dream that had warned of their last chance. She would sacrifice anything to go back and change things. How could
I, above anyone, fail to encompass the horror in that recognition? What else she might be going through as the memories that
had composed another life slammed mercilessly into her mind, one thing was certain. That reality was not the horror to be
escaped from;
it was this one.

As I tried to pray, the lost ones of my own life closed in around me. The circle nearly complete, only my place was yet empty.
I tried to believe that they would be waiting for me, and pleaded God to forgive my own hurtfulness and neglect. I thought
I was going to vomit, too. I’d never been so conflicted, didn’t even know for what the hell I was praying. To let her go was
impossible. Yet comprehension of her pain was unbearable.

A maudlin little offering of my life for hers could not begin to touch the love that gripped Justine’s soul, or divert its
purpose. She had reawakened with a passion I had never known, even in my adoration of her. If she could not find him here,
she would reach for that other night. Her youthful beauty, her brand-new future, were as nothing compared to the goal before
her eyes. She would sacrifice her life, her self, her sanity, just to go back to that other night and make it different.
If she could not find him here …

————————

“M
ADELEINE!
” I yelled in her face over the crashing thunder. “Justine,” I corrected when I failed to immediately get her attention, “don’t
you know it’s over, babe? The aching and the loneliness are over. The hurting can end now. We live in an otherworld, and I’ll
always be there to hold your hand. I promise you that, and may I be damned if I don’t keep it.”

The lightning flashed again, and I saw the green eyes were open, trying to make me out. There was no time to think this through.
I knew that I might succeed in waking her into a state comparable to schizophrenia, but at least she would awaken. Without
the only reality upon which she would let herself be grounded, I had no confidence that she would.

“Willie?” she asked faintly.

“It’s me,” I answered earnestly, wondering at the eerie notion that I might, somehow, have just damned us both.

Her hands sought my face in the darkness. “Oh my, you’ve grown a beard,” she laughed weakly, “You always did look good with
a beard.” A prolonged electrical burst revealed us to each other, and she threw her arms around my neck with joy and relief
so intense as it melded with my own. “And I’ve missed you so much. Oh, my dear, dear Willie!” I wondered at what incomprehensible
image she might be seeing. Was it like in a dream, where a figure might be two persons simultaneously?