Bestial (7 page)

“The faces!” he would cry. “Don’t you see them?”

His religious preoccupation grew more extreme, too, burgeoning into a kind of mania. He took to wearing a rosary. One evening, when he and Mary were out for a walk, they passed a store that sold religious articles. In the display window was a painting of a beatific Christ, his soft eyes gazing heavenward.

Earle grew strangely excited. “See! See!” he exclaimed, jabbing a finger at the picture.

“See what?” asked Mary.

“There! Don’t I look like Christ?”

Mary stared at her husband. Far from looking beatific, there was a coarse, hulking quality to Earle. If anything, his thick, sensual features were the very opposite of the sublime face in the picture. A saying she had once heard flashed into her mind. “For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel. Thus is the Devil ever God’s ape.”

Not long afterwards, Mary went to see her priest. Tearfully, she explained her predicament and asked his advice. He told her that “kindness can cure insanity.” She should “do her best” and “bear with it.” Mary was heartened by this counsel. Perhaps Father O’Connell was right and, with a little kindness and patience, Earle’s condition would improve over time.

For a while, they moved in with his Aunt Lillian. During
this period, Earle would sometimes disappear for weeks at a time without telling anyone where he was going. Even Lillian could not understand why Mary would tolerate such behavior in a husband. Still, she was grateful that her nephew had found such a loyal woman.

When Earle returned from one of these mysterious sojourns in the spring of 1921, Mary decided that a change of scenery might be good for them. That April, they moved to Palo Alto and rented a little bungalow. Within days, both of them had found work at a private school for girls—Mary as a cleaning woman, Earle as a handyman. It wasn’t long, however, before Earle began making life miserable for her again.

One morning, not long after they began their new jobs, the school’s headmistress, Miss Harker, asked Mary to bring in the laundry. As Mary was plucking the clothes from the line, an elderly man named Patrick, who doubled as gardener and watchman, strolled up and began making small talk. Seconds later, Earle burst from the schoolhouse, his eyes (as Mary would later describe them) “all black and angry and fierylike.” While Mary stood there trembling and speechless, Earle stormed up to the old man, shook a fist in his face, and began shouting threats. “What do you think you are doing? She’s my wife! I’d better not see you talking to her again. If I do, why, I’ll—”

At that point, Miss Harker herself, alarmed by the commotion, came bustling out, demanding an explanation. The two livid men simply glowered at each other. It was left for Mary to stammer an apology and promise that there would be no such scenes in the future.

That night, back at home, Earle went wild, accusing Mary of deliberately going out to the school’s backyard to flirt with other men. He worked himself into such a state that Mary, fearing for her safety, fled the house.

In spite of Mary’s promise to Miss Harker, Earle continued to make mortifying scenes in public, sometimes in front of the students. On one occasion, he confronted his wife in the dining hall and, florid with rage, accused her of having a boyfriend. As the horrified children looked on, he grabbed her left hand and tore off her wedding ring, bloodying her finger.

Mary managed to break free of his grasp and ran sobbing to Miss Marker’s office while Earle stormed out of the school.

Inside her office, the headmistress urged Mary to leave Earle before he did serious harm to her. “That man is absolutely insane,” warned Miss Harker.

By the time she arrived home that evening, Mary had made up her mind. She found Earle pacing back and forth in the kitchen. “Pack up your bags,” he commanded. “We’re leaving this place. They’re all against me, every one of them.”

Steeling herself, Mary told him her decision. She was staying. She liked Palo Alto. And she was happy at the school. But she wanted Earle to go. She could not live with him anymore.

Earle said nothing. But the look on his face was so terrifying that Mary turned and bolted, taking refuge at a neighbor’s. When she returned in the morning, Earle was gone.

That afternoon, however, he came back. Mary was at work at Miss Marker’s, sweeping out the kitchen, when Earle suddenly appeared, looking as if he’d spent the night in a gutter. There was something in his face that rattled Mary so badly that she dropped her broom and ran. Earle gave chase, cornering her in the pantry.

Clutching his hands like a supplicant, he implored her to take him back. When Mary refused, his eyes took on a startling look, the pupils contracting so completely that there seemed to be nothing but white.

