The Uses of Enchantment (30 page)

“I’m not the one with the rage problem,” Aunt Helen said. “Where does rage initiate from, Gabrielle, but from a sense that one is a perpetual victim? Hmmm? You think about that. But about the painting. Of course I understand why you’d want to sell it, especially you, Regina. You’ve always been jealous of your sister. She proved to be the most imaginative one in the family, didn’t she? And of course Mimsy wants to sell the painting because it reminds her of how much her own misdeeds wounded—perhaps
mortally
wounded—your mother. Paula was so wounded by her own daughter that she wasted her adult life trying to exonerate a long-dead lice-ridden
chambermaid
. Talk about poorly redirected energies. Which couldn’t have helped her cancer any. I’m not saying it was the cause.”

“Abigail Lake was not a chambermaid,” Mary said numbly.

“Darling, they were
all
chambermaids. And those were the classy ones.”

Weegee, previously dozing under the coffee table, let out a high-pitched yelp. He skittered, tail tucked, into the front hall and up the stairs.

“Weegee!” She looked accusingly at Gaby. “What did you do to him?”

“He caught his pecker in a rug loop.”

“You’re disgusting,” Aunt Helen said. She stood unsteadily, bony hand propped against the door molding for balance.

“Maybe you should go home, Aunt Helen,” Mary said.

“Home! You’re trying to get rid of me? When I’m too weakened by grief to carry the painting that
lawfully
belongs to me?”

“We’ve all had a very long day,” Mary said.

“I’m sure you have. Nobody’s asked me what kind of day I had.”

Nobody spoke.

Aunt Helen raised her voice. “
Nobody’s
wondered what it’s been like for me to lose my older sister.”

Aunt Helen started to cry.

Mary put a hand on her elbow. “We know you’re suffering in a highly unique way,” she said.

“I
am
suffering. My older sister is gone. Who shall death come for next, but me?”

She turned her eyes toward the space on the wall where Abigail Lake used to hang. Then she lurched into the hall.

“Where are you going?” Mary called after her.

“I need to find Weegee,” she said. “He’s hurt and he’s scared. You girls are beasts. You’ve always been hideous little beasts. And ugly, too. Why do you think no one will marry you? You ugly, ugly girls.”

Aunt Helen bobbled precariously up the plush stairs.

“Go follow her!” Regina hissed.

“Me?” Mary said.

“She might end up in Dad’s room! Dad will blow his stack if she wakes him up.”

“Dad took sleeping pills and he’s never blown his stack in his life.” Gaby cocked her wrists and made motions with her fingers in the air as though she were snapping a pair of castanets. “
Ca va!
” she yelled at Regina.

“Be quiet!” Regina yelled back. “But thank god she can still drive home. The only thing worse than Aunt Helen drunk is Aunt Helen hungover.”

“I’ll clean up the kitchen,” Mary said.

“No, we’ll clean up the kitchen,” said Regina. “You go get Aunt Helen. She needs to start driving before they set up the police roadblock.”

“What police roadblock?” Mary said.

“To catch drunk drivers,” Regina said. “She’d never pass a Breathalyzer. But she’s fine to drive. She’s an old pro.”

Old pro or not, Mary worried that Aunt Helen had exceeded the point of functional drunk and would land her station wagon in the living room of one of the faux-colonial elderly apartments built stupidly close to her exit ramp. But she kept her worry to herself, in part because she didn’t want to spark another disagreement, in part because she too wanted Aunt Helen gone. Aunt Helen’s presence wasn’t merely an annoyance, it was unsettling, not to mention heart-wrenching, to catch glimpses of Mum in Aunt Helen’s face as it shifted gears between distinctly Aunt Helen–like expressions; during these split-second moments of slack repose, Mum’s face became fleetingly visible—her denatured, uninhabited, glum, dead face. Because of this Mary was willing to pretend, like her sisters, that Aunt Helen was perfectly fine to drive.

The upstairs was creepily quiet and dark—perhaps Aunt Helen
had
found her way into their father’s room. She opened her father’s door and heard the weighty, underwater sounds of his drugged sleep. No sign of Aunt Helen, no sign of Weegee. Nor was Aunt Helen in the guest room, study-cum-second-guest-room, or the bathroom. Which left only one possibility.