“It’s him, ain’t it?” he snarled.

In her terror, Mary could barely croak out a reply. “Who?”

“
Him
. The one who’s keeping you from me.”

“There is no one, Earle,” she managed to say.

“I’ll get you back,” he said with an emphatic nod. Taking a step towards her, he raised his curled hands as though he meant to throttle her.

Letting out a scream, Mary ducked beneath his outstretched arms, scrambled out of the pantry, and made for the nearest office. It belonged to Caroline Wellman, the matron of the school. “He’s after me!” Mary shouted as she burst into the room.

The startled matron snatched up her phone and called the Palo Alto police. Just then, Earle appeared at the threshold. Panting, hands clenching spasmodically, he stood there looking wildly from Mary to Miss Wellman, who was talking excitedly into the phone.

It was a cloudless day in late spring, and the school windows stood wide open. Backing toward the hallway window directly behind him, Earle climbed halfway through and fixed his wife with a baleful look. “I’ll get you!” he shouted. “I’ll get you yet!”

Then, hurling a final curse at the ashen-faced woman, he slipped out the window, dropped to the grass, and was gone.

†

Eugene O’Neill,
The Hairy Ape

If you’d seen the look on her pale mug when she shriveled away with her hands over her eyes to shut out the sight of him! Sure, ’twas as if she’d seen a great hairy ape escaped from the zoo!

A
fter the lapse of so many years, it’s impossible to know the particulars of the incident that occurred on May 19, 1921. The only existing record is a brief article from the following day’s
San Francisco Chronicle
, and the information it contains is very sparse. It doesn’t say, for example, how Earle Leonard Ferral came to choose the house at 1519 Pacific Avenue, or what his motives were for bluffing his way inside.

Only these facts are known: sometime during that Wednesday afternoon, Ferral appeared unexpectedly at the threshold of Mr. Charles Summers’ modest home. The door was opened by Summers’ twenty-four-year-old son, Charles Junior. Claiming to be a plumber who had come to repair a leaky gas pipe, Ferral gained admittance to the house and immediately descended into the cellar where twelve-year-old Mary Summers was playing with her dolls.

Moments later, Charles Junior heard his sister scream.

Though the news account supplies no physical details about little Mary Summers, she must have been a strapping girl. Earle himself was no flyweight but a burly twenty-four-year-old who had done manual labor throughout his adult
life. But when Earle suddenly set down the tools he was carrying and fell upon the child, she put up a ferocious struggle. Screeching, kicking, tearing at his face, she was able to fend him off until her brother heard her frantic cries.

Rushing down to the basement, Summers threw himself on the attacker. The two young men grappled fiercely until Earle managed to break loose and flee the house. Summers chased him into the street and tackled him. They battled again, Summers knocking Earle down at least three times. Finally, Earle landed a punch that staggered his opponent and took to his heels. After checking to see that his sister was unhurt, Summers hurried to the nearest precinct house and reported the crime.

Two hours later Earl Ferral was arrested on a Polk Street trolley car by Traffic Policeman Ebner Esteranz, who had been supplied with a detailed description of the suspect. Earle was taken to the city jail and booked on an assault charge. In his mug shot, he looks more like the victim than the perpetrator. Hair wildly dishevelled, face battered and clawed, he gazes at the camera through hurt, hooded eyes. There is a strange mix of coarseness and sensitivity to his face. He looks like a thug who might burst into tears at any second.

In Palo Alto the next morning, Mary Fuller received a double shock. Less than a week had passed since her last, frightening confrontation with Evan (as she still believed he was called). Early Thursday morning, not long after she arrived at work, two policemen showed up at the school to inform her that a man claiming to be her husband had been arrested for attacking a young woman in San Francisco. Mary had to sit down to keep from swooning. Her distress was compounded when the officers told her the prisoner’s name, Earle Leonard Ferral. For the first time, Mary Fuller discovered that her husband had married her under a false identity.

In spite of all he had put her through, Mary continued to feel responsible for Earle, as she would until the end of his life. She promptly made arrangements to take several days off from work and visit him in jail. By the time she arrived in San Francisco, however, he had already been transferred to the city Detention Hospital at Ivy Avenue and Polk
Street. From the moment of his arrest, he had acted bizarrely—babbling about voices, staring intently at the empty air, threatening suicide. During his first night in jail, he had somehow managed to pluck out his eyebrows with his fingernails.