In the pyramid splash of hallway light she could see Aunt Helen’s sweater set and pants folded on her desk chair along with Weegee’s dog sweater. Aunt Helen’s shiny-beige bra straps curved over her shoulders, emerging from the top of Mary’s duvet. Weegee had made a bed of Mary’s bathrobe and towel, wadded into a nest at the foot of her bed. His head was tucked under his flank and he, as well as Aunt Helen, was snoring.

Mary might have been angry if the scene, slapstick and pathetic as it was, didn’t tweak her in a deeply familiar way. If she squinted to the point of practically closing her eyes she could almost fool herself into thinking the woman in her bed was Mum—a deeply ironic misidentification given that Mum, on several occasions, had succeeded as Helen more readily than Helen might have done. In the summer of 1960, if Mum’s version was to be believed, Aunt Helen found a job as an intern at the Lesley College Archaeology Department, but awoke her first morning of work with chicken pox. Mum, a Wellesley student on grade probation, drove to the department to fill in for her sister so that Helen wouldn’t lose the job. Surrounded by canoe-length mandibles and children’s skulls the size of teacups, her mother decided that a job at the Archaeology Department was a far preferable way to pass the summer than selling fudge and tulips to cranky matrons at a clapboarded roadside stand in Concord. Within a week she’d worked her way from filing department-meeting minutes in a windowless file closet to replacing the department head’s assistant, away on a temple dig in Sri Lanka. Aunt Helen, once she learned that her sister had stolen her job, insisted that she confess. Mum did; the department head, remarkably, didn’t care. Aunt Helen took her rightful place as a filing intern in the windowless closet while her sister enjoyed her own office with a view of the quad.

There were other incidents as well; her mother, already married, had gone on a blind date as a “placeholder” for Aunt Helen, stuck in the Philadelphia airport due to a blizzard. Before she could properly identify herself to the architect as his blind date’s sister, he kissed her on the cheek and addressed her as “Helen.” She remained Helen for the evening. The architect wrote letters to Aunt Helen when, humiliated, she refused to return his calls. The architect grew increasingly besotted. What could Aunt Helen do? Her potential husband had fallen in love with the wrong Helen. To show her face now would be to spend another metaphorical summer in the file closet.

Which was not to say that her mother was a malicious or even deceitful person. Mary interpreted her mother’s admittedly questionable behavior this way: she was unable to disappoint strangers. She flexibly transformed herself into a file clerk, an assistant, a potential wife. Or, to dig more deeply into the thicket of her mother’s psyche, maybe some chronic dissatisfaction made slipping into another’s person skin and body and life a welcome diversion. Given the chance, her identity was prone to wander.

Mary relaxed her eyes and her mother disappeared from her bed. She noticed that Aunt Helen had placed her car keys on the bedside table. This struck Mary as a fair exchange—her bed for Aunt Helen’s station wagon. Besides, given the slip of paper in her pocket, there was no way she was sleeping tonight.

Notes

APRIL 1, 1986

B
efore my next meeting with Mary, I received a phone call from her mother’s sister, Helen, informing me of a discovery made in Mary’s bedroom. On principle, I do not allow family members to intrude upon my therapeutic dyad with a patient unless convinced that the discovery concerns a life-or-death matter. I explained this policy to Mary’s aunt over the phone; she insisted nonetheless that I meet with her, while refusing to reveal the nature of her discovery. She would only say it was of “extraordinary significance.” I doubted very much the extraordinary significance of her discovery; it was possible, even likely, that Mary’s aunt and mother suffered from a hysterical condition or similar cluster B personality disorder, these things being hereditary.

I agreed to the meeting.

Helen, an extremely thin woman with short blond hair and lively dark eyes, arrived late to our scheduled appointment. We spent the first few minutes determining what sort of rate I’d charge for the visit, since her older sister’s insurance didn’t pay for second-party consultations. I asked her if money was an issue for her sister, and if so we could negotiate a rate that would be agreeable to all. Her hands clenched and unclenched in her lap. She said that no, money wasn’t the issue, it was a matter of her sister’s insurance policy and what it would and would not cover. I told her that if money wasn’t an issue, than neither was the insurance policy. She became flustered by logical attempts to solve her concern, unable to mount an articulate defense of her fixation while remaining stubbornly fixated.

Eventually, she let the matter drop and produced, from her purse, a dented silver cigarette case engraved on its front with the letter
K
.

The engraving glinted beneath my office lights like a mangled rebuke. My scalp began to sweat; my peripheral vision darkened and constricted until I was staring down what seemed like a virtual optical nerve at that single letter. Only one conclusion could be drawn from it:
K existed
. I experienced what my own analyst calls the Rosenthal effect kickback—and I realized, as Helen and I stared unspeakingly at the cigarette case in her lap, that I had decided absolutely, without consciously acknowledging the absoluteness of this decision, that Mary had fabricated the story of her abduction, just as Bettina had fabricated her story. I had begun unquestioningly to see them as parallel cases, and planned to do with Mary all that I had failed to do with Bettina, thereby rectifying my past mistakes and, additionally, restoring my own faith in myself as a therapist. The cigarette case, thus, served not only to undermine this certainty—it called into question my own therapeutic methods, and suggested that either my methods were faulty or my relationship with my past remained so unresolved that I was unable to objectively assess situations with my new patients. I had, in classic Rosenthal effect fashion, conflated Mary and Bettina—for understandably circumstantial reasons. But my deeper analytic self had cut itself off from nuance—not to mention the possibility that Mary, after all, had been telling the truth.

This first Rosenthal effect kickback was followed by a second, more distasteful realization: I was depending upon this assumption for professional as well as personal reasons. I had begun to generate an idea for a book about a new adolescent disorder I’d been calling, in my own casual thoughts, hyper radiance. Literally, hyper radiants were Parisian lenses created in 1822 by Augustin Fresnel and used by lighthouses; a single thousand-watt lightbulb is condensed and magnified by the hyper radiant so that its beam can be seen eighteen miles away. This struck me as a fitting metaphor, so I’d adopted the term “hyper radiance” to describe the morbid appeal of the Salem witch trials and the need for young girls, especially those girls raised in the repressive culture of New England, to “magnify” themselves as the victims of spells and devilry at the very moment they come of sexual age; since the abduction of one’s personality and soul were no longer viable claims, these girls insist that they have
literally
been abducted. Their soul does not go missing; their body does, through a complicated self-engineered process that may, or may not, be “known” to the hyper radiant. Both, however, were fabricated situations created in response to fear—in the case of the girls who claimed to be spellbound in 1692, such fear was later seen as a mutated terror of Indian abduction combined with intense sexual repression. Though hyper radiance enjoyed a certain local potency due to the proximity to the source myth, there was little doubt in my mind that hyper radiance threatened to become a nationwide phenomenon. On my more confident days, I believed this theory would prove a tremendously influential discovery, and would result in a book that would, in turn, make my reputation among my colleagues. On my less confident days, I was reminded of something Mary herself once said about high-school English papers, and her ability to prove competing theses using
The Scarlet Letter
, her point being that one can find what one wants to find, which does not necessarily means that what one finds is actually there.

I’m assuming this is the important item you wished to discuss with me, I said, finally, to Helen.

It is, Helen said. Paula found it in the top drawer of Mary’s bureau.

Is your sister in the habit of opening Mary’s drawers, I said.

The top drawer is the place Mary hides the objects she wants Paula to find.

That’s quite a roundabout means of communication, I said.

It’s a classic mother-daughter non-relationship, Dr. Hammer, Helen said. Surely you’ve encountered the phenomenon before.

Helen didn’t smile; her demeanor remained caustic toward me, but her hostility possessed a glumly erotic component.

But if Mary’s mother found the cigarette case, I said, why are you here?

Paula doesn’t want to be perceived as a meddler, said Helen.

One person’s meddler is another person’s nurse, I said, my mind still distractedly spinning through the dismal implications of the cigarette case. I had the strongest desire to snatch the case from Helen’s lap and throw it into the Charles, to remove it permanently from the world. A part of me actually considered the fact that if I could destroy this case, then my theories about Mary and Bettina would still be true.