In his cell at the Detention Hospital, Mary found her husband bound in a straitjacket and strapped to a cot. Though he gaped at her with his crazed, browless eyes, he did not seem to recognize her. He kept ranting about the leering faces on the wall. When Mary insisted that there
were
no faces, he clamped his eyes shut for a full minute, then popped them open, stared at the wall, and let out a cry. “
There! There!
Can’t you
see
them?”

That same afternoon, Mary called on Lillian Fabian, who told her about Earle’s previous stint in Napa. It was the first Mary had heard of it. Suddenly, she was faced with many disturbing discoveries about her husband: his true identity and his recent history as a mental patient in a state institution, as well as another piece of information the police had uncovered and conveyed to her, namely, Earle’s ignominious record as a military deserter.

In an effort to keep him out of prison on the assault charge, the two women decided to institute insanity proceedings against Earle. On June 10, 1921, an Affidavit of Insanity was filed in superior court before Judge John J. Van Nostrand. Earle was ordered to appear for a hearing in three days.

The hearing took place as scheduled at precisely 11:00
A.M.
on June 13, 1921. Mary was there to testify, as were two medical examiners, Doctors D. D. Lustig and Arthur Beardslee, who had interviewed the prisoner in his cell at the Detention Hospital two days earlier. Their conclusions were summarized in an official “Statement of Facts”—essentially a two-page, fill-in-the-blanks questionnaire—that became part of Earle’s file.

There is a distinctly perfunctory quality to the answers on this form. In response to question #4, “What is alleged insane person’s natural disposition, temperament, and mental capacity?,” the medical examiners typed, “Eccentric, not industrious, could not concentrate.” Question #10 asked, “Is alleged insane person noisy, restless, violent, dangerous, destructive,
incendiary, excited or depressed?” Instead of supplying an answer in the space provided, the examiners simply crossed out the words they regarded as inapplicable (
noisy, destructive, incendiary
), underlined the relevant ones (
restless, violent, dangerous, excited, depressed
), and inserted one small emendation, typing “to wife and self” above the word
dangerous
.

The only answer that runs more than a few words is the response to question #14, which asks about “other facts indicating insanity.” Here the two examiners wrote the following: “Brought to D.H. [Detention Hospital] order Judge Superior Court Dept. 11, charged with attacking girl—at D.H. patient apathetic—difficult to elicit information—hears voices and spirits and sees them—threatened suicide. People about him say that he is crazy—will not associate with him—claims to have lapses of memory.”

The cursory quality of this document leaves little doubt that Drs. Lustig and Beardslee did not subject the prisoner to a particularly probing psychological examination. Even so, they came to a reasonable conclusion, finding Earle Ferral “so far disordered in his mind as to endanger health and person.”

The Hon. John J. Van Nostrand declared that “by reason of insanity” Earle was “dangerous to be at large.” A commitment order was filed that same afternoon. On June 16, 1921, Earle Leonard Ferral, who had escaped from Napa State Hospital exactly two years earlier, found himself back inside its walls.

Once again he was put under the supervision of Dr. J. B. Rogers, though it was another staff member, a psychiatrist named William Pritchard, who conducted Earle’s preliminary interview. “This patient shows to good advantage on superficial examination,” Pritchard wrote in his report. “To bring out his defects, it is necessary to recount his life’s story.”

Pritchard’s brief synopsis of Earle’s dismal past touched on all the salient points, beginning with the early death of both his parents from syphilis. It noted Earle’s rudimentary formal education, which ended when he was fourteen—the same year he himself contracted a venereal disease that left
him with a urethral stricture and a chancre in the perianal region.

Questioned further about his sexual habits, Earle replied that he had “masturbated several times a day” from the ages of fourteen to eighteen. He confessed that his sex drive remained undiminished. Since his marriage to his fifty-nine-year-old wife, whom he described as his “soul mate,” he had engaged in “excessive intercourse” as well as in “occasional periods of excessive masturbation.” Otherwise, Pritchard noted, he “denied further sexual perversions.”